Queer Cinema: A Reality Check
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Queer
Cinema: A Reality Check
by Dmetri Kakmi
Dmetri Kakmi is a critic
and essayist. He works as an editor for Penguin Books Australia.
for Geoff and PG
Have you ever thought about what constitutes a gay film as opposed to a
straight one? Is it gay thematic content, characters, gay filmmakers, or
the amount and explicitness of gay sex? Assuming that you have a favorite
gay film -- by whatever definition -- was it chosen for its artistic merits
or some other reason, such as, that it advanced the 'gay cause'?
I have never liked this segregation of films into gay or non-gay categories.
However, for the record, my strict definition of a gay film is a film made
by, for and about gay people. Anything that falls outside of that is, strictly
speaking, not a gay film. Ultimately, however, for me, a film is either
good or bad. It makes a whole lot more sense to engage with a film on an
emotional, intellectual or aesthetic level and, no matter what the sexual
proclivities of its makers, to view the unfolding drama in terms of our
complex responsiveness to universal human experience.
In our age of urban tribalism, factions and segregation, it requires a
certain amount of imagination and projection beyond one's own comfort zones
and experience to achieve this, but it can be done and I assure you it is
worthwhile. Last time I looked I wasn't a lesbian, but I still broke into
a sweat over the hot finger-fuck sequence between Jennifer Tilly and Gina
Gershon in Bound (Andy Wachowski, 1996). Furthermore, I'm no paedophile,
but I still swooned when Dominique Swain rubbed up against Jeremy Irons
in Lolita (Adrian Lyne 1997).
Frankly, I'm mystified by gay men who say that Lolita has nothing
to offer them because the protagonist is in love with a girl. Similarly,
I'm puzzled by straight people who say that Derek Jarman's masterful Caravaggio
(1986) was 'too gay'. It's like these people have forgotten what it means
to be rounded human beings. If you want art to affirm what you already know
and feel then stand in front of the bathroom mirror, don't go to the cinema
ever again. Film, as the premier art form of the twentieth century, should
open up your sensorium and challenge you in all sorts of unexpected ways.
Before going any further, I should also say that I differentiate between
the terms 'gay' and 'homosexual'. The former is a relatively new, well-meaning
but, in my opinion, misguided ideological movement. (What leads people to
believe that an occasional sexual activity constitutes an entire personality
is beyond me.) The latter has been around since mankind emerged from the
caves and learnt to scrawl on papyrus. I have argued elsewhere that homosexual
experience is part of the human totality, an option that is open to all,
should they choose to explore that avenue, and not some separate and exclusive
category. (A film which illustrates this point is the 1997 Italo-Turkish
co-production Hamam.) Homosexuals shouldn't be fighting for gay rights;
they should be fighting for human rights.
Gay activists would have you believe that Hollywood portrays them in a negative
light. Vito Russo, the purblind film historian who wrote the over-rated
The Celluloid Closet (Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1981)
claims Hollywood has packed the screen with limp-wristed victims, suicides,
sad-sacks, bitchy queens, psychos, hairdressers, fey fashion designers,
perverts and sex maniacs, stereotypes all who have nothing to do with real
gay people. Odd, they always seemed like accurate portrayals to me.
Anyone who knows their film history would instantly recognise the numerous
gay stereotypes lovingly depicted by Franklin Pangborn, Edward Everett Horton,
Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and the husky voiced Mercedes McCambridge
(who also supplied the voice for the demon in The Exorcist),
to name just a few actors who filled the screen with homosexual characters
from its earliest days. But to Russo, the richly detailed Dog Day Afternoon
(Sidney Lumet, 1975) is nothing more than ''the ultimate freak show . to
titillate a square audience' (p. 178-179) and that remains his
ultimate judgement on every Hollywood film with gay characters. What a pity
he didn't seek out Parker Tyler's Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality
in the Movies (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, New York, 1972) before writing
his desperate-to-be-offended book. He might have learned something about
art, aesthetics and how to read a text.
Further back in time, there were even a couple of handholding homo jailbirds
in an early Mae West film -- the greatest drag queen of them all ('Sisters!'
she quipped as she sashayed past their cell). Furthermore, the contributions
of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo to the question of gender in cinema
cannot be overestimated.
Alfred Hitchcock, always fascinated by the darker byways of sexuality,
explored the theme of the homosexual as Nietzschean superman in Rope
(1942), and followed that up with another deadly homosexual alliance in
Strangers On A Train (1951). But, because both films depicted homosexuals
as sociopaths, to gay activists this is nothing more than homophobic depiction
at its worst. This despite the fact that the former film was loosely based
on the true story of Leopold and Lobe, two young intellectual aesthetes
and lovers who killed a 14-year-old boy in 1924.
