Saturday, 30 March 2019

Clueless

From the fabulously gowned Queens of the desert, to the plaid mini skirt wearing, bare midriff showing Queens of Bronson Alcott High School.

A major milestone for me watching Clueless throughout my teens. I recall the experiences watching it vividly. My sister came home one day with a videotape of this funny movie that her friend had recorded off Foxtel (one of Australia's two cable companies at the time). We didn't really go to movies much as children, and we were excited because we got to see something from expensive cable TV months before it came out on free-to-air TV.

Unlike my experience with Priscilla, I was able to just sit and watch along with my sister. But it was not an overly gay movie, so I could rewatch it openly.  I loved the movie it was fun and witty, with a great performance by Alicia Silverstone. At the beginning, I recall laughing and going along with the basic plot, but I'm sure that I didn’t fully appreciate all the jokes. I had no idea that this was a reimagining of Emma. Like Cher, I too was clueless and was only getting a Cliffsnotes version of the movie. It was only some years after that fully understood what 'balls flying at my nose' meant.

For all the satire and one liners, I’ve found the film to be quite a lovely progressive film. Over the years, I've kept coming back to the 'Haiti' debating scene, which I love. Yes, Cher’s speech glosses over the facts, lacks nuance and comes from a point of privilege. But, at its core, it’s a lovely message of empathy and humanism. What makes me love the scene even more is while the classic ‘It does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty’ line continues to resonate in the present day, the scene extends beyond this line. It continues to preach empathy, with Travis later talking about how he feels about the Rolling Stones is about how his kids are going to feel about Nine Inch Nails, and how he should really be less harsh on his parents. As Mr Hall says, tolerance is always a good lesson. But this lesson did not come out of nowhere – it comes directly from Cher’s speech that everyone had just dismissed.



Of course, the other major impact of the film is that it informed my gay development. In particular, it had a strong female gaze. The film is uncompromisingly from Cher's perspective, clueless or otherwise. From a gay perspective, this meant that for me it was one of the first films that looked at men with desire. The film offers up studies of Christian, Murray, Elton, and of course, Josh. Unlike Priscilla which was told from the gay men’s point of view (a perspective that was too mature for me to understand), Clueless is told from the perspective of Cher. She judges males (‘ugh as if’), desires males (the slow-mo introduction of Christian by the door), and she realises that she even loves one of them (Cher’s epiphanic montage of Josh by the films end).

Like Cher, the film’s initial focus of desire is Christian.



Christian ticks off a lot of gay male stereotypes - interesting in art, well dressed and fashion conscious. From the present perspective, this may seem too stereotypical, but I don’t think it really was for a mainstream teen comedy from 1995. Even so, stereotypes can be used as a starting point, to challenge and to explore. When I look at the film closely, I think the film is quite nuanced in its depiction of Christian. Murray might call Christian a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy.


But, in fact, while Christian's a good dancer, but he isn’t shown dancing just to disco music in a gay bar. His songstress is Billie Holiday not Barbra. He is shown reading William S Burrow's Junky, not Oscar Wilde. He watches Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot and 'Sporaticus', not Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz. And by the end, what Cher loves about Christian is not his shopping and dress sense, but how he wants everything to be beautiful and interesting. While I didn’t desire Christian, I think it was a revelation to me that not all gay men were those I had seen on Mardi Gras or in Priscilla.

And then there’s Josh. Cher was a surrogate for me, and Cher’s desire for Josh sparked something in me too. I remember being quite entranced by that final montage of Josh, and that final slow-motion shot of him smiling in the car. I've always loved a good end of film flashback montage; the slow-mo pace, the recall of earlier moments in the movie, now seen in a new light.


Like any good romantic comedy object of desire, Josh had some definable characteristics, but he was also a blank canvas onto which the audience could project their own fantasies. I was attracted to the fact that the was the gentle, nice, everyman guy. A do-gooder. I definitely thought he was a Baldwin, but unlike the characters in Priscilla, he was attractive in a conventional (non-threatening) sort of way.

Looking back, the film was quite a revelation for me, in that magical way that art and films can clarify things that might not be apparent in the reality of your everyday life.


While I didn’t know it at the time, I really think it was Clueless that confirmed, for one of the first times, that I could have desire for men. Priscilla suggested that that desire was sexual, but Clueless showed me that that desire was emotional too.



Thursday, 28 February 2019

Priscilla

Drag queens parading down the street, lip-syncing to the music pumping in the background, a bus in the background. Is this The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert or is it the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade? To my young self, they were one and the same. A world of flamboyance, overt sexuality, torch songs, deep hurt, and discrimination. This was how the world presented the gay world to me, and how I was imagining the world I would be part of.

