Some artworks respond to the urgency of moment. Others make a pitch to long memory. Amidst rising suppression of the arts in the US, Mask for Pleasure – full title: A future that could include (and is not affiliated with) Eric Bogosian by the transdisciplinary arts collective Holy Erotic Propaganda Arson (HEPA) is attempting to do both, as an in-development performance and transnational ecosystem, including archival memory and diasporic support networks.
In the United States, the arts sector is experiencing significant upheaval due to recent federal policy changes. The Trump administration has proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), leading to the abrupt rescission of grants and encouragement for staff resignations. Simultaneously, the Kennedy Center has undergone a leadership overhaul, with president Trump appointing himself as chairman and installing Richard Grenell as president. These changes have led to the cancellation of events with LGBTQIA2S+ and progressive themes, staff layoffs, and a significant decline in ticket sales and donations.
Mask for Pleasure: a historical precedent in the Nazification of German film
What began in 1933 as political consolidation quickly became a total capture of Germany’s cultural sector, through what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung (coordination). Germany’s most prestigious film studio, Universum Film AG (UFA), had been internationally respected for its artistic innovation during the Weimar period. That ended swiftly. By 1934, all film workers, including directors, actors, screenwriters, and composers, were required to register with the Reichsfilmkammer, a branch of the newly formed Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), overseen by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Membership was mandatory.
Studio heads complied early. UFA terminated its Jewish staff preemptively in 1933. By 1937, its majority shares were quietly transferred to Cautio Treuhand GmbH, a Nazi-controlled trust. In 1942, UFA was forcibly merged with Bavaria Film, Tobis, and Terra Film to create UFI (UFA-Film GmbH), a total monopoly under Goebbels’ control. Cinemas could now show only state-sanctioned films. Non-German films were banned or severely censored. By 1936, even film criticism was outlawed and replaced with Filmbetrachtung, state-controlled “film observation,” where critics could only describe films, never interpret them.
Silencing, arrest, and execution of creatives
Creative workers experienced silencing, arrest, and execution. Conrad Veidt, one of Germany’s most famous actors and an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime, was abducted and tortured by the SA, later fleeing to Britain. His portrayal of queer and Jewish-coded roles had made him a target. Grete Berger, a renowned silent film actress, was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in 1944. Dora Gerson, an actress and cabaret performer, was killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Robert Dorsay, a satirist and singer, was hanged in 1943 for allegedly making jokes about Hitler.
Even those who complied were ultimately expendable. Emil Jannings, the first-ever Oscar winner in the best actor category, and a vocal Nazi supporter, returned from working in Paris to publicly align himself with the regime. He made several propaganda films for Goebbels. After the war, his career was over. No redemption. No legacy rehabilitation. Just disappearance. Those who tried to remain “neutral” were surveilled, manipulated, or blackmailed. Many fled. Many disappeared.
A play in a speculative future not unlike post-war Germany
A HEPA collaborator said:
No one can predict the future, but we know the regime is plagiarising the National Socialist playbook. In that case, we’re attempting to overtake their timeline, setting Mask for Pleasure in a future where the regime’s hubris has already been reduced to rubble, where the trauma is contained in safety whose aesthetic is slate-gray conformity, and yet, like the dawn of the culture wars, embodied memory reconfigured as a new eros is emerging through the cracks.
The play is set in a speculative future that feels strangely like post-war Germany in the 1950s – starched, humming with reconstruction, and sanitised to the point of grief – with the philosophical backbone of the Frankfurt School of Philosophy that had developed in the salons of Los Angeles in the German exilic community. It follows a survivor, an older Covid-marked gardener of the rubble who insists on a wild burial. Opposite her is a repressed entry-level death administrator, whose job is to shepherd her toward a “clean death”, complete with paperwork, starched linens, and a performance of consent. What unfolds is less a drama than a ritual negotiation between Thanatos – the death drive – and Eros, the wild, unruly energy of erotic being.
Eros and Thanatos: coexistent impulses
Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, described these two forces not as opposing binaries but as coexistent, interwoven impulses. He wrote that:
The aim of all life is death.
Yet, in the same breath he insisted on the erotic as the force that binds, builds, reproduces, remembers. Thanatos pulls us toward dissolution, Eros insists on continuation. Every agent of power, suppression, and desire contains both.