For those who insist on 'positive role models', Montgomery Clift in Howard
Hawks's western, Red River (1948), filled the bill nicely. And let's
not forget spunky Katherine Hepburn crossdressing in Sylvia Scarlett
(1936), directed by one of the great Hollywood directors, George Cukor.
With its sharp, peppery dialogue, I interpret Cukor's 1939 classic The
Women, which boasted an all female cast, as a gathering of bitchy backstage
drag queens all competing for the affections of their unseen men. While
we're on the subject of drag, Brian De Palma's psycho-sexual thrillers,
Dressed To Kill (1980) and Raising Cain (1992), contain surreal
representations of men in the throes of psychic schism metamorphosing into
sinister, powerful women by the last reel. And you don't have to be the
great film critic Parker Tyler to interpret The Great Escape
(John Sturges, 1962) as 'a homosexual mystery story'. Nor does it take a
genius to see the noirish Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) as a bisexual
menage a trois.
But gay activists are like persistent blowflies. Once they latch onto an
idea it's almost impossible to shake them off. To them, far from exploring
complex, ambiguous notions of gender and sexuality, the above-mentioned
films do not show 'positive representations' of gay life, and are therefore
homophobic distortions. What activists really mean is that, in their bid
for acceptance, they want to spread their own approved and sanitised brand
of the truth, which is filled with its own distortions and half-truths.
They are Stalinists who would censor the arts to suit their own political
ends.
That's why they demonstrated against films such as Cruising (William
Friedkin, 1980) and Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), which
they claimed painted a seedy picture of gays. But the truth is that the
urban, commercialised gay scene, with its bouts of drug taking, bacchanalian
dance parties and anonymous sex, is decadent. Hollywood has never been inaccurate
in its portrayal of homosexuals. If anything, as director Bruce LaBruce
said, 'Hollywood ... has represented homosexuals with chilling accuracy
largely because Hollywood was and still is rammed with fags both off-screen
and on.'
Hollywood only began portraying gays inaccurately when gay activists finally
infiltrated the studios during the '80s and '90s and began pushing for films
made to their own narrow specifications. Lacking all artistry, they are
basically 'how-to movies' whose sole purpose is to promote gay life.
Suddenly, sprightly party boys looking for self-affirmation in an uncaring
world replaced the rich variety of homosexual stereotypes that had previously
filled the screen. The well-meaning but soppy Making Love (Arthur
Hiller, 1982) was the first of these films. Over a decade later, the weepy
Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993), with sanctimonious Tom Hanks,
added AIDS to the sickly sweet formula.
Not wishing to be left out of their own game, independent gay filmmakers
joined in on the act with the dull-as-dish-water Parting Glances
(Bill Sherwood, 1985) and Longtime Companion (Norman Rene, 1990).
What activists failed to see, however, was that they were still pushing
the martyr-like victims they were meant to be ditching, but because their
plights were 'sympathetically portrayed', they applauded these films as
some kind of breakthrough.
A recent offender is Tommy O'Haver's tepid little film, Billy's Hollywood
Screen Kiss (1998). The caricatures these films portray look like they
were made by Mattel. They are white, handsome, nice, polite, middle-class
men with go-anywhere phones and innocuous straights straggling on the edges.
I call them the Stepford Boyz after the 1974 film The Stepford Wives,
whose unspoken domestic motto was 'conform or die'. But rather than enlarging
experience, the new Hollywood gay cinema reduces it to a set of clichés,
a preordained destinyWith very few exceptions, this also applies to the
New Queer Cinema.
Most gay films resemble Soviet propaganda films. Cinema in the real world
follows a far more complex and organic process than inside the gay ghetto.
After watching one of these films with a queer stamp of approval on its
forehead, I walk out of the cinema feeling more alienated than ever because
of my failure to connect with any one of these 'positive role models' I'm
supposed to be so happy about. More to the point, I don't want to relate
to such a vacuous bunch. These people are not on the screen because they
or their stories are interesting. They are there because they stuck it into
another person of the same sex, and want to show everyone else how nice
and normal they can be despite their sexual preferences. If anything, these
characters are aberrantly normal; so balanced they make even the most exemplary
heterosexual look freakish.
In this climate, what a breath of fresh air John Maybury's Love Is The
Devil (1998) and Bruce La Bruce's rough-and-ready Skin Flick
(1999) were. Personally, I relish the depiction of homos as Jean Genet-like
outsiders, thieves, hustlers and troublemakers, perched on the barbed-wire
fence and destabilising the status quo. I'd rather be the outlaw in Gregg
Araki's The Living End (1992), crushing bigoted heads with a ghetto
blaster, or Ari, the fallen-angel hero of Head On (Ana Kokkinos,
1998), than Saint Sebastian nailed to a tree.
