The Banality of Evil

This is part of the Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs and Andreas and Ashley over at Pussy Goes Grrr (who I've been neglecting to mention; please accept my apologies, guys. My bad.).

I'm going to a Gay Pride celebration in St. Louis this weekend. I have mixed feelings about this because even here in the Midwest, in an ostensibly "red" state, Gay Pride celebrations have largely ceased being about politics or a struggle for rights. They've been tamed. They're "family" events now. They've mostly been co-opted to sell a hip young demographic alcohol or cell phones or whatever. Oh, there will be booths dedicated to politics, sure, but I'll cringe at the drag show (as I always do), I'll chafe at the bemused toleration of my own letter(s) in the GLBT alphabet soup, I'll gripe about the fact that the Stonewall riots happened in June rather than some more temperate month, and I'll come home, once again, wondering why I went in the first place. Things are not so rosy elsewhere in the world, however, and if I ever need a reminder of why these events are important, I need only think of the lot of GLBT people in sub-Sahara Africa, who are struggling to assert their own pride in who they are, and who are under constant threat. I should think of Uganda in particular, where the legislature has been toying with the passage of a bill that would make homosexuality punishable by death. The lot of gays and lesbians in Uganda is the subject of Call Me Kuchu (2012, directed by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall), a documentary that mostly focuses on the work of David Kato, who founded Uganda's first gay rights organization.

If you've followed the story of Uganda's anti-gay pogrom, you may have heard of David Kato. He was murdered in early 2011 after he sued the country's most prominent paper, The Rolling Stone (no relation to the American magazine), for publishing photos of him and outing him to the world as a gay man. His case put a kibosh on the paper's practice of outing "homos" (as their headlines screamed). The filmmakers met Kato before this, though, and followed the entire process of his lawsuit and of the operation of his fledgling movement. It listens to his friends and gets to know them a little. The movie offers a portrait of life in Uganda, too, to put everything it shows into some kind of context. Kato was killed mid-shoot, and the footage from his funeral is among the most heartbreaking things I've ever seen in a movie.

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Losing My Religion

This is part of the Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs and Andreas and Ashley over at Pussy Goes Grrr (who I've been neglecting to mention; please accept my apologies, guys. My bad.).

My local art house's series of microbudget indies continued on this Wednesday with The Wise Kids (2011, directed by Stephen Cone). As fate would have it, it's a queer-themed film. I love it when my local theater caters to my blogging needs. More to the point, I love it when they schedule movies that completely ambush me, as this film did. Going in, I thought it was mostly a coming of age film centered on one particular teenage boy in deeply religious South Carolina. What I wasn't expecting was a much broader ensemble that teased out many of the deeper problems of living an authentic life within the confines of American Christianity (and not just if you're gay). The whole coming to terms with being a gay Christian teen? Well, it's there, but it's not front and center and it manifestly refuses to unfold in the way an audience might expect it to. More interesting to me is the way the problem of sexuality challenges faith in the literal reading of The Bible as true. This also hit a deeply personal chord with me, but I'll come to that in due course.

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Document

This is part of the Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

Transgender people have featured in exploitation films since at least the 1930s. There's a hermaphrodite in the circus in Tod Browning's Freaks, though ze doesn't play a prominent role in the film. There's also a genderqueer element to James Whale's horror comedy, The Old Dark House, in which the patriarch of the film's looney family is played by a woman in old man drag. Whale liked to tweak gender norms in his movies sometimes. The golden era of transgender exploitation began in the 1950s, though, when Christine Jorgensen's gender surgery became a seven day wonder. One of the first films to take on the subject of transgenderism was Ed Wood's legendarily bad Glen or Glenda (1953, aka: I Changed My Sex). It's easy to mock Wood and Glen or Glenda, what with its weird assemblage of stock footage and with Bela Lugosi playing a god who composes boys and girls out of snips and snails and sugar and spice, to say nothing of its litany of angora sweaters and grossly misinformed pronouncements on the causes of transgenderism. Hell, you can even play the transgender documentary drinking game while watching it (Glen or Glenda is a documentary of sorts, after all).

