Classic Media Reviews

qsmpc 1 (1) pp. 123–128 Intellect Limited 2016

Bewitched, created by Sol Saks (1964–72) Culver City, CA: Screen Gems Television

Reviewed by Bruce Drushel, Miami University

Ordinarily, the reviews section of an academic journal provides an opportu- nity for colleagues to share informed perspectives on recently released books and other current works relevant to the interests of its readers, and Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture will be no different. But just as this journal sets itself apart in terms of the focus of the scholarship it publishes, its editors hope readers similarly will find a certain distinctiveness in the range of its reviews. The classic media reviews in this and future issues, therefore, are intended to consider anew what their authors regard as being particularly influential offerings in queer culture. For the scholar who focuses on queerness in media, the task of selecting a single text as a favourite is something close to choosing a favourite child. At the very least, the text should be one that is formative in shaping the lens through which that scholar will view future encounters with queerness. Although openly lesbian and gay characters were all but missing from the television portion of the cultural landscape in the United States until the 1970s, queerness abounded, from the tailored efficiency of Miss Hathaway (played by Nancy Kulp) of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71, CBS) to the over- the-top hysterics of Dr Smith (played by Jonathan Harris) of Lost in Space (1965–68, CBS). But ground zero for televised queerness of the immediate pre- and post-Stonewall era was Bewitched (1964–72), which for eight seasons on ABC television weekly sent our gaydars into the red zone. According to Alexander Doty (1995: 71–84), texts like Bewitched become queer in three ways: (1) through the influences of queer people in the proc- ess of their production; (2) through reading them from a queer reception position; and (3) through the period-specific uses self-identified queer people

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make of them – what I like to refer to as their status as icons of queer culture. Bewitched’s scorecard on each of the three was amazing for its time and remains impressive even by more contemporary standards. Among its production influences was a leading and supporting cast of not-quite-out-of-the-closet actors embodying characters at the very heart of most episodes’ plots. There was Agnes Moorehead’s Endora, the matriarch of a family of witches and warlocks, ever scheming to undermine the series’s signature happy heterosexual couple, daughter Samantha (played by Elizabeth Montgomery) and mortal son-in-law Darren (played by Dick York and Dick Sargent). Moorehead is thought to have been lesbian (although she never identified publicly as such) and brought to her performance a career filled with roles of powerful female characters out to disrupt heteronormative pairings. There was Maurice Evans as Samantha’s father, whose relationship with wife Endora was never specified, though it might best be characterized as distant and based upon either mutual respect or mutual fear. Evans never married and was widely thought to be gay. There was Paul Lynde as Uncle Arthur, the wisecracking and always-trendy warlock, who was given to theatrical extremes such as appearing as Canio from the opera Pagliacci in one episode to sing lines from ‘Laugh, Clown, Laugh!’ Lynde also was a closeted gay man, but he eventually acknowledged that his sexuality was an open secret in Hollywood and beyond. And there was also Dick Sargent, the ‘new Darren’, who replaced actor Dick York in the role for the final three seasons. Sargent eventually acknowledged being gay following his outing by a supermarket tabloid in 1991. Although they identified as a heterosexual couple, Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery and series director William Asher must be considered key elements of the queer production influences in the show. The couple were particularly close to Lynde; they promoted pilot series with him as the star and reportedly negotiated ABC-TV’s pick up of The Paul Lynde Show (1972–73) as a replacement for Bewitched when it left the air in 1972. They also were friends with Dick Sargent and his partner; in a gesture of support of Sargent’s coming out, Montgomery agreed to serve as co-grand marshal with Sargent of a gay pride parade in Los Angeles. Montgomery herself is credited with succinctly describing a queer reading of the series as the ultimate coming-out story: a woman must renounce her special powers and conceal an essential part of her identity that gives her pleasure and imbues her with a unique cultural herit- age – but that will engender irrational public hatred against her if it is discovered. Beyond that, queerly positioned audiences may readily read Bewitched as a queer-positive story because, week after week, crises are averted and domes- tic tranquillity is restored, not through the subjugation of Samantha’s witchly identity and powers but specifically because she relents and employs them. The iconic value of Bewitched to the generations of LGBTQ people who grew up during the period of its original run or who have discovered the show in reruns or through its DVDs is more difficult to specify. Individual members of the cast, particularly Lynde and Moorehead, have their own queer followings. Articles occasionally surface that celebrate its queerness, including Taylor Cole Miller’s (2015) recent entry in the Huffington Post’s queer weblog, titled ‘Remembering Elizabeth Montgomery: Nine queerest moments of Bewitched’. The mere recognition of the concentration of queer talent that contributed to the show’s production (to say nothing of those who remained closeted and undiscovered) would be enough. And certainly Montgomery’s Bewitched-as-coming-out-metaphor would have powerful resonances for LGBTQ audiences.

