Homoerotic cinema club
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James Franco and Travis Mathews did something inspired by it too,
Interior. Leather Bar. is a 2013 American docufiction film, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.[3] Directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews, the film stars Franco and Mathews as themselves working on a film project which reimagines and attempts to recreate the 40 minutes of deleted and lost sexually explicit footage from the controversial 1980 film Cruising...
Despite early media reports when the project was first announced, the film is not itself a recreation of the deleted footage, featuring only brief scenes that actually do so literally.[4] Instead, it uses the idea of recreating the footage as a plot point to explore the creative and ethical questions arising from the process of trying to make such a film. It depicts issues such as the actors' level of comfort or discomfort with the material, the conflict between creative freedom and censorship, and the ways in which the cinematic representation of LGBT issues and people has evolved since Cruising was originally released in 1980.[3] One of the main narrative threads of the film is the confusion of several participants over why James Franco would want to be involved in such a project in the first place.[1]
Mathews has stated in interviews that one aspect of the original film's production that interested him was the contrast between analyses which suggest that the deleted footage constituted homophobic propaganda, and those which suggest that it was more documentary in nature.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
there's an element of sexual tension in his obsession with Paul Allen, even if it only goes in one direction
and the murder itself has a kind of erotic charge - the flip side of the violence in his sexual encounters with women
other than that yeah it's narcissism which the film can't help making seem homoerotic, all the tasteful cinematography of his sculpted form
things are murkier in the book
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
definitely. Jude Law as the object of Matt Damon's gaze and desire, lying shirtless and golden in the Italian sun, etc. women as literal beards.
tho yet another film that unfortunately connects being closeted to dishonesty and general immorality
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
yeah I was gonna say in the book his homophobia - in his internal dialogue anyway - is violent, constant, obsessive
so over the top that it makes you think of the classic homophobia compensating for one's own repressed homosexual desires
but he doesn't seem attracted to men. he doesn't really seem "attracted" to women either. everything is just power, dominance. he sees gay men as weak.
I assume it's mostly cut from the film due to repetitiveness, and the filmmakers preferring not to have the main characters saying faggot constantly
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
not just the Luis encounter
there's also his reference to "that whole Yale thing"
there's also his reference to "that whole Yale thing"
There's a really awful bit in Pynchon's first novel where he says one of the characters knows "lesbianism is just an extension of narcissism". Perhaps it wasn't his own opinion, but there's a lot more misogyny in that book than his others and he retconned the chapter decades later with a line about "the eternally-adolescent male mind".
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
I assume part of the reason the racism/homophobia were taken out were due to repetitiveness and virtually all of it being internal dialogue
but it also makes him a much more appealing character in the movie, much closer to a kind of anti-hero - easier movie to make
kinda fucked up that those things would probably make him more unappealing to audiences than gruesome murders and sexual violence
something something aestheticization of violence
tho, it also has a way of heightening the satire - greater juxtaposition between his empty Tom Cruise smile exterior and the demon within
whereas racism and homophobia are petty, ugly, mundane bigotries that can't be aestheticized the way violence itself can
IdleRich
IdleRich
Less interesting for this thread.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
seems like a very of the times (late 50s-early 60s I'm assuming) ignorant conception of homosexuality
if he saw the error of his ways, it is what it is. he was ahead of the times on other things.
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
sure
something interesting is the way the idea of queer coding has passed into mainstream thought
like that no one batted an eye at all the ridiculous homoeroticism of 80s action, those movies were just taken at face value, seems utterly absurd now
padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
sampling of Jarman's Sebastiane, his biopic of the world's first gay icon and probably one of the most homoerotic films ever made
it's definitely not pornography, but I think you can see the influence of 70s porno chic, albeit very arthouse (the dialogue is in fucking Latin)
it's definitely not pornography, but I think you can see the influence of 70s porno chic, albeit very arthouse (the dialogue is in fucking Latin)