Fred Niblo | The Mark of Zorro / 1920

zorro as bisexual

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene Miller and Douglas Fairbanks (screenplay, based on the story by Johnston McCulley), Fred Niblo (director) The Mark of Zorro / 1920

 

      Douglas Fairbanks’ Don Diego Vega goes about with a frilly handkerchief in his limp hand, making regular use of his snuff box, and repeating, as he stands with slouched shoulders and droopy eyes, that he is fatigued. He pays utterly no attention to the beautiful Lolita Pulido (Marguerite De La Motte), whom his parents have insisted he should marry, and invites her and her family to his home while he is away at his country hacienda. In short he demonstrates absolutely no interest in Lolita as a female; she might as well be a potential new roommate rather than a bride. And she herself describes him to her family as not being a man, but a fish, which today’s urban dictionary defines as “A drag queen giving off female impersonation where you can't tell they are even a man; also being able to hid the male essence,” and has long simply long been an obscene slang word for a woman.

     His father Don Alejandro Vega (Sidney De Gray) and his childhood mentor Father Felipe (Walt Whitman) are all embarrassed for what has become of the boy they sent off to Spain for an education. And all the villains of the work, Sergeant Pedro Gonzales (Noah Beery), Captain Juan Ramon (Robert McKim), and the California Governor Alvarado (George Periolat) perceive him as a neutered landowner who cannot possibly pose a threat, precisely what he would like them to believe.

      We know, however, that he is also Zorro, the masked man in black, and in that role is everything that Don Diego is not, a brilliant swordsman filled with nearly endless energy, a great horseman, and a distinctive lover, which Zorro proves by immediately visiting Lolita after she has left Don Diego’s company, and despite his reputation as a dangerous outlaw, immediately gaining her love and exciting her to new possibilities in her otherwise closeted life.

 

    Yet the way Niblo’s script and direction separates these two different aspects of the same man for so much of the narrative suggests that this man or fish embodies both identities. He can neither be said to be one or the either, an impotent poof or a heroic lover. Both are purposely given equal weight in the 1920 version of the film, necessary for him to help both identities survive and to keep his any notion of true identity constantly in question, both for the figures of the story but for the audience as well. The adventure of the narrative, indeed, depends on his constant shifts between the two.

     No other characters have significant meaning, the landowners merely serving as passive participants in their war against the corrupt government which continues daily to tax the poor peons and landowners alike, whipping or even killing anyone who disobeys their demands.

       Only one person is aware of his moment-to-moment transformations, his servant Bernardo (Tote Du Crow), whose tongue has been removed as punishment, making him unable to tell anyone of his friend and master’s constant metamorphoses. But he is more than simply a silent observer, like the bosom friends of other such masked superheroes, Jimmy Olson to Superman’s heterosexual nerdy Clark Kent, Tonto to the sexless Lone Ranger, and Robin to the Boy Wonder to Batman, he is more than a mere “partner,” but a symbolic lover who helps his companion by keeping him abreast of events, and facilitating his return to his secret hideout with its numerous secret rooms and passage ways. He is the link between the two worlds and identities that his friend/master inhabits. I come back to these companion roles later in my essays.

      Niblo’s character, it is important to remember is far more that simply “foppish,” the way in which we might define Rudolf Valentino’s character, Monsieur Beaucaire of four years later. Don Diego is clearly homosexual whose intentions to marry are simply in obedience to custom and parental desires. And that, in itself, is utterly fascinating. For there is no obvious reason that in Diego’s attempt to cover for Zorro that sexuality need be part of the equation whatsoever. He could still be a weakling, a nerd like Clark Kent, a man without political concerns, and a fop whose major joys in life include resting, taking snuff, and doing magic tricks and sleights of hand—all of which would cover well for Zorro’s athletic and intellectual abilities. Sex need not have anything to do with it. Indeed, as in Tyrone Power’s portrayal of Don Diego in the Rouben Mamoulian directed 1940 version of the story, such a character may actually prefer the company of women.

       In Niblo’s wonderful interpretation of Johnston McCulley’s 1919 story “The Curse of Capistrano,” however, the character’s homosexuality is positioned as a central aspect of Fairbank’s characterization. Why, given the macho culture that both Don Diego and Zorro in habit, was such an added aspect of Don Diego’s character deemed necessary? I would argue that structurally it is necessary.

      Don Diego is not simply a ruse which a supposed real character more like Zorro has chosen to protect himself, but is central to the thematic that dominates this work. It is Spain, after all, that has so changed this child of the wild west. And the battle of selves in this work represent the struggle between the innocent, unlearned, ineffective, American raw masculinity—and all the patriarchal associations of that vision—and the educated, skilled, experienced, manipulative European effeteness—and the associations which gather around those words.

      The character Don Diego/Zorro is now both and of both worlds. And it is precisely his ability to contain those contrary identities which make him such a remarkable hero. I’d argue that this story was intended to be, almost destined to be a serial picaresque in which the two sides of the mirror (itself a standard trope of homosexual identity as I discussed in my essay on The Student of Prague of 1913) would inherently have continued to share the stage ad infinitum like the two television series that played from 1957-1959 with Guy Williams playing the heroes and again in 1990-1993 with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. and Duncan Regehr playing the major roles. Although there were “final” unmaskings in these series as well, the basic tenant of the series was that Don Diego / Zorro would go alternating forever as long as the series lasted.

      Obviously, in a film the unmasking must come far earlier, but Niblo intuitively continues the two identities as long as possible, only allowing Fairbanks to reveal himself at the very last moment when Lolita and the Pulidos are jailed and it is necessary to bring together the downtrodden natives and for the once-wealthy landowners to rise up against the corrupt California government and save them from death. But even then we know that both of the figures, homosexual and heterosexual, will remain within the character, as he produces a handkerchief, the major symbol of his homosexuality, to unsuccessfully hide his final heterosexual kiss with Lolita. What Don Diego has learned in Spain will remain with him in his marriage to the US West. His home, if nothing else, will be both an acculturated and cultured spot in the middle of the wilderness.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).