George Cukor | The Women / 1939

fool’s paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anita Loos and Jane Murfin (screenplay, based on the play by Clare Boothe Luce), George Cukor (director) The Women / 1939

 

It had been many years since I last George Cukor’s The Women, and I can’t say that it has entirely aged well. At many points, Clare Boothe Luce’s witty language (spruced up to fit into the Film Production Code by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin) helps the film to be still fun in a truly “bitchy” manner, particularly through the gossipy chatter of Sylvia Fowler (Rosalind Russell) and Edith Potter (Phyllis Povah) and others of Mary Haines’ (Norma Shearer) supposed friends. Sylvia has gotten news from a manicurist that Mary’s husband Stephen has been having an affair with a perfume counter clerk, Crystal Allen (Joan Crawford)—and within hours she and her friends have passed it on to one another, even gathering a kind of small scouting party to check the counter-clerk out.

 

     At moments their comments, especially those of the lesbian-like writer, Nancy Blake (Florence Nash), are brilliant, presenting a far different view of New York house-wives from any film later reaching into the 1960s. These women are not only quite independent, but—at least two of them, Mary and Peggy Day (Joan Fontaine)—are pleased with their companions. If you might have ignored Cukor’s credits, wherein he equates each of these figures with animals, you might even think that these smart women are proto-feminists. They’re certainly not stupid or passive. Nancy is even hinting that she believes her husband to be gay.

 

Sylvia Fowler: Well, heaven be praised, I'm on to my husband, I wouldn't trust him on Alcatraz, the mouse.

Peggy Day: Sylvia, you oughtn't talk about him like that! Why, I think it's disloyal!

Sylvia Fowler: Oh now, listen Peggy, do we know how the men talk about us when we're not around?

Nancy Blake: I've heard rumours.

Sylvia Fowler: Exactly... And uh... While we're on the subject, have either of you wondered whether the master of this maison might not be straying?

Nancy Blake: I haven't.

Sylvia Fowler: Well, for all you know Mary Haines may be living in a fool's paradise.

Nancy Blake: You're so resourceful darling. I ought to go to you for plots.

Sylvia Fowler: You ought to go to “someone.”

 

      Yet, we soon perceive that, like the women of whom Elaine Stritch sings in the musical Company, these are “the ladies who lunch.” When they’re not busily gossiping or, metaphorically speaking, stabbing one another in the back, they shop, attend fashion shows, and, yes, lunch. Indeed, I had never before seen the long center of this movie, a scene in the middle of this black-and-white film that, like The Wizard of Oz (a film that appeared in the same year, directed in part by Cukor), was shot by the director in color: a long fashion parade that might almost have been stolen right out of a Ziegfeld Follies routine. Many of outrageous costumes by Adrian, in fact, appear to have been inspired by the Emerald City. 

     Certainly, there are witches here by the dozens. Not only, as Mary’s intelligent mother tries to tell her, are these “friends” eager to dish the dirt, but want to force Mary to confront her bedroom competitor and seek a divorce from the husband she still loves. And if their mean behavior was not enough, Cukor drags in a true “witch” in the form of Hedda Hopper (playing Dolly Dupuyster) who takes the affair to new levels by plastering the news all over the daily papers.

     Like the character Mrs. Lord (Mary Nash) of the The Philadelphia Story—a film that was released the following year—Mrs. Morehead (Lucile Watson) advises her daughter to simply wait out her husband’s current obsession, just as she did in her own long marriage. (Two of the actors in The Women also appeared in The Philadelphia Story, Ruth Hussey, and Virginia Weidler, the latter playing Mary’s daughter, just as she later did Mrs. Lord’s precocious child.)

      If the film is sometimes fun in its satire of female gossip, it turns very sad, however, on the train to Reno, particularly since two of the Reno ranch tenants, Mary and Peggy, really don’t want their divorces. The script and Cukor try to keep up the spirits of the clever play by introducing the hilarious, serial divorcee, The Countess De Lave (Mary Boland) and the ranch owner, Lucy (Marjorie Main). Peggy, who finds herself pregnant, returns to her husband; but when Mary attempts to call him with hopes of a reconciliation, he calls her, instead, to let her know, since the divorce has now gone through, about his own marriage to Crystal.

