The Critical Concept of Queer in Relation to Films - Report Example

The critical concept of ‘queer’ in relation to films Introduction Queer theory, the post-structuralist critical framework that emerged from the 90’s queer studies and women’s studies, provides a profound insight into the natural as well as unnatural acts; queerness nuances a fundamental mismatch between sex, gender and desire, which explains why it has been linked to bisexual, lesbian and gay subjects. Queer theory critically investigates the fundamental idea that any particular sexuality can be “natural” and “immutable” while expanding its lens to include all manner of sexual activities or identities that may either be put in the normative or deviant categories. Queer media, which encompasses websites, films, magazines, among other cultural products, became a common phenomenon from the ‘70s through the ‘80s and ‘90s, with the increasing pervasion with the concept of queer aesthetics. Queer media has often sought to challenge the traditional knowledge of what is known as universal truths and it relies on the uniqueness of visual vocabularies, the usually perceived vile, exaggerated or showy images that are recognizable as queer. Queer media often has a profound impact given its ability to engage with and address events as well as ideas that are of concern to the queer community; traditionally, the film industry, typically the Americanized Hollywood, has been at the core of criticism for marginalizing and silencing queer people through their negative portrayals of homosexuality (Briley, R. 2006 p.62). This paper will explore the concept of queer in relation to three archetypical queer films including Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976), Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1985) and Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Dont Cry (1999). A historical perspective of queer cinema Through the ‘1890s and ‘1980s, the gay and lesbian characters in films were heavily defined by their sexual orientation and did not have any complex character development. From 1890s to around 1930s in particular, homosexuality was often depicted as an object of ridicule and laughter in films while from 1930s to 1950s, Hollywood was heavily criticized for promoting immorality by religious and women’s groups. In response to the heightened criticism, Hollywood introduced a self-censorship code that greatly inhibited the overt portrayal of homosexuality, which led to the codification of homosexuality into characters’ mannerisms and behaviours. However, the birth of women’s and gay rights movements in the 1960s through the 1970s led to the loosening of the self-censorship code as more gays and lesbians were gaining visibility in public spheres. The representation of gay characters became overtly homophobic in the 1960s and 1970s with increasing portrayals of the group as being dangerous, violent, predatory, or suicidal in nature; however, the 1990s saw a paradigm shift in the depiction of gay and lesbian characters in films (Stevens 2006, p.174). Nonetheless, the film industry has remained cautious in its depiction of queerness such as gay themes, characters and experiences, particularly given that many film firms seek to appeal to large audiences and by focusing on queer topics they risk offending a significant portion of their audience or losing potential investors. Queerness concept cannot be divorced from the study of film since queer cinematic images react to the potential of film as a lens for subversive reimagining, which creates a simulative, avant-garde platform for reconceptualization of infinite sexual meanings, pleasures as well as interpretations. Queer cinematic experiences help in the reconstruction of individual perceptions or views of whom and how they desire as well as whom and how they identify themselves; Queerness in the British cinematic narrative remained largely invisible till the release of Victim in 1961 (Griffiths, Robin 2006, p.9) Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976) Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976) has been famed as one of the earliest most overtly homophobic films ever made in the history of the film industry; this film has been hailed as a highly creative work not only in the era of its release but also in the subsequent gay and queer cinema histories. In this feature film, Jarman undermines the classic style of film narration that characterized the commercial releases at the time of the film’s release (Lippard 1996, p.12). The film offered a consistent homoerotic appreciation of the male physique as well as an alternative view of masculinity that had never been seen before in the history of the British films (Loannides 2011, p.37). Jarmain establishes a cinematic enunciation of the queer desire by rewriting and appropriating the conventional Saint Sebastiane through a gay and overtly queer lens. Jarman has been recognized as one of the most influential independent filmmakers in England in the 1980s (Wymer, Rowland 2006 p.5); he stands out as a significant figure due to his exploitation of emblems and symbols in associative contexts, unlike his contemporaries, who used them in the conventional cause-effect narratives. Generally, Sebastiane depicts excessive sexual undertones, particularly sexual sacrality, respectful self-abolition and queer desire; the films’ overtly queer cinematic experience is only comparable to an act of worship. Set in