What's that? Transgender documentary drinking game? Oh, yes. The tropes of the trans documentary are so calcified that you can get good and sloshed if you follow along with alcohol. The original version was authored by Gwendolyn Ann Smith, and you can read it here. Others have added to it over the years.

Anyway...

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Dearly Departed

This is part of the Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

Richard Linklater's Bernie (2012) is a kind of film I've become very familiar with over the last few years thanks to the True/False Film Festival. It's a kind of hybrid non-fiction film. Not really a documentary, not really a mocumentary, but similar in most respects to either. It's also a quirky, regionalist comedy, and a vehicle for star Jack Black. That it is able to balance all of these idioms and incorporate them into a mostly unified whole is a one of the film's more impressive accomplishments.

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Boy Meets Boy

This is part of the Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

I don't think I'm offering any blazing insight into Weekend (2011, directed by Andrew Haigh) when I say that its obvious touchstone is Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise/Sunset diptych. It has the same fleeting affair, the same sense of something larger than a one night stand just flitting out of reach for its lovers, it has the same intimate focus that seems to isolate its lovers in a kind of microcosm away from the rest of the world. The fact that its lovers are queer is almost beside the point. Almost.

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Open and Shut

This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

The problem with wishing for something in a movie is that once you get it, you start wishing for more. Some people--me, for instance--are never satisfied.

I'm hard pressed to think of another movie that's as sensitive to the diversity of bodies and expressions of sexuality or lived experiences than Open (2010, directed by Jake Yuzna). More than that, it doesn't punish its characters for their bodies or sexualities, either, though it does complicate their lives in ways that are inextricably linked to body and sexuality. At a very basic level, this is a movie about longing for love and not finding it, or about finding love only to find it fleeting. I think these are universal themes, even if the characters experiencing these are probably alien to a hetero and or cis audience. I think this is a good thing. This is something I long to see in movies about trans or non-cis people but never really get. That it confronts the audience with sometimes alien expressions of love and intimacy is even sweeter.

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Top and Bottom

This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

Nobody in movies knows anything, if you believe William Goldman. For instance, no one in their right mind would have predicted that the highest grossing movie in the history of Korean cinema would be a queer-themed historical drama. And yet, that's what happened. The King and the Clown (2005, directed by Jun-ik Lee), an unassuming "small" movie, somehow tickled the Korean popular imagination and became that blockbuster.

The story follows the friendship of two itinerant "clowns," though "clown" is an English descriptor. They are more like traveling acrobats and actors, whose plays are ribald. These are the rough and tumble Jang-sang, the frontman, and the androgynous Gong-gil, who specializes in playing women. When the film opens, their manager finds that he can make more money by pimping Gong-gil to the local aristocrat than he can from the play. This infuriates Jang-sang, who rescues a not-exactly unwilling Gong-gil from being sold for the night. The two escape from their troupe after killing the manager and head to Seoul, where pickings for traveling players are slim. The king has driven out huge chunks of the population to increase his hunting grounds, and there is no longer a show district where Jang-sang and Gong-gil can ply their trade. They're basically for the street, where they fall in with a rival company and stage a play mocking the current king. They make a lot of money, but the run is short.  They're arrested for treason. In the course of being punished, Jang-sang challenges their jailors that the king himself should judge them. If he laughs, they're off the hook. If not, heads roll. Miraculously, they make him laugh, but then things get hairy, because the king has cast his eye on Gong-gil. So, too, has his consort. Meanwhile, the king's ministers begin using the troupe as pawns in the intrigues of court...

