The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema
328
The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema
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Overview
In this wide-ranging anthology Waugh touches on some of the great films of the gay canon, from Taxi zum Klo to Kiss of the Spider Woman. He also discusses obscure guilty pleasures like Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman, unexpectedly rich movies like Porky’s and Caligula, filmmakers such as Fassbinder and Eisenstein, and film personalities from Montgomery Clift to Patty Duke. Emerging from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, Waugh traverses crises from censorship to AIDS, tackling mainstream potboilers along with art movies, documentaries, and avant-garde erotic videos. In these personal perspectives on the evolving cinematic landscape, his words oscillate from anger and passion to wry wit and irony. With fifty-nine rare film stills and personal photographs and an introduction by celebrated gay filmmaker John Greyson, this volume demonstrates that the movie camera has been the fruit machine par excellence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822380948 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Thomas Waugh is Professor of Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. In addition to his many published articles and reviews, he is the author of Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall.
John Greyson is a prizewinning filmmaker whose work includes the features Urinal, Zero Patience, Lilies, and Uncut, as well as numerous short videos.
Read an Excerpt
The Fruit Machine
Twenty Years of Writings on Queer CinemaBy THOMAS WAUGH
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2000 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2468-3
Chapter One
Films by Gays for Gays: A Very Natural Thing, Word Is Out, and The Naked Civil Servant
* * *
I still remember my quavers about publishing this, my coming-out piece in academia. I had just begun my new job teaching at Concordia University and would not be up for tenure until 1981, but plowed ahead fearlessly. I must have felt pretty confident about my place at Concordia and don't remember any reactions from my colleagues. Twenty years later I should perhaps acknowledge my gratitude and affection for this carnivalesque institution, with its erratic escalators, nurturing networks, and safe places for risky scholarship (I won't get into that nasty business about same-sex spousal benefits at the end of the eighties, when, when it came to actual money, a conservative faculty union and the inertia of a liberal institution came together to hesitate just a little too long for my liking). I also have a debt to the Jump Cut coeditors, Chuck Kleinhans, Julia Lesage, and John Hess, who encouraged me on this first brazen venture, then not blinking, eventually got me on the board of this immeasurably influential rad tab, where I would continue to publish major work over the next decade. This indefatigable pinko media rag is celebrating its twenty-fifth birthday as we go to press.
All three of the films discussed in this article have entered the nineties gay canon, thanks as much to their availability on video as to their centrality to our cultural history. None has lost its power tomove and astonish. I still cry at Word Is Out. The Naked Civil Servant I think I understand better now, less as a serendipitous fluke in a vacuum than as a logical outcome of a British tradition that had provided space for almost two decades for such images of queer dignity.
A Very Natural Thing remains the most precarious of the three but still may not have deserved the disproportionate ideological thrashing I gave it. No doubt my defensiveness reflects a lot about the atmosphere in the cultural wing of the North American New Left, about my sense of mission caught in the middle between the straight Left, who didn't understand identity politics, and the gay-lib mainstream, who denied class. Whether or not the late editor David Goodstein of The Advocate really deserved comparison to the fascist Chilean dictator is another question. But categorical moral judgments were the flavor of the day. Plus ça change ...
* * *
Will Homosexuals Be Admitted to the Classless Society?
The prospect of writing on a few gay-oriented films for Jump Cut has caused me a few tremors of hesitation. There are obvious dangers in blowing one's professional cover (i.e., coming out) in academia in 1977. But there are worse places to come out in than a faculty of Fine Arts, like a Faculty of Engineering, for example (to indulge in a little of what is called interdisciplinary retaliatory stereotyping). And if a friend of mine in an English department was able, just last year, to seize tenure from the jaws of a board of Catholic priests, things are looking up indeed. There are other more important reasons for my hesitation, which I would like to outline briefly before I get started.
Dialogue between gay leftists and straight leftists is not a new phenomenon, but until recently it was never conducted equitably or constructively. As a rule, most serious leftists now give at least token support to the issue of gay civil rights, as they do to one variation or another of the feminist analysis—you just can't keep opportunism in the closet these days. Nevertheless, gays still occasionally get expelled from left party formations; the Venceremos Brigade still won't let us go to Cuba with them; an enthusiastic gay contingent gets ignored and insulted at last summer's Fourth of July Coalition, Anti-Bicentennial Rally in Philadelphia; and one still has to deal with such provocations as a position paper recently published by a California-based splinter group that states unequivocally that "homosexuals cannot be communists."
