Underneath the Skin

38 ALREV7BV Underneath the Skin (1969), Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), Silence of the Lambs cleaned up at the Academy Cruising (1980), Windows (1980), The Fan (1981), Mad Max 2 (1981) and Awards, amid passionate protests. Brett Deathtrap (1982) all feature a variety of Farmer thinks the protesters had a big point. gay and lesbian killers whose sexual abnormality, it is implied, results in wild and monstrous behaviour. In the 1933 musical Going Hollywood, homosexuality as inherently Bing Crosby crooned, "Out where dangerous and socially subversive Robin Wood argues that horror films they say, let us be gay, I'm going Hol continued to influence Hollywood's turn on a formulaic structure of "nor lywood"; he could not have been fur view of gays and lesbians. Joseph mality, the Monster, and, crucially, the ther from the truth. Jonathan MankiewiGz' 1959 screen adaptation relationship between the two". The Demme's Silence of the Lambs cleaned of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Monster in the Hollywood horror film up at the 64th Annual Academy Summer was one of the first Hol functions as both social and textual Awards in April, in the teeth of con lywood films to make any direct refer- Other, simultaneously threatening as certed demonstrations against it by ence to homosexuality. Centred well as reassuring 'normality'. By gay and lesbian activists. But the film around the 'dark secret' of dead poet defining the homosexual as the is only the latest instalment in Sebastian Venable, Williams' rather monstrous other, as a threat that must Hollywood's long and tawdry record bizarre play about Southern madness be contained, these films help not only of representing homosexuality in film and perversion was extensively to reinscribe heterosexuality as ideal Under the iron-clad rule of the 'cleaned up' and transformed into a but also serve to legitimate the often Production Code Association, the self- creepy Freudian horror story or violent ethos of homophobia. regulatory body established in the late morality tale. In the film, Sebastian's 1920s to monitor Hollywood's 'moral 'secret' dooms him to a horrible fate of In this way, the homosexual monster content', the representation of outraged moral retribution (eaten helps to define and assert socially homosexuality "or any inference to it" alive by a mob of Hispanic street kids, prescribed categories of gender and in Hollywood films was strictly for no less!) and leads directly to insanity sexuality, while at the same time play bidden. As a result, mainstream for both his cousin, Elizabeth Taylor, ing out, and thus allaying, fears and cinema refused even to acknowledge and mother, Katharine Hepbum. insecurities about the stability and the existence of homosexuality for legitimacy of heterosexual social decades, creating a celluloid world of Homosexuality in Suddenly Last Sum dominance. Mainstream cinematic insistently heterosexual characters mer is an insidiously evil force and the representations of homosexuality and with equally heterosexual ideals. male homosexual is a monstrous the homosexual often tell far more alien, almost contagious in his about the fantasies and insecurities of There is an anecdote about studio dangerous depravity. In an unprece heterosexuality, and the cultural magnate Samuel Goldwin who, when dented move, Hollywood's Catholic mechanisms through which its con informed that his proposed plans to watchdog, the Legion of Decency, tinued hegemony is ensured, than make a film of Raddyffe Hall's con awarded Suddenly Last Summer a spe they ever reveal about homosexuality. troversial novel The Well of Loneliness cial classification prior to release argu would never pass the censors because ing that, "Since the film illustrates the For the handful of readers who may the main character was a lesbian, horrors of such a lifestyle, it can be not have yet seen the film, Silence of the responded "So? We'll make her an considered moral in theme even Lambs is a psychological thriller/hor American!" Homosexuality was though it deals with sexual perver ror film that charts the unusual traditionally seen in Hollywood as an sion". relationship between FBI trainee unmentionable evil, as socially and Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and the morally subversive and thoroughly Vito Russo's landmark study of brilliant psychiatrist turned 'un-American'. Indeed, the moral homosexuality in mainstream film, psychopath, Dr Hannibal "The Can ianic that gripped Hollywood in the The Celluloid Closet, demonstrates how nibal" Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). Eate 1940s and which culminated in Hollywood has long employed the Starling is sent to visit Lecter in his the circus known as the House Un- homosexual as a privileged source of ultra-maximum security prison by the American Activities Committee hear cinematic horror. Sebastian in Sudden head of the FBI Behavioural Science ings identified homosexuality as one ly Last Summer is a prime example of Unit, Jack Crawford (Scott Glen), in of the two greatest threats to national this, but he is far from alone. Indeed, the