I probably would have let this post continue gathering dust in my Drafts pile but this post by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo about the peculiarities of gay closeting among conservative homophobes in politics made it percolate back up for me.
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In a post about arty films that at least in retrospect suck, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon made a poster child of the 1999 Oscar-winning American Beauty. Which in an awful lot of the ways she lays out really did suck.
Amanda mistakenly thinks the movie was about the reduction of Kevin Spacey to a state of pure privilege — a narrative arc that begins with him masturbating in the shower and, um, ends shortly after we’re supposed to see him as some kind of hero for not having sex with a 14-year-old… when it turns out (surprise!) that she wasn’t as ready as he (and she) had imagined.
That interpretation of the movie always surprises me. And if you see it that way then yeah, it doesn’t just suck pretentiously, it sucks gratuitously. Look at it that way and everything about it from the pseudo poetic voice overs to the floating plastic bags to the abrupt murder to the whole he saw / we saw comedy-of-errors between the Spacey character and the dope-dealing boyfriend just reeks phony/artsy.
But I always saw it as a gay morality play where the happy, well-adjusted out gay couple represent true suburban paradise, where the self-loathing, desperate-to-pass closeted gay neighbor on the other side represents Hell, and the Spacey character’s obliviously “latent homosexuality” is the metaphorical battlefield between the forces of the good of being ordinary and out and the evil of the closet. Throw in that all slightly tin-eared representations of heterosexuality are the result of “colonization” and… well, I’m not sure that’s what the producers really had in mind but it’s a lot easier to appreciate the movie that way.
Anyway, after a bit of rumination over irony, hypocrisy and petard-hoisting, Marshall closes his piece with this thoughtful observation
...as Andrew Sullivan puts it, these are all examples of their tragedy of the closet. Not just the inability to live full lives and all the self-loathing that’s painfully obvious in these men, but the soul-crushing and character-distorting effects of a life of denial and toxic secrecy.
That sounds about right. It’s not the hypocrisy, it’s the toxicity that drives it.
I always read it as a story
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Fri, 2010-03-05 19:09.I always read it as a story about the anomie of suburbia. This guy DID manage to buy a car after losing a job, so he’s hardly one of the most unlucky people in the world in that sense.
But basically, once this very linear set of expectations weren’t met he didn’t have the imagination to do anything better with himself, even though he had the money.
Latent homosexual? I didn’t see any evidence of that in Kevin Spacey’s character, especially since his fantasy of a young girl figured so big in the story.
Are those fantasies priviledged? Not really. Fantasies aren’t really right or wrong in nature. I never got the impression that anyone was supposed to see the character as a hero.
He as basically a guy who had no idea what to do with himself-even with considerable money-once his job was gone.
American Beauty is my all
Submitted by The Beautiful Kind (not verified) on Sat, 2010-03-06 03:38.American Beauty is my all time favorite movie. I take all the amazing messages out of it. It mirrors my goal of living a rich and beautiful life.
Mmmm. It’s quite obvious here
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2010-03-09 06:34.Mmmm. It’s quite obvious here that the “out and proud” Andrew Sullivan is a tad biased, projecting his own sensibility on that movie. He’s quite right about the well-adjusted, openly gay couple and the self-loathing closeted neighbour, but there’s absolutely no evidence of Lester Burham’s latent homosexuality. By the way, Alan Ball, the screenwriter, is openly gay. And very open-minded. :-)
Ooops, I take back “Andrew
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2010-03-09 06:39.Ooops, I take back “Andrew Sullivan” and put “Figleaf” instead. It was a misunderstanding. Sorry.
Oh, and one last word, from
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2010-03-09 06:51.Oh, and one last word, from what I’ve read there’s no evidence that Figleaf is “out and proud”, so I take it back too. ;-)
I’m just saying that’s a more
Submitted by figleaf on Tue, 2010-03-09 08:53.I’m just saying that’s a more coherent way to read the movie than a lot of more hetero, but also more critical, interpretations. The Spacey character spends the movie in sexual limbo, connecting emotionally but unable to connect sexually with either his wife (one stereotyped married-hetero ideal) or a sexually aggressive but still-virginal teenager (the other.) Amanda thinks that’s about failure to get the privilege due to him. I think the movie works better if his heart isn’t really into it but he doesn’t figure out why.
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Well of course Lester Burnham
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2010-03-09 15:05.Well of course Lester Burnham is sexually – and emotionally – frustrated, but that doesn’t make him a latent homosexual! As for his wife Carolyn, she’s not a “married-hetero ideal”. She’s a conventional, anal-retentive real-estate employee. If you listen to their dialogue carefully, LB asks her at one point where is the free, joyful, sexy young girl he has married 20 years earlier. Personally, I see LB as someone who refuses to let the age and the rules of the modern society system destroy his genuine personality. His complicity with Ricky and his attraction to Angela are a consequence of his middle-age crisis. But he’s not ready to transgress all the taboos (that of a teenage girl’s virginity, notably).