the detective arrives on the case
by Douglas Messerli
Curtis Harrington (director) Fragment of
Seeking / 1946
Curtis Harrington arrives at the gate of the
white stucco complex wherein he will proceed with his search dressed, in a
raincoat and oversized classes, as a kind of comical undercover detective, his
shadow projected ahead of his body, a presence foretelling the terrifying
secrets he may soon uncover.
What he quickly perceives is a blonde woman who keeps appearing,
forebodingly, in various places around the buildings, sometimes on the roof, at
other times in windows, later in halls, garden pathways, on the stairs, almost
seeming to stalk our “detective” while at the same time, as in noir
films, attempting to attract him and lure him into her arms.
Our somewhat standoffish “hero” seems at times to be interested, following
her throughout the film—although we don’t know if he’s actually seeking her
company or attempting to discover where she might lead him, or, perhaps, even
attempting to find out why she is so suddenly and erratically moves about the
space. But as in almost noirs, our young man seems to be fascinated by
her, even perhaps sexually drawn to her.
Yet the camera, giving us a clue of the detective’s true
focus, seems far more interested in a handsome young man on the outside terrace
having lunch with another blonde woman who we see only from the back. Time and
again the director’s camera focuses in on the good-looking stranger as if the
detective were attending equally or even more to him. And at one point when the
woman meets up with the detective and is perhaps ready to reach out and touch
her face, the sudden appearance of the young man walking toward him forces him
to quickly pull back from the blonde and move off in the direction the male
stranger has taken.
Finally,
the detective decides to explore the building’s inner stairways and halls,
eventually entering one room, removing his coat and glasses to reveal himself
as a rather handsome, curly haired youth, we wonder whether or not he awaiting
an encounter with the male or the female.
The female knocks on his door, but does not enter, and when the young
director, now freed of his detective disguise, opens it, he discovers she has
walked off, necessitating a further chase after her down long hallways as she
moves ever further away from him. Does he truly want to reach her or is only
intrigued about her interest him and in her constant presence?
When the two, female and our hero, finally do meet up face to face, he
finally leans in to kiss her again only to discover she has become a horrific
skeleton which reminds one, seeing this film today, as critic Chuck Stephens
has noted, of a vision out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho “foretold.”
Racing away from the scene, he returns to the terrace—en route
observing other such skeletons standing and sitting where she has previously
appeared—he discovers the man with his head having fallen upon the table,
apparently dead.
His search now becomes an attempt to discover who has done the deed and
why? Cartoon-like footsteps point in the direction of a doorway through which
he has previously never entered.
He
opens the double doors, his shadow again proceeding his gaze into the room
where he sees what appears to be a woman, dressed as a man, who when she turns
to look at him we perceive is himself in a long blonde wig. The end.
What we have just witnessed, obviously, is a search for something he was
previously simply not sure of: his own sexuality. And what he has discovered,
just as apparently, is dependent upon how the film’s witnesses interpret what
they have just observed. But I think we can say, generally, that any
relationship he might have sought out with women has failed horribly. Either in
reality, or in his own way of seeing, the woman—serving as a symbol for all
women, the ones in various positions about this dream-like space—offer him only
images of death and decay. It is clearly the man who intrigues him in his
lovely smile.
But
his own reticence to explore any communication or love with the boy—and all the
others whom he represents—has destroyed any opportunity for love to survive,
the seeker himself having killed it off by his own confusion, his own sexual
unsureness and inability to present himself as he truly is. As Stephens
summarizes it: “death is a wig.”
This work, created just previous to Harrington’s friend Kenneth Anger’s
far more confident celebration of male/male relationships in Fireworks
(1947), was perhaps the first gay “coming out film” ever made. In its dreamlike
elements, its rather negative analysis of the situation, and the central
figure’s confusion of sexual identity and desire, Harrington’s work definitely
belongs to the pattern of that genre which I describe throughout these essays
as the A variation which we also see played out in several of Harrington’s
later works and in movies by Anger, Gregory J. Markopoulos, James Broughton, Willard
Maas, John Schmitz, François Reichenbach, Ron Rice, A. J. Rose, and Jacques
Demy, among others. And as such. it stands as one of the most important early
works of LGBTQ cinema. Here we see, finally, the gay detective, only 20 years
of age, arriving to seek out clues to a case which no one ever before had
openly announced as an issue even needing to be solved.
Los Angeles, August 23, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (August 2021).
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment