In 1997, I left California for New York, to enroll in yeat another Ph.D. program. In the humanities, there was constant pressure to embrace only "art"; the grad students competed with each other to determine who had watched tv less:
"The only thing I watch is opera on PBS." "Oh, I watched the news once 10 years ago." "I glanced at a tv screen once in a doctor's office waiting room, but immediately turned away." "TV? Never heard the term before."
In the social sciences, grad students and faculty didn't care: all art was garbage. Richard III or Wacky Races, Mrs. Dalloway or Blondie and Dagwood, all was mindless trash, rotting your brain so you wouldn't be able to think Deep Thoughts about chi squares and logistic regressions. So go to all the movies you want, but don't expect social scientists to lower themselves sufficiently to accompany you.
August: The Full Monty. Unemployed working-class blokes get the idea of making money by stripping (for women). Two of the blokes fall in love. Actually, one of the grad students in my department did see this; she commented that she went with someone "who is not that way AT ALL," yet still thought that the gay romance subplot was "cute." So only gay people can watch a gay romance without retching, but everybody can enjoy a boy-meets-girl story? Heck, the two guys don't even kiss!
September: The Ice Storm. Bored suburbanite swap partners while their son (Elijah Wood) dies in an ice storm. I seem to remember Elijah being gay, but the wikipedia summary doesn't mention it.
October: Seven Years in Tibet. I read the autobiography about a German soldier during World War II who flees into Tibet and becomes the tutor in all things Western for the young Dalai Lama. The movie goes to great lengths to heterosexualize everybody, giving Heinrich Harrer (Brad Pitt) a wife and estranged son back in Austria. His POW buddy (David Thewlis) eventually gets a wife, too.
There's a gay or bi character, but heterosexual romance saves the day.
November: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. On the evil side, a tawdry closeted "homosexual" is on trial for the murder of a "male prostitute" (he's acquitted, but dies anyway, because Bury Your Gays). On the good side is Lady Chablis, a transwoman playing herself. There's a heterosexual romance in the midst of everything, of course.
December: An American Werewolf in Paris, Not a sequel to An American Werewolf in London, it actually involves a boy discovering that the Girl of His Dreams is a werewolf. She belongs to a secret society of werewolves that eats his two friends. So much for gay subtexts.
January: Star Kid. It was science fiction, so why not? Teen idol Joseph Mazzello finds a talking superhero suit that helps him save the world and...meet the Girl of His Dreams. Ugh!
February: Mrs. Dalloway, based on a novel by Virginia Woolfe that I hadn't read, but I knew that she was gay or bi, and traveled in the gay-friendly Bloomsbury Group of early 20th century England. During a long day fraught with depression, marital squabbles, and suicide, Mrs. Dalloway reflects on a lesbian affair in her youth, and Septimus feels guilty over the death of his boyfriend during World War I.
March: Wild Things. Sounds like a 1980s sex comedy, but it's actually about a high school teacher who has sex with an underaged student and is accused of rape (which, legally, it was).
April: Lost in Space. A film version of the 1960s classic sci-fi series about a family waylaid on the long journey to Alpha Centauri, with several of the old cast members doing cameos and hunky Matt LeBlanc as pilot Don West
April: Tarzan and the Lost City. Audiences were expecting yet another rehash of the Tarzan origin story, not realizing that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote over 20 Tarzan novels. This one brings Tarzan (and Jane) to the lost city of Opar!
May: The Opposite of Sex. A 16-year old girl, pregnant by her boyfriend, most in with her gay half-brother, and steals his dead lover's ashes. Meanwhile his dead lover's sister, also pregnant, disapproves of him being gay because it's disgusting and all gay men die of AIDS and..at that point we walked out of the theater. It was offensive all the way down, which is actually the tagline.
June: None
July: Smoke Signals. Victor (Adam Beach) and Thomas (Evan Adams) are gay subtext buddies on the rez.
I would love to see a gay version of "Boogie Nights'- The Joe Gage Story. "The Full Monty" kind of cheats because we never get it . "An American Werewolf in Paris" has fake CGI monsters but I do remember the hero has a cute friend who ends up shirtless and tied up.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that anyone in the audience thought that they were going to actually see the cocks of five random guys. They probably wouldn't be impressive anyway, since the idea is that they're not the typical representation of masculine beauty.
DeleteYou are right- there was also a Broadway musical based on the film and yes sometimes its better to leave some things to the imagination
DeletePhil Buckman plays the guy who is tied up in "An American Werwolf in Paris" who still looks good at 53
ReplyDelete