Bend Me, Shape Me, Anyway You Want Me: Angelo Madsen Takes on Modern Primitive Pioneer Fakir Musafar in A Body to Live In

A BODY TO LIVE IN
(Angelo Madsen, USA, 2026, 88 minutes) 

The human body is an amazing thing. It does a lot, and it can take a lot. To quote those Timex television commercials of yesteryear, "It takes a licking, and keeps on ticking."

Filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist Angelo Madsen's central subject, Fakir Musafar, pulled, poked, prodded, pierced, and otherwise treated his body like clay or putty. Something to re-make/re-model. A toy. And a sacred object. But the former Roland Loomis wasn't simply trying to shock or to find sexual release–well, not completely–but to open his consciousness. 

In the 1980s, the father of Modern Primitives--a catchall term for body modification–would reach a wider audience when RE/Search published the influential book Modern Primitives: Tattoo, Piercing, Scarification. In 1989, Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art mounted a popular exhibit inspired by the book (to quote LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, "I was there!").   

Fakir provided this filmmaker and those authors with ample material since he documented his many and varied body mods, and his archive at UC Berkeley--my late father's employer--includes 13,400 photographs and 122 video files. Fittingly, Madsen avoids talking heads in favor of artfully-composed still images and hand-painted 16mm film along with evocative music and audio excerpts from interviews, creating an oral history effect.

I couldn't say whether Fakir's remarkable B&W images had an impact on transgressive photographers Robert Mapplethorpe or Joel-Peter Witkin, but it wouldn't surprise me. I do know for sure that his interest in corsetry inspired Mr. Pearl, corsetiere to the stars.

In his prime, Fakir also made talk show appearances where he alarmed normie audiences, while taking the opportunity to explain his practice in an unpretentious, matter-of-fact, midwestern dialect. It probably didn't hurt that the part-time poet had a master's in creative writing from San Francisco State University.

When dressed in a suit and a tie, Fakir looked like your average advertising executive with his open face, close-set eyes, neat hair, and untrendy spectacles--and he did, in fact, work in that field for several years.

From an early age, though, Fakir was fascinated by the strange. In rural South Dakota in the 1940s, that meant circus freaks and images from the pages of National Geographic magazine. He found these exotic people more relatable than his peers, though he would find his tribe when he moved to San Francisco after the Korean War. For a time, that tribe included Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, who he knew best as a musician. 

Madsen spoke to others who worked with or took inspiration from Fakir, like Modern Primitives coauthor V. Vale, body piercer Jim Ward, adult film performer Annie Sprinkle, and Fakir's wife, BDSM practitioner Cléo Dubois, who rejected her mother's Nazi ideology as a young woman, fled France, and ended up in the City by the Bay where she too would find her tribe. 

Fakir could handle most everything he did to his body. AIDS, however, would decimate his community in the 1980s (though he identified as gay at a perilous time, he emerged unscathed from the worst of the epidemic). He also faced accusations of cultural appropriation, which he did--or did not--handle well. Madsen leaves it up to viewers to decide. Fakir never expected his Arabic stage name to stick, for instance, but it did. 

He also claimed that he learned about the Sun Dance, a Native American ceremony that can involve ritual piercing, while growing up on a Sioux Reservation, which is probably true, but it doesn't change the fact that he was a white man shaping a sacred indigenous rite to his own purposes. 

I'm reminded of the Richard Harris western, A Man Called Horse, in which the Sioux abduct and eventually initiate a British man in a similar manner. Hard to believe the film was so popular that it spawned two sequels–and encouraged my high school history teacher to screen it in class (if given a choice, I would've preferred Arthur Penn's more playful Little Big Man). 

For Fakir, who lived a full life by any standard, time ran out in 2018. He had made it to 87, seemingly none-too-worse for wear. 

Madsen doesn't go into detail about his precautions around piercing and other potentially risky procedures, but it's clear that he took care, and remained as active as possible until lung cancer took its toll.  

Fakir did not fear death, though, because he had been preparing for it his whole life. His body was spent, and now he could become pure spirit. 

Madsen doesn't answer every question about the man, but he honors his practice and presents it from his thoughtful and, yes, loving perspective.

A Body to Live In opens at Northwest Film Forum on Fri, May 1. Angelo Madsen will be in attendance on Sat at 4:30 and 7:30pm. Images from Fakir Memorial, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Point - Journal of Body Piercing.