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Lesbian Noir

This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

It's so tempting to use the queerness of Bound (1996, directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski) to psychoanalyze its directors that it's all I can do to restrain myself. It's unfair to the movie, really, and it's unfair to the Wachowskis because it reduces their worth as directors to their gender identities rather than their filmmaking virtuosity (and their filmmaking virtuosity is often dazzling). In fact, I'd rather celebrate the fact that the directors of huge blockbusters are trans. That needs to be celebrated rather than analyzed. Bound, it should be noted, is much more a product of keen cinematic intelligence and a voracious appetite for cinematic influences than it is a Rorschach test. Its worthiness as a movie (rather than as tea leaves) comes from the fact that it's sexy, taut, and expertly made. It's one of the best films noir of the last twenty years, possibly the best noir film from the 1990s noir revival. It might be an unfulfilled promise--it remains The Wachowski's best film--but there are plenty of directors whose first films are their best. Just ask Orson Welles or Tobe Hooper.

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Boys and Girls

This is part of the LBGT Blogathon hosted by YAM Magazine. It's also a prelude to next week's Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Caroline over at Garbo Laughs.

I'm not really sure how to take Tomboy (2011, directed by Céline Sciamma). It's one of the most carefully observed movies about childhood in recent memory, lovingly mounted and beautifully performed. It's also infuriatingly coy about what it's about.

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My Big Queer June

It's Pride Month in the civilized world (and here where I live in Missouri, too) so I'll be participating in a couple of LGBT blogathons in the coming weeks. One of them is the LGBT Blogathon sponsored by YAM Magazine. The other is the Queer Film Blogathon held by Caroline over at the awesome Garbo Laughs. They run one right after another, so that'll be two weeks' worth of delicious queerness (and a bunch of crabby bitching about trans depictions in film, I'm sure). With any kind of luck, I'll be able to find some queer subtext in Prometheus or Brave, too, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll still write about them, though.

Martyr Complex

One of the things that struck me as I watched the opening scenes of Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1976) was how closely both it, and through its influence, subsequent gay cinema resembles porn. I mean, the opening pantomime for the pleasure of the court of the Roman emperor, Diocletian, is an art house version of a bukkake reel, what you might get if Fellini decided to film a reel for the gay bathhouse rough trade. And it doesn't change much when it focuses its attention on its (mostly nude) male cast of exiled soldiers a few minutes later. It films their bodies in long, lingering idylls. These are the same kinds of longueurs one finds in any given Emmanuel movie, complete with the slow motion splashing of water and the frequent voyeurs watching the action. Jarman throws in some kink, too, with several flogging scenes.

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The Krell Labs Podcast! Episode 1: Interview with a Queer Pornographer

This is a new experiment here at Stately Krell Labs. It's a podcast! The first episode interviews transgender activist and feminist pornographer Tobi Hill-Meyer, who makes and distributes sex-positive, trans-positive feminist porn through her company, Handbasket Productions. She's also a frequent contributor to the GLBT blog, The Bilerico Project. In the interview, we talk about the conventions of porn, especially as it relates to the trans and feminist communities and we talk about the practical elements of DIY filmmaking.

Hopefully, I'll make more of these. So without further ado, on with the show:

Crazy for trying...

The title of Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) pulls double duty. It's most obviously a reference to the Patsy Cline/Willie Nelson song, which finds multiple iterations on the film's soundtrack. The way it's punctuated, though, indicates that it's an acronym, consisting of the first letters of the names of the five brothers whom the movie is about. They are: Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zach, and Yvan. The film itself is primarily interested in only two of the brothers: Raymond (Pierre-Luc Brillant), a drugged out, burned out fuck-up, and especially Zach (Marc-André Grondin), who struggles from early childhood with his sexuality, and with their father, Gervaise (Michel Côté). The main conflicts in the movie are fueled by Zach's denial of his own homosexuality, and by his father's intransigence when it comes to accepting anything that might be tainted with a gay brush. We experience the movie from Zach's point of view. He narrates the film, and we are privy to his vision of the world and his fantasies about how he would prefer the world to be. On a basic level, the narrative of C.R.A.Z.Y. is kind of banal. It's a queer coming of age story. It covers twenty years of Zach's life, from birth to adulthood. The relationships between Zach and his brothers and between Zach and his father follow well-trodden queer narratives. And that's fine, I guess, because what the movie lacks in narrative originality, it more than makes up for it with both its cinematic elan and its tendency to completely blow up those well worn tropes in unexpected ways.

