Fassbinder's "Querelle": The Queercage

[RBenner801]

Not having read Jean Genet's novel "Querelle de Brest," I don't know how
faithful the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder's movie adaptation "Querelle"
is. The theatrical expressionism and poetic sap of Genet's addiction to
masturbation is evident, though, and Fassbinder, who died of a drug
overdose not long after completing the movie, did what he could to
druggishly titillate and compel us to watch in a way Genet might have
approved: everything is jaundiced brothellian. Except for the hyped
chanting of a male chorus and a few Germanic tangos, the droggy mess may
remind you of John Huston's equally sluggy "Reflections in a Golden Eye,"
in that Franco Nero, basically in a reprise of Marlon Brando's Major
Penderton, acts as the narrator and who is the unrequited lover of the
military stud Querelle, played by stone-faced American Brad Davis. Nero
orgasmically spurts things like "Is love like a killer's den?" and "Do I
have the charms with which to conquer?" Don't ask me to explain what goes
on -- "Querelle" is just a dumb, humorless piece of homoeroticism, albeit
a compulsively watchable one. But it confirms that movies with homosexual
themes have a bad time of it. Mainly, I think, because moviemakers can't
escape -- they don't seem to want to -- the easiness of stereotyping. The
flamming queens, the limp-wristed swishes, the neo-Nazi butches, the bull
dykes, the Christopher Street jeans & beards clones are all so much a part
of the "imagery" of gays that there doesn't seem to be any other way to
deal with them. By default, the imagery becomes the subject. Some movies
about gays -- like "The Killing of Sister George," "Reflections in a
Golden Eye," "The Gay Deceivers," "The Boys in the Band," "Staircase,"
"Dog Day Afternoon," "Outrageous," "The Shadow Box," "Personal Best,"
"Victor/Victoria," "Kiss of the Spider Woman," "By Design," "The 4th Man,"
"My Beautiful Laundrette," and the Homocaust dramas "As Is," "An Early
Frost" and "Philadelphia" -- ask us to accept what we're shown because
"they're people too." No matter how tasteful or restrained the goings-on,
there's a repugnance anyway, especially in the first seven mentioned. The
imbalance of the imagery is often exacerbated by the casting: Susannah
York could be a credible young lesbian in "Sister George," but Coral
Browne's Cobra Woman is as sinister and prejudicial as the evil inverts in
Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" series. Leonard Frey's queen in "Boys"
produced less chuckles than squeamishness. In "The Birdcage," Nathan
Lane's mannerisms may have set back gay rights a decade or more. Some of
the casting can literally scare audiences: my otherwise liberal parents
did their unsuccessful best to keep me from seeing "The Children's Hour"
(I was 15 and had already read the play) because Shirley MacLaine's
characterization of a repressed lesbian was just too close to home. They
were right to worry about the consequences -- I recognized some of their
party friends in MacLaine. Even in the ultra-smooth and very classy
"Sunday, Bloody Sunday," the best of the gay-themed lot and written by the
late critic-author Penelope Gilliatt, the casting conflicted with the
intended heartbreak. Murray Head, playing the bisexual having affairs with
Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson, was a hole on the screen. His air-like
walk, lifeless voice and emaciated looks didn't cause much heat for Finch
or Jackson, or anybody else; his cavalier independence, meant to be
strength, was too apathetically cool. Someone with a fleshy bedevilment,
someone like Michael York or Alain Delon (or, if he could have been tamed,
Helmut Berger), someone the audience itself could be attracted to, might
have made all the cosmopolitan drooling by Finch and Jackson more
convincing. And so comedy, as always, seems to be the only way to make a
general audience comfortable about gays, as "La Cage aus Folles," its
sequels , "Victor/Victoria," "To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie
Newmar" and "The Birdcage" confirm. But the laughter these movies get is
by and large perpetuation of and ridicule at imagery. But this damaging
perpetuation -- resulting in prejudice and violence against gays -- can
not be blamed solely on the mass audience, or the ignorant Bible-thumpers
or the media. Gays who perform in movies -- for example "Cruising" and
"Basic Instinct" and "The Birdcage" -- or for the cameras of news and talk
shows with their wrists flapping and asses swaying are themselves
instigators; they set themselves up for the popular sport of gay bashing.
There is something offensive about a queen in drag cascading down a
street, or seeing butchettes locked in rigid conformity, not just in
jeans, cropped haircuts and joggers, but -- God help us! -- with their
Jeeps, Blazers and Geo Trackers now too. The conformity of anti-gay
feelings the gays condemn as bigotry is the very conformity they've pretty
much condemned themselves to. Many gays don't want to hear and some even
refuse to acknowledge that it is their image that gets them into trouble.
Haven't you ever wanted to take steps when you've watched gays prancing on
television for gay rights? How can we tell if they deserve more tolerance
and acceptance? By the length of their feathered boas? By those steep
Fredericks spikes they wear during their parades? Do news reporters or
cameramen ask the gays to add extra swish? (Though talk show hosts and
producers encourage it.) It's one thing to take the gay act along with you
when you go slumming in the homosexual entertainment underground. (Plenty
of heteros partake in these pleasures as well.) It's quite another to
fully live out the amusing degradation for the boob tube audience that
wants to kill you. Why is it that publicity always seems to bring out the
worst in gays? Gay bashing is deplorable and cowardly, but if gays were to
do it amongst themselves, by insisting that some of their behavior remain
in the closet, it could speed up the acceptance process. One of the
saddest obstacles for gay males in their justifiable demands for inclusion
in society is that they have no masculine, non-lispy, non-AIDS-infected
spokesmen. Sadder still is that there are many of them out there but are
afraid to come forward. When, in the awful "Querelle," Jeanne Moreau
repeatedly sings "Each man kills the thing he loves," the message is
conveniently perceived that the happiest homosexual is a well-groomed
corpse. Bull shit. The happy gay -- and I've met some who genuinely are --
is the person who doesn't betray his or her values by goose-stepping to
showbiz sexual fascism.

[RonG2934]

>>The happy gay -- and I've met some who genuinely are --<<

Wow! And some of my best friends are neurotic heterosexuals! What a
condescending asshole!

[FilmGene]

At last -- a convenient reason to NOT read Benner's logorrhea. :-)

Gene Stavis, School of Visual Arts - NYC