All Men Are Melted Equal: Street Trash (1987/2024)
Wealth inequality will melt your face.
The original Street Trash (1987) is a gonzo melt movie centered on unhoused people who are unwittingly being sold a toxic liquor that causes the body to dissolve. Last week I caught a 35mm screening of director Ryan Kruger’s new reimagining of the film, a crude, trashy, beautiful, and almost comically straightforward social commentary on increasing societal stratification along lines of wealth and status. Somehow the remake — which features a tiny, wisecracking blue creature that only one character can see — is the more measured and sedate of the two.
Compared to the former film’s detached batshit lunatic energy, Street Trash (2024) is a more conventional film full of charming oddball characters and a fairly typical narrative trajectory. In the new film, a future dystopian city is ruled by an evil mayor who plans to use a chemical weapon to melt the city’s unhoused population. When a group of those unhoused citizens revolt against the mayor’s plans, they take their displeasure (and some doses of the melt chemical) all the way to the top.
There is a particular subgenre of body horror sometimes referred to as the melt movie: a genre full of bodies rapidly decomposing into nothingness. The body is, in the end, nothing more than a mixture of strangely-hued goop.
Melt movies, in their exposure and breakdown of the human body, tend to reveal lies and truths around social barriers and stratification. They serve as a reminder that, to borrow from a historical document, all men are melted equal. The decay of the body almost always tends to expose the breaking points of social constructions and inequalities, and melt, as a body horror subgenre, is a socially conscious corpus.
Cronenbergian body horror has a way of theorizing a body politics that offers up growth and possibility: for example, deconstructing lines of gender and sexuality and reconstructing them in very queer ways. The body progresses, in a sense, to a post-human state, like Brundlefly in The Fly or Max Renn in Videodrome.
Melt movies are a bit different: more nihilistic in their near-complete dissolution of the human body and therefore the society that those bodies comprise. Where certain body horror suggests the possibility of a “new flesh”, in Cronenberg’s parlance, melt movies suggest no flesh. We are all simply waiting to melt.
But Street Trash (2024) is more optimistic than some of its brethren, and even its own predecessor. The new Street Trash offers hope that maybe there can be justice in the distribution of melt. A tagline on one poster says “MELT THE RICH”, and surely the idea that the right people will melt and the right people will survive is hopeful if nothing else. But the film’s proactive, revolutionary premise also reminds us that we must be the melt we wish to see in the world.
Bonus content: movie quotes you forgot were about melt.
“Melt finds a way” — Jurassic Park
“Meltbud.” — Citizen Kane
“Use the melt, Luke” — Star Wars
“The melt that dreams are made of.” — The Meltese Falcon
“Melt means never having to say you’re sorry.” — Melt Story
“I’m melting! Melting!” — The Wizard of Oz