The State of Queer Film

Of course, all of these films were better than the creepy homophobia that emerged in some of the bigger Hollywood films. The Haunting brought up lesbianism, but never had the nerve to do anything with it and left us wondering what was going on to begin with. While Alan Cummings, who had scored such a huge hit in the New York production of Cabaret, garnered some laughs as a libidinal desk clerk in Eyes Wide Shut, his character simply reflected the creepy sex-hating tone of the entire film. Even worse was American Beauty with its glib pseudo- critique of middle-class suburbia and its ultimate horror of the repressed violent-ex-Marine-homo- next-door who offs the film’s main character after his sexual advances have been rebuffed. This guy even collects Nazi memorabilia—but nothing butch like grenades or machine guns. He collects plates from Hitler’s dinner parties. But this was not as insidious as Franco Zeffirelli’s  Tea with Mussolini, which used gay male sensibility about older actress divas to grotesquely sentimentalize Italian fascism. We also had the usual I’m-not-gay-but-everyone-thinks- I-am plots in Happy, Texas, Three to Tango, and, to a lesser degree, Dogma. This last film continued director Kevin Smith’s obsession with repressed or disassociated homosexuality: the angels played by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are mistaken by other characters as a gay couple, but in the end it was more weird and annoying than interesting.

The one remarkable trend this year in both independent and mainstream films was the emergence of transgendered characters and themes. These ranged from the third-rate The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, in which a teen boy learns to deal with his transgendered dad to the groundbreaking Boys Don’t Cry fictional- ization of the Teena Brandon story. In between we have Philip Seymour Hoffman’s transgendered drag queen in Flawless, the quirky sort-of-trans-gendered lesbian love story in Being John Malkovich, and the always brilliant and confounding sexual politics of Almodovar in All About My Mother. These films evidence a new, far more sophisticated approach to portraying the complexities of gender and sexuality, with the best of the lot—Boys Don’t Cry—never shying away from the harder issues.

So what can we expect after this year? In past years some of the most insightful and provocative portrayals of homosexuals surfaced—usually as minor characters—in mainstream and Hollywood films: John Ritter’s southern queen in Slingblade, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s gay loser in Boogie Nights, Tilda Swinton’s high-powered bisexual lawyer in Female Perversions, Robert Downey’s gay man dying of AIDS in One Night Stand, and Timothy Hutton’s morally-upright gay son in a dysfunctional family in The Substance of Fire. These were complex characters who conveyed the multiplicity of realities that queer people live everyday. These were not “gay movies”—in the sense that Better Than Chocolate or Trick are—but thoughtful, well made investigations into how people live their lives. The reason why so many “gay films” are bad is not because they are primarily about gay men and lesbians, but because they have become conformist, stale, formula products rather than art or even enjoyable entertainment. Trick, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, and Better Than Chocolate are the cinematic equivalents of television sit-coms that have gone on three seasons too many.

The one exception to this is the end-of-the-year release of Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, a quirky, mostly amoral thriller about a sociopathic gay man who, while social climbing his way to a better class status, commits and gets away with several murders. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s classic 1955 novel (filmed previously as Purple Noon by Rene Clement in 1960), director Minghella reinvents and politicizes it so that it is as much about class envy as the intricacies of homosexual identity in a repressive society. In Highsmith’s original, Tom Ripley is a working class grifter with no scruples or identity boundaries who becomes enamored with the wealthy Dickey Greenleaf. After they are thrown together by a chance encounter, Ripley’s desire for Dicky becomes inseparable from his wanting to be him. This leads to murder, impersonation, and more murder. In Highsmith’s hands this became a meditation on identity, sexuality, and guilt, similar to her themes in the 1949 novel Strangers on a Train, best known in Alfred Hitchcock’s film version. Here Minghella also emphasizes Tom Ripley’s class ambitions and anxieties (as well as Dicky Greenleaf’s class privileges) and turns the film into a black comedy of class mobility and murder. Far more savvy than his highly awarded 1997 The English Patient—which suffered from both sentimentality and Masterpiece Theater syndrome— Minghella gets at the quirky intersections of sexual outsiderness and envy, class resentment, and longing, and the psychopathology caused by all of the above.