Queer as Folk has an almost totemic place in queer culture. The original show, which aired on Channel 4 in 1999, is often evoked by gay men, and others, as something that introduced them to a metropolitan gay life that existed beyond the trappings of a regional existence. There is a recurring image presented by gays on Twitter of the young queer watching it on TV in secret with the sound turned as low as possible, resting one hand on the remote control ready to switch to any other channel. 

I first watched the show when it was uploaded to 4OD (or All4 as it is apparently called now, though I don’t know a single person who calls it that.) It was filled with sex and unapologetic gay men. It was soapy at times, yet always wore its specific brand of humour well, a type of humour that would continue into its creator, Russell T. Davies’, later projects too. The original series followed Stewart, Craig, and Nathan, three gay men living in Manchester who spent their weekends out on Canal Street. Even when I watched it, in 2008, that seemed radical. Perhaps, as a symbol of how groundbreaking it really was, nearly two decades later, very little has come close to it. There were men kissing on screen, something I’d very rarely seen, and they were often naked, in the throes of sex, and, heck, the show even featured a discussion of “rimming” in the first episode. Outside of sexually progressive American shows like Sex and the City, which, like Queer as Folk, often found itself at the receiving end of moralistic diatribes, the sex on Queer as Folk was like nothing I’d seen before and that’s one of the reasons, I think, the show was so popular with the aforementioned closeted teens; it showed them what gay sex looked like. 

Since 1999, however, few shows have followed in its footsteps. There was the American remake of Queer as Folk, which aired on Showtime, that followed the same basic plot of the original but ran for five seasons rather than the two produced in the UK. It expanded the two female characters from the original show, making them integral in its main cast. There was, of course, Will and Grace, which premiered a year before Queer as Folk, but, though groundbreaking in its own way, this still found it necessary to place its gay lead opposite a straight woman and relegate its femme character to a supporting comedic role. In 2004, Showtime introduced us to The L Word, a show about a group of relatively wealthy lesbians living in Los Angeles and, in a post-Lena Dunham world, HBO’s Looking tried to ground a queer experience into something more realistic and millennial, but was unfortunately cut short. Most recently, Netflix’s Heartstopper has drawn significant attention for focusing on a gay love story between two teenagers but, other than that, very few shows since Queer as Folk have focused exclusively on gay characters. Especially when you think of many how shows and movies regularly feature all-heterosexual casts. Instead, we mostly see shows like Glee, Skins, Riverdale, Downton Abbey, Scandal, and Grey’s Anatomy including queer characters within their regular cast and giving them storylines which, despite a few exceptions, deal with coming out, hiding their sexuality, or being bullied. 

Now, in 2022, Stephen Dunn has revivified Queer as Folk for a second time, creating a new version of the iconic show this time set in New Orleans. Shades of the original show remain, however, and it hits similar beats. In the first episode, for example, a baby is born and the baby’s father is our queer leading man who has donated his sperm to his friends. There’s a high school student who becomes infatuated with an older man, and a character who dies early on, making our lead characters question their own mortality. Yet the fact that Dunn is at the helm of this reimagining always meant that this Queer as Folk was going to be a little different. Just like his brilliant debut feature Closet Monster, which featured talking hamsters and body horror influences, this version of Queer as Folk is trippy, filled with dream sequences, haunting flashbacks, and one long shrooms-induced hallucination that fits excellently within Dunn’s wheelhouse. The show, too, features heaps of sex, pushing the boundaries for NBC’s streaming service Peacock that made it. Its sex is radical, too. Not only centering cisgender bodies but offering up narratives around sex and disability, as well as looking at sex and gender. Beyond its bold style and radical sex, Dunn, who serves as writer, showrunner, and director for three episodes, has assembled a cast that is less white and less cisgender than its predecessors. It also features a predominantly queer cast.

At the heart of the show is the potentially toxic friendship between Brodie (Devin Way), a queer black man who has recently dropped out of Med school, and Ruthie (Jesse James Keitel), a trans English teacher who is about to be a mother yet doesn’t want to give up the party lifestyle that has maintained her thus far. The two enable the worst in each other, whilst also proving to be loyal and robust sounding boards for the other’s problems. Ruthie’s partner, Shar (CG), is non-binary and is facing the complex emotions that come with giving birth to two twins while panicking that Ruthie might be having second thoughts. Elsewhere, Devin’s brother Julian (Ryan O’Connell) has trouble reconciling his desirability and capacity for love within a community that continually others him for his cerebral palsy, and Marvin (Eric Graise), is a wheelchair user who tries to navigate a deepening relationship with a sex worker named Ali (Sachin Byatt). There’s also an excellent and tender performance from Armand Fields as Bussy, a local drag queen inspired by Dunn’s friendship with Chi Chi Devayne, best known for her appearance on season eight of Ru Paul’s Drag Race who unfortunately passed away in 2020. It also features Juliette Lewis as the mother of a young queer boy, a role inspired by Dunn’s own mother, and a scene-stealing turn from Kim Cattrall as Devin’s mother who, as one Twitter user wrote, really throws “her whole pussy” into the role.  

Outside of expanding the “queer” of Queer as Folk, the most drastic change to the source material is the show’s new ripped-from-the-headlines premise. During the first episode, while Mingus, a young, gender fluid drag performer is making his debut performance on stage at the local gay bar Babylon, an unnamed shooter with an assault rifle forces his way into the club and opens fire. This, a scene intentionally reminiscent of the horrific mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub in 2016 and, eerily, has similarities with the recent shootings in Norway last week, hangs over the rest of the series. Over eight hour-long episodes, those who were there as well as those who weren’t grapple with the effects of that traumatic event. They attend corporate-sponsored benefits in which the grieving families are given brand new cars, and, in retaliation, start up their own radical queer party night called “Ghost Fag”. 

At times, the show’s attention to this grief waivers. It seems to come and go when the story demands it.  But it’s a bold choice that might silent naysayers who question why there needs to be Queer as Folk reboot in 2022, when we’re seemingly in a post-gay world. “Post-gay” is a politcal illusion that looks only at white, middle class queerness, and doesn’t consider intersectionality. So a show that explores the messy, interconnected qnd community-driven stories of a group of queer people is perhaps, and please excuse the cliché, more necessary than ever.

After all, last week, when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe Vs Wade, the law that granted women and pregnant people access to legal and safe abortions, Judge Clarence Thomas wrote that it was also time to review the laws around gay marriage, the right to sexual privacy, and access to contraception meaning that, in the coming months, many other rights in the US have the potential to go the same way as Roe. It should also be noted that, in 1991, Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by Anita Hill during his confirmation hearing and the case was famously mishandled at the time in what was seen as a back door deal between Republicans and then-Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Joe Biden. Before Thomas’s statement, various US states had already introduced nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ+ bills including the so-called “Don’t Say Gay Bill” in Florida and many others specifically targeting Trans and non-binary communities. Here in the UK, it isn’t much better, with the media classes and Conservative elite becoming obsessed with transness and routinely attacking any attempts at progress. The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, in an attempt to gain favour after a series of scandals, recently waded into the discussion around trans people in sport (a transphobic dog whistle around a situation that, in actuality, bears little relevance to the lives of most trans people in the UK). There have also been attacks on trans healthcare in the UK, routine pile-ons orchestrated by so-called “gender criticals”, and continued manufactured outrage over menial issues, such as inclusive language and misrepresented policies within workplaces. 

As such, at home and in the US, the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and the specific, cruel focus on trans people means that this latest version of Queer as Folk is still, unfortunately, as groundbreaking as its previous interactions. It’s still just as entertaining, too. After all, no matter whether it’s 1999, the early noughties, or the present day, there is nothing as queer as folk.

Queer as Folk (2022) is availble to stream on Stars UK now.

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Queerbaiting

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Queer as Folk appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

In July, Styles will transition from supporting actor to leading man in Don’t Worry Darling, a Stepford Wives-esque thriller directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Florence Pugh and Chris Pine. In October, he’ll appear as Tom, a closeted police officer trying to balance his relationships with his wife and his male lover in My Policeman. The film’s October release date suggests the studio thinks there’s some awards potential there, and the cast does also include The Crown’s Emma Corrin and BAFTA nominee Rupert Everett. Elsewhere, after appearing in an end-credits teaser during The Eternals last year, Styles also has a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (yawn!). There has been no confirmation of where exactly Styles fits into the studio’s master plan. Still, he’ll likely show up, albeit in a limited capacity, in one or more of the many, many projects the studio has lined up over the next few years. In March, however, he dropped out of visionary director Robert Egger’s Nosferatu remake due to scheduling conflicts, but, last month, rumours swirled that Styles had signed on to appear in Dan Gilroy’s latest project, whose previous movies Nightcrawler and Velvet Buzzsaw have made a relative splash for their intensity and strangeness. Styles seems to be carving a very distinct path for himself, but he’s certainly not the first to do so.

Since the beginning of talkies, musicians have stepped into film, and the results have been mixed. For every Whitney Houston, Cher, and Queen Latifah, there’s a Madonna, Britney Spears, or Jessica Simpson. In the early days of Hollywood, triple threats like Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra were the lifeblood of major movies. Stars who were equally at home on screen and in the recording studio dominated the entertainment industry. They starred in films, released albums, recorded variety specials for television, and did concert tours. But, since the end of the studio system and the decline in lavish movie musicals, it’s become much rarer to see a star who can do it all (or, at least, see that star exercise all their talents at the same time).  

