The Green Berets Meet Cabaret
John Wayne is a transsexual ex-soldier, in love with a burly truck driver in a Viet Nam-like setting. An ongoing set of military operations are the backdrop to the action, but observed from a place at least partially civilian. Many threads of action and personal stories going on at the same time.
A U.S. military base is disabled in a guerrilla attack, but the officers in charge are too embarrassed to call for support, so they try to recover on their own, with no electrical power to the base, with foul water and spoilt food, oblivious to the likelihood that further attacks are nearly certain to come soon.
JUMP CUT TO: A restaurant-cum-cabaret with very good entertainment, but rapacious billing practices. The stripper of Afro-Indian origins whose breasts are bound to resemble a nose, which has the effect of transforming her upper torso into a grotesquely comic face. The music is something between jazz and acid rock, and it seems clear that the performers are well-known, top-flight jazz musicians, who are playing here for reasons no one could begin to divine.
There is a $23 added charge to our bill, added because we are using a charge card. We are a large group, aware of and at one time trying to help the military base, but we have gotten word that our efforts are pointless. We have come to this club, then, to drown our disappointment, and also to find out what the next step is, if we are to survive, escape, and find our way out of a situation that is growing ever more tenuous.
Outside the club, the Catholic Church has decided to re-establish control of a local cathedral. Special priests, dressed in hellish demon robes, all black, with spikey, extremely delicate, yet somehow architectural black lace collars and faux wings, are flown on cables from the roof. Each priest flies swiftly downward from the roof into a black, openwork cast-iron sconce, which is attached to the main support pillars of the cathedral. Once inside this "grillwork," coal and oil pour down over the priest’s head.
A ball of fire descends to the sconce where the priest stands. Flames engulf each priest as he cackles defiantly. As the flames build higher, the priests are lifted from the flames and descend to yet another sconce to repeat this ritual. The ritual begins with one (or a very few) of these demonic angel priests, but as attention draws to the "performance" the number of flying priests is multiplied.
Somewhere in this scene, John Wayne, looking like a not especially attractive, mildly overweight, and middle-aged woman, of the sort who might run a bar or a brothel in many movies, is seen being kissed by the truck driver/Hell’s Angels-ish lover mentioned before. It seems clear that they are planning to do something that will not meet the approval of the Church or the Army.