 

     Even if, a bit like All About Eve, everything does work out in the end—particularly since the nasty Crystal has now taken up with The Countess’ most recent husband, a Reno cowboy turned, through her money, radio broadcaster—there’s something more than sad about the horrible behaviors of all, male and female, involved. And we know by film’s end, that the lovely mother that Mary portrays at the beginning of The Women will never quite be restored. She may be the “owl,” which her mother represents, but she will never again be the joyous, loving wife and mother of work’s first scenes.

      In a sense, The Women is a kind of playing out of the Garden of Eden myth, but from the perspective only of Eve, as if Adam didn’t truly matter. In such a world, as one character suggests early on, there is no forward movement, no possibility for a new world: “everything is going in circles.”  

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2018).

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Medea / 1969

medea’s mad dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenwriter and director) Medea / 1969

 

I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea several days ago but couldn’t quite bring myself to write about it until now. Part of the problem is that the story itself is so confusing and shifting that it is difficult to truly understand the role of Medea in her relationship with Jason (Giuseppe Gentile), his search of the “golden fleece,” and her pain concerning her many children who have been destroyed by Kresus (Massimo Girotti).

  

  Medea, in the myths, is impenetrable, and even the great Maria Callas, the remarkable opera star Pasolini chose for his Medea figure, hardly speaks in this film—and when she does only in translation. Mostly she glowers over the scenes this ritualistic tribe, who killing men use their innards to return them to the landscape in attempt to reinfuse it with their powers. It is a terrifying ritual that smells of a Euripdean world that Pasolini never quite explains. But then Pasolini is obviously seeking a world even darker than that of Euripdes.

      People in this world are chopped up, for hardly any logical reason, and their parts distributed back into the earth, with the community participating in a cannibal-like feast. Mostly, the participants look on, including Callas, with severe observation, as if the entire community were transfixed by the central scene in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer.

      Whatever the source of Pasolini’s film, we are simply terrified by the brutality. And there seems to be no way out of this horrendous drama of hate and revenge, except in the earliest of scenes with the centaur (Laurent Terzieff) and the young Jason (Luigi Masironi), encouraged before he can comprehend the message by the centaur to reclaim his kingdom taken from him. 

     Although quite beautifully filmed, Pasolini’s movie is a confusing mix-and-match version of the Medea myth. And, since it is mostly presented in images, with very little dialogue, it is almost impossible to comprehend why Jason, upon his return to Corinth, turns his attentions away from Medea to Glauce, and why in sudden revenge Medea repeats the brutal ceremony we witnessed earlier in the film, this time destroying her brother Absyrtus before she turns on her lover and Glauce. As The New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby expressed it:

 

"Medea is a primeval soul who erupts almost spontaneously when transplanted into a civilization ruled by order. And this, I think, is where the film goes awry. There is no real conflict between Pasolini's conception and Euripides's Pasolini's supplements the other's, but because nothing in Pasolini's imagery in the scenes in Corinth is equal to the passion of the original text, or to Pasolini's own scenes early in the film, the movie seems to go thin and absurdly melodramatic."

 

 

Indeed, her vengeance, coming seemingly out of nowhere—particularly since she has not even been allowed to explain her love for Jason—is so difficult to endure that, as in the final scenes of the director’s Salò, we almost feel that we must close our eyes to what we are observing, particularly since Pasolini has previously made love to his beautiful star with his camera.

     Perhaps, as in that Salò, Pasolini’s point here is that within every human heart there is always perversion and, finally, a monster, and trying to hold on and control the beloved is always a sort of fascist act.