In modern movie making, singers still cross over but they tend to take one of two distinct routes. These paths are best explored by looking at two singers who found great success in movies: Whitney Houston and Cher. 

By 1992 Houston was one of the most prominent musical artists of the late 20^th century. Her self-titled debut album topped the charts in 1985 and generated three number-one singles. Her second album, Whitney, in 1987, added five more top-ten hits to her name, and her third album, I’m Your Baby Tonight, added six more in 1990. Her success as one of the world’s most recognisable stars of the nineties meant that Warner Bros. didn’t have to look far when casting the role of Rachel Marron in The Bodyguard. Houston’s star persona was a perfect fit for the leading role as an ultra-successful singer being stalked by an obsessive fan. In fact, in the 1970s, Diana Ross had been meant to play Rachel before the movie got stuck in development hell. 

Houston’s casting, as Ross’s would have been, was a perfect example of how ‘stunt casting’ can be used to a film’s advantage. The Bodyguard hinges on whether or not we believe Rachel Marron is the biggest star in the world, and when we look at Houston on screen, we see a star. It’s Houston’s prowess as a singer that makes the film work. Her presence on stage when she’s performing in clubs makes Rachel’s level of superstardom believable, and Houston’s connection to the material, about a huge star fighting for privacy, allows Rachel to become more rounded, often in softer, quieter moments. Given that The Bodyguard became a huge hit, it’s clear it worked, and it meant that Houston could explore other acting opportunities. She joined Angela Basset in the totally brilliant Waiting to Exhale in a non-singing role. However, she contributed two songs to the incredible R&B soundtrack and then starred opposite Denzel Washington in The Preacher’s Wife. 

Using a star’s persona to build a career in movies is a typical path, and many have followed in Houston’s footsteps. For example, Lady Gaga’s breakthrough performance in A Star is Born had a similar vibe. As Allie, the audience gets an immediate sense of her star potential because we know what Gaga can do. When she steps out onto the stage and sings ‘Shallow’ for the first time, we feel the thrill that the talent we know is finally coming through and being recognised. The same can be said for Jennifer Hudson, who won an Oscar for her debut performance in the movie-musical Dreamgirls. The actress who played Effie needed to be a powerhouse and have the ability to nail the character’s signature song, ‘And I Am Telling You’. Hudson had all that and more after appearing on the first season of American Idol, coming in fifth place, and trying to establish herself in the music industry with a few features and singles. In all these cases, the casting works to help sell the film’s musical element and allows fans of those singers to see their favourite performers in a new light. It’s why we saw Mariah Carey in Glitter, Eminem in 8 Mile, and Beyoncé in The Fighting Temptations, Dreamgirls, and Cadillac Records. 

Cher, however, walked into movies without singing a word. She would sometimes contribute a song to the soundtrack, such as her cover of ‘The Shoop Shoop Song’ for 1990’s Mermaids, but it wasn’t until 2010’s Burlesque, followed eight years later by Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, that Cher actually sang on-screen. Instead, as Cher told Graham Norton in 2013, the idea of her acting garnered laughter from audiences who saw the trailer for Silkwood in theatres. The film, directed by Mike Nichols, was based on real-life whistle-blower Karen Silkwood and saw Cher star opposite Meryl Streep (already a two-time Oscar winner by then) and Ken Russell, whose appearances in The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China had made him a household name. 

Before Silkwood, Cher had been known as a campy and extravagant pop singer, as one half of Sonny and Cher, even if she had starred in a play on Broadway and in the film adaptation of that play directed by famed auteur Robert Altman. Silkwood, however, signalled a shift (one detailed in Be Kind Rewind’s video essay on Cher as an actress). Her performance was jaw-dropping as a lesbian woman sick from radiation poisoning due to her workplace’s negligence, and she earned an Academy Award nomination. After Silkwood, Cher went on to win the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask in 1985. She followed this up with an Oscar win for her sensational performance in 1987’s Moonstruck (a practically perfect movie!). So, Cher was a big deal in movies throughout the eighties and into the early nineties. She had big hits with The Witches of Eastwick, Suspect, and Tea with Mussolini, before deciding to only appear in cameos for most of the early noughties. 

In contrast to Houston, Cher actively set out to act in movies that didn’t need her vocal talent to prove she won the roles on her skill as an actress. This meant that, for the most part, Cher’s two careers almost ran concurrently and rarely met. Jennifer Lopez, as an example, followed a similar trajectory when she started on network television before gaining rave reviews for her performances in movies like Out of Sight and Hustlers. Lopez didn’t sing on screen until 2022’s Marry Me (although she did appear as Latin pop princess Selena in a 1997 biopic, she lip-synced to the original vocals). Justin Timberlake, who also left a boyband to go solo and then began acting, took this approach, too. His roles in critical hits like The Social Network and rom-coms like Friends with Benefits quickly established the star as a go-to leading man. The same can be said for Ice Cube who appeared in movies like Boyz N the Hood, before he started making mainstream family comedies in the noughties. 

Each path has its perks, each has its risks. There’s a chance, as with Gaga and Houston, that exploding into movies with the full weight of your musical talent can work. But it doesn’t work for everyone! Meanwhile, Cher’s route runs the risk of a star being ignored or, worse, giving a bad performance because they haven’t got their musical talent to hide behind. Looking at Styles’ upcoming roles, it seems like he is taking the Cher route, too. None of the movies he’s been cast in thus far require him to sing. Though he was close to being cast in the upcoming Elvis Presley biopic and was rumoured to be in contention to play Prince Eric in the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, neither came to fruition. Instead, it looks like he’s stepping out to prove that, without the silky singing voice, he has the ability to act the house down. We’ll find out later this year if that is the case. 

Also Read: The Music Behind Great Films

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Musicians Who Act appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

That said, Cannes always feels exciting. Perhaps because it takes place in May, so it kicks off the festival season. Summer for some is marked by white men in superhero capes fighting other white men in superhero capes; for others, it is measured in an international tour of movie appreciation that travels through Colorado, Venice, Berlin, London, and New York – but it all starts in Cannes. Its early date allows Cannes to platform a lot of movies that are untested. There are no preconceived notions, no hype built up over months. Instead, most of the movies at Cannes are playing for the first time, which means it is consistently full of surprises and can be a strange mix. Films like the Oscar-winning Parasite, Ken Loach’s brutal realist I, Daniel Blake, and Todd Haynes’ luscious lesbian romance Carol all premiered at the festival, but so did The Phantom Menace, Shrek, X-Men: The Last Stand, and, most recently, Top Gun: Maverick. This means that, one night, there’s the splashy extravagance of seeing Tom Cruise walk down the red carpet while fighter jets stream across the sky leaving trails of red, white and blue, and then, later, you can see Kristen Stewart on that same red carpet talking about a movie that the LA Times described as being about a “world where physical pain has dramatically decreased, leaving individuals free to cut open their own bodies for pleasure and profit.” 

However, the fact it’s first out the gate isn’t just what makes Cannes fun to follow because Cannes’ audiences love to make their feelings known. The length of a standing ovation is often the topic of discussion at Cannes, as are boos and walkouts. In 2006, Guillermo del Toro’s spooky parable Pan’s Labyrinth received a whopping 22-minute standing ovation. This year, Baz Luhrmann’s bizarre-looking Elvis Presley biopic got 12-minutes’ worth of applause and, I mean, I love Tom Hanks but even I can’t understand what he’s trying to do in that trailer. But that’s the thrill! Nicole Kidman’s wild but ultimately forgotten southern thriller The Paperboy got 12 minutes in 2012. Michael Moore’s haunting school shooting documentary Bowling for Columbine got 13 minutes in 2002. There seems to be no logic, neither rhyme nor reason to it. Alongside the standing ovations, there are the walkouts too. This year, many in the audience walked out of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, which stars Stewart alongside French-movie royalty Lea Seydoux, and Viggo Mortensen, which isn’t Cronenberg’s first run-in with dissent at Cannes. His 1996 film Crash, adapted from the J.G. Ballard novel of the same name about a group of people who get turned on by violent car crashes, got some major heat too and inspired many walkouts. With Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg takes his place alongside Lars Von Trier whose films Antichrist and The House That Jack Built inspired walkouts, too. 

So, what else happened at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival?  Who walked out of what and which stars had to stand awkwardly for what seems like forever as a camera is forced into their face to capture their reaction while people clap? (Honestly, if you haven’t watched the footage from the 7-minute standing ovation for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood then you haven’t lived. It’s essentially performance art.) According to the critic Peter Bradshaw, this year’s festival was particularly divisive. In his round-up, he wrote that he had never “seen a Cannes like this for radical disagreement among critics on almost every single title”. So, where to begin? 

The festival is divided into three sections: ‘In Competition’; ‘Un Certain Regard’, which highlights avant-garde filmmaking; and ‘Out of Completion’, which is essentially your big-budget stuff looking for a boost. The films playing In Competition are vying for the Palme d’Or, an award voted for by a jury made up of people from the industry, that counts amongst its winners Von Trier’s depressing musical Dancer in the Dark, Michael Moore’s Iraq war exposé Fahrenheit 9/11,  Jane Campion’s feminist period drama The Piano, and Scorsese’s career-defining Taxi Driver. Most recently, Julia Ducournau became the second woman to win the top prize, after Campion, with her body-horror-hit Titane at last year’s festival. This year, it went to Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness. Described by the BBC as “a frontal assault on the super-rich, and on the capitalist system in general” the film “has enough rage and riotous abandon to compensate for its lack of subtlety”. Triangle of Sadness is Östland’s second Palme d’Or win after The Square, a biting satire of art and charity which took the award back in 2017.

