Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships / Edition 2 available in Paperback, eBook
Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0822325896
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822325895
- Pub. Date:
- 10/30/2000
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0822325896
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822325895
- Pub. Date:
- 10/30/2000
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships / Edition 2
Buy New
$28.95Buy Used
$19.67-
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
Building on the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasmatic, Farmer works to depathologize gay male subjectivity. While discussing such films as Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Pirate, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sunset Boulevard, and stars ranging from Mae West to Montgomery Clift, Farmer argues that the particularities of gay men's social and psychic positionings motivate unique receptions of and investments in film. The Hollywood musical, gay camp readings of the extravagant female star, and the explicit homoeroticism of the cinematic male body in gay fanzines are further proof, says Farmer, of how the shifting libidinal profiles of homosexual desire interact with the fantasy scenarios of Hollywood film to produce a range of variable queer meanings.
This fascinating and provocative study makes a significant new contribution to discussions of cinema, spectatorship, and sexuality. As such, it will be welcomed by those in the fields of film theory, queer theory, and cultural studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822325895 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/30/2000 |
| Edition description: | Second Edition |
| Pages: | 318 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.67(d) |
About the Author
Brett Farmer is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Read an Excerpt
Spectacular Passions
CINEMA, FANTASY, GAY MALE SPECTATORSHIPSBy BRETT FARMER
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2000 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2559-8
Chapter One
SOMETHING A LITTLE STRANGE: THEORIZING GAY MALE SPECTATORSHIPS
When director Hector Babenco approached the major Hollywood studios with his plans to make a film version of Manuel Puig's celebrated novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, he encountered fierce opposition. The production executives he consulted gave him a long list of reasons why he should not make the film, ranging from the difficulties of adapting Puig's fractured, modernist narrative to an alleged public disinterest in "social message" films. Not surprisingly, the most widespread and insistent objections that were raised concerned the fact that the protagonist was what critic Leonard Maltin describes as "a gay man whose only food for survival is ... tacky Hollywood movies." It seemed that the prospect of a film about a flaming movie queen proved to be just a little too much to contemplate for the studios' top brass. As one executive bluntly opined, "Who is going to want to see a story about a movie-mad faggot? I mean, the guy's a bit of a freak."
It is impossible to know how or even if these responses influenced the film's final production, but it is interesting to note that the gay protagonist in Kiss of the Spider Woman isin fact represented as "a bit of a freak." From the outset, the character of Molina (William Hurt) is explicitly defined as eccentric, even grotesque. Our introduction to him occurs in the opening sequence through a long, rather ambiguous mobile shot that crawls across the shadowy interior of a prison cell to reveal the figure of Molina, standing divalike in a floral-print kimono with a towel wrapped around his head as an improvised turban, passionately recounting the plot of an unidentified film he has seen. Taking on the role of the glamorous female star, Molina acts out entire scenes from the film while his straight cell mate, Valentin (Raul Julia), looks on with incredulous disdain. "Something a little strange," Molina whispers with breathless excitement, "that's what you notice ... that she's not a woman like all the others. She seems all wrapped up, lost in a world she carries deep inside her." As he continues his extravagant performance, descriptions of the female star's "glistening skin," "sensuous legs," and "petite feet" are all correlated with a vertical pan down Molina's solid, hirsute torso.
The primary objective of this opening sequence is clearly to produce a sense of uncanniness that the film directs toward and attributes to the figure of the homosexual Molina. The diegetic ambiguity of the establishing tracking shot situates Molina within a semiotic economy of mystery and foreboding while the juxtaposition of contrasting visual and aural signifiers across his body encodes him as a freakish figure who disrupts, even perverts, the gendered categories of hegemonic meaning. Should these formal cues be lost on the viewer, the film offers the character of Valentin, whose intercut looks of scornful disgust and periodic critical interjections support and fix in no uncertain terms the sequence's construction of Molina as perverse spectacle. That Kiss of the Spider Woman should refer this economy of semiotic and sexual uncanniness to a formation of gay spectatorship is significant and more than a little revealing. Cinema has long functioned as a vital forum for the production of gay male meanings and identifications to the point that a certain type of film spectatorship has become a veritable shorthand for male homosexuality in various cultural discourses. Molina's extraordinarily intense spectatorship functions in Kiss of the Spider Woman as one of the more spectacular and readily legible signs of that character's homosexuality. If, as his opening voice-over promises, we are to notice "something a little strange" about Molina, that strangeness is nowhere more manifest than in the peculiar nature of his spectatorial passions.
Routinely characterized in terms of an "uncanny" strangeness, gay spectatorship is something that exceeds and, by so doing, disturbs mainstream categories and protocols. To think of the gay male spectator is to conjure up, almost automatically, an image of someone who, like Molina, cultivates an intense fascination with film, especially classical Hollywood film; who surrenders totally to the lure of cinema and its escapist fantasies; and who engages and relates to film in a manner that, to borrow J. P. Telotte's description of the cult film spectator, goes "beyond reason, beyond the usual ways of seeing, caring about, and identifying with film." That this popularly conceived image of the excessive gay spectator is little more than a mythological fiction that could never be assumed as in any simple way "true" or "real" almost goes without saying. In empirical terms, few gay-identifying men would engage their spectatorships with anything like the operatic extravagance or all-consuming intensity suggested by a fictional character like Molina. Furthermore, in its status as a myth, this image also fundamentally services heteronormative hegemony. Roland Barthes has famously taught that the primary aim of any popular myth is the naturalization of ideological meaning and the ratification of the social status quo. One need not look too hard to discern the normalizing operations of the "myth" of an excessive gay spectatorship. Its coding of gay cinematic reception as deviant and extreme openly inscribes gayness in a regulatory structure of visible and thus delimitable difference while devaluing it as the obscene other of an implied, stable, heterosexual norm.
Nevertheless, precisely in its status as a myth, the popular image of the obsessive or eccentric gay male spectator does provide a starting point from which to begin to think about the question of gay spectatorial specificity, of how and where gay-identification frames, shapes, affects the relations of cinematic reception or, vice versa, how cinematic reception frames and affects gay-identification. As Barthes observes, "any myth with generality" will, at some level, "represent ... the humanity" of those it depicts and "of those who ... borrow it." In the mythologies of the excessive gay spectator, these widely circulating images seize on and articulate the broad significances that cinema has played and continues to play in gay male cultures while also offering insight into some of the values and functions of spectatorship for gay-identifying men. At the very least, these myths attest to the multivalent fertility of spectatorship as a site for producing gay male meanings and pleasures.
As one of the dominant mass cultural forms of contemporary society, cinema plays a potentially important role in the cultural practices of many subjectivities and/or social groups. Gay men have, however, forged what critic Richard Dyer terms "a special relationship with the cinema," a relationship in which film and its attendant forms have been mobilized as a vital arena for gay self-definition. Generations of gay men have used film to produce their sexual and social subjectivities with the result that spectatorship has, as Judith Mayne notes, developed as a fundamental "component of the various narratives that constitute the very notion of a gay/lesbian identity."
A Special Relationship: Gay Men and Cinema
Even the most cursory overview of gay cultural history reveals that homosexuality and film have become imbricated in integral, mutually productive ways. Historically, cinema and identity-based homosexuality are more or less coterminous, both emerging out of the massive sociodiscursive transformations of nineteenth-century, Euro-American modernity. It was thus inevitable, perhaps, that the two should have developed such significant interrelations. For its part, cinema has long been a forum for the circulation of sexual meanings and pleasures. With its congregation of bodies in close, darkened spaces; its simulation of patently voyeuristic structures; and its lush supply of erotic visual spectacles, cinema has, from the beginning, been marked as a profoundly sexualized form. And the long history of homophobic film censorship notwithstanding, homosexuality has always been an integral part of cinema's erotic allure. As Mark Finch notes:
It is part of popular cultural mythology that homosexuals are meant to be obsessed with Hollywood.... What is much less remarked upon is precisely the reverse: Hollywood's obsession with homosexuality.... In films as different as Adam's Rib (1949) and American Gigolo (1980), A Florida Enchantment (1914) and The Hunger (1980)-from Laurel and Hardy to lesbian vampires-since cinema began, Hollywood has been fascinated with ... gayness.
In return, gay men have used cinema as an important arena for the production of their own homosexual desires and meanings. Quite literally, in certain respects, movie theaters have long functioned as important venues for male homosexual encounters. In his history of "gay New York," George Chauncey details how the city's movie theaters, for example, emerged very early in the century as popular homosexual cruising areas, noting that in the first six months of 1921 alone, "at least sixty-seven men were arrested for homosexual solicitation in movie theaters in Manhattan, including an astonishing forty-five men at a single theater." Importantly, these encounters were not merely sexual but often assumed a strong social function as well, so much so that some movie theaters quickly developed the reputation as a place where, in the words of one disapproving magistrate of the time, "men of a certain class ... [could] meet congenial spirits."
In more abstract but equally crucial ways, movies themselves emerged quite early in the century as important sites for homosexual identification. Some critics have suggested that, because of their experiences of social marginalization and alienation, gay-identifying men have been particularly responsive to the escapist potentials and fantasmatic largesse of film. Dyer argues, "Because, as gays, we grew up isolated not only from our heterosexual peers but also from each other, we turned to [film] for information and ideas about ourselves.... This isolation ... perhaps also made the need to escape more keen for us than for some other social groups-so, once again, we went to the pictures." Although obviously speculative and thus impossible to determine with any precision, this reading does key in suggestively with arguments made about the special historical appeal of cinema to other marginalized or disempowered social subjects such as women, people of color, and immigrants. For many of these subjects, cinema has long provided what Miriam Hansen terms "an alternative horizon of experience," a relatively accommodating space within which they could access formations of meaning, pleasure, and consumption not readily available to them elsewhere in the realm of public culture.