      Certainly, Pasolini’s own life and death gave credence to that fact, as his “acquisition” of a young handsome man led to the boy turning on him and murdering the director. One might almost read Medea today as a prescient vision of what love spurned can lead to.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

Nontawat Numbenchapol | ดอยบอย (Doi Boy) / 2023

dangers of love

by Douglas Messserli

 

Homsap Chanchana, Prasongsom Koonsombat, Prakit Laemluang, Nakorn Phopairoj, and Nontawat Numbenchapol (screenplay), Nontawat Numbenchapol (director) ดอยบอย (Doi Boy) / 2023

 

Documentary filmmaker Nontawat Numberchapol worked for 5 years on his 2023 film Doi Boy, now distributed by Netflix. Surely one of the reasons it took so long to make were the varying layers of significance that his film reveals.

  On one level it is yet another glimpse into the sex worker network in Thailand. The central figure in this film, Sorn (Awat Ratanapintha), is a citizen originally of Myanmar, who has gone AWOL from his enforced military service. Originally a monk, the Myanmar government entered their shrine, conscripting all to join in the government’s long-standing war with the ethnic Shan tribe in eastern Myanmar. Without a steady job or passport to obtain one, Sorn finds it easiest to make money and keep below the police radar by working as a dancer and masseur in the Doi Boy Club in Chiang Mai.

     One of his major customers, strangely enough is Ji (Arak Amornsupasiri), who works as a police officer. Although both men are in sexual relationships with women, Ji’s wife being pregnant, their massage sessions are also highly sexual with, at each session, them determining who wants to be the top and who the bottom. Indeed, Sorn seems quite popular at the club but still does not make enough to survive, relying on his girlfriend, also a sex worker, to pay the electricity, etc. He and his friend, however, spend some of the rent money on attempting to get passports which they are certain will allow them better paying jobs.

 

     Despite the sexual focus of the first part of this film, however, Doi Boy quickly morphs into a dark political adventure tale as the clubs are closed down during the Covid pandemic and Ji enlists his unwilling sexual partner to help him enter Myanmar in order to fulfill an assignment of tracking down a young man, Wuth, a political activist who with his gay lover Bhoom has long been speaking out about both their own government and the Thai police force who work together to silence activists such as themselves.

      Ji promises Sorn a passport and money if he will help get him across the border and help him find and silence Wuth.

     Bhoom, Wuth’s lover, has already been killed by Ji by the time Sorn becomes unwillingly involved. But Ji, tired of being forced into such dirty deeds this time wants to help the young Wuth, by forcing him to disappear into a Buddhist shrine instead of killing him as well.

      But when are all arrested by a former monk now working for the military, their voyage becomes, as one my imagine, a kind of journey into hell where no one can be trusted, friend or enemy, and each of them are forced to align themselves in variously different configurations of friendship just in order to survive. At one point Ji must disavow any connection with Sorn and Wuth, at another moment Sorn and Wuth attempt escape Ji’s control over them, and at year other moments Sorn must join up with Ji in order to help the always suspicious and wary Wuth.

     As Hugo Hamon writes in Asian Movie Pulse:

 

“The movie encompasses a fluidity in everything. Ultimately, identities, nationalities, states, boundaries, relationships, values, friendships appear as arbitrary constructions, and in the midst of this jungle without any absolutes, anyone can be anything and everyone could represent a danger. The transition between scenes is executed with delicate grace, seamlessly navigating even the harshest realities.

    Doi Boy features numerous plot twists, with many scenes allowing the complexities of each character to unfold and reshape our emotional investment in them. Our empathy varies greatly throughout the viewing. Initially, we adopt the perspective of the cop and develop empathy for him. However, as he proves to be violent and as the film takes on a thriller tone, we become much closer to Sorn and activist Wuth, creating an especially intense contrast.”

     By film’s end each of the three central characters have gone their own direction. Wuth ends up safe, in nothing else, as a monk with nowhere else to go. Ji returns home to his pregnant wife only to disappear again, probably a victim of his own police force for not having properly disposed of Wuth.

     Sorn’s girlfriend, not knowing where he has disappeared to and even if he is still alive, takes of the offer of a wealthy customer and escapes with him to a promised life of well-being.