Elsewhere, one of the big stories was Clare Denis’ adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 1986 novel, The Stars at Noon, which marks the filmmaker’s second English-language feature after 2018’s High Life. Denis is no stranger to Cannes and is, perhaps, one of France’s most interesting filmmakers. Her previous features have been known for their slow, slight brilliance, and she has attached great French actors such as Isabelle Huppert, who starred in Denis’ 2009 civil war drama White Material, and Juliette Binoche who gave a career-best performance in the sweet and existential Let the Sunshine In. As for The Stars at Noon, its actors are more up-and-coming than established. It sees relative newbie Joe Alwyn stepping into shoes previously meant for Taron Egerton (who had stepped in to replace Robert Pattinson before dropping out himself) and ingenue-of-the-moment Margaret Qualley starring as lovers. The BBC called it “beautifully made” and Indiewire described it as a “sweaty romantic thriller about two white foreigners who fall in love (or at least fuck a lot) against the background of Central American political tensions” with the film ultimately feeling like “a cryptic and carnal search for a way out of purgatory.” Variety praised Qualley’s performance as “tremendous” but others felt the film lacked heat. Though I have sworn off Twitter recently in an attempt to actually enjoy my life, it seemed to cause quite a stir online with one user calling The Stars at Noon a “tragedy” and another claiming it was “laughably un-erotic”. Still, it won the Grand Prix (essentially, second place after the Palme d’Or!).

One thing it seems most people can agree on is Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave. The Korean filmmaker’s past works include the revenge thriller Oldboy, the brittle family drama Stoker, and the stylish erotic thriller The Handmaiden which premiered at Cannes in 2016. Decision to Leave is a crime procedural that becomes a romantic drama as a top detective falls for the wife of the man whose murder he is investigating. If it sounds like a corny premise, all accounts suggest that Park does nothing conventional with the material, with Variety calling the film a cool saunter through an “immaculately intricate labyrinth”. Park also took home the Best Director prize and it seems this is one of the few Jury decisions that everyone can get on board with. 

The controversial true-crime thriller Holy Spider took home an award for its leading actress Zar Emir-Ebrahimi who plays an investigative journalist trying to uncover the truth about a serial killer who is hunting sex workers. The film is based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei, known as “The Spider Killer”, who killed sixteen women between 2000 and 2001. Hanaei became a quasi-hero for the religious right in Iran at the time who felt he was “cleansing” the city of Mashad, and he even received help from the police force for doing what was seen by some as God’s work. The film, which is set in Iran, wasn’t able to film there due to the subject and its inclusion of substantial nudity and was filmed in Jordan instead. It has been called, by some, a slick and enticing thriller in the vein of David Fincher’s Zodiac. Others have criticised Holy Spider for “Hollywood-ising” the tragic deaths of these women who, according to The Guardian, don’t receive a huge amount of screen time. The premiere was protested too by a feminist collective who took to the red carpet and set off plumes of black smoke whilst holding up a list of 129 women’s names. The group indicated that these names were a list of the “129 feminicides in France since the last Cannes festival” – ‘feminicide’ being a phrase defined in the late seventies as the intentional killing of women and girls because they are female. 

Last year, Titane walked out of Cannes with huge buzz and so did The Worst Person in the World, both of which went on to receive some major award nominations. This year it seems slightly harder to see those sure-fire successes (outside of Decision to Leave which, if it’s anything like Park’s previous movies, will do well at the arthouse box office). Denis’s movies are often divisive (High Life featured a “fuck box” for Christ’s sake!) and Östland’s Triangle of Sadness will likely have its fans, too (I imagine I will be one of them if just for a shirtless Harris Dickinson alone…). But what does seem clear is that the stage is set to see how these movies fare over the next few months. They’ll all be sure to pop up elsewhere and the discussion around them will grow (and, undoubtedly, become infuriating at points) but that is the thrill of festival season. Not to mention there are still plenty of movies that have yet to enter the ring. There’s Noah Baumbach’s reteaming with Greta Gerwig in White Noise, Sebastian Lelio’s period drama The Wonder which stars Florence Pugh, Joanna Hogg’s as-yet-untitled ghost movie, and two (TWO!) Harry Styles movies, one of which is said to feature a fair amount of sex and nudity. All of which are likely to show up on the festival circuit in the next few months. So, strap in folks! It’s likely to be a bumpy ride. 

Also Read: The History of the Cannes Film Festival

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On The Cannes Film Festival appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Few others inspire such fervour. In the early noughties, it might have been Zadie Smith who found herself on a meteoric rise to fame after the publication of White Teeth, which itself was later made into a television series for Channel 4 starring Naomie Harris. Or, perhaps, Elena Ferrante, the internationally renowned Italian author who, to date, has seen every single one of her novels adapted into a film or television series, most famously in the form of HBO’s acclaimed My Brilliant Friend and the Oscar-nominated The Lost Daughter. Yet Smith and Ferrante are not household names the way Rooney is. The television adaptation of her second novel, Normal People, was one of the biggest hits of 2020, and Paul Mescal took home a BAFTA for his performance as anxious teen Connell Waldron. The show arrived a few months into the UK’s first national Lockdown, allowing its audience to live vicariously through its intimate sex scenes in a time when being closer than six feet to a stranger was a crime. This latest adaption, created by the team behind Normal People, promises just as much sex, if not more. 

Conversations with Friends, which drops today on BBC iPlayer, follows twenty-something Frances (Alison Oliver) as she engages in an affair with a sexy, married actor, Nick (Joe Alwyn). Meanwhile, Frances’ ex-girlfriend, who is also her roommate and the other half of a performance poetry duo, Bobbi (Sasha Lane), takes an interest in Melissa (Jemima Kirk), Nick’s intimidating and successful wife. The show has proven to be less of a critical darling than Normal People, with some reviews noting the pace and questioning the motivations of its characters, but the same is true of the book. The spikey and selfish people who inhabit the show are a lot less likeable than Connell and Marianne; their intentions much murkier. The love story at the centre of Conversations is one of infidelity between a misguided, insecure girl and an unhappy, closed-off man. Nick’s marriage looks perfect from the outside but is nearly hollow on closer inspection; his wife has had her own affairs in the past, while the two girls, once lovers, are forced to navigate the choppy waters of a friendship that was once something more. Whereas Normal People presented us with a relationship we might want to emulate, one that is deeply passionate and filled with genuine affection, Conversations asks what happens when you don’t regulate your desire to fit within the conventional ideas around relationships when monogamy doesn’t feel like enough, and love is not just something that can exist between two people but between many. 

Though Conversations with Friends was a big hit back in 2017, this aspect of it went under-explored. Hearing about the novel from friends or seeing people reading it on the tube, it was never immediately clear how queer the novel was. That Frances and Bobbi were an item was mentioned in passing on the blurb, but there wasn’t a significant focus on the implications. My only guess as to why would be that Rooney has, unjustly, been a poster girl for skinny white girls, and her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, was accompanied by an uncomfortable fanfare that included pop-up shops in trendy London boroughs and an infamous bucket hat with the book’s title embroidered on the front. It seems at odds with the way she’s positioned that she is also staunchly anti-capitalist and that her novels and the shows based on her books reflect this. The more fraught exploration of identity at the centre of Conversations and its endorsement of lifestyles other than the monogamous is less palatable than a story of young love. Yet, to my mind, it’s more intriguing. 

The television adaptation, like the novel, highlights the confusion and complication of bisexual desire as Frances admits to Nick that she’s never slept with a man before and that her “entire sexual history is Bobbi”. The upheaval of such a revelation can be destabilising, especially in a world that asks for sexuality to be clear and defined. In 2022, in a world bogged down by accusations of queerbaiting, ambiguous sexuality is consistently questioned, and most narratives about people exploring who they’re attracted to end with a definite choice. Sexuality is commonly presented as a binary, and those who exist in the middle are, as Toni Stanger wrote for Film Daze, asked to “pick a side”. Conversations doesn’t conform to this idea, and when the idea of loving men and women is raised, it is never accusatory. Instead, it falls into the category of rare but welcome media, like Desiree Akhavan’s The Bisexual, that allows for this type of exploration and doesn’t try to reach a verdict on who someone is more attracted to. 

Frances’ feelings for Nick are a substantial part of the novel, as is Bobbi’s reaction to them, and so, at the heart of it, Conversations is a queer book. But it rarely seems this way. In recent months, when I’ve spoken about Rooney, I’ve always pegged Conversations as my favourite of her novels, while others, ostensibly my straight friends, will say Normal People. This isn’t wrong, of course. Normal People is a great book, but it’s always interested me that Rooney’s straightest novel is her most successful. In Beautiful World, we meet Felix, a bisexual warehouse worker who lives for chaos. He’s an equal opportunity flirter who relishes making people uncomfortable. In Conversations, his counterpart might be Bobbi, an overpowering force who likes to be in control and to party. She isn’t interested in anything that conforms after watching her parents’ marriage fall apart, and seeing Frances start a relationship with a straight married man, who Bobbi thinks is uninteresting, feels like conformity. If loving Bobbi had been radical and queer, falling for Nick is the obvious and easier choice. 