For all its faults, the standout Hollywood film with homosexual content
is William Friedkin's Cruising. Originally slotted for Brian De Palma,
this psycho-sexual thriller, starring a sexually ambivalent Al Pacino, contains
some low-down home truths about the aphrodisiac dangers of public cruising,
and along the way, offers a view into the New York S&M scene before
the advent of the plague.
Following in the same genre, though not as impressive, is Paul Verhoeven's
Basic Instinct, memorable mainly for Sharon Stone's bisexual
femme fatale, with a fetish for ice picks and leg crossing. Verhoeven
was more successful in his homeland with the gothic male nightmare The
Fourth Man (1983), which stars Jeroen Krabbe as an alcoholic homosexual
writer who falls into the clutches of a spider woman. But, being the cock-driven
man that he is, rather than escaping he stays on just so he can get into
her hunky boyfriend's pants -- with eye-popping results.
For my money, the film that most effectively deals with homosexual desire
on an artistic level is Jean Beaudin's 1992 French-Canadian film, Being
At Home with Claude. Adapted from a stage play, this 85 minute,
black and white film is a romantic and moving illustration of Oscar Wilde's
maxim, 'each man kills the thing he loves'. Beginning with an explosive
opening sequence, the film focuses on why a hustler killed his lover while
they were fucking. What follows is an anguished dialogue between the outlaw
and a mystified police inspector who is trying to find a motive. The performances
by the two leads are brilliant; Beaudin's direction superb and every film
student should study the opening sequence.
Tellingly, when this devastating film was released, the straight press
looked on it favourably, while gays were generally negative. I was even
called 'deranged' by an irate gay reader when I wrote in praise of the film.
But time has proven me right. While Beaudin's film is steadily gaining in
reputation, Ang Lee's lightheaded The Wedding Banquet (1993)
has gone out with the tide.
The true face of sex is danger and perversion. That's why I love Suite
16 (1995), directed by the Dutch director, Dominique Deruddere. This
sleazy thriller zeroes in on a compelling series of psychological and sexual
power games played by a crippled older man and a young hustler who falls
under his spell. An extra element of suspense is added by the inclusion
of a young woman who completes the deadly triangle. As one reviewer said
at the time, this film 'has you thinking about things you shouldn't.' Apart
from David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), Suite 16 still rates
the highest for its mutually beneficial effects on my brain and loins. And
I mustn't forget to mention Bruce LaBruce's gleefully perverted Hustler
White (1996), starring the Joe Dallesandro of the '90s, Tony Ward. This
delightfully grungey film is what porn would be like if there were more
auteurs working in the field instead of the current deadheads.
When you cast your net wide you begin to find a rich source of cinematic
gems that deal with the subject of homosexuality from within a much wider
social and ethical context. Not surprisingly, earthy yet refined European
cinema has always had the edge over English-speaking countries.
In this regard, the aristocratic Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti's Conversation
Piece (1974), as a visually rich masterpiece about the nature of
death and beauty, is more resonant than his own more famous Death In
Venice (1971). Another Visconti to look out for is the last gasp in
neo-realism, Rocco and His Brothers (1960), starring a knockout Alain
Delon. This is a lyrical melodrama to be relished, not least because of
its unashamed celebration of the masculine physique in the boxing arena.
Jean Cocteau created some of the most sublime and mysterious films ever
made. Beauty and The Beast (1948) and Orphee (1952) are virtually
love songs for Jean Marais, Cocteau's lover. And while we're focussing on
Gallic cinema we should mention Andre Techine's Wild Reeds (1994)
-- a coming-of-age delicacy to savour.
From his earlier erratic post-punk films to his later works in the '90s,
no praise is high enough for Spain's Pedro Almodovar -- an openly gay filmmaker
who has managed to break out of the gay ghetto and create films that are
accessible to all moviegoers. Having said that, I'm not a fan of the 'mature'
Almodovar who keeps pumping out retentive refinements like All About
My Mother (1999). However, Matador'(1985) and his seventh feature,
the joyous Law Of Desire (1987), have a special place in my cinephilic
heart.
Nor should we forget the legacy of independently produced films left behind
by England's great Derek Jarman. This is a true renaissance man whose artistry
has not been fully comprehended or appreciated. From the salacious audacity
of Sebastiane (1976), to the paralysing grief of Blue (1993),
the only true work of art to come out of the AIDS epidemic, is almost two
decades of incredible achievement.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but in putting these few films before
you I hope to have demonstrated that in the reckless, wayward manner they
approach the vagaries of human desire, they also arrive at an intrinsic
combination of truths that 'gay filmmakers' will not achieve until they
wake up to the fact that reality is made up of organic, unified wholes that
are greater than the simple sum of their parts.
© Dmetri Kakmi, 2000
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