"What you know /To be real"

Last night, we watched The Bachelor, a remake of the Buster Keaton classic starring Chris O'Donnel and Renée Zellweger which is...well, pretty much exactly what you would expect given that information. (About all that got me through it was imagining a shirtless Ed Asner in a forbidden-love subplot with a pantless Artie Lange.) monshu only picked it up because an ex of his appears in the final 1000 brides sequence; I spotted one or two other drag queens on screen for a second or two, but no one I recognised from our one meeting. We only watched it because we were too tired to pop in one of the other choices, Junebug and The Celluloid Closet.

After a movie that's as unreflexive a celebration of marriage and unimaginative a regurgitation of heterosexual gender stereotypes as you could hope never to see, I needed something to flush the system with, so I popped in Closet to watch Daniel Melnick talk about screening Making Love for a homophobic new studio head and Gore Vidal describe the homoerotic subtext of Ben Hur. I've watched that documentary so many times that I can repeat entire swathes of dialogue from memory.

It's been a while, though, and I was a bit taken about by how it resonated. I was reminded that, when I first saw the movie, I was still an insecure little homo constantly searching for validation in the media. Every month, I read Rex Wochner's quotation feature in Outlines savouring every pearl of approval from the lips of Susan Sarandon or Keanu Reeves; several I cut out and saved. Every positive gay character on TV, from Roseanne to Buffy TVS, set my heart aflutter.

I never watch sitcomes anymore and I don't think I've picked up a copy of that paper in ten years. It's been longer than that since I decided that not only was I not interested in the big budget gay films coming out of Hollywood, but that there was no virtue in "supporting" them. I believe it's Jan Oxenberg who hits the nail squarely when she says there's been a reluctance to show "not positive gay images, but real ones". Sad how little has changed in twelve years, isn't it?

Every year, there are about a dozen mainstream films with gay characters in leading roles--and I find it nigh impossible to recognise my life or the lives of my friends and acquaintances in any of them. That's ultimately not surprising; I don't recognise the lives of my straight friends in mainstream films either. Back in college, I guess I was suffering from the illusion that I hadn't seen "real gay images" yet because Hollywood was just too skittish to show them. Since the culture was changing, I figured it was merely a matter of time before they began to emerge.

Now I recognise that the market isn't really interested in seeing real images of anybody. (And don't tell me about indie films; most are just as bad in their own way.) Only in marginal films do they occasionally slip through. This hardly bothers monshu because he approaches films as primarily a form of escapism; it's the same thing he looks for in the literature he reads, by and large. But what I want from my art is a kind of transcendence, something that requires more work from both me and the creators. Amost none of the "gay films" I've seen--before or after Celluloid Closet came out--make the cut.