This is what feels refreshing about Rooney’s work and its adaptations. For a novelist that is forced into the mainstream and who is so influential on the cultural zeitgeist, the work is still questioning and politically intriguing. For all its mainstream appeal, Normal People has much to say about class and sexual desire. Conversations reconsiders the romantic structures we’re asked to place ourselves within, while Rooney’s third novel is no different. This too will surely be adapted to screen soon (and I’m going to start my campaign for Saoirse Ronan to play Alice as quickly as possible). In a review of Conversations for the BBC, Philippa Snow said it best when she described Rooney’s work as containing “an additional sly undertone of commentary on class” that helps “to shore up the impression of an Austen love affair playing out in a hip millennial milieu.” It’s no surprise, then, that Rooney is significantly influenced by writers like Jane Austen and George Elliot, two female writers from history who’ve seen their work returned to again and again, both as novels and in their various TV and film adaptations. Whether the adaptation of Conversations with Friends is as big a success as Normal People is yet to be seen, but it seems that, just like with Austen’s work, we’ll likely see more Rooney adaptations. 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Queerbaiting

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Conversations with Friends appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Earlier this week, I thought about these movies when Hulu released the trailer for their upcoming queer rom-com Fire Island. The film, due for release in the US on 3^rd June, transposes the action of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice into a queer space, the Bennets are no longer four middle-class sisters in the south of England but, instead, a group of gay men on vacation at the iconic summer spot. The subject of Austen’s novel and its many faithful adaptions seem perfectly primed for a queer retelling, not just because the words ‘pride’ and ‘prejudice’ have a strong connection with contemporary queerness but because its themes and ideas seem like a perfect fit with the image-obsessed world of contemporary gay men. 

Fire Island stars comedian Joel Kim Booster as a version of Elizabeth Bennett, a former waiter who ends up quarrelling with Conrad Ricamora’s rigid and awkward Darcy stand-in. SNL’s Bowen Yang becomes a version of Jane Bennett, the close friend and confidant who falls for and likely has their heartbroken by, a handsome doctor he meets at a party. Austen’s themes of social status and the strength of family units fit naturally here, only the lavish Pemberley becomes a glass-fronted beach house, and the family is a chosen one rather than blood. In contemporary queer politics, too, there has been a significant focus on status, social and financially, amongst gay men regarding their views on assimilation, approaches to sex, and the privilege awarded to wealthier gays, who often get the most attention in mainstream culture. It’s interesting to note that Fire Island features a distinctly diverse cast, both in terms of race and physique. This shouldn’t be radical but, in Hollywood, gay men are almost always white and adorned with rippling pectorals. 

Pride and Prejudice, of course, has been modernised before in the form of Bridget Jones. Renee Zelwegger’s bumbling publishing assistant-turned-journalist gets caught in a love triangle between the sensible and repressed lawyer Mark Darcy and the cheeky yet morally suspect Daniel Clever, which mirrors Elizabeth’s position when choosing between Mr Darcy and George Wickham. There have been many faithful adaptations, including the landmark BBC TV series, versions made for Bollywood, and the exceptionally brilliant 2005 version by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightly and Matthew McFadden pre-global domination thanks to his role in Succession. It would be remiss not to mention that Pride and Prejudice and Austen have significant name recognition. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in the west who hasn’t at least heard of it, and because of this, it’s not difficult to imagine studio heads and financiers thinking about them in the way they think about Spider-Man or franchises about any kind of man. But there’s clearly something in the story, thematically, which draws writers and filmmakers to it repeatedly. 

The wonder in movies like Fire Island or Bridget Jones’s Diary is precisely in the way they’re updated. It might sound simple, or even obvious, to say that what’s so appealing about them is how they take classic ideas and modernise them, but doing so creates a chain of sorts, whether we’re aware of it or not. It connects past and present and deepens the universality of their themes. The greatest example of this, to my mind, is Cruel Intentions. Released in 1999 to some substantial controversy, the film is an update of the French novel from 1792, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It’s a book filled with scheming and dissections of gender relations amongst the nobility in 18^th century France and, a decade before its teenifcation, it was made into an Oscar-winning period drama starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. Cruel Intentions moves the action to modern-day New York and fills its cast with wealthy socialites obsessed with their reputation and image.  Katherine, a version of the  Marquise de Merteuil, is a popular girl at an Upper East Side private school. Her image is well-curated, relying on supposed purity and moral superiority. In private, she is the opposite. She seeks out and enjoys sex and revels in manipulating other people’s lives. Her position in society hinges on this façade, and, by the film’s close, those around her take satisfaction in her downfall as her stepbrother, the equally vile and perhaps worse Sebastian, is valorised. 

Cruel Intentions is an inditement of the double standard inherent between men and women in the nineties as seen through the lens of several self-absorbed rich folks. Sebastian is brash, egotistical and loud. To him, women are dispensable, often games that he can partake in until he gets bored. He relishes in taking their purity and values his reputation as the kind of man from whom no woman is safe. As such, women fall at his feet. Katherine is his equal. She is desirable and confident. She’s sexually experienced but is routinely passed over by men for women who are virginal and innocent. Her experience as a woman is not valued and is not something Katherine can openly discuss. A video essay for The Take released a few weeks ago suggests that these dynamics make Cruel Intentions the clever, dark and lasting movie it is because Katherine’s character is a complex antagonist that we all find so captivating.  

Unfortunately, they don’t make films like Cruel Intentions anymore. Aside from Fire Island and Netflix’s 2019 film The Half of It, a modern queer take on Cyrano de Bergerac, they don’t seem to be in fashion. At least, not as much as they were in the late nineties and early noughties when classic work, particularly the plays of Shakespeare, were ripe for the pickings. Now? Not so much. 

On her YouTube channel, Broey Deschanel breaks down the reasons for this in her video on Baz Luhrmann’s campy, MTV-inspired fever dream Romeo + Juliet. The fact movies like Romeo + Juliet, or any of the ones mentioned above, take what is typically considered high culture (Shakespeare, 18^th-century novels, classic plays) and turn them into accessible, fun and modern interpretations goes against the cultural ethos; that which is exclusive and potentially harder to understand doesn’t belong to the masses. Instead, by transposing the action of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to a private school in America, modernising the dialogue, swapping out the period-accurate costumes for Amanda Bynes in make-up and a young Channing Tatum in sportswear, or placing The Taming of the Shrew amid nineties feminism, the themes and ideas of the play become accessible to teens. Moreover, they can be updated along the lines of gender and sexuality. For example, in 10 Things I Hate About You, Kat Stratford doesn’t need to deliver Katherine’s lengthy monologue that comes toward the end of Shakespeare’s play, one that attests women should be subservient to men, one that proves she’s truly been tamed. Instead, she can write a poem claiming she misses the man she loves, and they can kiss in the car park while nineties pop-rock plays in the background, but we get a sense that Kat has met her equal, not her master. 

Nothing defines culture more than those who try to gatekeep. Cultural institutions assign value to certain things, often enjoyed by the middle classes and usually requiring further education and money to consume. They panic that if everyone has access to these stories, they’ll lose value, and then what will they have left to make them feel superior? This, of course, is not the case. I love classic literature and, at times, I even love Shakespeare, but throughout my teens, my access to those stories was through modernised adaptations. I didn’t grow up in a house filled with books. I wasn’t introduced to lengthy high-brow film adaptations of Shakespeare. Instead, I saw the films that dispensed with the poncey finery, that allowed people to see the story anew. It seems a shame that filmmakers seem less interested in providing this in 2022. Here’s hoping Fire Island bucks the trend and ushers in a swell of new adaptations. 

Also Read: Too Awkward For Love: Understanding the British Rom-Com

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Modernised Adaptions appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

It occurred to me later that I’d absorbed a lot of Oscars information as a teenager when I spent my time watching acceptance speeches on YouTube and scrolling through the Trivia section on IMDb whenever I watched a movie. I also knew that the wealth of my knowledge-focused heavily on women because, as in most art forms, their work interested me more. The Oscars led me to some of that work, to the kinds of films I wasn’t aware of as a child, the type of films that played against the big blockbuster movies of my youth and instead featured women who did more than scream and ask the male lead what to do. This meant I’d go and see movies like Rachel Getting Married, An Education, or Blue Valentine with the money I got from my first job; films that introduced me to a different kind of filmmaking. I also used the Oscars as a basecamp for movie history by scrolling back through the lists of previous Oscar winners and becoming obsessed with Kathrine Hepburn, Judy Garland, Deborah Kerr, Barbra Streisand and many others, all of whom were women who had their own history of being overlooked or celebrated by the Academy. 

It seemed, however, that any Oscar titbits I might learn mainly were seen as useless information or, at best, a party trick doled out to impress people for a few minutes before they became bored when I tried to discuss the subject further. I knew an older gay man who could list every Best Picture winner in order after a few drinks at the pub and thought, maybe one day, I’d do the same with the actresses who had won but, beyond that, it wouldn’t be very useful. Occasionally, when I watched a film with my housemates, one would point and ask if an actor in the movie we were watching had ever won an Oscar. I could say yes or no and, in the cases of actresses, had a good idea about what they’d won for. Or, like had happened with Kidman that Saturday morning, a few small opportunities would appear from nowhere, and I’d be in my element before the conversation inevitably moved on. 

