Sunday, August 21, 2011

Gay Filmic Fiction



Gay Filmic Fiction

1 Filmic fiction as a transgressive artform.

2 It involves the gay re-adaptation of various str8t adapted films out of the past.

3 One could go down the list of Tennessee Williams films—that have been adapted by str8t directors to fit into the str8t zeitgeist.

4 Even so, a Williams film like “Baby Doll” still gets blacklisted and banned by the Catholic Church for still being too controversial.

5 A gay adaptation of “Baby Doll” with a young male as the femme fatale would still even in these noir dayz of “post-DOMA Enlightment” still be extremely controversial and perhaps even be banned again.

6 Like “Out of the Past” (1947)—with it’s somewhat film noir revisiting and representation of Mitchum’s past rather sordid romantic and fascinating low-life love-affair with Jane Greer.

7 How could such supposedly str8t or str8t-adapted films be re-adapted in favor of new gay cineaste point of view? A queer tainted mise en scene?

8 Like “Out of the Closet” (2012)—redoing str8t filmscripts along more subversive, transgressive revisionistic lines—rewriting and reconstructing formerly str8t-adapted film scripts through a homoerotic filmic fiction aesthetic?

9 For example, “Hot Kid on a Tin Roof” (2011)—a rather faggy re-adaptation of Tennessee’s play “Hot Cat on a Tin Roof” which was later adapted by Richard Brooks into the filmscript we know today as the 1958 “Hot Cat” version of Williams’ classic movie.

10 The same with “The Roman Spring of Mr. Stone” (2011)—a gay adaptation of the Williams novel without the transvestite str8t revision of the text or the need of Williams to disguise himself as Vivien Leigh.

[Although the camp power of Norma Desmond drag and Lotte Lenya “Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales” cabaret kitsch and Marlene Dietrich “Blonde Venus” weltschmertz is notable—at this point in GLBT Hollywood Babylon cineaste history it might be well to revisit not only gay filmic revisionism but also gay film crit revisionism. For example, reinventing a new kind of noir, cynical film critic along the lines of Waldo Lydecker in “Laura” (1944) or Addison DeWitt in “All About Eve” (1950)—both Clifton Webb and George Sanders as bitchy Medusa-like movie monster critics quite up to “going down” with the “Titanic” (1953) or posing as the Saran of Gaza in “Samson and Delilah” (1949).]


No comments:

Post a Comment