QUEERABLE SPACES: HOMOSEXUALITIES AND HOMOPHOBIAS IN CONTEMPORARY FILM A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Studies in the University of Canterbury by Vulcan Volkan Demirkan-Martin University of Canterbury 2009 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments............................................................................................................ 2 Abstract ............................................................................................................................ 3 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter I. GEOGRAPHIES OF CRUISING................................................................ 19 Part II. Eyes Wide Shut (EWS).............................................................................23 Part III. Boogie Nights (BN) ................................................................................. 42 Part IV. Conclusion ................................................................................................48 Chapter II. GEOGRAPHIES OF EFFEMINACY........................................................ 50 Part II. The Talented Mr. Ripley (TMR).............................................................57 Part III. The Mexican............................................................................................ 82 Part IV. Conclusion ................................................................................................ 88 Chapter III. GEOGRAPHIES OF EXCLUSION ........................................................ 90 Part II. The Cellar: Politics of Mystic River (MR) .............................................99 Part III. Mysterious Skin (MS) .......................................................................... 120 Part IV . Conclusion .............................................................................................. 125 Chapter IV. GEOGRAPHIES OF ABUSE AND RAPE ........................................... 128 Part II. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (ISWID).......................................................134 Part III. Irreversible: Whose Rectum Is This? ................................................ 153 Part IV. Conclusion .............................................................................................. 160 Chapter V. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN……………………………………..…... 163 Conclusion................................................................................................. ………….. 189 References .................................................................................................................... 193 List of Plates Plate I: EWS 36 Plate II: EWS-2 38 Plate III: BN 44 Plate IV: TMR 58 Plate V: TMR-2 70 Plate VI: TMR-3 72 Plate VIa: TMR-4 72 Plate VII: TMR-5 72 Plate VIII: Mexican 84 Plate IX: MR 104 Plate X: ISWID 138 Plate XI: ISWID-2 145 Plate XII: BM 166 Plate XIII: BM-2 179 2 Acknowledgments There is no way of finding the adequate words, either in English or in Turkish, to express my gratitude to my supervisors Misha Kavka and Julie Wuthnow who constantly supported me through the writing of this dissertation. The supervision and support I have got from them was outstanding. 3 Abstract This dissertation seeks to read contemporary films as symptoms of the societies they are made in, mainly contemporary Western societies, which I argue to be subtly but intensely homophobic. Films imagine/represent their own subject matter in terms of symbolic, encoded scenes. The decoding for the films I chose occurs through a use of very specific, heavily coded spaces as visualisable shorthand for a complex of homophobic reactions. Filmic texts do not have to have denotative non-heterosexual elements to be termed ‘queer’. These texts become queer often in their reception by non-heterosexual audiences. In ‘queering’ these spaces and films, I extensively make use of tools of social geography, film studies and cultural studies The films I chose are not random choices, but they include certain themes that I believe to reflect the subtle homophobia in our societies. In the first chapter, Geographies of Cruising, I analyze the representation of streets and the leading character’s cruising on the streets in Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999). The second chapter, Geographies of Effeminacy, concentrates on the denial of space to non-masculine men exemplified in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). In the third chapter, Geographies of Exclusion, the representation of a cellar in Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003) serves to display the links between paedophilia and homosexuality. The fourth and final chapter, Geographies of Abuse and Rape, is an exercise on “out of placeness” and examines the connections made between male/male rape and homosexuality in I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (Mike Hodges, 2003). The last chapter is an extended reading of Brokeback Mountain ( Ang Lee, 2005), in which the tension between closed spaces and wild spaces leads to a discussion of contemporary representation of homosexuality and a summary of the chapters. 4 INTRODUCTION As soon as it was understood that same sex passion between men was not only the immoral desire of the sodomite but a significant part of some men’s personalities, 1 it became either closeted, relegated to a silent space that guarantees no place in history, or it was mapped onto the court room, prison, and execution chart as documented in the works of Randolph Trumbach (1998), Gerdt Hekma (1989) and Rictor Norton (1997) among others. In the Western world, the homosexual man has been blackmailed and/or imprisoned (the most famous early example being that of Oscar Wilde) for at least a century. When homosexuality first became visible in film, it was nearly as quickly abjected and closeted, with the result that not only the actual homosexual man but also his representation have been punished. In Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2003), Richard Barrios decodes film characters’ gayness from as early as 1910, at the beginning of film-making. Barrios argues that these codes were understood by certain people and were unreadable by others. But the sympathy for such characters faded away and in 1934, with the introduction of new censorship regulations in the U.S.A., known as the Motion Picture Production Code, “[s]o many things vanished from film . : women’s navels, occupied double beds, getting away with murder without being punished, any sense of a bedroom as something other than a sleep chamber, drug use, the attractiveness of lawlessness, and, essentially, being an out gay man or lesbian” (10). This regime resulted only in making these veiled codes subtler, a dynamic that was further strengthened in the 1950s when censorship codes were tightened. Today, gay people are by and large neither imprisoned nor tortured; legal discrimination against gay people has lessened and the understanding of homosexuality as a disease has lost some ground (albeit mostly in ‘Western’ societies and bearing in mind some possible exceptions). 2 In mainstream film there is no formal censorship of gay representations comparable to that of the 1950s. While homophobia is not legally prohibited in our culture, it is challenged more and more often: a homophobic law is revisited, a homophobe is 1 According to Foucault, homosexuality was ‘invented’ by the medical sciences in 1870 (1978, 43). Although the exact date is an over-simplification, and challenged by Randolph Trumbach (1998), it is widely accepted that the date should be sometime between the late 18th and mid 19 th century. 2 For example, the right to adopt by gay parents is a considerably novel discussion: “Moreover, legislatures and courts that understand homosexuality as an illness are much more likely, for example, to prohibit homosexuals from being adoptive or foster parents, for fear the children will ‘catch’ it” (Goldstein 1997, 403). 5 exposed, and a homophobic film is protested. It is important to note that gay men’s lives have changed drastically since the 1970s, by which point homosexuality had become decriminalized in most Western societies, while gay marriage and adoption by gay couples have become the recent common issues. In parallel, the representation of gay men in film has changed drastically; in contrast to the limited representations in a number of films from earlier eras, we have now come to see gay men in film as common characters. B. Ruby Rich coined the term “new queer cinema” in the early 90s for a movement that provided a new, self-made visibility for gay men and women. 3 Some gay-themed films, like Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993) and Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), have even been very successful at generating box office revenue. I suggest that although there have been significant changes in gay men’s lives and in heterosexual culture since the Stonewall riots, homophobic discourses about gay people continue, even though one of the major sources of homophobia, AIDS, is no longer identified as a gay disease. 4 As Fuss affirms, in the binary system, it is impossible to think about things without their opposites (1991). We have not yet created a system without dichotomies, though we have acknowledged the other side of the opposition. In such a system, homophobic films continue to be made. However, it should be noted that nowadays there is rarely a consensus on whether a film offers a homophobic representation of gay men or not (although groups like