      The last we see of Sorn, now with passport in hand, is as he seems to be trudging through the jungle in hope of escaping once more into Thailand. We realize, however, that he will perhaps be no better off this time. And he has already lost the two beings who most lived him. Whether or not he may return to sex work, his future is bleak. And he now surely realizes in this world in which everything is constantly changing that he can no longer trust anyone. As director Nontawat Numbenchapol makes clear, and as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul also hinted in his Blissfully Yours (2002), life for Myanmar immigrants in Thailand is dire.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Alfred L. Werker, Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwerks, and Jack Kinney | The Reluctant Dragon / 1941

the upside down cake: how coding in film functions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ted Sears, Al Perkins, Larry Clemons, William Cotrell, and Harry Clork (screenplay based on the original story by Kenneth Grahame with additions by Erdman Penner, T. Hee, and Berk Anthony), Alfred L. Werker, Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwerks, and Jack Kinney (directors) The Reluctant Dragon / 1941

 

If one truly wants to comprehend how cinematic “coding” works, one need only watch the Walt Disney feature of 1941, The Reluctant Dragon. Coding, I would argue, is an extreme form of irony, wherein you say one thing but mean or point to something else. But it functions mostly in reverse of the general examples of literary irony. If in irony one begins often by saying something quite outrageous, he is doing so to point out a reality that forces one to imagine that extreme, the real permitting us to imagine the absurd. When Jonathan Swift argues that the children of the extreme poor throughout the country might serve a great purpose as “a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout,” he obviously is not arguing for cannibalism, but making the point of just how horrible the conditions are among the poor and how insufferable are those who will not work to find a way to help families pay and provide for their starving children. The absurd suggestion is an ironical statement that covers over his anger and frustration with a society not willing to help its own people and their children to properly survive.

      In “coding,” the statement being made generally begins as a placid one that fits into a fairly traditional viewpoint: a heterosexual hypochondriac gets the notion that he is about to die, so he begins looking for another man to replace him who might be suitable for his wife. Indeed, given the behavior of that man’s friend who is a bachelor who gleefully contacts women who are getting divorced or have just lost their husbands and pretends to console them with the real purpose of seducing them into his bed, the character (in this instance Rock Hudson, the film being Send Me No Flowers) is apparently attempting to be a good and protective husband. But the search allows him to spend the rest of the movie observing and commenting on the male sex, without having to devote hardly any time dealing with heterosexual matters. In short, Hudson’s character and his close friend played by Tony Randall to whom he has confided, are permitted to spend almost the entire film cruising men and at times one another.

      For the everyday theater goer, the humor of the film derives simply from the irony that, in fact, Hudson’s character is perfectly well, and all the efforts and mishaps he goes through in attempting to protect his wife are absolutely unnecessary. But for those viewers who knew of Hudson’s and Randall’s sexuality or at least suspected it, or for those who, without even knowing that both were actually homosexual, but perceived that the story was really a movie about something else, the humor is derived from the irony of the cinema’s pretense, the fact that he is hypochondrial being only incidental. I might just add, that since homosexuality was something rarely spoken about, moreover, and in many states against the law, Americans were generally much more innocent about such sexual possibilities and mostly unaware of gay humor.

     The example I used, however, is not typical of coding. In most films the thematic that lies underneath the veneer the surface plot, do not fully function throughout the film. Coding does not work like allegory, in which at nearly all times things can be seen in double. In most films with LGBTQ coding, the coded scenes are simply dropped in from time to time, with the major plot bubbling along in its heterosexual manner, usually ending in the prerequisite reiteration of heterosexual love and/or marriage. The characters often, in fact, change their sexual alliances according to the demands of the normative heterosexual template.

