Scene 2: Beauty in the unknown
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What if the most honest way to experience queerness on film is through uncertainty, not clarity?
In Only Make Believe (Robert Knights, 1973), theatricality is used as a disruptive approach. Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performative helps illuminate this dynamic — identity is not innate but produced through repetition. The use of mirrors, repetition, and multiple identities gives off the feeling of instability, blurring the line between the stage and ‘reality’. For Ellis Hanson (1999), queerness often emerges in style and excess, when cinema chooses artifice over order, spectacle over certainty.
Knights is constantly reminding us that we’re watching a play within a play; his conscious expressiveness does exactly this: it exposes performance as a framework of identity, reminding us that desire, like acting, is something continually rehearsed and reimagined. What Hanson (1999) calls ‘artifice’: the exaggeration and awareness of performance as a space where queerness can flourish. This self-reflexivity ‘queers’ the form by refusing the idea of stable identity — characters perform their desires as much as they feel them.
Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) brings that disorientation into the horror genre. Set inside a cheap post-production studio, it replaces on-screen violence with the physical work of creating horror through sound; we are only really shown half of the whole film, creating a sense of uncertainty and unease for us as viewers. Strickland also plays on a sort of gory desire, where we are intrigued by what we can't see, but at the same time, not sure if we want to see it. Something else that adds to this dissatisfaction is the way the narrative is clearly not structured, building what Halberstam (2005) would call a “queer time and space,” where chronology is ruptured and reality dissolves. The protagonist, Gilderoy, becomes psychologically trapped in the world he is trying to create, serving as a metaphor for our Own entanglement with media, as we too become absorbed, influenced, and disoriented by what we consume. The film queers cinematic thrill by making us aware of how sound and image manipulate desire and fear; the horror lies in the not knowing.
Essentially, the queerness emanates from the uncertainty itself, the gaps and the illusions that invite us to feel rather than understand.