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Another Mermaid

There's a statue in Copenhagen of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, looking mournfully back out at the sea. This is it right here:

Photo credit.

This is one of the saddest pieces of art I've ever seen, based on the most bittersweet of fairy tales. Whenever I think of the lives of mid-20th Century trans people, I think of this statue for some reason. Not because I think they've suffered some irretrievable loss, mind you, but because so many other people believe this. This is an attitude that persists unto the present day. In my own life, I cannot count the number of well-meaning cisgender acquaintances who have come up to me and said: "It must have been very hard for you," with that note of condescending sympathy. Maybe the condescension is something I only hear in my head. I'm sure it's sincere, but, man, it gets old. And it's so clueless.

Copenhagen itself is where Christine Jorgensen underwent her surgery, substituting her fins for legs, and if you believe the end of the movie version of her life, The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970, directed by Irving Rapper), she suffered nothing but heartache in the bargain. The movie has that same condescending sympathy. The form of the movie--styled as a 1950s weepie--builds this into the very fabric of the narrative. And it's so earnest! Mercy, it's earnest! So much so that it barrels right through its own cluelessness. This is a combination that usually results in really bad movies, and this one, it turns out, is a howler.

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Netflix Roulette: Bloody Mallory

The title character of Bloody Mallory (2002, directed by Julian Magnat) is a gothy anime-ish asskicking supernatural superhero whose team takes on demons and monsters. Assisting her are a statuesque transsexual named Vena Cava and a telepathic girl genius named Talking Tina. The team drives around in a hot pink hearse and dress like a cadre of cosplayers. The whole thing plays like a kids movie gone 'round the bend, or more probably like a post-modern update of a silent serial, though Mallory ain't got nothing on Irma Vep. Or Buffy, for that matter. From the description of our heroes, you can probably surmise that this is one of those "supposed to be campy" films. It's French, too, so it's shot through with a fair amount of Gallic theater of the absurd.

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More Noise about Silence

My answers to a couple of the comments on yesterday's Silence of the Lambs post seem like they deserve a post of their own. So here it is.

Mykal (of the excellent Radiation Cinema--you should seriously check it out), writes:

"Vulnavia: Wonderful analysis. I agree. Lector is a monster, pure and simple, and a great one. Thus, a horror movie. I can’t agree with your reservations about grading this film as great as I find your prism too specific, if completely valid (that is to say, it didn’t occur to me but probably should have). For my part, I reserve "great" status because I find it too easily entertaining. Hopkins himself said that Lector was one of the easiest parts he ever played. Once he got the voice, the rest was like falling off a log. It’s basically a softball waiting to get lashed out of the park. I would happily watch it anytime and never feel the slightest challenge, and there certainly isn’t a thing wrong with that. It just keeps it from reaching the upper strata.

Another great post - always challenging."

Hi, Mykal,

This is one of the reasons I try not to "rate" movies. Is The Silence of the Lambs a great movie? Absolutely. Does it have less-great things about it? Let me give you another example outside of my specific prism: After the FBI bursts into the wrong house near the end of the movie, Crawford gets that one moment where he goes "Clarice!" This moment is utterly stupid. I mean, there's nothing to give any indication that she's in any danger at that moment. This DOES establish Crawford as some kind of patriarchal "protector" who has somehow failed. It's kind of galling, actually, given the way the movie is sending Clarice out as a kind of knight errant.

The way this sequence is crosscut is interesting, too, so permit me a non-sequitur: Demme's subversion of the conventions of cinema in this sequence is brilliant. When the caption on the exterior shots says "Calumet City," and then the interior--without attribution--is in Pennsylvania, the director is having fun screwing with the audience's mind.