the era of the Roman Empire during the Christian persecutions, Sebastiane explores the story of Saint Sebastiane, who is banished to a remote outpost when he upsets Emperor Diocletian; here, the leader of the outposts, who sadistically delights in punishing his soldier, desires Sebastiane. Even though Sebastiane is believed to be an early Christian following his iconic martyrdom by arrows, Sebastian worships the Roman sun god phoebus Apollo whose desire for his male companions is redirected to the worship of his deity and pacifism. The commanding officer of the outpost where Sebastiane is exiled becomes greatly obsessed with the Sebastiane after seeing him take an early morning shower (Dillon 2004, p.68), and even attempts to assault him and in the end he oversees Sebastiane’s execution for failing to take up arms to defend the Roman Empire. One of Sebastiane’s comrades in arms known as Sebastiane is also seriously in love with Sebastiane and even though his love is unreciprocated, Justine remains friends with the celibate pacifist. Two of Sebastiane’s fellow soldiers, Adrian and Anthony, are gay and seriously in love with each other, like most of the soldiers at the outpost who have turned into having intimacy amongst themselves as a mechanism of coping with and relieving tension. Sebastiane remains marked as the outsider throughout the film, strange and overtly queer, partly due to his religion too, and he seeks isolation to the company of the others. Sebastiane prefers to be alone because he finds his intense inner life to be more essential than the company of others. Sebastiane remains aloof and does not seek to make any social connections even when the other soldiers genuinely offer him friendship and love rather than the rough camaraderie characteristic of regiments. Jarmain depicts Sebastiane as a queer character by disassembling of the body as a prescription of sexuality and gender; furthermore, Sebastiane’s constant praise of his god’s body reveals his narcissistic pleasure (Loannides 2011, p.43). Precisely, Sebastiane constantly speaks in praise of his beautiful god’s body, which in real sense is either the reflection of the sun or Sebastiane’s narcissistic pleasure; by constantly obsessing himself with his own exquisite body, Sebastiane is actually worshipping himself. Jarman constantly contrasts Sebastiane’s praise of the beautiful body of Christ with the protagonist’s visual image as he relishes his own flesh or narcissistically gazes upon his own reflection or the sun’s reflection. In Sebastiane, Jarman attempts to create a visually sacred and sexual reality thereby engendering a sort of religious subjectivity through the film’s queer concept of the protagonist; Sebastiane strikes as a queer media form since in it, Jarman creates both a religious and queer reality. Sebastiane is thus best approached as a queer rather than a particularly gay male cinematic experience, which interrogates the views deeply embedded in at the core of conventional cinematic spectatorship and defies the binary categorizations of gay and straight (Loannides 2011, p.33). The film queerly interrogates the normative cinematic gaze thereby overtly prompting its audiences to question their own sexual subjectivity that is strongly influenced by the traditional narrative film. Precisely, the film greatly undermines its audiences’ invisible, powerful gazes that might seek to objectify, classify and categorize the bodies it depicts; Jarman exploits aesthetics such as a dazzling light that blinds the spectator from regimenting the characters he portrays. Furthermore, Sebastiane’s characters defy the conventional sexual categorizations of gay or straight thereby interrogating the views of appropriate masculinity and cultural perspectives that appropriate specific sexualities for specific bodies (OPray 1996, p.11). The sadomasochistic power play between Severus and Sebastian coupled with Max’s excessive pervasion with performing and instating hyper-masculinity in others while participating in aggressive sexual horseplay all are indicative of the film’s critique of universal views regarding sexualities. Sebastiane queerly disassembles sexual dimorphism through its portrayal of sadomasochistic and narcissistic sexuality, which not only challenges the universal gaze at male bodies, but also questions the idea that bodies prescribe sexuality and gender (Dillon 2004, p.63). Queer aesthetics in Jarman’s Sebastiane including the film’s gay male sadomasochism visual and psychological aspects like nudity, submission, loss of subjectivity as well as bodily signs of ecstasy and climax highlights the director’s queer cinematic lens. The film draws a close connection between gay male sadomasochism and queer sacrality; for instance, Sebastiane pursues masochistic thrills through provocation of punishments as seen in his failure to reciprocate Captain Severus’ love. Later, the soldiers flog Sebastiane thoroughly while hanging him with his hands behind his head and stake him out in the sun before burning him with a candle and rubbing sand in his wounds. The film’s editing highly sexualizes these punishment events by comparing Sebastiane’s flogging with the soldiers drivelling over a naked picture of a woman; furthermore, Sebastiane’s agreeableness to these punishments indicates that he finds them erotic. Eventually, Sebastian’s execution in the end nuances a sort of religious ecstasy with an overtly sexual redolence which is highlighted through the long, medium as well as close-up shots of Sebastiane’s pierced body on the backdrop of a bare and barren landscape and the soundtrack of a sighing wind in the background. Sebastiane’s punishment is also highly romanticized with the absence of synchronized sound such as the whirring of arrows through air, the thud of impact, as well as voices of soldiers, which makes it utterly impossible to correlate the shot arrows with any physical consequences. Furthermore, Jarman’s iconic slow motion of cinematic eroticism highlights the erotic pleasure on Sebastiane’s face each time an arrow penetrates his body through a close-up while a long shot of Sebastiane’s body also reveals his semi-erect manhood. Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1985) Desert Hearts is a lesbian-themed romantic drama film directed by lesbian filmmaker Donna Deitch, which came out in 1985 based on Jane Rule’s novel titled Desert of the Heart; this was yet another successful film during the wave of independent gay and Lesbian filmmaking. Set in the 1959, the film narrates the story of Vivian Bell, an English professor at Columbia University who moves to Reno Nevada to obtain a divorce and there she encounters Cay Rivers, a free-spirited lesbian artist, whom she falls in love with and the two begin a love affair eventually. The film strikes as an overtly queer lesbian heartthrob movie that is set in the fantastical Wild West where all the socio-political consequences and contextual realities are undermined and anything goes (Griffin 2006, p.196). The film utilizes a slow progress of shots that are always moving closer and punctuated with sighs and shivers, depicting the caresses, kisses, and the intense gaze between the protagonists. As an independent lesbian feature film, Desert Hearts uses a realistic narrative techniques to explore the coming out and romance of lesbian lovers and it stands out as the first full-length lesbian love story to ever hit the screens. The two women in this film struggle with conflicting desires and their sense of obligation to others but eventually they are drawn to each other both because of their powerful attraction to each other and the void each of them fills in the other. The film evokes very emotional and erotic connection through its landmark queer-laced cinematic experience that greatly resonates with both the gay and straight audiences all over the world. The earlier 1990s era of the New queer cinema era has equally been significant in the manner in which queerness is represented in today’s cinematic experiences (Stevens 2006, p.174). Increasingly, the dominant feature of the new queer cinema is the movement motif, which tends to underpin the idea that queerness is always on the move. A vast proportion of the new queer cinema represents queerness as something that generally resists stillness and moves in every aspect of the word “movement”, that is, it not only nuances a community, but also to a cinematic shift and a literal sense of motion (Cunningham 2002). The queer current is both anti-separatist and anti-assimilationist besides being overtly strange and relational; queerness has been represented as a fluidity state that entails moving or transcending sexualities, genders, desires as well as practices of the world, challenging, questioning and eventually undermining the universally acknowledged notions of gendered sexuality among other gender prescribed categorizations (Richardson 2009, p.7). The recurring motif of the road or traveling in the queer cinema is often a compelling notion of the movability of queerness; in most queer films as depicted in the Desert Hearts, the subjects keep on shifting their residence rather than inhabiting the same place. The constant traveling or moving of queer characters from one place to another evokes the idea that queerness is not bound by any restrictions, be it physical, social, economic or political as it keeps on moving across things, and landscapes while passing through and between spaces, places, identities and things (Cunningham 2002). Notably, like a majority of the early ‘90’s queer cinema, Desert Hearts depicts Cay as a young, free-floating soul that is constantly searching for profound experiences; her travelling with Vivian at the end of the film nuances the road motif, which underpins the idea that her restless nature cannot be bound in any one place. Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Dont Cry (1999) Peirce’s Bad Boys Don’t Cry (1999) is a more cent film that further explores the persistent road motif that depicts queer characters as restless identities that cannot be contained in any single location (Cunningham, 2002). The film features trailer trash protagonists that move across the landscape, an act that informs their circumstances and subjectivities. Given that the pervasive engagement of queer films with the idea of movement lingers on throughout the development of this genre through to the latest films implies that it was not by chance that most early queer films were road movies. Bad Boys Don’t Cry narrates the real life story of a poor, white and queer female known as Teena Brandon, who changes her name do Brandon Teena and spends her life posing like a boy in Nebraska; because of the petty crimes committed in his boyish life, Brandon was always running away from the police. The heaviest offense levelled against Brandon is that of sexual normativity also known as the crime of “performance’ or