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“The Celluloid Closet” (1995) Dir. Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman

“The Celluloid Closet” (1995) directed by Rob Epstein, and Jeffrey Friedman massively opened my eyes as a heterosexual in the industry. Not only did the film inform me of the  history of queer representation that had sometimes flown over my head, but it also provided the full spectrum of gay representation. 

What struck me near the opening of the film was the idea that films “taught straight people how to think about gay people, and taught gay people how to think about themselves.” And to that end, “we learn from the movies what it means to be a man or a woman.” The screen acts as a mirror, and people are desperate to see themselves in that mirror. 

The “sissy,” the first gay character that started cropping up in movies, was always the butt of the joke. “When men dress like a woman, everyone laughs, but when a woman dresses like a man nobody laughs. They just think they look wonderful.” Then from the sissy, the next level in representation became gay characters as villains. From the obsessive, leering gay woman in “Rebecca,” to the murderous lovers in “Rope.”  

In 60’s America, gay characters were unhappy, suicidal or murdered, and lonely. They had to suffer or pay. Maxim de Winter (“Rebecca”) goes down in a blaze, Plato (“Rebel Without a Cause”) is gunned down by police, and Martha (“The Children’s Hour” hangs herself in her room when she realizes she loves another woman. “The Boys in the Band” (1970) is one of the earliest images of gay camaraderie, and all of the gay men survive. 

As time went on, the downside to gay visibility became the threat of retaliation. In “Vanishing Point,” the audience laughed as queer hitchhikers were foiled in their robbery attempt and shoved out of the car. When a trans villain is foiled in their murder plot and is gunned down, the audience applauds. “The audience was applauding the death of the villain and the death of a homosexual.” In “Cruising” (1980), gay characters transitioned from victims to victimizers. But in “Making Love,” (1982) there was imagery of a tender and loving gay relationship between men. 

I would love to see a continuation of this film that tackles gay representation in the present, as there is still a long way to go for gay characters.

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Halloween (1978) Dir. John Carpenter

When rewatching the iconic 1978 John Carpenter hit, “Halloween,” I desperately wanted it to be feminist. I was constantly fighting to find the feminist reading, and would jump at anything that felt different; anything subversive to the classic feminist tropes. And while I did find those instances, “Halloween” still feels utterly “tropey.” I asked a fellow film fanatic about which way the film slanted and he was convinced it was feminist. “Michael Myers is an incel!” he said. While a modern term, I have to admit that Michael Myers seems to perfectly fit that “involuntarily celibate,” women-hating, sex-hating image of toxic masculinity. We spend the first moment of the film with him, forced to join in on his voyeurism, then creeping through the house with him and leering at his nude older sister before mercilessly stabbing her. He watched her fooling around with a boy and then he killed her. This pattern continues. The women who have sex die. The virgin does not.

Jamie Lee Curti’s teenaged character Laurie is the outcast among her so-called friends. They are feminine. They wear makeup. They date boys. They ridicule Laurie for not doing the same. Laurie is intelligent and cares about school. Her friends mock her for it. “Poor Laurie, you scared another one away.” “It’s tragic. You never go out.” Laurie is later rewarded for this behavior. When Annie and Lynda scheme to see their boyfriends and fool around, it results in their downfall. Laurie is “not like the other girls,” and for this she gets to survive. But Laurie does not survive on her own. While there is an empowering moment where Laurie jams a hanger into Michael, this ultimately does not result in victory. In fact, Michael is about to kill her when Loomis appears at the last second to shoot down Michael. 

Of course, he is not successful, because toxic masculinity apparently never dies. But any sense of victory is robbed from Laurie. Instead, she is powerless, weeping, alone.

“Blue” (1993) Dir. Derek Jarman

“My sight seems to have closed in. The hospital is even quieter this morning. Hushed. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach. I feel defeated. My mind bright as a button but my body falling apart - a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room. There is death in the air here but we are not talking about it. "

The film opens. An English man slowly speaks in prose. I am staring at a plain blue screen. I soon realize this will be the film. The film will continue to be this for one hour and sixteen minutes. I will stare at an unwavering blue screen and listen to poetry for one hour and sixteen minutes. I am ready to hate this film, if it can even be called that.

But, I know a little bit about the context for this film. This isn’t just anyone speaking. This is Derek Jarman, an iconic and influential queer artist and director. He contracted AIDS and this was his final feature film, reflecting on his illness and inevitable death. He died four months after this film was released. During the making of the film, his illness rendered him partially blind, only able to see in shades of blue. This little bit of prior knowledge and understanding greatly alters the watching/listening experience. Suddenly, I find myself latching on to phrases I hear. I jot a few down. 

My vision will never come back. The retina is destroyed. 


I have to come to terms with sightlessness. 


If i I lose half my sight, will my vision be halved? 


The virus rages fierce. I have no friends who are not dead or dying. Like a blue frost. 


I shall not win the battle against the virus, despite the slogans like “living with AIDS.”

