There is one gem of a film made during the height of the AIDS-era called Parting Glances. Steve Buscemi plays a listless rock star dying of AIDS, but he is no Christ-like figure. He's a humorous and at times existential effete, who truly misses the days of wine and roses that have passed and is not filled with regret for what he enjoyed. Parting Glances portrays the dynamics of several unorthodox gay relationships: gay-marriage-like pairings, a young 21-year-old who enjoys the status of his beauty, a gay man happily and conveniently married to a straight woman. No one bothers to give speeches about the horrors of homophobia, or the cataclysm of AIDS. It's very much a movie of its moment, a portrait of a segment of New York that was experiencing a great cataclysm and the jokes of the movie carry a sad weight. The movie reminds me of a line from an Andrew Holleran novel: "I think the '80s were a very nice dinner party with friends, except someone was taken out and shot every few minutes."
Philadelphia, on the other hand, is a movie in which no gay man is anything less than a saint (Tom Hanks's character mustn't be allowed to have anything less than a well-functioning marriage to Antonio Banderas...oh, and he lets his underlings off early on Friday afternoons), in which certain black characters exist solely for the purpose of connecting the civil rights struggle with the gay rights struggle, and in which homophobic corporate bosses have all the subtlety of a Bela Lugosi villain. The movie is laughable today, a sign that Hollywood had come out a little too late in tackling a VERY IMPORTANT ISSUE THAT WE MUST WEAR RED RIBBONS FOR.
Parting Glances is a tone poem. Philadelphia is social realist agitprop.
very well articulated -- i can't wait to read your midterm!
ReplyDeletei was struck by the "I think the '80s were a very nice dinner party with friends, except someone was taken out and shot every few minutes" quote you used and waxed on it for a while. but, um, yes, philadelphia, like broke back mountain, is the hollywood feelgood film of homonationalism. and still, in the absolute awfulness of most mass circulated films that take on serious social issues, i force myself to pause to think of the spectator who is transformed by the bravery of the representation -- that it exists at all (going back to color adjustment and diane carrol as well as pat turner's comments on representation), or incited to, as bell hooks says (and perhaps jacqueline bobo might say), who use it as a teaching moment to "talk back" to the pathology of those representations.
cheers!