the crime of passing as a man even though his anatomy was nowhere near to being masculine. Ideally, Brandon’s crime is not serious offense but ‘his’ redneck colleagues heighten the gravity of the matter by claiming that it was punishable by law; this film explores the concept of queerness in an intricate manner, more so, because it was acted, unnatural and constructed. Like the rest of the films that engage with the transgender and transsexual themes, this film demonstrates that gender and sex are never stable, authentic, or orderly because they are neither inherent nor essential aspects of identity. A common trend inherent in the new queer films genre is the fact that the films are increasingly restaging documented histories, innovating, renegotiating subjectivities and invading other genres in their own image; Bad Boys Don’t Cry keeps up the trend by restaging a historically documented crime. The film further explores the idea of social division through the metaphor of a wall as depicted through many of the supporting roles that are played by bored kids assembled at the Quick stop convenience store wall all night long; the metaphor of the wall highlights the idea of small town entrapment. Furthermore, the “wall people” in this film are alienated from their town’s smallness yet Brandon’s arrival into the town signifies a sort of freedom and possible escape for the many young women he meets (Cunningham 2002). Brandon adopts a thoroughly exaggerated cow-boyish masculinity that is not only assertive and fearless, but also sensitive and romantic, attributes that give her a queer appearance that out rightly symbolizes all that is free, exotic as well as beautiful. A blend of the cow-boyish and frontiersman archetypes, characters that are mostly related with performing and passing, largely underpins the new queer cinema’s obsession with movement, of passing through the landscape; the road is Brandon’s escape or means of drifting through life in search of social acceptance, community as well as love. Overall, cinemas have often marginalized and silenced queer people through their negative portrayals of homosexuality, lesbianism and other behaviours that fall out the norm; gays and lesbians in films were heavily defined by their sexual orientation throughout the 1890s and 1980s. The subsequent cinematic period prior to 1930s often depicted homosexuality as an identity of ridicule and laughter while the 1930s to the 1950s lead to the widespread censure of homophobic characters in films. Nonetheless, the 1960s and 1970s saw an increased assertiveness of the gay and lesbian characters with increasing portrayals of these identities as dangerous, violent, predatory, or suicidal; the 1990s saw a significant paradigm shift in the depiction of gay and lesbian characters in films. Evidently, queer media such as queer cinematic experiences have always sought to challenge the traditional knowledge of what is known as universal truths, particularly regarding gendered sexualities. The concept of queerness has often been at the core of the study of film since queer cinematic experiences have been perceived to provide a lens for subversive reimagining that enables the creation of a simulative, new platform for recapturing infinite sexual meanings, pleasures and interpretations. Queer cinematic experiences have often emphasized the idea that queerness is often moving and queer characters are free souls that cannot be contained through the persistent metaphor of the road; precisely, queer experiences reconstruct individual perceptions or views of whom and how they desire as well as whom and how they identify themselves. Jarman depicts Sebastiane with a queer sexuality that lies between autoeroticism and sadomasochism while sustaining an overtly queer cinematic experience; Sebastiane is portrayed as the archetypical sadomasochistic and narcissistic link between beauty, pain and ecstasy. The film’s overt indulgence of sacrality aesthetics, queer desire as well as self-abolition underscores its cinematic involvement of queer nimiety that is greatly comparable to an act of worship; eventually, the film creates a platform for the development of suggestive and religious prejudices. References Briley, R. 2006. Queer images: A history of gay and lesbian film in America. Film & History, 36(2), 62-63.  Griffin, B. 2006. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Stevens, K. 2006. New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, Film Criticism, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 173-176,180. Dillon, S. 2004. Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea. Texas: University of Texas Press. Wymer, R. 2006. Derek Jarman. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Richardson, N. 2009. The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman. London: I.B Tauris. Loannides, G. 2011. Pietistic Penetration: Aesthetics of Queer Sacrality in Derek Jarman‟s Sebastiane (1976). Literature & Aesthetics 21(2): p.26-44. Griffiths, R. (ed.). 2006. British Queer Cinema. London: Routledge. Lippard, C. 1996. By Angels Driven: The Films of Derek Jarman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. 208pp. OPray, M. 1996. Derek Jarman: Dreams of England. British Film Institute Publishing. 232pp. Cunningham, D.M. 2002. Driving into the Dustless Highway of Queer Cinema. The film journal [Online]. Available from: http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue5/highway.html Read More