That being said, "perfect" movies are boring. There's nothing to write about. Give me flawed masterpieces every time.

J. Astro, who runs the Screen Grab blog, writes:

"I didn't, even as a youngster when I read the book, necessarily assume that Buffalo Bill was any sort of overall representation of the transgender set. I just viewed him as another wonderful cog in this well-crafted story. As I grew older and learned to appreciate films more on different levels, I've actually become entranced with Ted Levine's portrayal of the character and I like him more than the widely-loved Lecter.

This may be just be my mis-reading this, and if so lemme know, but it seems you kinda resent the Bill character out of the assumption that he is meant to be a scary shorthand for all transgender personalities. Did you feel the same way about Norman Bates when you watched PSYCHO? (although not strictly "transgender" by definition, Bates was the closest thing that era would've come to depicting a Bill-like character in that day)... Just curious."

Hi, Astro,

This particular objection is a quagmire for me. As I say in my second paragraph, it's one of the reasons I've held off writing about the film. There are some differences between Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill. For what it's worth, I love Ted Levine in the movie and the character is certainly indelible. But...

The transgender psychopath is a cliche, and a pretty harmful one at that. It's one of the four dominant depictions of transgender identities. The others are "the pathetic, the prostitute, and the punchline. These are collectively the four "P"s. The trans person as psycho has its origins in the Gein story, natch, and it WASN'T a cliche in Psycho, which was the first film to exploit it. And Norman doesn't necessarily "read" as transgender because the image of him in Mom drag is so patently absurd. He's not fooling anyone. I'm more troubled by the daughters of Psycho in movies like Homicidal or Dressed to Kill or Stripped to Kill, et al., because these films have a vested interest in deceiving the audience in a way that suggests that trans identities are inherently deceptive. But that's another argument. In the case of Buffalo Bill, the depiction exists in a more specific political context, which I enumerated in my post. It also does some very particular things that I chose not to write about. I'll cover some of those now:

First, it fetishizes the exterior. Bill doesn't seem trans when he's not dressing the part. It suggests that the trans identity (which, of course, the movie claims he doesn't actually have) is all about the surface. The fetishistic nature of Bill's crossdressing feeds my second point: The Silence of the Lambs sexualizes trans identities. When Bill is done up in his human-scalp wig and his frou-frou, he mouths at the camera "Would you like to fuck me?" He gets off on dressing up, and on the image of himself as a woman, and here's where the movie becomes inextricably entangled with trans identities in spite of its best intentions. Bill is exhibiting a paraphilia, and it's one that has been used to categorize transsexuals in the DSM until VERY recently. He also exhibits a condition called "autogynephilia", which is a quack science description of why transsexuals do what they do. The fetishistic sexualization at work here feeds the public discourse on the rights of transgender people, because it feeds the moralizing tendency of opponents of trans rights. If it's done for sexual pleasure, then it must be sinful, ipso facto, it must be okay to sanction this in the public sphere. Now, I'm well aware of the fact that as a matter of ethics and as a matter of law, it is and should be illegal to legislate from this position, but that doesn't stop people.

While it's easy for me to rationalize all of this as a depiction of a specific character in a specific movie with a specific pathology, my eyes tell me that this just isn't so. One of the first depictions of transsexuals I ever saw was John Davidson on a 1974 episode of The Streets of San Francisco who was as close to Buffalo Bill as 1970s television would allow. So if I resent Buffalo Bill, it's only because he's the most prominent incarnation of this archetype of the last 25 years. It's because the specter of the transgender psycho is so strong in the popular mind that it's used as an argument to bar people like me from the public restroom that is appropriate to my gender or prevent me from adopting kids or teaching school, it's hard for me to turn a blind eye.

Anyway, thanks to both of you for commenting.

