The Celluloid Closet - Watch Notes
- When you don’t see representation of yourself in films you often feel alone
- Movies ‘from the beginning relied on homosexuality as a sure fire source of humour’
- Ideas about who you are come from what you experience and we learn from movies what out means to have ‘sexuality’
- Chaplin Movie ‘Behind the Screen’ 1917
- Stereotyping - swishy mime was so ingrained in the portrayal of the ‘gay man’
- ‘The Sissy’ - The first of Hollywoods Gay ‘characters’, Made everyone feel either mor manly or more manly by occupying the space in between the two gender roles, he did not appear to have a sexuality and so he was allowed to thrive in films because he was homosexual only subliminally and yet everyone knew that they should be read as gay - some people like the idea of visibility at any cost but some people feel very strongly that it is wrong to have this type of character ‘there is no sin like being a woman’ ‘when a man dresses as aa woman everybody laughs but when a woman dresses as a man nobody laughs’
- Queen Christina - based on true monarch and lesbian of Sweden
- 1920s and 30s - film got a lot more ‘raunchy’ and so the catholic community introduced the Hayes code, which was seldom taken seriously but by 1935 the legion of decency backed by the Catholic Church and threatened boycotts forcing Hollywood to ‘play by the rules’
- Among the things restricted were: open mouthed kissing, lustful embraces, sex perversion, seduction, rape, abortion, prostitution and white slavery, nudity, obscenity and profanity
- The Hayes code did not erase homosexuality from film but it did unfortunately give them a new identity, as villains
- Rebecca 1940 - the words homosexuality/lesbianism is never explicitly mentioned however there are moments where the former housekeeper appears to be obsessed with her, particularly the scene where she opens the underwear draw
- Oriental music, perfume and other hints were used to show a characters sexuality where it couldn’t have been explicitly said
- Hitchcock’s film ‘Rope’ features two gay lovers as the villains
- Sometimes censors turned a blind eye to lesbians if they were kept ‘safely behind bars’ such as ‘Caged’ 1959, supposedly the message is ‘isn’t it terrible for a woman to go to prison’ a warning about what women could become
- In 50s America ‘seeming gay was as bad as being gay’
- Rebel without a Cause - adoration of James Dean’s character, the relationship wasn’t intended to be read in a homosexual light but the film is about intimacy and allowing med to have feelings in an era where it was looked down upon
- ‘Ben-Hur’ - the roman character is in love with Ben-Hur, it is never explicitly said but the writers have written it to be perfectly clear
- Many ‘characters can only express themselves indirectly just as we (the lgbt community) can often only express ourselves indirectly’
- “The Children’s Hour’ 1962, homosexuality was finally become more widespread on screen but only as something ‘nice people didn’t talk about’ - the two character have a very intense emotional scene where one of them cries about ruining both of their lives and feeling dirty and disgusting, the actual subject was never discussed in rehearsal but watching it you can see exactly what she is trying to express. This is a difficult moment because watching it is quite hard, the feeling of sadness that she has for herself is still mirrored in today’s society and felt by many of the LGBT community
- ‘I felt that something dreadful was going to happen to me, something I wouldn’t be able to turn back once i had actually had sex with another man and that the end of that road would be suicide, and i got that impression form the movies’
- ‘Growing up in the 60s all we had were images of unhappy, separate, suicidal gay people’
- ‘You must pay and you must suffer - if thou are gay you have to do real panacea you have to die!’
- Cabaret 1972, is amongst the first films which openly accepted homosexuality and after this things began to change much more quickly
- It was easier for Hollywood to show a block character as queer than a white persona as queer
- ‘Cruisin’ was the cause of a lot of anti-homosexuality
- ‘Making love ‘1982’ - was one of the first films to deal with the topic of homosexuality sensitively and in a non sexually explicit way, it was groundbreaking
- For women, there was a very different view of sexual scenes, generally there is am image of femininity that comes across as much less threatening, female audiences generally don’t find it ‘offensive’ sand make audiences either find it non-threatening or titillating
- Women are often not taken seriously in this kind of context, it is usually perceived as experimental or ‘a phase’
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