I loved them.
It's about a man killed by a ghost horse. The nudity was completely unnecessary, but certainly welcome.
Even without the nudity, the stories were amazingly homoerotic, male narrators visiting male friends to hear their tales of murder and madness, with few or no women around, except for a few husbands who hate their wives.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Pym and his boyfriend Augustus stow away about a whaling ship and have adventures. After Augustus dies, Pym hooks up with Richard Parker. The two have more adventures.
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). The narrator and his buddy solve a murder.
"The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842). The narrator is tortured by the pit and the pendulum, but rescued by the strong arm of a French soldier.
(Left: ABC series with Edgar Allan Poe as a paranormal investigator.)
"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843). The narrator (played on film by Stephen Brockway) "loves the old man," but kills him anyway.
"The Gold-Bug." (1843). The narrator, his buddy, and their servant search for buried treasure.
"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) Montresor gets revenge on Fortunato by walling him up. But why is he so upset?
No wonder he was not mentioned in my class in American Renaissance Literature at Augustana, though he lived at the same time as Melville, Hawthorne, and Emerson.
Maybe because if the women are dead, the men don't have to worry about any of that icky hetero-romance.
Poe certainly spent a lot of time courting women through his life, but usually they were sickly or dying, like his 13-year old cousin Virginia Clemm, whom he married in 1836, when he was 27.
Maybe he found some solace in glimmers of same-sex desire.
See also: The Gay American Renaissance.
I saw the movie "The Pit and the Pendulum" in middle school. Scared the c**p out of me.
ReplyDeleteNot to be confused with the HBO special. (Which has two men wrestling at a woman's request. In their underwear, not naked which would make more sense. Also, I only saw the pendulum in that. Used for "really weak brainwashing that would not work of not voluntary and pretending it's the same strength as several months of proper torture" as pop culture always does.)
DeleteI saw the Masque of the Red Death with Vincent Price once. I mostly wondered what the Red Death would look like. I don't know what's with the rainbow of death at the end.
There are several movie versions of "The Pit and the Pendulum" - the Roger Corman production from 1961 starring Vincent Price is scary and atmospheric. Stuart Gordon directed the 1991 version with Lance Henriksen as Torquemda having fun torturing people. In 2009 DavidDeCoteau directed his boys in tight briefs edition
DeleteInteresting never thought of Poe in that context- there was a David DeCoteau version of "House of Usher" in which the house was haunted by his usual cute boys in their underwear.
ReplyDeletePoe had a lot of people in his live died from tuberculosis. The Narrator and Usher could be read as gay romance- in the movie he goes to the house to visit his girlfriend- Usher's sister but no in the story.
ReplyDeleteDid you watch " The Pale Blue Eye" film on Neflix- Poe joins with an older man detective to investigate who is killing the cadets at West Point which the real Poe attended. For a story set in a military academy there is no male nudity or repressed gay desire- the solution to the murder is very heterosexual.
ReplyDeleteI think I started it, but gave up when it turned out to be heterosexist.
Delete