Clarice in the Underworld

One of the things that really irks me about hanging out in horror fan spaces on the internet is the persistent question of whether or not The Silence of the Lambs (1991, directed by Jonathan Demme) is a horror movie. To which I say: Of course it is. The argument that it's "really more of a thriller" doesn't hold any water with me on multiple fronts, not least of which is the notion that movies that are "thrillers" aren't also horror movies. Even granting that dubious division, Silence passes the smell test, because if you think Hannibal Lector is a natural human murderer and not some unnameable creature from the outer dark, you are wrong. Not only does he possess abilities and insights that are beyond human ken, the movie tells you outright that he is some kind of more-than-human monster. "Never forget what he is," Jack Crawford tells Starling at the movie's outset, and the film cuts to Dr. Chilton answering the elided question with, "He's a monster." Later in the movie, Clarice is asked if Lecter is some kind of vampire. She replies: "There's not a word for what he is." What he IS is a conflation of every horror-movie mad scientist ever to stalk the silver screen. He's Dr. Caligari (a psychiatrist guiding the actions of his protege), he's Svengali (grooming his follower for success), he's Dr. Mabuse (ruling the world from his cell at the asylum), he's Dr. Jekyll (after Hyde has taken over completely). So let's dispense with the notion that Lecter is a presence that could exist outside the context of the horror movie, that he's not a creature of fantasy. That notion is absurd. But more than that: Buffalo Bill is based on Ed Gein, and by my lights, any movie that's based on Ed Gein is, de facto, a horror movie. We'll come back to Gein in a bit.

In any event, the previous paragraph is one of the reasons I've never really written about The Silence of the Lambs, despite a long familiarity with the movie (and the book). It's a discussion with which I have no patience. The other reason I've never really written about The Silence of the Lambs is because it's a movie that gives me all kinds of fits when it comes to the politics of its imagery, and writing about those politics--which for me are completely unavoidable--is going to make me sound like an apologist or (and) a scold. I don't intend this. We'll see how it goes.

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Love and Undeath

"I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine" --J. Sheridan le Fanu, "Carmilla"

Although Harry Kumel's Daughters of Darkness is more well-regarded by critics, Hammer's The Vampire Lovers (1970, directed by Roy Ward Baker) is the grandmother of lesbian vampire movies. It's one of the few relatively faithful adaptations of "Carmilla" (that eternal wellspring of lesbian vampires) and it was one of Hammer's biggest hits. In spite of all of this--or maybe because of it--it's a film that makes me uneasy.

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Mutatis Mutandis

Way back in 2003, writing about X-Men 2, I wrote the following: "A more subversive queer subtext can be derived from Mystique, whose character suggests a polymorphous transgender sexual revolution. She's the ultimate genderbending mind-fuck; the perfect sexual object, one that can take the shape of your heart's desire. Furthermore, she likes it and is unrepentant about it." I'm kind of surprised to be resurrecting this line of thought concerning X-Men: First Class (2011, directed by Matthew Vaughn), but this theme isn't even subtextual anymore. I mean, it's true that the X-Men have always been a vehicle for examining the oppression of any given "other," but what Mystique articulates in this movie, and how it relates to both Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr seems to me to be unmistakable. It causes some serious problems for the movie itself--as was the case with X-Men: Last Stand, the villains have the moral high ground in this movie--but, damn, it makes the movie more fun to watch than any other dumb tentpole movie this year.

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

I remember being fairly disappointed with Frank Oz's In & Out (1997) when I saw it on its initial release. My memory of it is that I thought it wasn't nearly funny enough and that it was entirely too middlebrow. It didn't have the strength of its convictions. Choosing to watch it again for Pride month and the Queer Film Blogathon was an act of laziness on my part, actually. It was on Netflix instant and I didn't have to scroll through a bunch of titles on my Roku to find it. Easy peasy. It turns out that my memory of it was pretty good, to a point. It IS entirely too middlebrow for its own good. It's also a pernicious fantasy and a bundle of unfortunate stereotypes.

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