 

*

 

      On May 29, 1941, animators at Walt Disney Productions went on strike to protest inequalities of pay and privileges at the studio in Burbank. The strike lasted for three months and 26 days. Wikipedia actually nicely summarizes the basic reasons for the strike:

 

“Disney's animators had the best pay and working conditions in the industry, but were discontented. Originally, 20 percent of the profits from short cartoons went toward employee bonuses, but Disney eventually suspended this practice. Disney's 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a financial success, allowing Disney to construct a new, larger studio in Burbank, California, financed by borrowing. At the Burbank studio, a rigid hierarchy system was enforced where employee benefits such as access to the restaurant, gymnasium, and steam room were limited to the studio's head writers and animators, who also received larger and more comfortable offices. Individual departments were segregated into buildings and heavily policed by administrators.

     The box-office failures of Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940 forced Disney to make layoffs, although Disney rarely involved himself in the hiring and firing process with those who were not atop the pay chain. The studio's pay structure was very disorganized, with some high-ranking animators earning as much as $300 a week, while other employees made as little as $12. According to then-Disney animator Willis Pyle, ‘there was no rhyme or reason as to the way the guys were paid. You might be sitting next to a guy doing the same thing as you and you might be getting $20 a week more or less than him.’ Staff were also forced to put their name to documents which stated that they worked a forty hour week, whilst their actual hours were much longer. In addition there was resentment at Walt Disney taking credit for their work, and employees wished to receive on-screen credit for their art.

     The Screen Cartoonist’s Guild and [their president Herbert] Sorrell started meeting on a regular basis at the Hollywood Hotel from the start of 1941 to hear Disney workers' grievances and plan a unionization effort. Many animators, including Art Babbitt, grew dissatisfied and joined the SCG. Babbitt was one of Disney's best-paid animators, though he was sympathetic to low-ranking employees and openly disliked Disney.  Babbitt had previously been a senior official in the Disney company union, the Federation of Screen Cartoonists, but had become frustrated due to being unable to effect change in that position. Disney saw no problem with the structure, believing it was his studio to run and that his employees should be grateful to him for providing the new studio space

     Sorrell, along with Babbitt and Bill Littlejohn, approached Disney and demanded he unionize his studio, but Disney refused. In February 1941, Disney gathered all 1,200 employees in his auditorium for a speech:

 

‘In the 20 years I've spent in this business I've weathered many storms. It's been far from easy sailing. It required a great deal of work, struggle, determination, competence, faith, and above all unselfishness. Some people think we have a class distinction in the place. They wonder why some people get better seats in the theatre than others. They wonder why some men get spaces in the parking lot and others don't. I have always felt, and always will feel that the men that contribute most to the organization should, out of respect alone, enjoy some privileges. My first recommendation to the lot of you is this; put your own house in order, you can't accomplish a damn thing by sitting around and waiting to be told everything. If you're not progressing as you should, instead of grumbling and growling, do something about it.’

 

     Understandably that speech was not well received and in May many of the animators and others went on strike. During that time, of course, projects that had already been started and new projects were halted; and Disney, at the pitch of its early popularity, had no way to proceed with new pictures. Although an agreement was eventually forced upon the company, it resulted in the loss of some of its major animators and other executives, at least temporarily, and helped to delay some of the features the studio had been working on, including Peter Pan until after World War II.

     In order, apparently, to resolve that situation and to provide further product, in June the studio released what can only be described as a kind of “cover,” a feature film that pretended to be filled with new animated works, but actually features only two short films, the longest, The Reluctant Dragon being only 20 minutes in length.

     Most cleverly, moreover, this film engaged the popular comedic raconteur, former member of the Algonquin Round Table, Robert Benchley to supposedly attempt to pitch the children’s book, Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon, read to him by his wife, for production by Disney, although what rights he had to do so is never explained. In fact, it is merely a cover to allow him, supposedly on the run from the designated studio guide Humphrey (Buddy Pepper), into the deeper recesses of the Disney factory. Playing the somewhat fey common man that he often portrayed, Benchley appears to be reluctant to actually meet with Disney or attempt to sell him the book.