The special appeal and significance of cinema for many gay men is evident in the way film has developed as a particularly privileged source of and for gay subcultural production. In his pioneering study of subcultural logic, Dick Hebdige contends that subcultures turn on a constitutive process of stylistic bricolage in which they appropriate various objects, texts, and signs from the "dominant" culture and refigure them so as to produce alternative, "subcultural" meanings. As Hebdige sees it, this constitutive process of social articulation allows subcultures to produce and reproduce themselves as "different" from the dominant or "parent" culture through their aberrant modes of cultural consumption. The varied practices of bricolage in subcultures become both the site and the currency of subcultural definition, the space for and tools with which a subculture produces and displays its cultural difference(s). Developing this reading further, Sarah Thornton coins the term "subcultural capital" to refer to the extensive and often highly developed systems of tastes, knowledges, and competences developed and used by subcultures as marks of distinction and group affiliation. By possessing and exhibiting the requisite forms of subcultural capital, a given subject expresses and ratifies his or her membership in a subcultural group.
Homosexual subcultures first started to develop in larger Euro-American urban centers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and almost from the start cinema provided a rich font of material for gay subcultural capital. In her study of lesbian audiences of the 1930s, Andrea Weiss argues that Hollywood cinema was widely deployed in lesbian subcultures as an important tool for communal identification. She contends that "cinema's contribution toward the formation of lesbian identity in the early-twentieth century should not be underestimated." Certain films and, particularly, film stars were routinely used by many lesbians as texts to express and confirm their homosexual identity, both to themselves and to other lesbian women. As Weiss writes: "Aspects of certain star images were appropriated by the growing number of women who began to participate in the emerging urban gay subculture, and played an influential role in defining the distinctive qualities of that subculture.... For a people striving toward self-knowledge, Hollywood stars became important models in the formation of gay identity" (35-36).
The case was similar for early gay male subcultures. Indeed, because their gender status furnished them with a much greater degree of social and economic independence, it was perhaps even easier for many gay men of the early twentieth century to develop extensive practices of subcultural cinematic consumption. By midcentury, Euro-American gay male subcultures had mobilized Hollywood film into quite elaborate formations of subcultural capital, with certain genres and stars possessing special significances for and devoted followings among gay men. From the forties through the sixties, Hollywood film and its products became a veritable lingua franca within urban gay male subcultures, providing a rich source of material for subcultural appropriation and a capacious reference system for gay subcultural codings. As Michael Bronski notes, "Eight-by-ten signed glossies of movie stars were standard ... decor" in gay subcultural venues of the time. A discreet reference to a particular film star with a strong gay following was often used by gay men during this era as a coded way to declare their homosexuality. One gay man recalls:
I first came out onto the gay scene in the early-sixties and movies were a huge part of the scene in those days. It wasn't that we went to the movies so much-though we certainly did go frequently-it was more that movies provided common reference points for us. They were like a shared passion. You could tell whether someone was gayor not simply by the types of films they liked and how seriously they treated them. We all had our favourite stars and would discuss them endlessly. Many of the bars had Hollywood-related themes and the drag shows nearly always had some type of movie star reference.
With the massive expansion and increased legitimization of gay subcultural formations in the post-Stonewall period, cinema has continued to play a crucial role in the production and circulation of gay subcultural capital. In line with broader sociohistorical shifts in contemporary culture such as the diversification of leisure markets and the emergence of new entertainment forms, cinema has inevitably lost the position of unrivaled predominance it enjoyed in gay subcultures in earlier decades; today it competes with other media such as popular music and television as privileged sources of gay subcultural capital. Nevertheless, film remains a vital forum of and for collective gay investment and definition. The "older" traditions of gay cinematic capital are regularly maintained and passed on through repertory screenings, television broadcasts, gay video stores, and endless references/discussions in gay publications; while more recent screen-based practices such as independent gay/queer cinema and gay/lesbian film festivals have expanded and enlivened gay cinematic capital with a wealth of new texts and pleasures. Writing in 1985, Al LaValley provided the following snapshot of (then) contemporary gay cinematic tastes that, though somewhat caricatural, highlights the important role of cinema in recent gay subcultural productions:
It's no secret to patrons of urban repertory film houses that for years a large part of the audience has been gay men. To the "gay rep" of Hollywood classics-films like All About Eve, The Women, Sunset Boulevard, A Star Is Born, Now, Voyager, and the star vehicles of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe-have been added newer gay cult favorites (Cabaret, Mahagonny, The Rose, American Gigolo), as well as the more openly gay films (Victor/Victoria, Making Love, Taxi zum Klo), and even occasionally a few of the more political gay-produced documentaries (Word Is Out, Track Two). A soupcon of gay porn often completes this varied menu.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spectacular Passions by BRETT FARMER Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: At First Sight
1. Something a Little Strange: Theorizing Gay Male Spectatorships
2. Fantasmatic Escapades: Gay Spectatorships and Queer Negotiations of the Hollywood Musical
3. Camping Under the Stars: Gay Spectatorships, Camp, and the Excessive Female Star Image
4. Mommie Dearest: Gay Spectatorshps and Formations of Maternal-Oriented Desire
5. Papa, Can’t You See That I’m Flaming: Gay Spectatorships and Figures of Masculinity
Endnotes
Filmography
Bibliography