As a teacher, I occasionally run into a few other variations of this old song and dance. Two recent examples: a claim that "There won't be any homosexuals in the classless society" and a reference to the Nazi extermination of homosexuals as an "isolated atrocity."
Adherents to the robust and rapidly growing gay left movements in North America and Europe constantly run into that kind of bigotry within the Left. Ironically, this more often comes from middle-class intellectuals than from workers themselves, as the experiences of lesbians in working women's groups and of gay men and women in various unions have revealed. The attitudes of these pseudoradicals usually boil down to, "We think you should have job security even if you are sick and leave the revolution to us." In the face of all of this, many gay radicals have simply resorted to organizing and consciousness raising within the gay community itself. Others refuse to leave the revolution to the straights—for this courageous minority, the model provided by contemporary East Germany is an important one: it can hardly be a coincidence that the most liberal of the socialist states with regard to sexual minorities is also the one in which gays participated most actively in prerevolutionary party formations.
To return somewhat closer to home, even a journal as progressive in its sexual politics as Jump Cut needs to examine its own record. The most obvious blot in this record came late in 1974, when a Jump Cut reviewer casually passed on one of the oldest and most libelous stereotypes going. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, but the offending article, a discussion of the Clint Eastwood vehicle Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, wittily entitled "Tightass and Cocksucker," needs to be given a decent burial. One of the few critics around to have confronted the homoerotic subtext of the "buddy" genre head-on, the author, Peter Biskind, correctly points to a fabric of sly allusions and suggestive imagery beneath the surface of the film but then turns his perception in a direction so perverse and reductionist that it is hard to follow. The gist of the argument is that there must be some connection between this latent gay motif and the film's much more blatant misogynist sensibility (surely a conventional feature of the genre). But the connection posited by the article is that, as everyone knows, homosexuals hate women. Behind the film, in fact, lies a conspiracy of woman-hating homosexuals with the intent of denigrating heterosexuality. This seditious intent is no doubt realized by the total suppression of overt gay references; by the prurient, mocking, and exploitative tone of the gay subtext; and by the startlingly original idea of having the protogay character stomped to death. The film is no less antigay than it is antiwoman—in fact it is antisex and about as subversively homoerotic as a frat party drag show or a barroom fag joke. Thanks a lot—we could pull off a better conspiracy than that anytime. (Just think of how skillfully we seduce your children.) The mind boggles over how a jumble of sly fag jokes tossed about by presumably straight filmmakers can be read as progay propaganda and, furthermore, how gays can get blamed for the antiwoman attitudes that accompany them. You can't win. For me the filmis definitive proof of the intrinsic identity between homophobia and sexism.
If Jump Cut's single such slipup is easily atoned for, a more general homophobia-by-default is less easy to repudiate, or to define. Any faggot or dyke worth his or her salt knows that silence is one of the first symptoms of advanced homophobia, and in this sense Jump Cut is clearly suspect (although the silence of other radical film mags, from Cinéaste to Screen, is deafening in comparison—without even considering the latter's adherence to certain latently homophobic aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis).
Jump Cut's most recent attempt to deal with the "buddy" movies, Arthur Nolletti's "Male Companionship Movies and the Great American Cool," was so anxious to block and repress a crucial aspect of the films under discussion —that is, the obvious homoerotic undertone of most of them—that it left a trail a mile wide. Except for a single passing reference, the article's avoidance of the love that dare not speak its name was as conspicuous as that of the films themselves.
It is true, however, that Jump Cut has been inching forward in this area. I was so excited to see the two open lesbians among the contributors to last summer's special issue that I nearly stopped hating women for a moment. And the two pieces on Dog Day Afternoon in the same issue at least recognized the relevance of the film to the gay problematic, although neither went beyond the call of duty.
Okay, it is in this context that I hesitate in writing this piece. Given the lingering homophobic tendency of the straight Left, does it not amount to treachery to criticize fellow gays (which I am about to do), to provide fuel for existing antigay stereotypeswithin the Jump Cut readership, to wash the gay movement's linen in front of a possibly unsympathetic audience? Just what the movement needs!