Some years after I summoned Kidman’s filmography as if through divine intervention, I was scrolling through YouTube, likely watching my favourite Best Actress speeches, when I came across a video dedicated to the tie between Barbra Streisand and Katherine Hepburn in 1969. This was one of the first Oscar stories I got wrapped up in after I began looking at its history. It featured two actresses I loved, unpacked the myths that had sprung up around that year, and, beyond all that, I was obsessed with the sheer black outfit Streisand wore to the ceremony. I clicked the video immediately, and at over fifteen minutes, the video deepened my understanding of that moment and my knowledge of two actresses I loved.

The video was uploaded by Be Kind Rewind, a channel dedicated to essayistic deep-dives into actresses who have won Oscars. As a standard format, each video focused on a particular Best Actress winner in a specific year by considering the narrative created around the winner, the other nominees, the cultural context that led to each woman accepting the golden statuette, and the socio-political implications behind Hollywood’s biggest night. After I finished the first video, I burned through all the analytical, insightful and well-researched video essays they’d uploaded so far and eagerly awaited new ones. 

As the channel grew, it expanded into videos that moved away from the Oscars, but its focus remained on women. In 2018, the channel released a video examining the differences between the many versions of A Star is Born, looking specifically at the role of ‘The Star’ and how it differed from Janet Gaynor to Judy Garland, to Streisand, and then Lady Gaga. They released “hot takes” on the recent award wins, particularly the 2019 race when Olivia Coleman won over Glenn Close, and an excellent essay on Madonna’s filmic references within her many music videos. There were lengthy and nuanced discussions of the Academy’s controversies, too. There was a set of two excellent semi-linked videos on #OscarsSoWhite. The first focused on Halle Berry’s historic win in 2001, and the second on the poor representation of Asian and Asian American women at the Oscars throughout history. In other videos, such as those dedicated to Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow, they considered the Harvey Weinstein of it all, a figure that looms large in any discussion of movies from the nineties and early noughties. In essence, the videos not only gave reverence to the women and the performances at their centre but connected them to a broader context in a way that fought back against the frivolity and in-built misogyny that coloured discussions about them in the past. So often, the performances nominated for Best Actress do not come from films nominated for Best Picture, which leads to Be Kind Rewind’s central message: that art made by, for, or featuring women should not be devalued or considered less than on this basis alone.  

For over a decade now, the Academy has expanded the Best Picture category from five to a possible ten, with the actual number varying each year depending on the number of votes it receives. In a 2017 article for Vanity Fair, Daniel Joyaux looked at the correlation between Best Picture and the Leading acting categories. Between 2011 and 2017, 30 actors and 30 actresses were nominated for leading roles, but as Joyaux notes, “while 21 of those best-actor performances came in films that were also nominated for best picture, only 12 best-actress performances came from best-picture nominees.” In focusing on Best Actress wins, Be Kind Rewind gives time and space to often-ignored or undervalued films. This, more often than not, is because the Academy, and the film industry at large, have shaped perceptions around what “prestige” means, about what “good” means, and it almost exclusively applies to male-led films. 

 “What is considered good or important cinema?” the narrator asks in their video on the 2020 Oscars race. “Thankfully, the Academy isn’t the only body attempting to answer that question, and their decisions are rarely considered sacrosanct.” So why are we drawn to them? The Oscars’ longevity and their centrality within the industry imply a sense of status, but that centrality also makes them a prime place to start for the cultural evaluation found in Be Kind Rewind’s videos. Part of loving the Oscars or being interested in their past is to acknowledge the Academy’s flaws. Increasingly, year by year, those who grew to love the Oscars when we were younger find ourselves increasingly annoyed that performances or movies that make waves or are considered significant are ignored. This, for me, was best encapsulated in this year’s ceremony, when not a single person I wanted to win took home an award (and other actors who I think deserved the top prize, like Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World, weren’t even nominated). 

In a recent interview with W, Izzy, the creator of Be Kind Rewind – who told the magazine she would like to remain “semi-incognito” – described the channel as a place for people who love classic cinema, and particularly the women who populate it, to come together. “There aren’t too many places to congregate and meet people who are interested in those same things, so the internet opened up the floodgates”, she said. “When I declared loudly online that this was what I loved talking about, it allowed others to find me.” This echoes the general notion of the good that the internet can do; it connects people. It is perhaps helpful to remind ourselves of this as being online is becoming increasingly hellish. There are corners of the web that offer people the chance to be passionate about things and for others to engage with that passion, to meet that enthusiasm head-on. For me, Be Kind Rewind’s YouTube channel is one of them.

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Nicole Kidman

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Be Kind Rewind appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

In Disney’s Alice in Wonderland from 1951, a cartoon I watched a lot as a kid, Alice follows the rabbit into the hole in the ground and falls into pitch darkness. She quickly accepts her fate, calmly waving her cat goodbye before settling into the descent. Her dress catches the air and becomes a sort of parachute, reducing the velocity of her fall into something more like floating. “After this,” she says, looking down into the total blackness, “I shall think nothing of falling down the stairs.” When she manages to turn on a lamp, light fills the rabbit hole, and a series of mirrors, paintings, and tapestries move past her. She picks up a book from a floating table and flicks through its pages. She lands neatly on a rocking chair that’s falling too, but quickly slips off it. Despite the fall being substantial, Alice doesn’t seem scared. She’s unperturbed by what might be at the bottom. Instead, she questions where she might end up, an implicit faith that she is not falling to her death but into something else. 

The word “fall” has many uses. We can fall into and out of things; we can fall over others. Things can fall apart, their very essence slipping away physically and metaphorically. We can fall in love, a phrase that conjures the stomach-churning fear of the drop just as much as any other. In America, Fall marks the coming of Winter. To fall is both a feeling and a practical danger. The first person narrator of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves speaks of a symbolic falling. “Alone, I often fall down into nothingness,” she says. “I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness.” 

The terror of falling, then, comes not from the drop but from our ability to see how it will end, and where we will land. If we can see the bottom, and calculate the risks, then it is a jump; out a window, from a plane, onto a moving train. A jump gone wrong becomes a fall. To fall is to feel gravity unexpectedly or against your own will. Falling is not a choice. In comic book movies, most notably several Spider-Man films, the female characters fall so they can be caught. Spider-Man swings into action, grabbing the falling women by their waist and taking them to safety. They are dropped from great heights, and the threat comes from the idea that they will fall to their deaths. 

Falling, however, is a guiltless way to die. The villains of Disney movies often fall to their deaths, so the hero cannot be blamed. They disappear down into dark trenches, off the edges of cliffs and into total darkness, their mangled bodies hidden from children’s watching eyes, and only when you’re an adult do you think of where they end up, of the gruesome splat that is suggested. The conservative values that have always haunted mainstream cinema mean that movies need morals. Bad guys need to be punished; often, this means they need to die, but a hero can’t kill. The villains fall to their deaths and do so by their own hand. They’re too greedy and make one final grab for power or revenge. The female villain in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade dies by falling into a hole in the ground, one that has opened up because she has disobeyed the temple’s rules and taken the Holy Grail over the threshold. Yet she is desperate to keep the treasure, entranced by the power it holds. It has landed on a ledge just below her and, with manic eyes and a grin of total desire, she reaches out for it. The hero holds her by one hand and begs for the other, the one outstretched across the ravine. But she refuses and falls down into an unknown place, into the mists that lurk below. 

When I started to think about falling earlier this week, I found a supercut someone made online of famous falls in movies. Cut together, the bodies moving through the air create something like a ballet. Their movements are matched and, each time, my stomach lurches as they tip over the edge. At first, there is the danger as people get too close to the edge, followed by a glimpse of the height. The two together suggest panic. Then there is the letting go, the slip, the trip, the push, which means someone is falling. In the supercut, the music kicks in. The fear in people’s eyes is emphasised, the plummet less of a spectacle than the feeling it induces. The arms flail as they desperately try to prevent the inevitable and then it’s over. They are caught or they are gone. 

Over the past few months, I have felt like I am falling. Toward what? I don’t know. The question continually seems to be whether I will land and where that will be. My falling is best encapsulated in the Bruegel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus from the 1500s. The painting shows a beautiful vista, a calm turquoise sea and the yellow sun setting in the background. This is the scene through which Icarus has plummeted to his death, but no one saw it happen. The people in the foreground go on with their tasks, herding sheep and ploughing fields. The ships remain stoic in the distance but, in the bottom right-hand corner, a body splashes around. Its legs jut out from the ocean, its head submerged. Is this Icarus? His wings melted by the sun, and so he has fallen into the ocean? He is drowning in the corner of the painting, and nobody is looking. No one has seen him go. What does it mean to fall when it isn’t up on the screen? How does a person fall in public and no one sees it? What happens when it’s all over? 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Feeling Stuck

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Falling appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

In Julie’s fantasy, the world around her reflects the life she is living. Her relationship with Aksel is nice but safe, and beginning to settle. She spends her weekends in the country with his friends and finds herself awkwardly out of place at artsy parties at which he is the centre of attention. She feels stuck. When she flicks the switch, the stagnant nature of her life is made real and Eivand, who offers the possibility of escape, is the only one not affected. In many ways, the two men, writes Vikram Murthi for The Nation, “represent the classic divide between stability and unpredictability, comfort and risk.” In one’s transition into adulthood, the idea of risk becomes less acceptable. We should all want stability. Yet, with Eivand, Julie wanders through the frozen world, talking and laughing, unaffected by whatever it is that weighs her down. Soon the sun starts to set on the fantasy and it has to end. Julie returns to Aksel, hits the switch again and the world comes back to life. She immediately tells him she doesn’t love him, and that she needs to leave. She takes a risk.

