The work of filmmaker Eva Aridjis Fuentes often tends to the tales of the outsider, marginalized communities such as the lost Mexican youth of Niños de la calle (Children of the Street), the religious cultists of La santa muerte (Saint Death), and the family plagued with congenital hypertrichosis in Chuy, El hombre lobo (Chuy, the Wolf Man). “I like telling stories of misfits, of people who are misunderstood,” says Fuentes about the connective tissue that unites her first three Mexico-set documentaries. “Q isn’t an outsider in the way that these people were. She wasn’t part of a community with a bad reputation, or that was broadly discriminated against. But Q was an outsider.”
The “Q” that Fuentes is talking about is Q Lazzarus, the late singer of the haunting 1988 single “Goodbye Horses.” Ominously evocative and ever so slightly detuned with an androgynous-voiced melody at its front, the track gained traction in 1991 when director Jonathan Demme used it in Silence of the Lambs’s pivotal “Would you fuck me?” scene. Whether you’ve watched Silence once or a thousand times, the intertwining of Ted Levine’s “Buffalo Bill” Gumb preparing his lamb for the slaughter and the shivering tonality of “Goodbye Horses” is immediately burned into your consciousness. That Demme used her in other films of his (Q appears in 1993's Philadelphia performing a cover of the Talking Heads song “Heaven,” while “Goodbye Horses” actually got its debut in his 1988 film Married to the Mob) after discovering her music upon stepping into the taxi cab she was driving only makes the legend of Diane Luckey—the woman behind Q Lazzarus—loom larger.
And yet, none of this compares to the fact that by the mid-’90s—after having her music appear in four films with an Oscar-winning director and leaving the US for London where she had success as a live artist—Q just disappeared, and stayed disappeared until Fuentes happened upon her in 2019 while using a car service in New York City. “She vanished for 25 years, and it took me just finding her in another car to re-discover Q,” says Fuentes by way of introducing Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus, a new documentary currently screening across the US, released alongside its soundtrack of Q’s previously unreleased music recorded between 1985 and 1995.
Working with the filmmaker on her life story’s documentation until her death in 2022, Q shares her belief, on camera, that in the New York City of the 1990s, the music industry “wasn’t ready for a Black rock and roll singer.” Despite NYC’s Living Colour ruling the charts several years before her, and Lenny Kravitz soon to follow, perhaps being a Black woman making that same curt, uneasy brand of post-punk noise with an ethereal new-wave-y ambience about it all was what made Q Lazzarus and her band a non-starter. “Despite Demme’s support, the music industry in the United States largely ignored her,” says Fuentes, a one-time DJ who used to spin Q’s songs during her years at NYU. “And I do think that Q was discriminated against: as a woman, as a Black woman, as someone who was homeless for a time during the period that she went missing,” says the filmmaker, suddenly echoing her sentiments about the subject matter of all of her films.
One of the things that struck me about Fuentes’ body of work—and Goodbye Horses, in particular—is that she loves a great mystery. All of Fuentes films’ topics may exist outside the system, wherever that system stands, be it Mexico City or the East Village. But what drives each of their fleshy narratives is the unknown spirits and hidden agendas behind each character: How did someone so talented and so close to fame’s flame wind up running away from it all, to make herself untraceable to her once-closest friends and collaborators? “Calling all of my work ‘mysterious’ is a beautiful concept,” says Fuentes. “I want to give voice to people who don’t often have one, and show what their daily reality is like.”
“Calling all of my work ‘mysterious’ is a beautiful concept. I want to give voice to people who don’t often have one, and show what their daily reality is like.”
Instead of keeping her characters in the shadows, Fuentes wants to expose them to the light for greater inspection. As an example, when the younger Fuentes heard Q’s “mysterious” song in Demme’s movies, she craved to find more, only to figure out that none existed. When she sought to discover who or what Q was, Fuentes couldn’t find much there, either. “Was this a band or just one person? Was this a man or a woman? You couldn’t really tell from ‘Goodbye Horses.’ Most people who heard it thought that this was a white new-wave guy and not a Black woman. The voice is powerful, yet it was so soft, fluid. The music and its lyrics [written by Bill Garvey, a one-time bandmate] straddles many realities. It could be about life or death. There’s a dialogue happening between the two characters in the song that you don’t know what’s happening. And that song got popular as a cult anthem in goth clubs and gay clubs—the two groups most obsessed by Q.”
Only when the filmmaker accidentally came across a woman without a GPS playing Neil Young’s Harvest in the car-for-hire taking her from Brooklyn to Manhattan, singing “Heart of Gold” with the driver and talking about concerts each had been to, was the mystery revealed: that Q Lazzarus, “a six-foot-tall woman with huge hands” was hiding in plain sight. And Q wasn’t yearning to tell her story, either. “Clearly, she’d been going underground for a while,” says Fuentes. “When I gave her my number and asked to meet up and talk another time, she said that she had to think about it. Only after she had a dream that she was performing with me in the audience did she take that as a sign, and we met up for lunch.”
“Most people who heard ‘Goodbye Horses’ thought that this was a white new-wave guy and not a Black woman. The voice is powerful, yet it was so soft, fluid.”
Once the process began of discussing the singer’s truly brief career in music (“10 years, really, between New York, London, and Philadelphia”), of how and why she wound up disappearing, of the two friends collaborating alone together during COVID (“This made it all so much more intimate, just her and I, telling me stories”), Fuentes came to the conclusion that she’d like to make a film about Diane Luckey, and not just Q Lazzarus. “That’s why this is so much more than a music doc.”
While the two planned a return to the stage for Q as the original ending of their film—a comeback for the singer—Luckey’s unexpected death from sepsis in 2022 changed the film’s final narrative, yet with one element remaining. “It’s bittersweet. I lost a friend. She never got the chance to see the movie or the release of her first album. Q wasn’t appreciated in her time, but people now are falling in love with her with this film and what they’re hearing. She’s finally getting that appreciation and attention she deserved.” FL
