Middlebrow Cinema

11 HYPOTHESES ON THE QUEER MIDDLEBROW Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover Although the middlebrow has often been theorized in relation to class and taste, it has not yet been analysed as a force in contemporary ‘world cinema’.1 As the case studies in this volume show, we are more used to conceptualizing the middlebrow in nationally specific terms, and if middlebrow most often refers to modes and practices of reception, rather than describing a genre, textual aesthetic or mode of production, then it becomes difficult to track across national borders. This domi- nant model of middlebrow as reception practice raises issues such as audience and address, genre and authorship and legibility and universality which remain of acute concern in the case of international films. Does the nature of the middlebrow change, however, when global circulation starts to strip away specific national parameters and cultural specificity? The encrusted layers of culturally specific knowledge that often freight the middlebrow are unavailable to films that travel to global audiences, so markers of quality must attach to the circulatory mechanisms of world cinema itself, rather than rely wholly on nationally located content or context. Moreover, shifts in commercial film distribution and exhibition such as specialized video on demand (VOD) and online streaming services – while rarely legally accessible beyond national borders – demand that we reconceptualize ideas about world cinema audiences and the processes of taste-making. The expansion of file-sharing, ISP-blocking, pirating software and even region-free hardware ampli- fies this need. Although contemporary scholarship on the middlebrow points to reception’s role in defining a register that has no automatic generic qualities, no semantic or syntactic structures of its own, there are nonetheless forms of textuality that more frequently attach to it. Middlebrow taste has been linked to heritage films, to historical costume dramas, to serious issue films, to adaptations, biopics and humanist dramas. The category ‘world cinema’ conventionally also includes such perennial genres, and it often exploits modes of the middlebrow. The popularity of films Hypotheses on the queer middlebrow 197 about children, for example, draws on their narrative promise to evade difficult socio-political contexts and to offer an insight into foreign cultures that can be universally legible. In fact, child-centric Badkonake sefid / The White Balloon (Panahi 1995) is an example of a kind of film that – outside Iran – is viewed as a middlebrow ‘foreign’ film. As we have argued elsewhere, the politics of universality and cultural specificity are always complexly intertwined at the arthouse (Galt and Schoonover 2010). In categories such as the popular art film, a world middlebrow has emerged – arguably visible since the 1950s but gathering force in the new cen- tury. There is a significant category in world cinema between art cinematic auteur films by directors such as Tsai Ming-liang and genre films like Thailand’s popular Satree Lex / Iron Ladies series (Thongkongtoon 2000 and 2003) that we might use- fully conceptualize in terms of the middlebrow. World middlebrow films are not formally experimental or subversive in the ways usually attributed to art genres or even to the kind of prize-winners heralded at Venice, Toronto, Berlin or Cannes. They are not like the ‘difficult’ world arthouse cinema that boldly warps conventions and expectations, remaining unafraid of being labelled inscrutable and always posed to an elite international audience (such as slow cinema). Nor are middlebrow films the domestic genre pictures distributed via arthouse exhibition circuits and understood as ‘art cinema’ simply because they are foreign (Galt and Schoonover 2010, 7).2 In dismissing the work of Christopher Isherwood, British literary critic Cyril Connelly argues that middlebrow culture suffers from a ‘fatal readability’ (quoted in Harker 2013, xi). Following from the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of ‘middlebrow’, we could say that the mar- keting of the world middlebrow film appeals to its ‘limited intellectual or cultural value; demanding or involving only a moderate degree of intellectual application, typically as a result of not deviating from convention’.3 Continuing to borrow from the OED, we could say that these films gear themselves to an aspirant but unadven- turous audience who always carry ‘the implication of pretensions’. The category of solidly world middlebrow defines itself in relation to its highbrow arty competi- tion. The trailer for Dabba / The Lunchbox (Batra 2013), for example, implies that the enigmas and social transgressions of big city life are always redeemed by clever- ness, coincidence and humanist goodwill. The preview insulates foreignness and ambiguity from any of the dissonances of Satyajit Ray’s modernity or Jia Zhangke’s ambivalences towards historical change. A significant example for our purposes is The Chicago Reader’s 1988 review of Patricia Rozema’s film I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987): the story . caters to middlebrow cultural insecurities even more