The Transcendent Flesh: Brother Sun, Sister Moon

When I was a kid, my church hated the Roman Catholic "cult."  The Pope was the Antichrist, priests and nuns were possessed by the Devil, and millions of their brainwashed followers worshipped idols and drank wine.  Our Sunday school teacher cautioned us to never speak to a Catholic, if we could help it, or we might get brainwashed, too, and never walk past a Catholic church, or a priest would "get" us.  

In college I dropped out of church.  When the Preacher called to check up on me, I told him I was going to another church now.
Which one?
"Roman Catholic," I said, just to shake things up a bit.
He slammed the phone down, and by the next Sunday, my family was being shunned, stared at, and whispered about.  They made me call the Preacher and tell him that I was only joking.

The first real Catholic I met was Frank, the boy on the Prospect List.  I spent the night with Todd, a Maronite Catholic, at  music camp in the summer of 1976.  My first view of the real Roman Catholic Church came the next fall, when my Medieval History class  at Rocky High saw Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), about the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

Like many movies and tv programs of the era -- That Cold Day in the Park, Hair, If...., even The Bugaloos -- it featured  a "wild youth" who shakes up the establishment.  Raised in luxury as the son of a wealthy Italian merchant, Francis is repelled by the materialism, avarice, and aggression of the adults.  He goes to war, but cannot bring himself to fight.  He seeks refuge in the Roman Catholic Church, but finds it antiquated and materialistic. So he "lights out for the territory" and starts a hippie commune. . .um, I mean a monastic order.

To symbolize his rejection of the material, Francis sheds his clothes, revealing a beautifully sculpted backside.  So a naked male body shows us the way to Paradise.

Some of the movie posters tried to transform the movie into a heterosexual romance, but Francis has no interest in women.  Or in men, either.  He has a best friend, Paolo (Kenneth Cranham), but his love extends to all living things and even inanimate objects, and cannot be contained in a single person.

Actor Graham Faulkner, reputedly gay in real life, also stripped down to play a Cornish farmer with rather shapely thighs, frolicking on the beach with writer D.H. Lawrence in Priest of Love (1981).

Director Franco Zeffirelli, gay in real life, often used beautiful male bodies as symbols of transcendent reality, even when they have sex with women, as with Romeo (Leonard Whiting, left) in Romeo and Juliet (1968).

Today I know much more about the Roman Catholic church.  I've read The Seven Story Mountain.  I've seen the Sistine Chapel.  I know about the histories of popes and saints, the scandals of the priests, the intense opposition to gay marriage and all things gay (but check out this blog, The Wild Reed, Thoughts and Reflections from a Progressive Gay Catholic Perspective).

But in the early days, I found there appreciation of male beauty that the fundamentalist church of my childhood denied.

Super 8: Four Boys, a Girl, and a Monster

An homage to filmmaking, Steven Spielberg, and J.J. Abrams' childhood, Super 8 (2011) is set in the distant past year of 1979, where high schooler Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) is working on a zombie movie, along with his best friend Preston (Zach Mills), the pyromaniac Cary (Ryan Lee), and the skittish Martin (Gabriel Basso). They need a female lead, so Preston calls a girl he likes, Alice (Elle Fanning).  Unfortunately, Joe likes her too.

While they are filming at the train station, they witness a train crash, which releases thousands of small white cubes.  To their horror, they discover that their science teacher, the cliched intuitive black guy (Glynn Turman) crashed into the train deliberately to stop it.  "They'll kill you!" he exclaims, mysteriously.

Meanwhile, Joe's dad, Deputy Sheriff Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler) is despondent after the death of his wife in an unrelated factory accident.  He blames the town nogoodnick, Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard), who was supposed to take her shift that day.

By the way, Louis just happens to be Alice's father.  Her mother "ran off."

The Peyton Place-like soap opera unfolds as unexplained events bedevil the small Ohio town.  All of the dogs run away.  People disappear.  The army arrives and takes over.  The weird cubes start pulsating and changing size.  There's a monster.

And a lot of gay subtexts.

1. Joe is a quiet outsider boy who does all of the makeup for the actors.  He has numerous gay-coded interests: makeup, art, design.  And his father assumes that he is gay.  Most parents, upon discovering that their teenage son is hanging out with a girl, would assume hetero-romance, but Deputy Lamb doesn't, not for a moment.  He consistently refers to the relationship as "a friendship," and to Alice as "one of your friends."

2. Though Joe and Preston both like The Girl, they get a scene in which they discuss their feelings for each other.

3. Martin (left) and Cary express no heterosexual interest; they don't even gawk at The Girl or make sleazy comments about her breasts, like nearly every other movie teenager.

4. Louis and Deputy Lamb apparently were close friends in high school, mirroring the relationship between Joe and Preston.  Then they had an unexplained falling-out.

Why does Deputy Lamb blame Joe for his wife's death?  Maybe Louis was interested in the Deputy, and unconsciously wanted her "out of the way" so he could move in?  Maybe Louis married in the first place only because the object of his affection was marrying.

Now, as they work together to save their kids, there is a palpable erotic tension between them.  One expects them to kiss at any moment.

They don't, of course.  The resolution, which draws on E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, involves a heterosexist rescue of The Girl.  But it's a nice ride.



In 2013, Joel Courtney will be playing Tom Sawyer to Jake T. Austin's Huck Finn.