reading sexually coded films: a defense
by Douglas
Messerli
After “outing” such classical heterosexual comedies and
dramas such as Too Many Husbands, The Letter, Meet John Doe, and Mr. &
Mrs. Smith, and just before I “desecrate” one of the greatest straight
romances of all time Casablanca, perhaps it is time to offer up
some defense for the “gay” readings—far too many suggests even my companion
Howard—of several of the films I have written about throughout these My Gay
Cinema volumes. Certainly there have been a number of them, but I do not
think of myself as a “queer theorist,” peeking under the rocks of any on-screen
relationship to “out” the fictional figures. Indeed, I think these kinds of
readings represent only a small part of the more sexually normative—although I
always find “normative” a slightly strange concept—romances and love stories
which I have described.
Film, as most of us recognize, is a
fantasy, and fantasy always allows people to go outside the lines of what we
might try to control or even hide in real life. Accordingly, in a world where
many of the “real life” actors, writers, and directors were forced to cover
over their true sexual encounters, made even more complicated by the strict
restrictions and delimitations of the Hays Code and other such bastions of
“decency” around the world, these fantasies, if carefully enough spun, could
nevertheless allow all to explore “sexuality” in general.
If I seem to suggest that these coded
explorations were often quite subtle, sublimated, and, at times, even
purposefully titillating, I would argue that they had to be. The filmmakers
were trying to appeal to the largest audience they might reach. And although we
like to think of sexuality as determined by clear boundaries, as Kinsey has
shown us, it seldom is. I would argue that sexuality is never one thing or
another, but always allows for “this” or “that.” One need only think of the
close relationships of male and female “bonding” to perceive that sometimes
even simple friendships can spill over to deeper relationships than marital or
sexual ones. Although we might think we outgrow the sloppy same-sex loves and
relationships of childhood, I’m not convinced we do, believing that potentially
we all have the ability of loving—both with our minds and our bodies—our fellow
beings of both sexes. Surely there are those who try throughout their lives
(and occasionally even succeed) at completely segregating these emotional
responses (my father was so determined to do so that during his life, he, poor
man, had no close male friendships; I think he was simply afraid of the
possibilities which he might have witnessed as a young soldier in World War
II), but most of us cannot nor should not, I would argue, attempt to categorize
and isolate—particularly in our fantasies (understandably, my father did not
like movies, particularly romantic ones)—our sexual inclinations.
It is just such categorizations which
lead, ultimately, to those absolutely ridiculous and often destructive
homophobic and misanthropic ideologies which lead some to attack gay males and
transgendered people, reject gay marriage, and abuse women. Pleasure, perhaps
the most notable component of sex, is also the central component of all art,
and, in particular, cinema. That can be intellectual or sensual or both. In the
films in which I have spoken of containing a covert language and message, both
the intellectual and sexual have, I would argue, truly joined forces to create
profound significance. For me, writing about these works has not been out of
sense of provocative insinuation or gossip, but out of a desire for explorative
revelation of what I truly think the writers, directors, and actors had hoped
to convey in their creations. As my playwright friend Mac Wellman once told me,
“I want my actors to be sexually attractive, to bring out the sexual responses
of my audience,” which, coming from a writer of some of the most experimentally
intellectual plays of his generation, is a fascinating admission, just at the
moment we were witnessing the bronzed body of Reed Birney, now an older and
established actor who recently appeared in the Roundabout Theatre’s production
of Picnic, as the handsome young soldier son in his Murder of Crows.
For those who might still insist I am
simply “reading in” to an otherwise perfectly lucid text, fine. I have never
had a problem in seeing something “other,” the ghosts, erasures and detritus of
meaning. Fortunately, any work of art means in numerous ways, and, as the work
of art becomes more complex, so too does that work’s meaning become richer and
more controversial. As I wrote in my first volume, “If disagreement with me
means seeing the film again or for the first time, then I have succeeded in my
efforts.”
Los Angeles, May
29, 2013
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