I arrived in Australia from Vietnam as a 5 year old in 1991. By the time the grand bus came to cinemas in 1994, swept the world and won a well deserved Academy Award for best costume design, I was 8 and had no idea that Priscilla existed. (1994 was also the first year that the Mardi Gras parade was first broadcast on commercial television). It was not until 2 years later when it was broadcast on free-to-air television that the film registered on my radar.

At 10 years old, my sexuality was starting to develop and I started to have an inkling that I was more interested in boys than girls. Sex, let alone being gay, was not something that was discussed in my family. Nor, at the time, was homosexuality discussed in any media or tv show readily assessible to a 10 year old. Sure, there may have been more adult tv dramas and some art house movies, but it was hard out there for a young gay kid from the western suburbs of Sydney to find early 90s gay representation. (That's why I also have a soft spot for Philadelphia, which also received this VHS treatment. Whatever your qualms about its quality, it nevertheless was much more accessible than the independent queer films of that time!)

But, as kids are wont to do, the topic surfaces in some way, and I knew somehow that there was this thing called Mardi Gras and drag queens, and they were the 'other' that I could possibly, scarily and completely unwittingly, could be part of. Then came the ads for Priscilla and lo and behold, here was something that piqued my interest. I can't remember dates and times - it was all a pre-puberty blur. But I remember that there was a curious little secret I had, something no-one talked about so it had to be hidden, something special but also something scary. So I secretly videotaped the movie when it was on. Full of nerves, I watched bits and pieces of it when I could, since I could not really chance someone in my family finding me watching it.

In this way, I don't think I fully really watched the film until much later in life. Like these secret opportunities I had, all I remember of the film were mere imprints and impressions of what this 'other' life was about. I could not tell you what I thought of the plot, character development, or anything else. These were the individual impressions I remember:
  • This movie was strange, and there were so many things I didn't understand and just glossed over. Mainly: most, if not all, of the sexual jokes. Having said that:
  • The film made me realise (or confirm) one thing: Men were sexy, and this was something that somewhere inside I knew to be true. It was great to see it on screen. Guy Pearce shirtless was my gateway drug - his abs, his pecs, his arms, his cheekbones. He had that toned underwear model body that paraded around at Mardi Gras. If anything, this confirmed my attraction to male bodies. What was important here was that my attraction was purely physical, I found. My earlier attractions was to a boy named Paul from my year 4 class - the classic nice guy who was voted class captain because everyone liked him. Here, Felicia was a troubled, acerbic, sarcastic personality, one that that I was not at ease at, and yet I still found him attractive. Yep, I liked men.
  • This film was weird. I realise looking back, that the film is a masterclass tonally, swaying between sexy, scary, funny and (to 10 year old me) quite creepy at times. Case in point: the bathtub flashback scene played between scary and dark humour. I don't think I had been exposed previously to dark humour and tonal changes. As I have discovered later in life, I am not very particular to dark humour - I'm too delicate a flower!
  • The costumes, of course, were amazingly fun. Even a young me appreciated that!
  • The scenery too was beautiful and iconic. A cock in a frock on a rock indeed.
For all of the above individual impressions, the overriding impression I got was that this was a strange strange world. Did this world really exist? If so, was I automatically going to be in? Was I going to automatically become one of the characters? Which one? Did I belong in this world? Would I like it?  For me, Priscilla asked more questions than it answered. How exhausting!



I wish I had a window to my thoughts and feelings back then, to see how I processed it and what I did with it. Perhaps, a young me, took in what I could. I know that, like many others would have, I would have proceeded to bury those thoughts and feelings, just like I would hid the VHS tape back in the recesses of my room.

Looking back, I missed out on all the nuances and depth to this film. My objective view of the film is pretty much like the consensus view - a great gay film, with maybe some outdated views on race. But a time capsule it remains. I'm grateful for the film because, for me, it remains a time capsule of the beginning of my gay awakening. And it introduced me to this sexy stud muffin!

Saturday, 12 January 2019

Hello world ... again

Forgive me internet for I have sinned. It has been months and years since my last blog post. I tried another blog, I tried other things, and now I’ve come back. How many hail marys do I need to do? Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die. That might mean letting this blog go, or rather, more optimistically, it means pivoting and trying something new. Here is my new approach to this blog to atone for my sins.

