QUEER CINEMA

[godardian]

i can't see jake and heath together.  they're so physically dissimilar.  i dunno...i like em both, but not together.  

Sometimes, yes, physical dissimilarities can equal a lack of onscreen chemistry. But the other side of the coin is that physical dissimilarities can make sparks fly... a lot will depend on the characters and the story as far as whether or not jake and heath are right for each other.  

I didn't know about Portia de Rossi, either. Was she outed against her will, or did she come out?

[pookiethecat]

i can't see jake and heath together.  they're so physically dissimilar.  i dunno...i like em both, but not together.  

Sometimes, yes, physical dissimilarities can equal a lack of onscreen chemistry. But the other side of the coin is that physical dissimilarities can make sparks fly... a lot will depend on the characters and the story as far as whether or not jake and heath are right for each other.  

I didn't know about Portia de Rossi, either. Was she outed against her will, or did she come out?

she never came out formally, but she got engaged to francesca gregorini, a singersongwriter, who is barbara (bondgirl and mrs. ringo starr) bach's daughter.  so it's pretty open.  plus there are lots of gossipy pictures of the two making out in public and such.

[pookiethecat]

But the other side of the coin is that physical dissimilarities can make sparks fly...

what's an example, gay or straight, in which that is the case... i don't doubt that there are.  it's just fun to think about.

[godardian]

But the other side of the coin is that physical dissimilarities can make sparks fly...

give me one example, gay or straight, in which that has occurred.   8)

Well... there's John C. Reilly (big brawny guy) and Melora Walters (short tiny thing) in Magnolia... and of course Harring (curvy, soft brunette) and Watts (spunky blonde) in Mulholland Dr., which the Ledger/Gyllenhaal thing would be a sort of male equivalent to as far as physical differences...

[pookiethecat]

But the other side of the coin is that physical dissimilarities can make sparks fly...

give me one example, gay or straight, in which that has occurred.   8)

Well... there's John C. Reilly (big brawny guy) and Melora Walters (short tiny thing) in Magnolia...

indeed.  but there wasn't exactly sparks between them, ya know.  there has to be a better example...

emmitt and the old dude on queer as folk?  hehe.

[godardian]

But the other side of the coin is that physical dissimilarities can make sparks fly...

give me one example, gay or straight, in which that has occurred.   8)

Well... there's John C. Reilly (big brawny guy) and Melora Walters (short tiny thing) in Magnolia...

indeed.  but there wasn't exactly sparks between them, ya know.  there has to be a better example...

emmitt and the old dude on queer as folk?  hehe.

Ha. I think the Harring/Watts sparks were undeniable, at any rate. I guess it depends on whether you see different physical "types" as incompatible opposites or intriguing contrasts...

[pookiethecat]

indeed, no one denies their sexual chemistry.

[Pubrick]

portia's been out for a few years now. i think she did a les scene, or maybe i just imagined she was banging lucy liu during ally reruns.

[ono]

Tonight, as part of a French Film Festival, I saw Drole de Felix (The Adventures of Felix)  A movie about this gay, Arab guy who goes on a road trip to Marseilles, hitchhiking in search of his father.  On the way he meets people.  Stuff ensues.  So it's really a run-of-the-mill roadtrip film with smatterings of man love here and there.  I was with a film-buff friend of mine, as we had just gotten out of seeing Amelie on the big screen (another part of the French Film Fest; just as brilliant the second time around, BTW, but most everyone here knows that), and we kinda laughed as we watched the sparse audience file in, mostly girls, and a select few males.  I was surprised there wasn't a larger turnout, especially considering our predominantly liberal campus.  But that's beside the point.

The film was funny at times, though not really all that insightful or groundbreaking.  There's a small bit of man-nudity, for those of you sick of women getting nekkid in film all the time.  Turnabout is fair play I guess, and I also guess that's part of the appeal for women.  That, and you know the thing about men liking watching lesbians get it on?  Well, I think it goes both ways for women and gay guys, too.  At least for this audience.  Anyway, good, nice drop-in-the-bucket film (it's only 95 minutes) if you're interested in that sort of thing.  *** (7/10)

[cron]

Hello, cowboy

So Ang Lee plans to make a gay western? Alex Cox didn't know there was any other kind
Thursday January 22, 2004


When I lived in Los Angeles, the pursuit of the object of my affections led me to hang out with some fairly strange crowds. I was a member of the Ambrose Bierce Black (And Other Colors) Norton Motorcycle Club for a while, lived in the back of a sausage factory in Venice and made the acquaintance of a man called Swatty.
Swatty was seriously mad, and died quite young of some brain ailment. He worked for a company called Arrow Glass and Mirror, in which context he claimed to have installed two-way mirrors in John Wayne's pad in Brentwood. What did John Wayne want the two-way mirrors for, I asked, astonished. "So he could watch his buddies fuck, of course!" said Swatty, who also insisted that Wayne was gay and that "he came to the door in a dress".

