by Douglas
Messerli
R. C. Sherriff
(screenplay, based on the book by H. G. Wells), James Whale (director) The
Invisible Man / 1933
By 1933 the savvy,
openly gay director James Whale and his closeted gay screenwriter R. C.
Sherriff, both at work on The Invisible Man—released in October of that
year—would certainly have seen what was soon coming regarding the Motion
Picture Production Code and, in particular, the attitudes of the man who would
soon be in full control of it, Joseph Breen.
Earlier that
same year, Breen had raved against the performance of Tyrell Davis as Ernest
the dancing instructor in George Cukor’s Our Betters, released in
February of that year. And the people from the Hays Board had already descended
upon Walter Lang’s late April release, The Warrior’s Husband with regard
to the fact that it had been reported in Variety, as I mention in my previous
essay, that the filmmakers had hired the entire chorus of the BBB Cellar Revue,
a gay nightclub show, to play the emasculated men to the warrior women led by
Katharine Hepburn. Reportedly, a great deal of the fun of portraying nearly all
the men of the film as pansies was cut by the busy scissors of Breen and his
board. Breen suddenly announced that the word “pansy” was now disallowed in
films, forcing the March release, Raoul Walsh’s Sailor’s Luck to have a
lisping bathhouse attendant notify his friends about the approach of a pansy in Pig
Latin: “Hey fellas, etgay the ansypay!” to which the ansypay responded,
wiggling his five fingers, “Hi, sailors?”
As Harry M. Benshoff has suggested in his
Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film, after the
Motion Picture Production Code’s crackdown in 1934, directors in the next
couple of decades would increasingly turn to monsters and science in which to
code and hide their queer figures, turning homosexuality into the true
monstrosity that heterosexual society had always believed it to be. Of course,
Whale has long been interested in just such a coding structure, particularly in
his two masterworks, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein,
where the creators behind these monsters were often gay figures, the monsters
simply becoming symbols of their dark desires and souls. Even in The Old
Dark House, the director had hidden much of his gay message in arcane
Biblical passages.
Yet unlike the werewolves, various
vampires, and other monsters of the 1940s and 50s, Whale’s monsters and even
their creators seemed to have far more fun than those who later threatened
society through their visual differences and strange behavior, something which
seems to occur in The Invisible Man as well. Although the scientist, played by Claude Rains as Dr. Jack Griffin, in his insanity later becomes a
true villain, before that he is more like a bad boy adolescent threatening the
unthinking and crude small town British pub habitues and the equally mindless
local police with good reason.
Strangely, however, this film rarely gets
talked about as being a gay film. Even Bernshoff mentions it only it passing.
Yet in many respects it is Whale’s most openly gay work.
It is highly likely that Whale was able
to perceive, given Breen’s expressed convictions to rid film of all homosexual
figures who, at least had been in the 1930s film as wretched stereotypical
types, would soon become “invisible,” H. G. Wells’ metaphor for the character with
whom they were now engaged.
If in 1952 Ralph Ellison realized that the
same metaphor could be applied to the black community in a majority white
society, so did Whale realize that in the primary heteronormative world which
had now managed to even wipe out their existence in film, gays had also become
invisible. And accordingly, Wells’ monstrously mad scientist, in Whale’s and
Sherrif’s hands, was made far more loveable and appealing despite his use of
the dreadful drug “monocaine” (clearly a sort of pun on cocaine, hinting at
something that is limited to one “mono” as opposed to being shared with others “co”)
that he has ingested and that will soon make him thoroughly insane.
Early in the work even Griffin’s employer,
Dr. Cranley (Harry Travers), in discussion with his daughter Flora (Gloria
Stuart), presumably Griffin’s fiancée, describes his young assistant’s
disappearance as a “queer thing.”
Unlike almost any other text of the day,
in which such a word would have meant only “strange” or “odd,” we know both the
screenwriter and director were fully aware of the other meaning of that phrase,
and they employ it here very carefully, Flora herself backing it up with her
comment, “He was so strange in those last few days, so excited and strung up”
presumably meaning that he was so involved in his experiments that he was no
longer paying attention to her. But the added phrase, “excited and strung up”
also hints at the behavior of a drug addict or perhaps even a queer man who has
just come out, discovering a world outside of the boring stomach experiments of
Dr. Cranley.
Cranley’s other assistant, Dr. Arthur
Kemp (William Harrigan), vying for Flora’s attention, summarizes his viewpoint
of their affair: “He meddled in things men should leave alone.” Flora immediately
wants to know what Arthur means.
“He worked in secret. Kept a lot stuff
locked in a big cupboard in his laboratory. He’d never open that cupboard until
he’d barred the door and drawn the blinds. Straight-forward scientists have no
need for barred doors or drawn blinds.”
But the text here goes even one step
further, as Kemp insists, “He cares nothing for you Flora, he never cared about
anything but test tubes and chemicals.” In short, Kemp is telling her that her
would-be lover’s interest was not in women but in drugs and whatever else, perhaps the
chemical pull of his own perverse desires.
