Even though we didn’t win all the Oscars of our dreams, it’s easy to see why queer Americans are feeling jubilant. Films with queer themes were nominated for virtually every major award this year. Not only Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress and Actor for Brokeback Mountain, but Best Actor for Capote and Best Actress for Transamerica. In addition, Brokeback and Capote had acting nominations for which they were never the frontrunners. All told, six acting nominations, and one win, went to queer films. Of 15 nominations for queer films, we won just four Oscars. Still, it’s hard to avoid: 2005 was the Year of the Queer.
But now that we’ve popped the champagne and gorged ourselves on gourmet crudités, shouldn’t we spare a moment for self-reflection? Capote is a wonderful film, but it’s the least gay of our contenders. The other two entrants are simply torchbearers of the continuing mediocrity of the Academy’s taste. Don’t we deserve better films than this? And do queer cineastes, who have supported the careers of groundbreaking filmmakers like John Waters, Derek Jarman, Pedro Almodovar, and Todd Solondz, no longer want to celebrate the radical and perverse in cinema?
Sadly, the gay adoration of Brokeback Mountain only underscores how far we have fallen. Gay politics, like gay cinema, has become mediocre and bland, aping the failed conventions of straight narrative arcs. I suppose we get the politics and the films we deserve, but for those of us who still believe in that hopeless dream of social revolution through art, (a dream that is all the more compelling for its hopelessness) let us take a few moments to examine Brokeback Mountain‘s vision of conformity and to praise another film, Mysterious Skin, the newest masterpiece in the queer radical canon.
Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has been hailed as a masterwork of gay cinema. Never mind the film’s overly schematic, heavy-handed, and monotonous construction, however offensive this may be to one’s aesthetic sense. Instead, let’s take a moment to examine how the film portrays homosexuality. The story, as I’m sure we are all aware, involves two cowboys who, through the mysterious alchemy of the wilderness and whiskey, fall in love. Of course, this being the early ’60s in Wyoming, the men must go their separate ways, marry women and raise children, all the while slipping off into each others arms on occasional “fishing trips”. But after that first scene in the pup tent, this is a homosexual love affair oddly bereft of homosexual sex. Oh, the men make out once in a while, but for the most part Lee chooses to capture the purity of their homosexual desire through naked cliff diving and Jake Gyllenhaal’s pouty expression.
Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist has big dreams of running away with his lover to run a ranch, but all that darned homophobia keeps getting in the way. In Lee’s film, the stifling heterosexism of the era keeps these men from true happiness by denying them monogamy, cohabitation, and a lovely little ranch house. It sits, then, in historical opposition to the vast subterranean reality of gay life in the ’60s. Indeed, the film gives no hint of any gay culture of any kind in America. Our one glimpse of the seedier, sexier side of gay life takes place in a dark alley in Mexico, as if homosexuality is so alien that it can only take place on foreign soil. Jack Twist spends the last 20 years of his life in East Texas, within shouting distance of Dallas, which undoubtedly had an underground gay scene, and Lubbock, which probably did, but this denial of the flourishing, if secret, world of gay promiscuity and radicalism serves to further isolate our characters: keeping them from temptation and forcing them into a kind of gay monogamy that is every bit as stifling as the homophobia surrounding them.
Long before Jack Twist’s fatal assignation with a hub cap, it is his lover, Heath Ledger’s lock-jawed Ennis Del Mar, who threatens to kill him if he dares to stray into the arms of any more Mexican hustlers. Jack Twist’s response is to blame Ennis for not being committed enough. You see, Jack Twist just has to sleep with Mexican boys because Ennis won’t abandon his family to start a new life with Jack. Neither character is capable of seeing the potential for gay love to free us from the conventions of monogamy. Unable to break free of either the prison of heterosexism or the prison of monogamy, our characters wither on the vine, literally and figuratively dying from their desire to be normal, just like any straight couple. While the film is brilliant at uncovering the savage mechanics of heteronormativity, its failure to even acknowledge the legitimate gay culture of the time, with all its hedonism, codes and silent liberation, is a serious disappointment.
Meanwhile, while Jack Twist is off finding the exotic erotic in Tijuana, another set of hot young queers is finding the alien other right here in Kansas. Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin really is a masterpiece: well crafted, brilliantly acted and stunning in its refusal to reduce queerness to complacent normalcy. Mysterious Skin is the story of two boys who were molested by their Little League coach and grow into very different, yet eerily similar, young men. One, played with harrowing coolness and indifference by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is a hustler dreaming of escape to the big city, a place that ends up giving him more than he bargained for. The other, Brady Corbet’s shy Brian, has suppressed his memories of sexual violence, memories that re-emerge in the form of an imagined alien abduction. He has become as asexual as the smooth-crotched aliens who probed him in their antiseptic spaceship, and in his scrawny nerdiness is the aesthetic and sexual opposite of Gordon-Levitt.
Both men are searching for peace and some kind of happiness, though neither has a vocabulary to explain this quest. But unlike Ennis and Jack, neither hopes to find comfort in a normal life. Both understand, in their inchoate ways, the real nature of the queer. Queerness is an alien force, a sort of gravitational disturbance of nebular desire, which cannot be satisfied by pretending to be straight. Whereas Ennis and Jack play straight with their wives while dreaming of playing straight together, Neil and Brian instinctively reject any stable place in the social order
Neil engages in a series of sexual encounters, mostly with older men and mostly for pay. His hustling eventually takes him to New York, where his heretofore creepy but harmless tricks take on a more dangerous edge. After an encounter with a man dying of AIDS he cleans up his act, getting a job at a sandwich shop. Then, walking home one night he decides to take a ride with a man who picks him up. Neil cannot be a robotically productive member of society, and he succumbs once again to his desire to be bought and owned. The resulting violence, with its overtones of retributive justice, is difficult to either handle or justify, but Araki is a deft enough filmmaker to understand Neil’s attraction to hustling in the face of violence.