When I saw The Worst Person in the World back in February, I was blown away by it. Not just by this scene, which I felt envious of, but by the way the film encapsulates how it feels to be stuck. In many of the conversations I was having, I’d wanted to stop time, to get up and leave when things grew stale. Conversations from a few years ago began to reemerge, and it felt as if there was nothing new to say. I was still thinking about the same people and still considering the same emotional entanglements I’d been ruminating on for what felt like forever. At the same time, a new life was forcing its way in like blunt trauma to the head. So many conversations revolved around money, around salaries, around job security, around contracts, around marriage, around dating, around children, around engagements, around stability, around property, around the things we had chosen. As I listened to people talk about the lives they were building, I felt drawn to something the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman wrote in her experimental memoir My Mother Laughs: “It’s hard to see why I’ve remained an old child in black and white,” she wrote, and wonders if that elongated childhood, in which she never really grew into the kind of adult she now sees around her, is the “reason never knew how to make a life for .” 

I’d done some of the things my friends had. I’d made decisions they’d made, too, but I didn’t feel as happy with them. As time progressed, I wondered about the life I once thought I would live. It was one in which I wasn’t tethered to anything, where I would move from one place to another whenever I needed to. I never imagined a life where I owned property or one that meant I would stay in the town I was born in. Suddenly, it seemed like the life I had built was standing on shaky foundations, and all I could do was think back to the person I used to be and wonder where he went. 

Chris (Vicky Krieps) in Mia Hansen-Love’s Bergman Island returns to a previous version of herself, too. She has gone with her filmmaker husband, Tony (Tim Roth) to Fårö, an island in Sweden where the director Ingmar Bergman lived. Chris is working on a new screenplay that explores what happens when lost love returns, while Tony is engaged in Bergman Week, an annual celebration of the filmmaker. Hansen-Love allows us into Chris’s mind as she takes a walk with Tony one afternoon and explains, in detail, her story idea. Then we see it play out; a movie-within-a-movie. It features a young American woman, Amy (Mia Wasikowska), who attends the wedding of an old friend on the island. Her ex-boyfriend, Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie, again!) is at the wedding too, and Amy has long felt their relationship unresolved. At first, the two take a flirtatious pleasure in pretending they don’t know each other. But as the weekend progresses, they are drawn back into their old passions. 

Tony is reluctant to hear about Chris’s current project because it isn’t totally fiction. Amy is a version of Chris, and Joseph a version of her ex. She has been mulling over this story in her time alone on the island, dissatisfied with her own role in life. Chris, like Julie with Aksel, plays second-fiddle to Tony. She waits around for his screenings to finish, wanders about the island while he is wined and dined by the festival organisers, and when she does attend dinner with them, she engages in a discussion about whether it’s easier for men to make art, citing Bergman as an example. The director fathered nine children but wasn’t overly involved in their lives. How could he be if he wanted to make movies? 

The stark contrast brings to mind Rebecca Solnit’s essay on Virginia Woolf. After giving a lecture on the writer’s revered body of work, Solnit was asked by an audience member whether Woolf should have had children. “What I should have said to that crowd,” Solnit writes, “was that our interrogation of Woolf’s reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses.” Woolf considered having children but decided against it and, in questioning her decision, in asking why she did not do what was expected of her, it created a conflict between art and life. What would we rather have, Solnit asks, descendants of Virginia Woolf or To the Lighthouse? 

That Woolf felt stuck is interesting, too. In Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, we see Woolf’s final years dramatised. Virginia (Nicole Kidman) is trapped in Richmond, unable to go into London after a series of breakdowns have left her fragile. She tries to escape to the city, but is stopped at the train station by her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane). He tells Virginia he is only trying to help her, that it was the city that made her sick and their move to the country was intended to save her life. “My life has been stolen from me,” she tells her husband. “I’m living in a town I have no wish to live in. I’m living a life I have no wish to live. How did this happen?”

How it happened seems to be crucial. When I suddenly realised the type of life I was living wasn’t the one I wanted, it required a retroactive examination of my past choices, a forensic look at all the decisions that led to where I was. So often, life barrels along without anyone noticing, to the point that its almost cliché to say you woke up one day and everything seemed stark and wrong. Once, this type of talk was relegated to the classic mid-life crisis: a time of expensive sports cars, spray tans and taking up with younger lovers. Now, the quarter-life crisis, Juliana Piskorz wrote in 2018, “manifests itself in wanting to run away; to start again, or bury in anything that will distract from own reality.” 

In an essay for W magazine, Caitlin Quinlan suggested The Worst Person in the World, along with Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part II and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, was ushering in a new take on the “coming-of-age-film”. For the women at the centre of these movies, their twenties “mark a time of great change and panic”. In “approaching the so-called end of youth” these protagonists “navigate an anxious post-adolescent period that offers new freedoms alongside many of the same fears.” Ultimately, they’re riddled with questions of identity, and whether or not it’s too late to figure out who they are. 

All of these films chronicle the struggle but are less interested in the afterwards. In The Worst Person in the World, Julie might have found a career that works for her. In The Souvenir: Part II and Licorice Pizza, the protagonists are on a new path by the film’s close. The end of Bergman Island, however, shows us that Chris got through her state of panic. In the final sections of the film, it’s revealed that the film-within-a-film we’ve been watching, which we believed to be simply a manifestation of Chris’s imagination, is actually the film she has gone on to make. She calls cut and the characters become actors; the world of that story is deconstructed. Chris has not only worked through feeling stuck, but has progressed far enough to turn it into art. 

At the centre of feeling stuck is the idea that things are immovable, that change is not as possible as people say. When a life has been built over years and the allocated time for “fun” is over, what is left? To wade back into the uncertain waters navigated in your twenties can feel terrifying. They were hard enough the first time around. To announce that where you’ve ended up is not where you want to be is not easy, but what is the alternative? 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Euphoria

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Feeling Stuck appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Barnard followed The Arbor with The Selfish Giant in 2013. Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s short story of the same name, the film follows two teenage boys who become interested in some horses kept by the local scrap dealer for amateur racing. 2017’s Dark River came next, a grim and unrelenting tale of grief as a woman (Ruth Wilson) returns to the farm she grew up on in the wake of her father’s death. Through all this, Barnard was hailed as the next Ken Loach for her focus on the working classes and her style of social realism. The Selfish Giant was openly compared to Kes upon its release, with both exploring animals as a gateway into imagination and responsibility, although perhaps Barnard’s sense of class consciousness and social commentary doesn’t quite compare. Barnard has been likened to the classic novelist Thomas Hardy, too, in that her films often feature characters torn down by circumstance. 

Ali & Ava, Barnard’s latest offering, released in cinemas this weekend, feels less radical than its predecessors. It is undoubtedly less grim, centring on a tender love story between a landlord (who is, rather bizarrely, well-liked) and a teaching assistant in Bradford, over bleakness and woes. Of course, darker themes permeate the edges as Ava’s son takes issue with her new relationship and Ali struggles to come to terms with the end of his marriage. Still, the film is tender and, when it wants to, it confronts interesting dynamics of mixed-race relationships in working-class settings, though admittedly it never really goes far enough in that direction. 

If Ali & Ava feels less radical it may be because, in the decade Barnard has been working, the genre of working-class drama has grown substantially. Francis Lee’s beautiful yet brutal God’s Own Country told the story of an immigrant worker and the closed-off Yorkshire farmer he falls in love with, and Shane Meadows has added more and more to the world of his film This Is England with three successful television follow-ups. Steve McQueen’s latest mammoth project, Small Axe, featuring five feature-length movies aired on the BBC, looks at the past of the black British experience in the UK, while Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You looks at the present through the prism of sexual consent and the complications of millennial existence. The BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People has a strong sense of the class issues at its root, too, in exploring who it is that gets to escape, what plains different people live on, and how wealth disparity can sit uncomfortably within romance. 

This might be why Barnard is leaving her native Yorkshire for the first time with her next project, her first for television, directing an adaptation of Sarah Parry’s novel The Essex Serpent, starring Clare Danes and Tom Hiddleston. This marks a departure from her previous work in more ways than just its location. The Essex Serpent is a period piece, features prominent actors, and is being made for Apple TV+, which is a far cry from drumming up money for independent movies. It is also the first time Barnard is not writing the project, instead of working from scripts by Anna Symon. It feels not unlike Andrea Arnold’s stint as the director of Big Little Lies’ second season (though hopefully without the behind-the-scenes drama), and it will be interesting to see how Barnard adapts to this new form; if her tight close-ups and misty greyness will carry through. Will her keen focus on the people at the centre of her filmic worlds remain as astute? What sets Barnard apart from many other British filmmakers is her almost journalistic motivation.

The Arbor is driven by the sense of wanting to uncover Dunbar’s life and the effect her death at 29 had on her children. The Selfish Giant sprang from a child she met while filming The Arbor, a boy excluded from school who was now selling scrap metal. Barnard’s impulse was to follow him, to figure out his life and see what really mattered to him. Questioning why things are seems crucial to Barnard, even if it isn’t to her characters. Neither Ali nor Ava rally against their circumstances – but the make-up of their lives, their complicated pasts and lonely presents, are continually interrogated and siphoned through. The nature of their existence with societal structure is uninteresting to Barnard’s characters. Instead, their focus is on getting by, and on their personal values system. Where Loach might want to make a protest and lay things out starkly, Barnard lets it take a backseat to the emotions that drive people. After all, to moralise can become clunky and can often feel less real, even exploitative.