doggedly than Woody Allen usually does. While it’s refreshing to find lesbian sensibilities represented honestly in a mainstream context, and the film is not without its other virtues (the performances are adept, and the conclusion is intriguingly open-ended), the cutesy style tries to promote the heroine’s dim-witted innocence in such an anti-intellectual fashion that the movie’s self-righteousness may set your teeth on edge. The very title of the film, 198 Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover which misquotes a line from Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ is symptomatic of the pretensions in store. (Rosenbaum 1998) This review’s combination of ‘dogged’ accommodation of middlebrow fears and pretensions, of cutesy intellectual naiveté and self-righteousness, reflects its sense of the aspirant but also the inadequate features that define the middlebrow text. It also suggests that one of middlebrow’s only merits is as textual mediator between the ‘mainstream context’ and honest ‘lesbian sensibilities’. The lesbian middlebrow, for Jonathan Rosenbaum, does a particular kind of cultural labour, albeit at a cost to ‘true’ artistic endeavours, such as Eliot’s poetry. In locating a world cinematic middlebrow, queer cinema provides not only an interesting subset but, in fact, a necessary case study. LGBT film festivals have provided a central locus for the creation of audiences for international films that were neither difficult modernist art cinema nor the kinds of global popular film that had previously been seen in the West (e.g. Hong Kong action films, J-horror, Bollywood crossovers). An emerging queer middlebrow audience comes into view in the festival popularity of serious films about LGBT experiences, drawing on discourses of quality, social engagement and identitarian membership that con- struct new canons of cinematic value across national lines. At the same time, a queer middlebrow audience also emerges online. Since queer films were less frequently programmed in many commercial cinemas, and not always easily available in video stores, LGBT films pioneered VOD technologies. If porn provided an early impetus for the platform and delivery of infrastructure, middlebrow films formed the backbone for the development of services like Wolfe On Demand, Pecadillo Player and the now-defunct lesbian site Busk for LGBT audiences in the US and UK. And, in turn, the latter platforms served as early alternative models of online distribution, propagating porn’s boutique model of merchandising while online superstores like iTunes VOD, Netflix streaming and Amazon Prime Instant Video offered very few LGBT features. Queer cinema is thus crucial to writing the history of the middlebrow as a determinant in contemporary world cinema. In this chapter, we thus advance a series of hypotheses on the queer middlebrow; somewhat polemic propositions that attempt to prise open the intersections of queerness with contemporary world cinema. A certain type of queer feature film is, we propose, an ideal site to observe and critique the contemporary phenomenon of the world middlebrow. Queerness makes films middlebrow Although earlier models of art cinema include gay auteurs such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and even Derek Jarman as central figures, in contemporary world cinema queerness can operate as a middlebrowing factor, indicating a certain identitarian or social problem status that disbars films from truly highbrow taste. Examples include Ma vie en rose / Life in Pink* (Berliner 1997), Ang pagdadalaga ni Maximo Hypotheses on the queer middlebrow 199 Oliveros / The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (Solito 2005), Tomboy (Sciamma 2011) or The Kids are Alright (Cholodenko 2010), all of which address bourgeois audiences concerned about the status of the family. Arguably, Lisa Cholodenko’s film gained greater popular traction as a result of its wealthy lesbian mid-life crisis narrative featuring two straight Hollywood stars (Julianne Moore and Annette Bening), but a comparable straight film (say, with Kristin Scott Thomas) may have retained a greater art cinematic cachet. Although all of these films screened predominantly in arthouse cinemas, they exemplify what film historians have outlined as the dual role of the arthouse, to nurture both middlebrow audiences as well as the more obvi- ously highbrow ones (Wilinsky 2001, 94; Betz 2003, 202–11). Art cinema directors who wish to retain high cultural status must avoid being seen as queer to distance themselves from a middlebrow category that would limit their access to global art cinema’s critical circuits. Thus, although several of the most prominent auteurs in recent world cinema represent queer sexuality in their films, they are not usually considered in the context of LGBT cinema. We’re thinking here of Lucrecia Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai: two of these filmmakers are out as gay, but none is predominantly famous as a gay or lesbian filmmaker on the world stage. A complex case for this hypothesis is Pedro Almodvar, who for much of his career was received as a queer art cinematic auteur.

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