What it really needs, I believe (as does an increasingly articulate segment), is a recognition of its stake in all revolutionary struggles and a firmer commitment to its natural alliance with radical and feminist causes. And not only this. What it also needs is dogged and determined spokespeople within the straight Left loudly refusing to down one or more ounce of shit from the closet bigots therein and defiantly insisting that any Marxist analysis or feminist analysis that ignores the gay struggle is an incomplete analysis. And they must persistently remind the Left that we are planning to turn out in full force, in our habitual percentage, for the classless society.
A Very Natural Thing
When Christopher Larkin's A Very Natural Thing first appeared in early 1974, the gay movement had every reason to be encouraged. Serious and first were the two words everyone used to describe this feature-length color narrative that dared to deal with gay male life from a gay perspective and in a nonporno framework. And it is true that its seriousness and its innovativeness both guarantee its place as amilestone in gay film history, despite its many obvious shortcomings.
There had been gay films before. After all, by the seventies the concentrated, profitable market of young, urban gay males was a well-tested commercial reality. Everyone from the Mafioso gay-bar entrepreneurs to haberdashers had long since cashed in on this ghettoized market, and filmmakers, at first primarily pornographers, were no different. (During the early seventies the gay porno industry was well ahead of its hetero counterpart in technical and stylistic sophistication.) Even Hollywood would wake up to the economic reality of this market, which gay publications such as The Advocate and After Dark (respectively the largest open-gay and the largest closet-gay magazines) made clear to their advertisers was composed of free living, big spending young bachelors with sophisticated tastes. However, until A Very Natural Thing, the nonporno films that catered to this market seemed relics of that pre-Stonewall past that gays wanted to forget. Two fairly competent such films had appeared in 1970, for example (the year after the New York Stonewall riots, which symbolically introduced the era of gay lib), and both reflected the gay perspective of gay subject matter: The Boys in the Band, a quite faithful Hollywood version of a gay-authored play, slightly enervated for general consumption by director William Friedkin, and Sticks and Stones, a more modest, independent treatment of a similar theme, directed by Stan LoPresto. Both of these films, however, embodied an anachronistic defeatism, a morbid, self-directed hatred that surely reinforced homophobia within their straight audiences, curious but still powerfully destructive artifacts of an era when "gay" translated onto the screen meant "trivial, tragic, and tormented."
What was different about A Very Natural Thing was that it deliberately attempted to escape the traditional rituals of self-loathing. Here was a film that so many of us wanted to call our own that many of us did so without thinking, not in the least because of one specific feature of the film that had vast symbolic importance—its happy ending.
Digression: Why Gay Endings Aren't Always Happy
The happy ending is a convention that Hollywood and its foreign competitors have traditionally reserved for films about straight people. Gay characters traditionally drop off like flies, with clockwork predictability, at the service of dramatic expediency and the sexual anxiety of the dominant culture. Nineteen seventy-four, for example, saw, in addition to A Very Natural Thing, the successful release of Truffaut's Day for Night. Truffaut's gay audiences were momentarily transported when the film's leading man, Jean- Pierre Aumont, was revealed to be gay and to have a beautiful young lover to boot. But they should have known that it was too good to be true. Truffaut's knee-jerk liberal impulse, on introducing such a fine affirmative image, was to have Aumont and his lover summarily wiped out by the most freakishly gratuitous highway accident in film history. Two more faggots bite the dust as Truffaut's warm, humane, joyous tribute to filmmaking tidies up its loose threads in the last reel.
As I've said, Truffaut was in traditional company. Death by unnatural causes has been the standard device used by the bourgeois cinema to finish off any token minority member who doesn't know his or her place—blacks and sexually forward or independent women, as well as gays. Remember the dozens of gruesome deaths inflicted on poor Sidney Poitier by fifties liberalism and the hundreds of saloon prostitutes finished off so that Henry Fonda, or whoever, could end up with the virtuous, submissive girl from the East? The deaths reserved for lesbians and gay men have been particularly mechanical, however, and often fiendishly ingenious. If Shirley MacLaine's dangling from the ceiling in The Children's Hour and Ratzo Rizzo's glazed eyeballs in the Miami bus in Midnight Cowboy are perhaps the images imprinted most indelibly on our collective unconscious, death by gunshot has been by far the favorite recourse of screenwriters looking for a tidy ending. Sal Mineo in Rebel without a Cause, Stéphane Audran in Les Biches, Don Murray in Advise and Consent, and Rod Steiger in The Sergeant head this list of the departed. The prizes for the most original deaths go to Mark Rydell for the tasteful way he had Sandy Dennis struck down by a falling tree in The Fox and to Ken Russell for Richard Chamberlain's magnificent demise in The Music Lovers, cholera-induced convulsions in a vomit-laced tub of boiling bathwater.