This line of thought – of memory, embodiment, and erotic resistance – is indebted to the ways in which Eros was metabolised and newly reasserted through American queer Black feminist praxis, especially Audre Lorde, whose Berlin years shaped both Afro-German feminist politics and Germany’s ongoing reckoning with anti-Black racism. Lorde understood Eros not simply as sex or pleasure (though it can encompass both), but as epistemology. She wrote that:
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings
It is power made form. Knowledge made blood.
Germany remembers through philosophy; America forgets through industry.
As part of the play’s launch, its materials, ephemera, and internal logic are being deposited across the German national archive system, beginning in the Social Science Open Access Repository, operated by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
The archive acts as a companion to the play that houses not just its media and documentation, but its underlying thesis: the archive is fragmented, multiplicitous, and produced in the interplay between Eros and Thanatos, living that springs from dying, memory that springs from erasure, and vice-versa.
The archive springs from growing efforts to preserve art -and artists’ lives – in the face of increasing suppression.
The Covid-competent arts community across borders has begun doing what states have refused to: remembering through performance.
In New York, on 24 April, two performances happened, uncoordinated, but somehow in communion. Air Change Per Hour by Anna R.G. centred HEPA air filtration units as its lead performers and included audio recordings from performers living with Long Covid, reflecting on their exclusion from their professions.
The second play was Wake Up and Smell the C*VID: An Evening Without Eric Bogosian by Holy Erotic Propaganda Arson (HEPA), featuring monologues about the impact of the ongoing pandemic on the performing arts community.
Disrupting the stasis
In the weeks following its announcement, search engine visibility of reporting around the latter play appeared to fluctuate across platforms. Without any public explanation, published articles from the Canary and Broadway World in the play’s discursive field, which had previously been trending, seemed to be no longer searchable in Google news results.
The Canary articles appeared to resurface, but as of writing one article seems to continue to fluctuate in visibility. This article, which references the play in its body, centres the Mask for Pleasure walk, where New York Covid-impacted artists handed out masks and leaflets in the Broadway theatre district during the opening weekend of George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, raising awareness of SARS-CoV-2’s impact on personal, interpersonal, and aesthetic pleasure.
At this point, all of this remains speculative, but the question lingers: if other articles from the same discursive network have reappeared, why is this one still apparently experiencing fluctuations? Why does it seem that a documented real-world event, captured and published in a mainstream US outlet, has remained structurally less visible than independent artistic manifestos?
This is entirely speculative, but if the invisibility originated at least in part from third parties, what might have caused any possible reactivity? The subject matter (long Covid, protest, pandemic memory) is unfortunately a nuclear topic even as Covid continues to devastate the arts, but this was a key topic across reporting. At the same time, if the article gestures to something more primally felt, then perhaps the response isn’t wholly and indivisibly logical, but also symbolic. Perhaps it’s not the language, but the drive behind it. By invoking pleasure, maybe the article doesn’t just report – it potentially disrupts stasis by reactivating affect.
The ‘threat’ of pleasure for a system trapped in death drive
Freud wrote that Eros and Thanatos, the life drives and death drives, are not enemies. They are twins: complementary, co-arising. Eros binds, constructs, repeats. Thanatos unbinds, dissolves, returns the psyche to stillness. In healthy systems, they circulate. But in moments of acute collapse, like war, pandemic, or political upheaval, systems fall into defensive postures, into Thanatos-locked stasis. Under such conditions, even the presence of one’s own life drives can feel invasive.
This may help explain why pleasure, joy, even tenderness, are now so often met with cynicism, sarcasm, or silence. Compounding this reactivity, as SARS-CoV-2 continues to damage nervous systems, dull reward centres, and erode libido and sensory coherence, the erotic may no longer feel restorative. It can feel like a demand. A disruption. A threat from the outside, when in fact, it is what the body already contains, asking to be remembered. Integrated.
Neuroscience is beginning to catch up. Studies on Long Covid show persistent inflammation in areas of the brain associated with pleasure, attention, and social reward. The loss of affect is not just a result of one’s thought world, it can be hard-wired on a neurological level. And when pleasure becomes unfamiliar, bodies may no longer recognise themselves.
This is perhaps where memory, performance, and archive meet. Because Mask for Pleasure, by invoking pleasure on a pre-cognitive level, does not simply remind us of what we’ve lost. It risks reactivating it. It opens a window through which Eros might re-enter. And for a system temporarily frozen in a protective stasis – which may be the death drive’s compulsion to self-anesthetise through control, suppression, and inertia – that could feel like violence.