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To those attributes I offer two further considerations. First, Bewitched shares the plot underpinnings of superhero stories, whose tales of virtuous common folk repressed by the need to conceal their secret identities have instinctive value for queer adolescents just coming to terms with their own distinctiveness. While evidence of the popularity of these stories in broader culture has been subject to the ebbs and flows of most popular media genres, the dura- bility of their hold on public consciousness is undeniable. Second, the timing of the production of Bewitched situated it as something of a bridge between the rising tensions in the gay communities that led to the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria and the uprising at Stonewall, and the realization of the potential for lesbian/gay power that followed those momentous events. Situation comedies of the period, Bewitched among them, were both utopian and escapist. In this case, the hopeful world they gestured toward appeared to be within reach.

References Doty, Alexander (1995), ‘There’s something queer here’, in Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (eds), Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 71–90. Miller, Taylor C. (2015), ‘Remembering Elizabeth Montgomery: Nine queerest moments of Bewitched’, HuffPost Gay Voices, 18 May, http://www.huffing- tonpost.com/taylor-cole-miller/remembering-elizabeth-mon_b_7289652. html. Accessed 29 July 2015.

Contributor details Bruce Drushel is an associate professor and director of the film studies programme in the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Miami University as well as the founding co-editor of Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture. His research and teaching interests include media representations of LGBTQ persons, media policy and media economics. He currently is Vice-President for Programming and Area Chairs of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association and chairs its Gay, Lesbian and Queer Studies area. Contact: Department of Media, Journalism and Film, 140 Williams Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, directed by John Cameron Mitchell (2001) Los Angeles: New Line Cinema

Reviewed by Shelley Park, University of Central Florida

Identifying just one instance of queer media to foreground as a ‘classic’ for this inaugural issue of Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture was difficult. It seems, however, that any archive of queer popular culture must certainly

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include the cult classic Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Directed by and starring the fabulous John Cameron Mitchell as its title character, Hedwig was a crowd favourite from the moment of its release in 2001, winning Audience Awards at Sundance and at the San Francisco International Film Festival as well as numerous acting and directing awards in the United States, Canada and Europe. Notably, it won the Best First Feature Film Award from the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the Teddy Award for the Best Gay/Lesbian Feature Film in Berlin, where the film’s story begins, prior to the end of the Cold War. The story about a genderqueer East German singer with a Farrah Fawcett flip wig and ‘a one-inch mound of flesh where [his] penis used to be, where [her] vagina never was’ clearly foregrounds questions about gender and sexual identity. Hedwig begins his life as the East German Hansel, ‘a slip of a girly- boy’ with an obsession for US glam punk. His mother gives him her first name (Hedwig) and passport and arranges for him to have a sex-change operation so that he might marry an American soldier, Luther Robinson (played by Maurice Dean Wint), and escape to the capitalist West. The botched back- alley surgery leaves Hedwig neither male nor female – and thus also neither gay nor straight. Evoking Judith Butler’s (1990) theory of gender as a product of reiterated actions, Hedwig’s femininity is entirely performative. Her ode to her wigs (‘Wig in a Box’) includes praise for their ability to transform her into various incarnations of femininity, from the ‘midnight checkout queen’ to ‘Miss Beehive 1963’ to the more iconic Farrah Fawcett and Dorothy Hamill. Hedwig’s second husband and bandmate, Yitzhak, also embodies an ambigu- ous gender identity. Revealed in the film’s outtakes to be a Jewish Croatian drag queen, Yitzhak is played by a woman (Miriam Shor) who plays a man who longs to present as a woman. Shor performs this queerly gendered performance of genderqueerness flawlessly. Importantly, Hedwig departs from (homo)normative scripts of gay pride and gay liberation as well as from standard narratives about transsexuality and transgenderism. Notably, Hansel does not become Hedwig because he is in love with Luther nor because he feels himself a woman trapped in a male body. Hansel is largely coerced into the operation by Luther and by his own mother who advises that ‘to be free, one must give up a little part of oneself’. Here and elsewhere, Hedwig’s backstory emphasizes the compromises that one must make in order to pursue so-called western freedoms. In addition to losing a penis, Hedwig loses her home, family and sense of self and receives little in return. Hedwig does not turn away from real pain and tragedy. The transition from Hansel to Hedwig is marked by a scream worthy of a horror film. In this scene and many others (e.g. when Hedwig’s musical mentee and lover, Tommy Gnosis (played by Michael Pitt), recoils in horror at discovering her angry inch and when Hedwig rips up Yitzhak’s passport in order to force him to stay with her), Hedwig reminds us that even fluid sexual identities may be accompanied by pain and suffering. Another reason Hedwig deserves to be re-viewed as a classic film is its savviness about the neo-liberal politics of globalism. Hedwig attends unflinch- ingly to the intersections of gender and sexuality with capitalism and nation- alism. On the same day Luther leaves Hedwig for another male, the Berlin Wall falls, bringing an end to the divisions between the communist East and the capitalist West. As the distinction between oppression and freedom blurs, (literally) poor Hedwig and her band of misfits seem doomed to perform in an endless series of tacky chain restaurants to largely unappreciative and