This isn’t quite a film. At least, not in the classical sense. It is poetry aided by a “soundscape,” cloaked in the omnipresent blue screen. It takes patience, but sometimes it really grabs you. I experienced goosebumps several times. It’s eerie to listen to a man speak of his upcoming death, knowing he died 4 months later. It’s emotional to understand the historical context. More than 700,000 people have died from AIDS since the beginning of the epidemic. Jarman says he has no friends who are not dead or dying, and he soon joins the dying. It sounds like something out of a horror movie.

I was struck by a comment I read on the Kanopy link. It reads:

“I was living in London and had seen all of Jarman’s movies. When this came out I cried like a fountain in the cinema. However, I doubt it would retain the same power today, especially on a small, individual screen. Back then, fresh after his death, the large blue screen and the voice-over created a sense of community.”

This made a lot of sense. Watching this film in the midst of the AIDS epidemic and being personally invested in Jarman would make this film very different to watch. I reflected on the idea of seeing this in a theater as well; being submissive to the almost-oppressive blue screen and being surrounded by Jarman’s voice and soundscape. If a director or artist that I was deeply invested in came out with a film like this, I would definitely be sobbing in a theater too.

Overall, I think understanding the context of the time and the context of this man’s life greatly enhances and deepens the viewing experience, but regardless of that, this is an intimate window into a dying man’s life filled with beautiful and haunting self-reflection that has the power to touch any viewer.

“Paris is Burning” (1990) Dir. Jennie Livingston

I am incredibly torn when it comes to how to read this film. bell hooks’ takes a hard and fast stance against nearly every aspect of the film, from its conception to its message to drag culture itself. She pointed out one of the more disturbing elements drag culture that the documentary revealed: “the idea of womanness and femininity is totally personified by whiteness.” Most of the subjects openly expressed their desire to attain the beauty and social status of a white woman.

I was also struck by hooks’ assertion that celebratory manner in which drag balls are represented turns them from ritual to spectacle for the pleasure of white viewers. I was immediately concerned about this as a white viewer who is pretty unfamiliar with the drag scene and history. To me, the drag balls had seemed like a celebration. Was it wrong that I saw them as such? hooks’ describes seeing the film with a fellow black female friend and being disturbed by the laughter and entertainment from white audiences in moments that they felt incredibly sad or disturbed. I wondered if I was guilty of this. She continues that the film aided this reading, jumping quickly from moments of sadness to dramatic scenes from the balls, undermining the pain felt by the subjects and again turning to spectacle.

hooks goes on to delve into the fact that this film was created by a white lesbian woman who was not at all involved with the community. Livingston, the director, is never seen on camera and takes on a very unassuming, uninvolved, and as hooks asserts “innocent” personage when it comes to her hand in the film. Nevertheless, the film was in fact shaped and pieced together by an outsider.

Daniel T. Contrera’s reading of the film pulls together a number of sources that concede to hooks’ reading at times but also provide a more optimistic take on the documentary as well as drag culture. He notes Judith Butler’s idea that perhaps drag is reshaping and reforming familiar gender roles. Contrera also notes that hooks’ and other scholars are taking for granted that “participants in the balls are simply practicing a type of parody of high fashion catwalk instead of actually creating it.”

“Fox and His Friends” (1975) Dir. Rainer Warner Fassbinder

Michael Koresky put it best in his 2017 article for Criterion-director Rainer Warner Fassbinder’s vision of life in “Fox and His Friends” (1975) is such that, “Sex and money are purely transactional, and while life is characterized by hopeless circularity, death offers no transcendence.” The underlying world view seems to be nihilism. 

You must use or be used. When we first meet Fox, he is young, naive, sex-driven, and desperately searching for fulfillment. He and his friends run a carnival scam. He is lower class but wants to elevate himself. His cheap but bedazzled denim jacket with his nickname on it represents his tragic dream to be more. He seems delusional at first when he claims he will win the lottery but by some mystery of fate it is soon fulfilled. 

When Fox falls in with a new, posher crowd after his lottery win, love becomes linked to social status. Eugen only leaves his like-minded lover Philip when he learns of Fox’s new wealth, and is mortified and disgusted by his lower-class tendencies. Fox is constantly sacrificing to sustain this new love. Things go sour when Fox realizes what the audience realize all along. His new friends and new lover don’t care about him at all. They are using him for his money to elevate themselves. When they are done with him, they toss him aside.

To me, “Fox and His Friends” is not a movie about the struggle of being a gay man. Gayness is normal among Fox and his friends. Fox does not suffer because of any persecution related to his sexuality, but instead his social class. I was interested to read that the film drew criticisms and backlash for its representation of gay men, as Fox’s circle of friends is shallow, selfish, and materialistic. Andrew Britton, a critic, wrote in “Gay Left” in 1976 that its “version of homosexuality degrades us all and should roundly be denounced.”

Fassbinder responded to the criticisms and claimed that to him, the film was not about gayness. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1975, he said, “Here, homosexuality is shown as completely normal, and the problem is something quite different. It’s a love story, where one person exploits the love of the other person, and that’s really the story I always tell.”

Fassbinder’s vision was how I read the film on first viewing. Fox is a tragic character. He goes from nothing, to something, to nothing again. He desired money and love and got the briefest glimpse of it before it was all taken away. He dies alone in a subway in his bedazzled jacket, the final marker of his identity, while unbothered young boys dig through his pockets to take whatever remains.

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