Eros doesn’t live in the logic dominance and submission, but in mutually-generative exchange. The play generates. The archive generates. There are no heroes and villains, just a dialectic of energies.
AMC: network archive of transnational exchange in US film
This is all speculation, but AMC may find itself in the position defending a painstakingly-constructed image of a tentpole TV series in a political environment that is becoming increasingly hostile to queer, BIPOC-centred media. That’s understandable. And AMC itself is the preeminent network archive of generative transnational exchange undergirding US film and TV, past and present.
The network has quietly become a vital repository of diasporic film legacies, and where you are most likely to encounter the oeuvres of exiled European filmmakers. In the mid-20th century, US cinema was fundamentally shaped by émigré artists fleeing fascism in Europe.
Perhaps the most celebrated film in US history is Casablanca (1942). Casablanca was, in essence, a film of exiles, with Hungarian director Michael Curtiz, anti-fascist Victor Laszlo played Paul Henreid, an Austrian-Jewish actor, and Conrad Veidt ironically playing a Nazi, though, in real life, he had assisted Henreid’s emigration. Casablanca transformed displacement into a shared ethic of cooperation, resistance, and layered intimacy. Its production reflected, and its narrative modeled, networks of cultural survival.
Interview with the Vampire, it could be gently suggested, belongs to that same lineage. As a show that crosses national, embodied, and historical borders with fluency, it could be said to participate in a diasporic cinematic logic, one in which identity is mobile, power is always being negotiated, and continuity is maintained through shared memory (and shared intimacy, and shared memory of intimacy), not national allegiance. In this way, AMC’s creative platform is already sustaining the kinds of transnational content and real-life networks that earlier generations of displaced artists depended on. That continuity is structural. And it deserves to be recognised as such.
Mask For Pleasure: artist-led transnational mutual aid
The archive is part of the early scaffolding of a growing transnational network to support at-risk artists in the US, particularly LGBTQIA2S+, disabled and chronically ill, and BIPOC communities. The model draws its lineage from the European Film Fund, established in 1938 by exiled German and Austrian artists fleeing the Nazi regime. Figures like Salka Viertel and Bruno Frank helped establish informal yet deeply effective support networks in Los Angeles, organising housing, work, and sponsorship for refugee artists.
These exile networks did more than provide survival, they replanted the emotional and visual infrastructure of European modernism into US cinema. Expressionist lighting, fatalism, and fractured identity became mainstream American idioms. Simultaneously, the psychoanalytic frameworks that shaped those émigré artists were later metabolised through American Black feminist theory, figures like Audre Lorde, who integrated Freudian and Jungian interiority with embodied, erotic knowledge.
It is from this combined legacy, of diasporic mutual aid and insurgent epistemology, that this present-day network emerges. Once again, we are witnessing a diasporic memory structure rematerialise, led by at-risk artists, and open to anyone at any career stage. Perhaps it is possible to decentre the Gleichschaltung playbook, integrating the wisdom from elders and ancestors who have not only navigated similar crises in the past, but in the process shaped the art we heretofore have been told was bound to a specific national identity, but was always the product of exchange.
Mask For Pleasure: disclaimer
This article is a work of cultural commentary, artistic reflection, and speculative analysis. References to public figures, including Eric Bogosian, Rolin Jones, and the organisations AMC and Interview with the Vampire, are made solely for the purposes of critique, contextual analysis, and public interest. No factual allegations of misconduct, illegality, or defamatory intent are expressed or implied.
All information included is based on publicly available sources, artistic works, and interviews already in the public domain. Interpretations are framed within the bounds of fair comment, academic inquiry, and protected expressive speech.
This article is protected under applicable freedom of expression and public interest provisions, including:
• United States: First Amendment protections covering opinion, satire, and fair use
• United Kingdom: Defenses of honest opinion, fair comment, and publication on matters of public interest under the Defamation Act 2013
• European Union: Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, covering freedom of expression, scholarly interpretation, and artistic critique
No statements herein should be interpreted as claims about the private beliefs, intentions, or actions of any individual or institution. Any perceived resemblance to real persons or corporate positions is part of protected critical analysis.
Featured image supplied