All of this stuff made its way into a film I made called Repo Man, where the actor Tracey Walter tells Swatty's story. The scene caused anxiety to Universal's army of lawyers and executives. Indeed, the studio was so ambivalent about the film that it hired the publicist for Pan Am, one Dick Barkle, to trash the movie: "I hope they never show this film in Russia!" Barkle declaimed. But when the film came out, no one said anything about the John Wayne scene.

I had no real reason to believe that Wayne was gay. I just liked the story, and the demented idea of the Duke answering his own front door in a strapless cocktail outfit. I had also heard that Wayne lived on a battleship, but that story didn't have the same resonance.

There is something deeply sexually ambivalent about the western, its heroes, and its villains. Its tales take place in the mental space of adolescent boys, where men are men and women have barely been invented.

Owen Wister's novel The Virginian is often credited as being the template for the western hero. Its hero courts two women, it is true, but at a "courtly" distance. The sincerest scenes are those involving male companionship ("You have a friend, and his ways are your ways. You travel together, you spree together confidentially, and you suit each other down to the ground ... ") The book is a celebration of manly admiration for other men, and this tone - of worship for the self-reliant, efficient, outdoor male, up for a shootout, or a lynchin' - continues unbroken throughout all the western films that followed it.

From the silents to Stagecoach to Once Upon a Time in the West, the most a woman in a western can aspire to is to be static, and to end up being saved. Men, on the other hand, get to ride horses, harbour grudges, gamble, drink, kill other men, and - in the later excesses of the genre - inflict and suffer the most excruciating tortures. This is what makes westerns such tremendous fun for boys, and so boring for women.

I don't mean simply that westerns are misogynistic: some of them, particularly the early talkies like Stagecoach, feature lively female characters who stick up for themselves. Wayne, interestingly, does some of his best work playing opposite strong women such as Claire Trevor or Maureen O'Hara. But think of the Duke and like as not you remember Wayne the implacable lone tracker in The Searchers, Wayne locked in an endless Oedipal fistfight with Montgomery Clift, Wayne surrendering the girl to Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

John Ford, the director of Wayne's greatest films, was either a complex or a very simple man. His principal interest appears to have been liquor, enjoyed in the company of men, or else alone. Though he had a long marriage and several guilty affairs, women didn't feature strongly on his radar. It is no coincidence that Ford "discovered" the magnificently phallic buttes of Monument Valley and made this the archetypal western landscape. It is the most masculine landscape imaginable.

In the 1950s, that troubled period of war abroad and witch-hunts at home, the western hero became more troubled, more introspective, less interested in women than before. All women do in Bud Boetticher's films is trip over their feet while running away. In the films of Peckinpah and Anthony Mann, they barely appear at all. By the early 1960s, a new western protagonist appeared: narcissistic, masochistic, obsessed with desire not for love or money but for revenge. This is the character Brando plays in One-Eyed Jacks: the Rio Kid, who thinks only of getting his own back on his betrayer, Dad Longworth (Karl Malden), and who sleeps with his daughter just to aggravate him. As a result of this, Rio gets stripped to the waist and whipped in the most over-the-top cowboy torture scene of its day.

Sadism of this sort may not be nice, but I suggest it is the inevitable outcome of a story structure (or a society) in which men's longing for other men is not allowed to take its natural course. Fine art historians have known this for centuries: why else are there so many paintings and statues of St Sebastian, stripped naked and whacked full of arrows? At least until Derek Jarman's Sebastiane, man-as-sexual-object was something society had managed to ignore. But man-as-skinny-object-of-religious-violence? Bring it on!

The hero-as-whippee reached its apogee in spaghetti westerns, which redefined the genre to such an extent that it has never recovered. In addition to countless scenes of One-Eyed Jacks-style beatings, the spaghettis also gave us Wayne's only undisputed successor: Clint Eastwood. Since he appeared in A Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood has specialised in a masochistic and monastic persona from which he rarely deviates. Only in non-westerns does Eastwood ever have a girlfriend. In several of the westerns he directed, including The Outlaw Josey Wales, Eastwood has a wife, but she is conveniently murdered in the opening five minutes.