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abusive American audiences. This cynical perspective on the immigrant expe- rience may explain, at least in part, why Hedwig (the character) develops a kinship with the Korean army wives who are, for a short while, her backup singers. It may also explain why Hedwig (Mitchell, 2003), the play upon which the film is based, has developed an international following. Although the bulk of the story is set in the United States and the Broadway musical is a distinctly American genre, Hedwig has been adapted for audiences in Brazil, Japan, Korea, Peru, Puerto Rico and Thailand as well as a wide variety of European audiences. Notably, Hedwig is genre-bending as well as gender-bending. Although perhaps best known today as a Tony Award-winning 2014 Broadway revival starring Neil Patrick Harris, Hedwig originated on the small stage of local drag clubs in the early 1990s and, after a brief off-Broadway run, was adapted for film. A critically acclaimed box office flop, it developed a cult following when it was released on DVD. (This is the media form in which I was exposed to it.) Like its queer filmic predecessor The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, 1975), Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a rock opera. As a stage production, it thus queers the genre of the Broadway musical, one typically featuring upbeat show tunes and dance numbers with a boy-gets-girl motif. At the same time, Hedwig also queers the genre of the rock opera by seamlessly mixing glam punk with torch songs and references to singers Toni Tennille, Debby Boone and Anne Murray with nods to Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie. In addition to mixing musical genres, Hedwig mixes dramatic genres. Part tragedy, part drag show, part camp, part burlesque and part vaudeville, Hedwig resists easy categorization as a narrative type. Hedwig also masterfully interweaves high culture and low culture: Broadway typically plays to an audience familiar with high culture (namely, those who can afford the price of a ticket); yet Hedwig develops a white-trash aesthetic (akin, in some ways, to the work of John Waters). Thus, in Hedwig, references to Greek mythology (Aristophanes), philosophy (Plato and Kant) and classic folk tales (‘Hansel and Gretel’) exist alongside references to McDonald’s, gummy bears and Barbie dolls. Perhaps it is just because I am a philosopher by training, but I cannot resist a film that interweaves an animated retelling of Aristophane’s speech in Plato’s Symposium (1999 [c. 385–370 b c ]) with a tragic story of unrequited genderqueer love(s) (i.e. the song ‘Origin of Love’). And describing the result of a botched genital surgery as ‘a Barbie-doll crotch’ (in the song ‘Angry Inch’) is just ballsy. In short, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is queer in both its content and its form, resisting – and encouraging us to resist – the binaries of male and female, straight and gay, East and West, oppression and freedom, tragedy and comedy, Broadway and low-budget movies, philosophy and popular culture. This makes it intellectually provocative and affectively moving. In keeping with the queer traditions of drag and camp, it pokes fun irreverently at all sacred figures and causes, making us laugh and sing along even where – and perhaps especially where – we may be uncomfortable doing so.

References Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Plato (2009 [c. 385–370 bc]), ΣΥΜΠΟΣΙΟΝ/Symposium (trans. Robin Waterfield), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Contributor details Shelley Park is an associate professor of philosophy, humanities and cultural studies at the University of Central Florida and the associate/reviews editor of Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture. Her research engages the intersections of queer theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory and popular culture with a focus on queer kinship and its media representations. Contact: Department of Philosophy, PSY 239, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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