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The movie, having begun in a Sussex inn
where Griffin, already invisible but fully clothed and bandaged arrives looking
something like an abominable snow man with sun glasses, to demand a room and a
meal, and after that to be left alone. But, of course, Whale has crowded this
corner of the world with the same drunken louts and “cackling” Una O’Connor
(the word Whale’s stand-in gives to his star actor in the movie Gods
and Monsters) who as the inn-keeper drives the men wild with her screaming
hysteria and lights up the screen with comedy where darkness otherwise
prevails. In some respects, her
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The police are called, mayhem ensues, and
the rude mechanical’s imaginations called into doubt by a police inspector. But
after, it is finally established with whom they are actually dealing, a menace
who at any moment might disappear into thin air—truly the story of so many gay
men who hid their sexual beings by pretending to be straight—they are
suddenly absolutely terrified, particularly of his ability to become naked
without their ability to see him, in other words, for his ability to engage in
sex out of sight. The local policeman expresses it best:
“He’s invisible
that’s what he is. If he gets the rest of those clothes off we’ll never catch
him in a thousand years.”
Nudity and nakedness strangely become the
dominant metaphors here, a power that even Griffin is totally aware of. As a
naked being he can no longer be seen, so he might do anything, kill anyone,
destroy thousands, and even control an army without being able to be found and
discovered. When the being of whom you are most afraid becomes powerful because
of his sexuality, because of his very nakedness, then there is no
controlling his behavior. The very fact that he can disappear into his “closet,”
can pull off his clothes with full liberty is what makes him both invisible and
such a dangerous being. He does not behave like well-dressed, straight-forward
(to borrow Kemp’s words) common folk. He is a monster because he is free and in
that freedom lies his power.
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The only dangers, as he himself admits, is
in his need to eat, when you can see the food within, and in his footsteps, in
the very actions he has made through which he can be traced.
Critic Eric Langberg, in one of the best
non-academic essays I’ve read about this film, reiterates how fun most of this all
is, at least in the beginning:
“Openly gay
director James Whale excelled at making films about outcasts from society,
considered horrifying by the local mob but in actuality rather sympathetic.
Unlike Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, where I root for
the “monster” pretty much the entire time, in The Invisible Man, Griffin
is consumed by his ambition to take over the world and becomes truly monstrous.
It’s fun to watch, though, how Whale uses the typical mob-mentality conventions
of some of his other films and turns the story from comedic to more horrific.
The mob following a police officer up to the room to see the Invisible Man is
funny.”
Perhaps even more darkly humorous is the
fact that in trying to escape the intrusions of the mob of society, in his
search for a “way back” to normality, Griffin approaches the straight man Kemp
to become his “partner.” “I must have a partner, Kemp,” he announces as if
demanding a relationship with the local bully who would rather see him dead.
But Griffin is now in full control and demands
that Kemp give up his own clothing that he might have something to wear over
his bandages. And later when it is time for bed, Griffin insists Kemp offer up
his own pajamas, again ridiculously insisting upon a relationship between the
two that could not possibly exist: “We’re partners, bosom friends.”
Langberg comments: “Still, though, there
are a number of fun little queer moments in The Invisible Man. When
Griffin invites himself over the house of fellow scientist Kemp, he insists
that he borrow Kemp’s pajamas, because, after all, they’re “bosom friends,” a
phrase typically applied to close women. Both men are ostensibly in love with
the same woman, too; this is another common device whereby men can work out
their attraction to one another.”
I’d argue, however, that by this time
Griffin, in his sense of new power, has simply grown delusional, imagining a
relationship—and when you demand to put on another man’s pajamas it is also a
sexual relationship, I assure you—with a heteronormative nincompoop, who
quickly choses to call the police and his impotent father figure Dr. Cranley instead
of helping his new “partner,” let alone share his bed. Kemp locks his study
door, closeting himself away from this wild “bosom buddy.”
Langberg notes another remarkable moment,
however, before this film finally begins to get more serious:
“And, of course,
there’s the thrill of watching the Invisible Man strip down to just a shirt,
talking about how he’s going to give the villagers a shock. He takes off his
pants with his rear end poking toward the camera. Then, when the policeman
opens the door, he jumps and leaps around, laughing. Even though Griffin is
invisible, Whale still strategically places a table in front of where his
crotch would be, just like you would if his junk was actually flopping around
in the visible spectrum. (See: the strategically placed flower in front of the
male nude in Will’s apartment on Will & Grace, or the whole scene in
The Simpsons Movie where Bart skateboards in the buff). Whale is
inviting us to imagine it, even if he isn’t showing it.”
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Alas, even such remarkably insightful
films such as Whale’s demand that a man who has killed several hundreds in a
meaningless railroad crash and tossed many a body to their deaths must come to
an end and be destroyed by normative society. They catch this gay man by his
footprints in the snow, he wailing out his own sense of betrayal about his wishful
lover Kemp: “I put my trust in Kemp. I gave him my secret.” It is perhaps any
gay lover’s lament after having felt suddenly that he might control the world
with the new force of identity he feels, only to crash back to earth with the
reality that since he is truly invisible the flesh he desires can never be his
to embrace, to kiss, even to touch.
Los Angeles,
February 22, 2024
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).
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