This is how far women had come between the 1920s and the turn of the century: in Stagecoach only a prostitute has autonomy; in The Searchers women are no longer protagonists - they are objects of search, of theft; by the time of the spaghettis and Eastwood's westerns, they are lucky to survive past the credits. There are a handful of westerns, such as Johnny Guitar and Corbucci's Great Silence, with strong female protagonists. But they are exceptions, famous in isolation, in a desert of men, horses and phallic rocks.

Some of the greatest westerns seem to exist almost exclusively in queer studies territory, including my own favourite, The Wild Bunch. Women appear only peripherally in Peckinpah's masterpiece: they don't have names, they betray men, they get shot for their pains. But men are filmed lovingly, from every imaginable angle, before and after torture.

Lonesome Cowboys was the first officially gay cowboy movie. It was one of a series of dramatic films credited to Andy Warhol, and actually directed by Paul Morrissey. In advance of its London screening, Warhol was quoted as saying something like: "Well of course the cowboys were all gay. There was nothing else to do out there on the range, except for wrangling cows, and sucking and fucking!"

The film was promptly banned by the British censors, which is a pity as it would have made an interesting contrast to the more conventionally structured westerns we were getting at the Essoldo in the late 1960s. Western pornos have been around since the discovery of the countryside, and have been mostly gay rather than hetero for generic reasons: men like westerns, women don't; men like hanging around western sets and old barns, women, for some reason, don't.

Years back, some wit made a video assembly of scenes from a genuine western and scenes from a hardcore gay porn movie. The mainstream film was Mark Rydell's The Cowboys, a 1970s western starring, I regret to say, John Wayne. The plot is rather horrible: Wayne, an obsessive cattle driver, hires a gang of children to act as cowboys, and some die, in predictable ways. In the subversive re-edit, Wayne stands beside the ol' corral, shouting: "Whip 'em, boys! Hog-tie 'em! Hold 'em down!" Intercut with this were scenes from one or more porno-westerns, in which cowboy-types got it on together in various corrals and barns. It was a splendid and subversive device, though I imagine copyright restrictions meant it did not receive too much play beyond the confines of film school.

Now Ang Lee is to direct a gay-themed western. I am sure that it will be good. It may even be great, if its author remembers John Ford's wise dictum about the genre: "A western, gay or straight, is at its best when it is long on action, and short on dialogue." He didn't really say the gay or straight bit. But what the heck? I say print the legend.

[MacGuffin]

Michelle Williams Climbs Brokeback Mountain
Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Michelle Williams (Dawson's Creek) will star in Ang Lee's cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain for Focus Features. She'll be joining Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in the film which starts shooting in May.

Adapted by McMurtry and Ossana from a short story by The Shipping News writer E. Annie Proulx, the story centers on two men (Ledger and Gyllenhaal) who meet one summer as sheepherders in Wyoming and form a bond and love that spans 20 years. The film tracks that time period and their evolving relationship.

Williams would play Ledger's wife, Alma, who has to deal with her husband's secret love.

[Thrindle]

I don't know if this has been said, but: I am REALLY looking forward to watching a movie featuring a gay romance.  I am straight... but there is always something so fantastically unrequited about homosexual affairs.  Think about it, this movie will have the ultimate love story formula to it.  Given the circumstances and time period, their love will probably remain uncomsummated, in the sense that they'll never be together.  I guess I'm F*cked becasue I enjoy painful emotions, almost as much as I do pleasurable ones.  I look forward to bawling my face off to this one.  And if this movie is done right, maybe it will transcend the giggle factor it is sure to induce.

[grand theft sparrow]

I don't know if this has been said, but: I am REALLY looking forward to watching a movie featuring a gay romance.  I am straight... but there is always something so fantastically unrequited about homosexual affairs.

Run, don't walk to your local video store and rent/buy Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together.

[grand theft sparrow]

Michelle Williams Climbs Brokeback Mountain
Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Michelle Williams (Dawson's Creek) will star in Ang Lee's cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain for Focus Features. She'll be joining Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in the film which starts shooting in May.

Adapted by McMurtry and Ossana from a short story by The Shipping News writer E. Annie Proulx, the story centers on two men (Ledger and Gyllenhaal) who meet one summer as sheepherders in Wyoming and form a bond and love that spans 20 years. The film tracks that time period and their evolving relationship.

Williams would play Ledger's wife, Alma, who has to deal with her husband's secret love.

Am I the only one who, upon first hearing of this, thought of South Park, when Cartman said that all indie movies are about "gay cowboys eating pudding?"

[BonBon85]

haha, yeah, I thought about that too.