    What it allowed Disney studios to do is to show off their remarkable studios in its many manifestations and to feature some of their more loyal and noted animators, while simultaneously promoting the company characters such as Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Pluto while pretending that all operations were continuing on smoothly and regularly, all in the guise of a featuring new works.

       Almost like Dante, Benchley tours the nine celestial spheres of Disney’s Paradiso. He first stumbles into a life drawing session where animators study how the make caricatures of people and animals by observing them in real life. Today’s subject is a live elephant, who Benchley mocks and praises alternatively, the animal sometimes reacting anthropomorphically, which is of course a Disney secret of their success. At each level of his holy journey is he provided with a small gift; here he receives a quick sketch of an elephant bearing a remarkable resemblance to himself.

     Again attempting to dodge the insistent Humphrey, Benchley attends a film scoring with a full orchestra and performers Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, and Florence Gill, the voice of Clara Cluck. Nash teaches him how to use his cheek for the Donald Duck effects.

      At a foley session, featuring a cartoon sequence from Casey Junior from Dumbo, he meets his Beatrice, Doris (Francis Gifford), who explains how to use the sonovox for the train sounds while the foley experts demonstrate how they create the noises of the traveling train and a storm that nearly destroys him. Doris allows him to play with sonovox as a treat.

      Finding himself in the camera room, featuring a demonstration of the multiplane camera, everything is turned from grayscale and black-and-white into Technicolor, Benchley himself examining his own now red and blue tie and commenting, when Doris asks if he remembers her from the foley room, “Yes, but look different in Technicolor!” Donald Duck makes another appearance on the camera stand as the cameraman explains how the duck is made to walk in animated photography. From here on Benchley has been given the gift of color.

    In the ink-and-paint department, the technicians show Benchley and the audience how the various colors are mixed and applied to cels such as that of the figure of Bambi we are shown and which is presented to Benchley to hold up against various backgrounds of glens and forests.

     Still evading Humphrey, he enters the maquette-making department which casts small statues to help animators envision their characters from all perspectives. A number of the maquettes are on display, including those from future films such as Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan, Captain Hook, Tinker Bell, John and Michael Darling, Smee, and Peter himself. Benchley admires a small black zebra centaurette from Fantasia which is given to him along with a maquette of himself, quickly done by an employee, a work later purchased for the collection of Warner Brothers director Chuck Jones.

     Hiding out in the storyboard department Benchley encounters a group of so-called “storymen,” one them portrayed by Alan Ladd who flips through a completed story book to glimpse the animation process. There also he is given a premiere look at a planned work, Baby Weems (the creation of Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, and John Miller) with the use of an animatic, a story reel that uses limited animation. The lead director of this entire film, Alfred Werker, then working for 20th Century Fox, but loaned out for this film, was the first director to use the storyboard as developed by Disney staff in the early 1930s.

     In the penultimate room he meets up with the animators themselves, Ward Kimball, Fred Moore, and Norm Ferguson, where he is treated to a preview of the Goofy cartoon, How to Ride a Horse, which was later released as a stand-alone short in February 1950. Ferguson also shows him his new animations of Pluto.

     Finally, Humphrey catches up with him, following rather than leading him directly to God, Disney himself in a previewing room about to watch a new completed feature, the 20-minute short of which this film bears the title and which Benchley had hoped to sell to him, The Reluctant Dragon.

     Handing over all the gifts that he has accumulated along the way, almost as in tribute to Disney, Benchley can finally sit back and watch the story created with a screenplay by Ted Sears, Al Perkins, Larry Clemons, William Cotrell, and Harry Clork, based on the original story by Kenneth Grahame and rewritten by Erdman Penner, T. Hee, and Berk Anthony. The directors include Alfred L. Werker, Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwwerks, and Jack Kinney. In all there were some 44 animators and background painters, only 11 of them credited.