Neil is not a prostitute because he has no options. Yes, Neil is a prostitute because he loves the complicated power dynamics which both mimic and repudiate his childhood abuse, but prostitution isn’t simply a re-enactment, it is also an overcoming, a cool dismissal of the safe, which is to say the norma. In accepting the money from customers, Neil must assume the putative role of the servant, but his youth and beauty are their own currency and offer Neil enormous power over his clients, power he wields with relish. It is in this double-bind of power that Neil flourishes.
Brian could not be more different. He shuffles through life, obsessed with the aliens who abducted him and the cosmic implications of his experience. He takes up with an odd farm girl who also claims to be an abductee, but when she tries to fellate him he pushes her away. She may be searching for love, but Brian is not. He sought her out in an attempt to understand what happened to him, to bridge the gaps in space and time and perhaps to speak again with those strangely erotic beings that took him away. Her attempt to draw him into the safety of human contact disgusts him. The mundane world, with its groping, awkward humans, holds no interest for him and cannot soothe his pain.
For all their differences, Neil and Brian are two images of the same queering phenomenon. Neil’s queerness is visceral and wet; Brian’s queerness is numb and dry. But both men are ultimately motivated by the queer instinct to negate the moral order. This tradition, currently the province of queers, runs through history at least as far back as the Gnostic Christian mystics, who, like Neil and Brian, were divided into hedonist and ascetic factions. But both methods work toward the same goal by refusing to submit to heterosexist authority. Neil abrogates this authority by violating Puritanical sexual taboos. Brian refuses heterosexism’s contrary demand that all people reproduce. Brian’s asexual persona is not homosexual, but it is undeniably queer (and queering.) Neil undoes the sexual order by exposing the lies it tells us about equality, mutuality and love. Brian undoes this same order by refusing to play the game.
Eventually, these two young men are reunited. Neil tells Brian the devastating truth and both have, for the first time in their lives, a moment of true understanding. There are no overtones here of sexuality or romance. The men look into each others’ faces as if into a mirror; it is a moment not of connection so much as recognition. Like Hesse’s Emil Sinclair finding himself in the alien soul of Max Demian, so too does Brian find himself not in the extraterrestrials of his dreams but in the queer hustler sitting beside him.
Araki’s vision is one of a queerness (a mystical penetration of the universal anus, forcing open the tightly closed sphincter of human existence) that can overcome the world. This stands in harsh contrast to Lee’s vision of queerness, which is virtually indistinguishable from one of straightness. Lee’s characters are engaged in a struggle that is ultimately ordinary. They want nothing but companionship, hot sex, and a lifetime together on the open range. They want to be content. Lee’s film, for all its genuine concern with the ways in which stifled homosexual desire destroys not only homosexuals but also their straight families, nevertheless forecloses any radical potential for his lovers by refusing to question the institutions that make heteronormativity possible. Jack and Ennis are gay men who, like the vast majority of gay and lesbian Americans today, just want to be normal. They rebel not against society’s refusal to admit their legitimacy but against society’s refusal to let them be “just folks”.
In this sense, Lee’s film is very much about the contemporary gay rights movement, a struggle which focuses more and more intently upon access to the privileged order. Long gone is the radical queer politics that demanded queers be taken seriously as queers, that the social order is too flawed to be maintained and must be brought crashing to its knees. Gays have become too bourgeois to believe in change, and will be content simply to don the garb of the oppressive class and fit in. It is not enough to argue in favor of civil equality when social institutions are predicated on inequality. Marriage can only maintain meaning and legitimacy when it serves to define all romantic and sexual relationships, dividing the population into the married and the not-yet-married and denying the legitimacy of both celibacy and promiscuity. Marriage furthermore priveleges a single type of family arranged, the monogamous nuclear family, over any other arrangement. Queerness, as it has existed in Western culture for the last century, has been a means of destabilizing the oppressive sexual politics of marriage and reproduction. But Lee, like our contemporary gay liberal leadership, ignores this history and potential in favor of giving gays and lesbians the same narrow and oppressive choices heretofore reserved for straights.
Lee’s film is so successful precisely for this reason. Straight men and women may oppose the recognition of gay unions, but they overwhelming “understand” the desire for stability and love. They, like Jack Twist, believe in the power of monogamy above all else. The story of Jack and Ennis is viewed as tragic because they have been denied what everyone else has. Lee makes no real attempt to question whether or not what everyone else has is worth having. Lee is unwilling to question the basic mechanics of the social order. And this unwillingness won him an Oscar.
Araki will never take home that slick, glistening golden phallus because his film dares to question the very basis of society. It dares to reject love and safety in favor of violent uncertainty. Araki’s film is meant symbolically, and therefore hardly presents us with a blueprint for queer action, but it does point the way toward a mystical transcendence of the world in the characters’ wild flailings toward will and selfhood. Mysterious Skin is too queer even for the queers, now that queers just want to be “straight”.