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Euphoria

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Clio Barnard appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

If you, like me, have been watching the second season of Euphoria, then you’ll know what it means to feel stressed. The opening episode alone featured a girl hanging her head out the window of a truck while the boy driving hit up to 90 mph, and later that same girl hid in a bathtub to avoid being caught having an affair (that second one was tenser than it sounds, I promise!). The premiere ended on a distinctly violent note, too, in which the show’s villain, if one can talk about Euphoria in such binary terms, was beaten to a pulp by the local drug dealer. Yet none of that compares to episode five, in which Rue (played exquisitely by Zendaya) goes on the run after refusing rehab, and, honestly, it’s still too soon to talk about it even two weeks later. But, in all the chaos, the show is often funny. A scene in a recent episode in which a large number of the female cast discuss the musical Oklahoma! in the school bathroom is a brilliant piece of comic writing. 

Amongst all this tension and humour, though, the show has consistently been a lightning rod for discussion by those who say they get the show and those who don’t. Its first season was measured by how many dicks were on screen (was it 30 or 80?), and it was dogged by a moralistic discussion of how much sex was too much. Was it appropriate to show teen characters, albeit those being played by adults, taking drugs and having sex? This was mixed up in the endless debate surrounding whether shows like Euphoria glamorise sex and drug use or condemn them, as if each piece of art needs to have a clear moral position on every issue it chooses to engage with. 

The show’s second season, currently airing on Now TV in the UK, has been chiefly used as a litmus test for coolness. If you say you don’t understand the show, you’re old and out of touch (either that or you admit to your own “uncool” teenage years). Moreover, people have questioned whether the show is any good when you peel back its shocking parts. Recently, various writers have levelled accusations of valuing style over substance, with Dazed calling the show a walking meme and The Guardian proclaiming season two contains “far too much nudity, sex and violence.” Still, the show has repeatedly dominated online conversation each week and has seen its viewing figures double since it premiered in 2019. Clearly, something appeals to people, and surely that can’t all be smoke and mirrors? 

I have found, perhaps surprisingly given its success, that the show’s second season reminds me of  John Cassavetes’ deeply depressing 1974 independent masterpiece about a woman’s declining mental state, A Woman Under the Influence. Not in its style – Cassavetes always favoured realism, and his films are brutal in their commitment to the grimness of reality – but in its central performance. It is certainly not light praise to compare Zendaya’s turn as Rue Bennett, a teenage drug addict, to that of Gena Rowland’s as Mabel, the latter a performance which crops up often in discussions of the greatest ever captured on film. Yet there is something to be said for the sheer panic of them; the way both actresses relinquish themselves totally to their respective roles.

Watching the first ten minutes of episode five, when Rue discovers her mother has flushed her stash, I saw shades of the scene in which Mabel’s family try to convince her to go to the hospital. Mabel’s demeanour moves from fear to denial to anger. When the doctor shows up, she makes nervous jokes, becoming increasingly uneasy as the inevitable dawns on her.  It is a heart-breaking scene, one that feels painful to watch—much like those opening ten minutes of episode five were, with Rue spiralling between severe anger, terror, and regret. 

A Woman Under the Influence was initially written as a play, but Rowlands told her husband, Cassavetes, she could not do the role eight times a week. It would be too demanding and too draining. Her performance earned her an Oscar nomination although, shockingly, she did not win, a decision that looks even more bizarre in hindsight. Zendaya has already won an Emmy for her role on Euphoria, and rightly so, but just as Rowlands found the idea of performing as Mabel, again and again, to be impossible, it’s a wonder Zendaya is able to manage the long shoots the show demands. Even the actress herself took to social media before season two started and told fans that it would not be an easy ride. Of course, the vehicle is different. A Woman Under the Influence was made with very little money, with Cassavetes literally stealing electricity and casting his own family in most of the roles. By contrast, Euphoria is a buzzy and expensive show funded by HBO. It routinely employs complex camera tricks, dream sequences, and complex deconstructions of its artifice, but the whole show feels rooted around Zendaya. Like Rowlands before her, Zendaya is carrying the weight of something on her back. Still, both actresses handle it with total grace and leave their audience in awe. I find myself, each week, texting my friends with the same simple worlds: Zendaya really is the best actress of her generation.

Also Read: Did High-End TV Replace The Mid-Budget Indie Film?

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Euphoria appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

The 10-episode limited series, now airing on StarzPlay, is adapted from the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel. The novel, which was widely successful prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, gained new attention in light of recent events when people (like me!) searched for something to help them make sense of things. The virus (Georgia Flu in the novel but unnamed in the show) is significantly worse than COVID-19, in that it causes most of the planet to be dead within the first hundred days, but the storyline still has startling resonance. It captures that early fear, that panic whenever someone would cough, whenever someone stood too close. It understands the dread of the unknown, of something approaching, getting closer and more real day by day. It captures the emotional pain of that time, too; one early heart-wrenching yet brief scene in the first episode shows a doctor talking to a room of children, in masks, rounded up because their parents are either dead or dying. Yet it gets things wrong, too. Anyone who walked around a supermarket in March 2020 knows the eeriness of empty shelves. But when Jeevan and Kirsten buy themselves $10,000 worth of supplies so that they can haul up and wait for the flu out, the store is both fully stocked and practically empty of patrons. Meaning, as Lucy Mangan put it in The Guardian, we can point at the screen and say no, ‘it wasn’t like that.’

Even so, the anxiety of the early pandemic scenes can be tough to watch. They bring back the push and pull between denial and fear rife in those early days. While watching the first episode, I was distinctly reminded of going to lunch with a friend before the UK went into lockdown and them commenting on how how much anti-bacterial hand gel I was using, which I would dab onto my hands when I came back from the toilet before I touched a set of cutlery, and after I’d pushed elevator buttons or opened doors. These fears came bubbling back when Jeevan first hears of the flu and looks around the subway carriage he’s riding on as everyone suddenly becomes a potential vessel for illness. Then, in episode three, we follow Miranda, who is in Malaysia for work, as she tries to figure out what’s happening and escape a country on the verge of collapse due to the virus.  

In all this, it might be tempting to read this television adaption as a response to the last two years, but it was, in fact, green-lit months before COVID-19 and, somewhat ironically, production on the show was delayed due to the pandemic itself. Still, it goes without saying that a show like this hits differently in light of the past few years. Or perhaps we can see it as an alternative to the last few years, to see what could have been if the worst imaginable had happened. 

The show, like the novel, is split into two distinct time periods—one in the days leading up to and immediately after the outbreak, and the other twenty years in the future when survivors now live in settlements without technology—but, unlike the novel, they’re spliced together in a way that makes the future seem inevitable. Before we flicker into the packed theatre and watch Arthur die, we see it derelict, overgrown with plants, and littered with rotting Playbills. Later on, when Jeevan and Kirsten stand on the platform of Chicago’s high-rise railway just after Jeevan learnt of the flu, it flashes forward to the same setting; empty and overgrown too. 

This visual style, which is profoundly compelling, is formed primarily by Hiro Murai, whose previous work includes episodes of Atlanta and music videos for Childish Gambino. Murai directs episodes one and three, both of which are slick and beautiful to look at but also deeply resonate in terms of their thematic explorations of art and love, the lasting effects of work that connects with us, and what we will crave when everything is gone. This is mainly due to Patrick Somerville’s deft adaptation of the source material, informed by writing on shows such as The Leftovers and Maniac, which understands the novel’s questions and expands on them. Or, as Katy Walderman put it in The New Yorker, Somerville’s take on the story considers how ‘Art matters to the world’ and ‘not just because it strengthens the social fabric—it’s an experience people can share—but because it notates and preserves the luminously erratic lives that is at great pains to capture.’

At the time of publication, four episodes are available to watch. The first three dropped together last week, and the fourth premieres today. Not only does the show harken back to pre-pandemic days, but also to pre-pandemic release models with episodes being put out every Sunday on StarzPlay (an add-on channel available with a Prime subscription or as its own subscription service via its website). This seems to be making a comeback, maybe for a good reason. Perhaps surprisingly for a show aimed at younger audiences, HBO’s Euphoria drops weekly too, and regularly dominates online conversation in the days that follow. The same can be said, though perhaps not as positively, about And Just Like That, a show that has had difficulty finding its footing and has been cross-examined week after week. Still, for Station Eleven, it feels like this decision might not only be about word-of-mouth and allowing the show to grow but also allowing audiences to consider and ruminate on the hefty questions the show has to offer. And ruminate we will, not just on the nature of art and the lasting effects of its reach, but on that possible future; on the idea of what could have been. 

Also Read: COVID-19 In Movies: Five Films About The Virus That Shook The Earth

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Station Eleven appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Since 2007, Hogg has been, slowly but surely, building up a repertoire of work that explores moments like this. Her first film, Unrelated, follows Anna, a married woman who feels a bit lost as she joins some friends and their teenage children on holiday in Tuscany. Her second outing, Archipelago (which features the restaurant scene), tracks a family bidding farewell to their son as he prepares to travel abroad for charity work. Then, Exhibition, her third film, chronicles selling a modern house in the centre of London. All three films are similar in style; they’re largely improvised, in which Hogg ‘writes a brief scene-by-scene plot summary and captures the actors’ spontaneity on camera.’ They’re deliberate and quiet, paced elegantly, and aren’t driven by plot. They’ve often been referred to as ‘middle-class social realism’ given they don’t feature any prominent actors (at least, they didn’t when they were made, as Tom Hiddleston features in all three films, but Unrelated was one of his earliest on-screen jobs) and they are all totally captivating. 