A person is made up of many things - many characteristics, many experiences, many thoughts and many behaviours. You can’t define them by a singular aspect. So it is with me. Having said this, there may be a few key defining aspects of what makes up who I am. The way my life has progressed, a significant aspect of my identity is my sexuality. It is not my only defining characteristic, and I’m not defined by my sexuality, but many important parts of my life have been related to my sexuality. It is the first significant internal characteristic of mine that was not immediately obvious, such as my gender, my ethnicity, or my family background. It is a part of me that has fed my introspectivity. It’s formed part of my views on social justice. It’s led me to standing up and announcing myself. It was the theme of my 21st party, and part of the theme of my first (of only 2) short films. It’s led me to some career choices, to friends, to lovers, and to a lifelong partner. So yes, it is not all of me, but, in the context of my life and the times that i grew up in (and continue to live), my sexuaility is definitely a major part of me. I’m grateful that, while there were some challenging moments, it has turned to be such a positive experience for me. I know not everyone has that same fortune.

Cinema is of course another important aspect of my life. It has been the main medium in which I’ve engage with culture. I’ve studied it. I understand its form, its techniques, its language. It’s a relatively accessible, not-too-time consuming art form that can burrow deep into the hearts and minds of auteurs and audiences alike. It’s a window into other cultures and foreign narratives. It can be force for introspection, a force for social change, and a force for the good ol’ ugly cry. I love nothing more than a good 2 or 3 hours of sitting in the dark reflecting on those images that reflect back onto me.

I’ve come to realise that getting into an in-depth series about the gay films that are personally important to me seemed a natural fit for this current attempt at restarting this blog. I’ve realised that I cannot do continuous blogging about a breadth of films and events. It takes too much out of me, something equivalent to ‘small talk’ for an introvert. So instead, for 2019, I’m going to invest my time into a year long deep dive project into the queer films (and one or two television shows) that have a profound impact on me.

So where to begin? As a queer fairy godmother once said: It’s always good to start at the beginning.



But, like sexuality itself can be, it is quite hard to identify exactly that first image, that first film, that first cultural artefact, that had an influence on me and made me question or clarify my sexuality. In the 90s, I recall television soaps, underwear ads, music videos, featuring men and women (but mostly men) who piqued my interest. Like the fog that was my childhood and most children’s understanding of sexuality, I imagine there was a blur of images and cultural texts that lay the groundwork for me to question my sexuality. I should mention 2 particular film-related things that stand out.

I was unwittingly introduced to the Wizard of Oz in primary school. We were sat down in the classroom to watch the movie one afternoon, and then told that we would be staging a production of the movie. A friend of mine ended up playing Dorothy, and I, with my impeccable acting skills, was going to play one of the monkeys chasing her. I can’t profess to this experience awakening any particular sexual curiosity in me. I do recall specifically remember that glorious technicolor reveal, and it made me suddenly realise that I had been watching a sepia toned film. What the film had presented as normal had been radically transformed. I think from that early age it began my awareness of storytelling, and particularly film storytelling. Perhaps it also opened the way for me to question the reality that I was being told. I know for sure that my involvement did set me up to know the quotes from the movie very well, and remains one of the movies I can quote incessantly, along with Clueless and all the Galadriel scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies.

The other significant text, not a film per se, was of course my sex education cartoon video my Year 5 teacher showed us one afternoon. My family were totally silent on the topic of sexuality, and I don’t recall exactly what I knew or didn’t know at the time. I do remember that the film itself was very educational in the ways of sex and reproduction. A particular comical scene showed a teenage boy at a swimming pool, about to jump off the diving board. Alas, as some girls walked past, he popped a prominent boner right at the .. ahem … tip of the board. The class erupted in laughter at an in-joke that I was blissfully unaware. The factual education I had received prior was soon dwarfed by the emotional discovery from that experience. I didn’t have that experience that they had - I hadn’t popped a boner, and I didn’t know what the joke was. I think at the time I didn’t know exactly why this was the case, and I don’t think i was significantly unnerved by it. On reflection, this could have been because I had not fully experienced puberty, but I have the sneaking suspicion that deep down I know I didn’t feel that way for girls as depicted in the video. Rather, somehow, somewhere deep down, it explained the curious looks I gave to a fellow classmate, Paul, at our school camp some months before. Whatever it was, I don’t think I particularly panicked, but that feeling that I was different (for this reason) remained. In many ways, I am so grateful to this video, for educating me and giving me this experience. Thanks to the internet, I’ve since discovered this was a pretty widely known and shown cartoon called ‘What is happening to me’. Coincidentally, it was made in 1986, the same year I was born! What a coincidence.

And one more thing ... as I thnk about what I plan to write over the next year, there are a few glaring omissions. Blindspots in my 'gay' education. Films I watched later in life that were amazing but did not profoundly affect me because of timing and circumstance. Films that objectively were amazing that I just did not connect with. There have been so much great writing about all these films. What I intend to do is contribute to it through my personal experience. It's the best I can offer.

And so with that, I’ll proceed with the movie that I think had the first profound effect on little ol' gay me … The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert… stay tuned!