the closeted narcissus
by Douglas Messerli
Fernand Nault (choreographer), Norman McLaren
(director) Narcissus / 1983
For years Canadian film director/animator
Norman McLaren, a gay man long living a semi-closeted life through years of
public homophobia, had struggled to find a way to express in his films his
homoerotic concerns, but felt that his conceptions would not be acceptable for
his productions distributed through the National Film Board of Canada. I
discuss some of his animations and films with coded images elsewhere in these
volumes; but in the 1970s, when he was working on early sketches for a piece on
the Narcissus legend, McLaren came upon a different version from the standard
Echo-centered presentation of Narcissus. As McLaren writes:
“Around 1970, when I was making a 35mm b &
w rough sketch of the film with Vincent Warren... I came across a version of
the [Narcissus] legend that contained the homo episode (in fact it recounted
that Narcissus was besieged by hosts of girls and young boys). The three or
four other versions I had read until then had mentioned only Echo... When I
discovered the encounter with Ameneius, I got very excited and dead set on
including both the girl and youth encounters, as they would not only throw
Narcissus’ auto-philia into even greater relief but would give me a very
justifiable opportunity to portray a homosexual relationship on the screen. A
thing I had often wished to do. I am not sure if at that time (1971) stirrings
of gay lib had filtered into the backwoods of my secluded life!”
Other projects intervened, however. And even though McLaren was now
ready to finally come out, announcing his homosexuality to the world, he
resisted due to the wishes of his partner NFB producer Guy Glover, with whom he
had lived for 45 years.
When in 1979 he returned to the Narcissus project, things had radically
changed given the various gay liberation movements, and he felt not only
emboldened to include the long scene of gay love between Amenieus and
Narcissus, but believed that he would have been a traitor if he had deleted it
from his work. McLaren, however, notes that the scene might have been even
gayer had he had more control over the project:
“Choreographer, Fernand Nault [b. 1921] who is
one of us [gay], handled that sequence of the film very gently. I would have
wished for him to have done it a bit more boldly, but I didn’t see his
choreography until the first days of rehearsal and it was impossible to ask for
any radical changes, since we were so pressed for time...”
The
final result is a narrative of potential possibilities of love in three parts,
two romantic pas de deux danced by Narcissus (Jean-Louis Morin), first
with a nymph (Sylvie Kinal) and then with what the program describes as a
“hunting partner,” Narcissus’ friend (Sylvain Lafortune). Although both are
traditional representations of sexual possibilities, ending with the hero sadly
rejecting both heterosexual and homosexual love, there are clearly important
differences: “the male duet,” as
MediaQueer commentator Thomas Waugh puts it, “has a stunning effect as an
unprecedented representation [in film dance] of gay male sexuality.”
To
the music of Maurice Blackburn, Narcissus awakes very much in the manner of
Nijinsky’s L'Après-midi d'un faune, lying flat upon the floor, gradually
lifting himself up into a sitting position to reveal his beautiful face and
chest, the latter of which he clearly takes self-adorating pleasure, stroking his nipples and upper chest.
Suddenly the nymph appears behind him, at first almost blocking her own vision
apparently in the shock of the boy’s beauty, but gradually peeking out of him
through her fingers, obviously intrigued. She quietly tiptoes toward him,
reaching out to touch his hair. For a
moment Narcissus pulls her toward as if inspecting this new being, but
immediately thrusts her away. She continues to try to entice him, pulling him
again toward her, a gesture he pulls away from as she gracefully dances about
him, he leaning back while still registering a look of curiosity.
Finally pulling him into an upright position, she leans back to bring
him forward, while he, in counter-turn, leans away, she pulling him again
toward her, and he leaning away as they were playing a childish game of pull
and drag. When she touches his face he shakes her hand off. Through gentle leg
lifts and turns she eventually allures him into to mimicking her as they move
into the more traditional holding and lifting motions of the standard pas de
deux. Yet when they finally reach a moment of a face to face in which she
ends a position a sitting on his lower stomach, he quickly pulls away, making
it clear that he is disinterested in the traditional male-female position
symbolizing sexual ecstasy.
The nymph backs off, putting her hand to her face in both bewilderment
and an expression of shame, much like the Renaissance painters portrayed Eve as
she was expelled from the Garden. With a seeming mix of regret and sorrow she
sadly drifts off only five minutes and thirty seconds into the ballet.
Narcissus returns to his seated position, once more stroking his own
breast. But at that very moment his friend leaps in a bit like a naughty Puck.
This time Narcissus seems delighted and gladly takes his hand as they almost
immediately move into an erotic duo, imitating and mocking each other’s moves
as they twist and turn—the camera sometimes alternating between fast and stop
motion. This time Narcissus gladly moves toward his friend, taking his arm and
joyfully moving into some of the similarly erotic positions of traditional male
and female dance movements. Yet their duet is far more playful, involving
imitation rather than sexually assigned movements.
Narcissus allows his friend to stroke his breast and hair, turning shyly
away momentarily, only to allow him to repeat the gesture. Narcissus even
allows, quivering with pleasure, as his friend runs his hands completely down
the length of his body, springing away only when he reaches his feet, perhaps
suddenly registering the fact of what has just happened.
As
the friend leaps back to continue his gestures of touch, Narcissus rejects
them. Yet when the friend leaps into his arms, putting himself precisely in the
same position as the nymph had, hanging on Narcissus’ waist just above his
crotch, Narcissus allows him to remain in position undergoing what is quite
clearly a moment of intense pleasure from coitus. When completed, however, he
pushes the other away, and the friend soon after disappears.
As
if almost proud of his rejection of the other, Narcissus brushes his hand
through his own hair and discovers his reflection in a nearby pool, peering
into it what might almost be described as an intense gaze of lust, an erotic
attention to the self that unlike all other depictions does not end there, but
is expanded in McLaren’s work into an extravaganza of a male solo played out
through mirrors and bifocal lens as an intense interchange of two images of the
same self, challenging one another to
athletic displays of various balletic positions, leaps, twists, spins, and
imaginary lifts that last for about 10 minutes, about the same length of time
that the other two duets added together. To the now electronically-inspired
score, the two images of the Morin not only appear horizontally in tandem and
in simultaneity, but are projected vertically in space that represents
cinematic reversals of the dancer’s movements.
This delightful portion of the work is, given the beauty of Morin’s
body, obviously also highly homoerotic, but is missing almost all sexuality
since the two parts of the same image can never truly touch except as they
cross electronically through each other’s bodies.
When finally Narcissus attempts to kiss the other, he discovers that he
has given up his heart to a brick wall which, which, as turns toward us, is
revealed to be the other side of a prison cell wherein he has locked himself
away from all human communication. I cannot imagine a more potent visualization
of Vito Russo’s celluloid closet.
Waugh brilliantly summarizes McLaren’s work:
“It
would be too easy to dismiss this film as yet another arty piece of closet
beefcake, and to see McLaren's lavish
stylization as yet another mechanism of avoidance. Still the prison‑bar ending
comes across as an image not so much of the tragedy of self‑absorption but of
sexual repression, even of the thwarted self‑realization of the closet. As
tragic as it is beautiful, Narcissus stands up well as the testament and the
yearning of the shy Scottish‑Canadian civil servant who was one of the more
isolated queer contemporaries of Visconti, Cadmus, and Burroughs.”
Los Angeles, March 17, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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