hope that Lecter might help the and social stability, the other being, of mainstream cinema is peppered with authorities capture "Buffalo course, communism. scores of homosexual monsters and Bill"/Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), a villains, all of whom are portrayed as serial killer who has committed a Even after the relaxatibn and final dis posing a profound threat to number of grisly murders of young bandment of the Production Code in heterosexual order and security. Films women. Lecter agrees to help Starling the late 1950s, this notion of as diverse as Rope (1948), The Detective and provide her with a psychological ALR: M AY 1992 i ALR EVIEW 39 profile of "Bill" based on the police and mannerisms that can be inter brutality. Deep within the cavernous evidence in exchange for intimate preted as gay" indeed! It is difficult, basement world of Bill's hideaway, revelations about her personal life. even impossible, not to read the "Buf the true nature of his abject Following a series of narrative turns, falo Bill character as a gay man. monstrousness is revealed to us in all in one of which Lecter escapes im its repulsive glory. We watch Bill care prisonment, Starling utilises the skills And how does the film evaluate Bill's fully apply his make-up and don his and techniques taught her by Lecter to homosexuality? Precisely as a source jewellery. Then, with the camera in track down and finally kill the mur of infinite monstrousness and terror, a extreme close-up on his painted lips, derer. pernicious force of unnatural evil that he taunts, "would you fuck me?", irrupts through the film, unsettling dances around the room, wrapped in While most discussions of Silence systems of gender and sexuality. nothing but a shawl, one of his have focused on the relationship be victims' scalps placed on his head as a tween Starling and Lecter, it is the fig From its opening scene where Star ling, bathed in sweat, is battling gruesome wig. Obviously rearrang ure of "Buffalo Bill" or Jame Gumb, ing his genitals, he steps back with his described by one critic as "the most furiously along an arduous obstacle course, Silence of the Lambs places arms outstretched and his penis terrifying monster to appear on the clamped back behind his closed screen since Linda Blair raised hell in central focus on the body, and specifi cally the gendered body. Our intro thighs to approximate the appearance The Exorcist", which is the film's most of female genitals. The true nature of startling aspect. Indeed, the com duction to Bill is through a series of Polaroid shots on Crawford's wall of Bill's monstrousness is crystallised in parison between Bill and the pos his desire to be fucked, to identify with sessed Regan in The Exorcist may be Bill's victims: female bodies rent, mutilated and skinned. The film the despised position of feminine pas far from simply perfunctory, for both sivity. embody, quite literally, a grotesque reveals that behind this sickening trail performance of sexual transgression. of murder and dismemberment is a Indeed, this scene of mock castration Just as the pubescent body of Linda delirious attempt to rewrite the body. in Silence is presented as its crowning Blair distorts, putrefies and sup- Bill wants to become a woman, and moment of visual horror, the supreme mrates with the emergence of a because surgical gender reassignment shock in a film that assaults its viewers female sexuality in the metaphor of has been denied him he sets about visually and emotionally from begin the Devil itself, so too Bill enacts a slaughtering women, flaying their ning to end. And, judging by the dis disgusting corporeal transformation corpses and making himself a suit of believing gasps of the audience at the impelled by the murderous drive of a female skin. two screenings I attended at least, it is effective in its aim. Silence o f the Lambs chancrous homosexuality. An American cultural theorist, Leo features a wide range of psycho- Bersani, argues that behind even the In an interview, the film's director, sexual perversions—sadism, can most trivial scenario of homophobia Jonathan Demme, asserts that he nibalism, necrophilia, against gay men is "the infinitely strove to ensure that "Buffalo Bill" not exhibitionism—yet it is homosexual more seductive and intolerable image be "misinterpreted" as homosexual. anality that is portrayed as the most of a grown man, legs high in the air, "Bill is not gay," he argues. "Rather, intolerable, the most threatening and unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of this is someone who is so completely, the most horrific. completely horrified by who he is that being a woman". "Suicidal" because his desperation to become someone where masculinity is constitutively Yet, like all horror films, Silence res completely other is manifested in his defined in terms of activity, male anal tores the balance of social normality ill-guided attempts at transvestism, passivity can only ever signify the by destroying the dreaded monster at and behaviour and mannerisms that negation of masculinity.

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