 

    Almost as what appears to be an in-joke, that animated short is itself a coded gay movie, featuring a Dragon (voice by Barnett Parker) who is befriended by a young Boy (voiced by Billy Lee) when the boy’s father and the community becomes terrified of the nearby beast. Visiting the Dragon, of whom the Boy has read, the Boy discovers that the storybook villain is not all interested in fighting but rather enjoys tea parties, playing his flute to accompany his bird friends, and, most of all, writing poetry. In every way possible—as the dragon tosses out its tiny front feet with the curvature of a limp wrist and sash-shays its huge rump with disdain of those who disagree with him, calling them sweethearts and dear ones—the writers, animators, and directors convey clearly that this Dragon is gay. Poets are, after all, the standard stand-in for fussy queers, and the poem he recites makes quite clear his inclinations:

 

Sweet Upside Down Cake

Cares and woes you’ve got them.

Because Upside Down Cake

Your top is on your bottom.

Alas Upside Down Cake

Your trouble’s never stop.

Because Upside Down Cake

You’re bottom’s on your top.

 

    (For those straight readers who have never watched TV, seen a film, and seldom leave their houses, I remind you that a top is the gay man who does the fucking, the bottom the one receiving. When the bottom is on his top, presumably he’s enjoying as ass-licking in preparation for the fuck.)

     When Sir Giles (voice by Claud Allister) shows up to fight the dragon, the Boy is equally disappointed that not only he is an old man, but he also writes poetry, although not of the same sort as the Dragon, his being more about the red radishes he downs in delight. When he discovers that the Dragon has no intentions in fighting, he secretly suggests they fight in gest, he pretending to slay him, while the Dragon will receive great attention and applause.

      Even Sean Griffith in his exploration of Disney characters in Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out notes of “the delight and acceptance [in this film] of an effeminate male.” He continues: “The dragon sports long emotive eyelashes and contains not an aggressive bone in his body, with the dragon prancing and pirouetting throughout the story... There is no mistaking how the film makes fun of the dragon's mincing manner and prissy pretentions. Yet, the film also makes it quite clear that the dragon does not believe in fighting, and the film doesn't specifically make fun of him for that... Just as in Ferdinand the Bull, The Reluctant Dragon presents an easily read gay character under the guise of fantasy and shows characters accepting him as he is."

     But the truth is that the Boy has a great deal of difficulty in accepting the Dragon, and does in fact taunt him, commenting, when the Dragon is unable to even get up enough macho to breathe out fire on the day of the fight: “Too bad you’re not a real dragon, instead of a puff poet.” That is the equivalent of calling him a faggot. And it so angers the sensitive beast that he suddenly draws up enough inner fuel to spew up a torrent of forgotten flames, allowing him to give the performance of his life.

 

     Like all gay films, the Dragon must die, or at least pretend to. Later, when the community discovers that he still lives, he must swear: "I promise not to rant or roar, and scourge the countryside anymore!" But then, of course, he never did rant or roar or scourge anyone before.

    Whether or not the average parent with children in tow saw this pacifist Dragon as being homosexual I cannot say. Did Disney know what his own remaining animators had cooked up as core of his personal tribute to his studio and himself? Certainly, it slipped by the watchful eyes of the Hays Board, who demanded that the film be censored only of the Dragon’s navel. What they might have been thinking of, I can’t imagine. Did a navel of this already totally anthropomorphized beast simply step over the line regarding him being too human?

     Clearly The New York Times reviewer entirely missed the point or purposely covered over it, writing: “As if to atone for the fearsome witches and monsters of his previous films, he has made of his dragon as dizzy a dowager as ever frolicked forth from her cave reciting little roundelays. Whatever the villagers think, she is nonetheless just a harmless old biddy forever drinking tea, and though, according to the best medieval practice, she is supposed to breathe flame, her very best is to emit one tiny smoke ring.” That’s certainly one way of escaping an effeminate beast.

       Did most of the audiences of the day simply read this as a parable of pacifist behavior, and if so, what did that mean to them in 1941, on the eve of the one of the most horrific wars of all time? We can no longer perceive it from the perspective of that moment.

     But if we can now see this work structured in a manner that might remind one of a series of increasingly smaller Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, the fruit we find in the final container is the sweetest one we might ever have imagined.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).