Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra | A Chairy Tale / 1957

the object of endearment: a queer tale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Evelyn Lambart (animator), Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra (directors) A Chairy Tale / 1957

 

Working with his regular animation partner, Evelyn Lambart, and directing with fellow Canadian gay filmmaker Claude Jutra, whom the work also stars, Norman McLaren created a memorable stop-motion movie in 1957 titled A Chairy Tale.

    The work, produced just a few years after Eugène Ionesco’s 1952 play The Chairs, shares some of that earlier work’s absurdity. In the 1952 play the ushers spoke to the chairs as if they themselves were the guests of a lecture that would soon take place, the invisible guests so overwhelming the guest lecturer that they drowned out his message.

   But in McLaren and Jutra’s work the chair is even more anthropomorphic in its stubborn determination not to be sat upon, the role a chair usually plays as an object in the universe. The particular chair the book reader Jutra encounters is a rather obstinate object, refusing to fulfill its normal purpose in life.

     In fact, the film, created by two queer artists at a time when it was difficult to speak openly about their sexuality, seems to be suggesting that the object itself of this short film is “queer,” that in refusing to perform in the context of normalcy, even the furniture upon which we depend to serve our daily realities has dangerously failed in its role. One imagines, in fact, that if this film were to have been directed by a macho straight director that the normative breaches of this chair would be severely punished—far more effectively than even Jutra’s momentarily wrestling with it—and turned back into the sticks and planks of wood from which it had been created, a pile of faggots to be set afire.

    Critics and viewers have sensed that in this particular chair’s stubborn refusal to play its natural role that there is something queer-coded about this 12-minute movie made by two homosexuals. Yet perceiving it as another of McLaren’s cinematic abstractions, most commentators have been rather vague about the actual meaning and mechanics of this work, which, henceforth, I will here attempt to more fully illuminate.

     First of all, we might begin with the title itself, A Chairy Tale, literally a story about a chair, but also rhyming with the notion a child’s fairy tale, although in this case, the fairy not representing a vague world of a faery or faeries, a magical or mythical world of imaginary creatures, but using the word in its derogatory meaning applied to fey or effeminate men, namely gays or queers. Even from its very title, accordingly, the creators link their “fairy tale” up with the queer world in which beings and things don’t behave as they ordinarily should.

     We then only have recall what a chair is for to begin to comprehend its associations with the queers of the fairy world. Primarily we sit upon a chair, it becoming the repository for our “tails,” our butts or asses. It is not coincidental that the position of holding someone lovingly in bed while laying on one’s side is often called the “chair” position. Quite inexplicably, this particular chair is tired of playing that role, of being a kind of “bottom” retainer for our butts. Even if we imagine that, in sexual terms, putting our bottom on a chair would mean that “it” would be, metaphorically speaking, “fucking us,” as it gives our asses pleasure, a chair is still usually a passive thing; while this chair is, in fact, quite active, moving away several feet each time Jutra attempts to sit upon it.

    This chair, indeed, is even more active than moving a few feet off from the man who attempts to engage it in his “comfort,” but races off, speeds away only to return a few minutes later, literally playing a kind of “come-and-get-me” or flirtatiously “hard-to-get” role in this man’s life.

    Jutra and the chair’s first encounters remind me, in fact, of what I have written about the role of gay cruising in queer sex. Like a sexual cruiser, this queer chair wanders away, only to reappear, time and again—at one point, as in the short film I describe from Britt Randle’s 2015 short Run Rabbit, actually racing off with Jutra on the chase—the cruiser, in this case, losing even his sense of purpose in the chase itself as the chair finally pauses just to observe the meaningless run of his sexual pursuer.

     And much like some gay cruisers in either nature or a gay bar, when the original male finally grows frustrated and tired of his fruitless pursuit, the original object of his desire returns, attempts to make up, to reengage him in his sexual chase.

      Jutra now approaches the potential romancer differently, sidling up to his would-be partner, sneaking up on him, flirting, rocking him in his arms, and tangoing with him across the floor, all in an attempt to romance the chair to accept his ass. When those acts still don’t quite accomplish the goal, Jutra finally completely abandon’s himself to the utter perversity of the situation, allowing the chair to sit on him, thus passively “fucking” the chair instead of the other way around.

 

     Now recognized as a sexual equal the chair is perfectly happy to resume its more “normal” role of being sat upon. Yet neither we nor Jutra can envision the chair with our previous objectification or with a sense of normality. It has become a being equal to us, forcing us to recognize the pleasure we take in its company as being anything but normal or obvious. The chair has entered the fairy tale world, where it exists as a strange entity that is different from all other chairs. As Jutra rests his butt upon it, he does so no longer with the nonchalant intention of simply reading a book; it has become an object of endearment. As a title announces, “And so, they sat happily ever after.”

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2025).