Even as superficially progressive a film as Sunday, Bloody Sunday left poor Peter Finch alone with his stoic courage at the end as his handsome lover jetted off to the New World—a transatlantic flight providing a more discreet way out for seventies chic than the suicide or freak accident that would have been Finch's lot in any other era.
In any case, the flourishing gay audience of the seventies, fed up with all this gore, was bound to get its happy ending sooner or later. Larkin stepped in to fulfill the historical role of providing it for them. And happy it was!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Fruit Machine by THOMAS WAUGH Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword / John GreysonAcknowledgments
Introduction
Films by Gays for Gays: A Very Natural Thing, Word Is Out, and The Naked Civil Servant (1977)
Gays, Straights, Film, and the Left: A Dialogue (with Chuck Kleinhans) (1977)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1976–77)
A Fag-Spotter’s Guide to Eisenstein (1977)
Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1978)
Medical Thrillers: Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman (1978–79)
Murnau: The Films Behind the Man (1979)
An Unromantic Fiction: I’m Not from Here, by Harvey Marks (1979)
The Gay Nineties, the Gay Seventies: Samperi’s Ernesto and von Praunheim’s Army Of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts (1979)
Montgomery Clift Biographies: Stars and Sex (1979–80)
Gay Cinema, Slick vs. Real: Chant d’amour, Army of Lovers, We Were One Man (1980)
Nighthawks, by Ron Peck and Paul Hallam (1980)
A Saturday Night Surprise: Burin des Rozier’s Blue Jeans (1980)
Caligula (1980)
Taxis and Toilets: Ripploh and His Brothers (1981)
Bright Lights in the Night: Pasolini, Schroeter, and Others (1981)
Patty Duke and Tasteful Dykes (1982)
Two Strong Entries, One Dramatic Exit: Luc ou la part des choses, Another Way, and Querelle (1982)
Hollywood’s Change of Heart? (Porky’s and The Road Warrior) (1982)
Dreams, Cruises, and Cuddles in Tel Aviv: Amos Gutman’s Nagua (1983)
Hauling an Old Corpse Out of Hitchcock’s Trunk: Rope (1983)
Sex Beyond Neon: Third World Gay Films? (1985)
Fassbinder Fiction: A New Biography (1986)
Ashes and Diamonds in the Year of the Queer: Decline of the American Empire, Anne Trister, A Virus Knows No Morals, and Man of Ashes (1986)
The Kiss of the Maricon, or Gay Imagery in Latin American Cinema (1986–87)
Laws of Desire: Maurice, Law of Desire, and Vera (1987)
Two Great Gay Filmmakers: Hello and Good-bye (1988)
Beauty and the Beast, Take Two (1988)
Whipping Up a Cinema (1989)
Erotic Self-Images in the Gay Male AIDS Melodrama (1988, 1992)
In Memoriam: Vito Russo, 1946–1990 (1991)
We’re Talking, Vulva, or, My Body Is Not a Metaphor (1995, 1999)
Walking on Tippy Toes: Lesbian and Gay Liberation Documentary of the
Post-Stonewall Period 1969–1984 (1995–97)
Archeology and Censorship (1997)
Bibliography: Selected Additional Works
Index
What People are Saying About This
Richard Dyer, University of Warwick
This is an enthralling book about a topic at once life-affectingly
important and extraordinarily complex: how gay people—or anyone else—are
seen and see themselves and how the movies help shape that. Tom Waugh shows
us in exemplary fashion that you can combine personal passion and political
engagement with the highest standards of intellectual discipline, while
taking us on a delicious trip through the vagaries of queer film
images.
Tom Waugh was thinking queerly about the movies for decades before the New
Queer Cinema was a market niche, but without his careful thinking and
charming interventions, it’s hard to imagine the present cultural moment.
Back when being gay was anything but fashionable, Waugh taught and fought,
proselytized and organized, so that queer films and queer audiences would be
taken seriously.
—(B. Ruby Rich, author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement)