Word: celluloidal
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This year, however, a film has appeared that has surpassed all expectations. "The Celluloid Closet," directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and based on the book by the late Vito Russo, is thorough, honest, coherent and artful. Tackling the tricky, complicated question of gay Hollywood, the creators of this film acquit themselves admirably. The movie, narrated unobtrusively by Lily Tomlin, is a comprehensive view of the presence of gay themes and characters in movies from the very beginning to the present. We witness the dramatic evolution from total stereotype and vague innuendo to movies wholly about gay life, including...
...secret any more." Apparently, k.d. lang, who provides a new recording of the song over the final credits, agrees with its relevance. The image of two men slowly dancing together, from an early experimental film by Thomas Edison, seems strange and haunting at the beginning of "The Celluloid Closet" but even more so at the end, where it is used to great effect, bookending the progress shown in the film, in which such images began as innocuous and then became an object of prurient curiosity and hatred, finally, as the directors hint, a symbol of possibility and hope...
...movies, as commentators of every political stripe have noted, are a glamorous mirror of society. Growing up, we all find ourselves, in part, by finding aspects of ourselves onscreen. Gays didn't. "You feel like a ghost," essayist Susie Bright (author of Sexwise) says in The Celluloid Closet, "a ghost that nobody believes in." So gays went looking for kinship in any movie character who was artistic, flamboyant, wounded. They still do, and some of the subtextual readings in The Celluloid Closet result in eyestrain. "We know the Sal Mineo character in Rebel Without a Cause is gay," asserts British...
...Celluloid Closet tells us things are better now. But that is mainly on the independent scene, where nobody's betting real money. In the films most people see, gays are still crippled in some way. Tom Hanks can be the good, dying gay man in Philadelphia--but no passionate kiss for your boyfriend, please. In the thriller Copycat, the gay character is not the serial killer, he is the heroine's best friend--but he still gets murdered. And gay baiting is still acceptable; "faggot" remains the epithet du jour of movie machismo. In Mel Gibson's Braveheart, early line...
...irony is that Hollywood, with its dozens of gay stars, its hundreds of gays in positions of creative and executive power, is afraid to depict homosexual life--the world it knows and could persuasively dramatize. The whole town, timid as ever, prefers to reside in one huge, beautifully appointed celluloid closet. Or a gilded birdcage with a cover over it. The world looks safe and cozy from inside. Why would anyone want to come...