Then, in 2019, Hogg changed direction. Her film The Souvenir, which premiered at Sundance to rave reviews, has a lot in common with Hogg’s previous work in terms of its style, but it tells a more focused story. This semi-autobiographical tale follows Julie (Honour Swinton-Byrne), a young film student trying to figure out her graduate film, who meets Antony (Tom Burke), a posh bloke who works at the Foreign Office. Antony is direct, teasing, and powerful, while Julie tries to adjust, still unsure of herself. Antony, it turns out, is an addict, and as the film progresses, the nature of his addiction deepens and becomes increasingly worse. Julie, in perfect middle-class fashion, tries her best to ignore it, not to cause a fuss, borrowing money from her mother to help him out. Her ignorance becomes increasingly harder to sustain until, at the film’s climax, Julie is told that Antony has been found dead in a public toilet at the art gallery where they had their first date. 

While The Souvenir isn’t plot-driven, it had a more direct story than Hogg’s previous work. It features actors you may recognise, like Tilda Swinton as Julie’s mother, who appeared in some of Hogg’s early short films after they met through the filmmaker Derek Jarman, and Richard Ayoade, who appears in a crucial scene as a dickish filmmaker friend of Antony’s. The film, too, is refreshing in its approach to the privilege at its centre, as, frequently, the idea of coming from money is dissected, considering it not just from Julie’s point of view, but by those around her too, working-class voices that get a say (and it is their say, due to the film’s improvisational core). Whereas films like Archipelago certainly poke fun at the uptight poshness of it all, The Souvenir draws it out and pinpoints precisely how it sets Julie apart. 

The Souvenir: Part II arrives in cinemas this week (Friday 21^st January), and it perhaps improves upon its predecessor, which is no mean feat. The sequel, such a rarity in the arthouse world, follows Julie as she tries to make a graduate film about her relationship with Antony. The film is driven by Julie’s ambition to tell a story that everyone seems to second guess. Julie, like Hogg herself, doesn’t want to use a typical script, and the money men at her university tell her that, without one, they won’t fund it. The actors she casts as stand-ins for herself and Antony question the motives of their characters, can’t understand why Julie didn’t do more or how Antony was able to keep it from her. The cinematographer kicks off about the seeming randomness of the production, the way scenes change from night to day, and is frustrated that things aren’t clean cut. Julie, despite all this, pushes through. 

At the same time, Julie is still mourning Antony and is trying to piece together what happened during his final hours. She asks his friends what he had been doing, if they knew where he was, or how he ended up dead, but no one seems to know, or they don’t want to tell her. In response to the sudden loss, Julie tries to explore sex, too, as a means of coping (including one brilliant and radical scene in which a young actor, played by Charlie Heaton, goes down on her whilst she’s on her period and another in which she attempts to seduce a gay colleague). Julie is overwhelmed, professionally and personally, given she missed so much school when she was dating Antony, and now, the person she loved is gone. 

What’s exciting about the second instalment, too, is how it works to unpack the first. At the root of Julie’s film project is the dilemma of making autobiographical work. How do you remain true to actual events? How do you handle people critiquing or quibbling over the characters’ actions when the characters are meant to be you and the people you know? In a meta way, these questions are raised in how Hogg approaches The Souvenir films and, as such, Part II pares out the issues Hogg faces as a director telling her own past. 

Hogg is one of many filmmakers ushering in what seems to be an era of deeply personal filmmaking. In the same year The Souvenir premiered at Sundance in 2019, so did Lulu Wang’s The Farewell and Shia LaBeouf’s Honey Boy, two significant cine-memoirs. These were followed later that year by Pedro Almodóvar who released Pain and Glory, his most personal film to date, and Noah Baumbach skated around autobiographical connections to his film Marriage Story. Now, The Souvenir: Part II joins the ranks. All of which were preceded by movies like Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning Roma, Jennifer Fox’s bold masterpiece The Tale, and Tamera Jenkins’ Private Life in 2018. It’s unclear exactly what inspired this trend. Though movies based on personal experience are not a new artform, certainly there is something to be said about their prevalence during the past few years. Perhaps it’s a reaction to the state of the world; that sharing personal experience feels like a more necessary act given how little the world seems interested in that which shapes us, only taking into account our opinions in 260 characters and using those to define us.

Either way, next up for Hogg is another departure; a ghost story. The Eternal Daughter, due for release in 2022, is set to star Tilda Swinton and was filmed secretly in Wales during lockdown. Very little is known about its plot, but it sees Hogg move into genre filmmaking for the first time and stepping away, presumably, from the form of hyperrealism she began with. It seems, with her deeply personal masterpieces out of the way, Hogg is looking to stretch different muscles and I, for one, am ready to devour whatever she offers up. 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Reinvention

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Joanna Hogg appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

What does it mean to change, though? There is an illusion that we can totally reinvent ourselves and become a different person, but that isn’t, and I don’t think it can be, true. Take Eliza Doolittle in 1964’s My Fair Lady, a cockney flower girl who is turned, by a posh phonetics professor, into “a lady”, one who can fool the upper classes into thinking she’s one of them. Yet she is never entirely reinvented. Her essential nature and attitude remain to break out in short bursts, but that’s part of the goal, the heart of the transgression. The professor, Henry Higgins, wants people to be fooled, but by that very idea, it suggests he doesn’t believe she can change because then there would be no need for tricks. Instead, the surface is altered, the dusty face and the raggedy clothes substituted for beautiful dresses, neatly done hair, and a voice lacking a regional accent.

The 1964 film is based on the 1956 Broadway musical of the same name, which itself is based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. As suggested by its name, Shaw’s play is influenced by the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who sculpted his ideal woman out of ivory and fell in love with the inanimate statue. After praying to the goddess Aphrodite for a bride as perfect as his sculpture, the statue comes to life, and Pygmalion can marry the “perfect” woman. The conceit of Shaw’s play was that the woman had autonomy. She is not a lump of stone brought to life by desire but, instead, a living, breathing woman whom Higgins wants to change for reasons of ego. Shaw also changed the ending, with Eliza leaving Higgins’ house to marry a man who perhaps understands her more. 

This is a story that has been told and told, most recently by a Tik Tok star in the latest gender-swapped adaptation of the play for Netflix, but it’s not as stylish as it used to be. The idea of changing someone has become less appealing, and the idea of it in cinema is mocked endlessly. Think of all the gag-worthy tropes such as a woman removing her glasses and her “actually being hot” underneath them, or the “nerdy” guy who happens to have a six-pack. The idea that to love someone you need to change them or, even worse, that if you change someone enough you may come to love them is an idea best left in the 1900s. Instead, cinema today is perhaps more interested in self-reinvention, in trying to change because we want to, not because of anyone else. 

Throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, this has been typified by certain middle-aged women (mostly white ones) discovering themselves, such as in Under the Tuscan Sun, Eat, Pray, Love, and their various copy-cats and knock-offs. It often requires travel to exotic locales and is usually, though not always, in the wake of a divorce. These types of movies certainly have broad appeal. They can, at times, be delightful (I’m thinking, specifically, of 1998’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back starring Angela Basset and Whoopi Goldberg). Yet these movies suggest a particular type of lifestyle required for reinvention, i.e. the money to travel and the ability to take time off work. For most people, they are akin to fantasy, the type of life we’d love to lead if given a chance. To not be pinned down by the perils of full-time work, to go and fall in love with a European man who understands us better than our exes ever did. Instead, we’re forced to reinvent and grow in more awkward ways. 

Television shows that speak to the millennial experience generally understand this idea best. Lena Dunham’s GIRLS spent its run cataloguing awkward growth, as did Issa Rae’s Insecure and even Apple TV+’s Dickinson (the latter two shows both aired their final episodes this past week). For Emily Dickinson, the classic American poet at the centre of the show, reinvention is into the poet and writer she always wanted to be, leading to isolation in later years. Dickinson contextualises that into a moment of power as, in the final moments of the finale, Emily enters into her own mind and sails off into the open and calm waters, suggesting that Dickinson’s most significant relationship was with herself and the poems she would write. Show creator Alena Smith told Digital Spy the show’s final scene is an image ‘of female creativity’ and that Emily is swimming towards her own poems that she is yet to write.’ For a show that has spent its time trying to not only modernise Emily Dickinson, a poet from the 1800s who has long been speculated about, but also trying to give reason to the fact Dickinson chose not to publish her near two thousand poems before she died, this ending is fitting. It is a moment of self-actualisation, of realisation, one that suggests Emily has found her calling and will ultimately be happy within her own mind. 

The prolific essayist and screenwriter behind The Panic in Needle Park and 1978’s A Star is Born, Joan Didion, who died last week, wrote that we should not forget the people we used to be. This might be what Eliza realises when she leaves Higgins, that the scrappy flower seller deserves more. It could well be what Emily thinks as she rows out into the sea, that to be the writer she has always wanted to be will require a certain level of solitude, and she owes that to the girl she once was. “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not”, Didion wrote in her 1966 essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’. “Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

It seems, then, that change neither has to be as drastic nor as earth-shattering as people may suggest, as some resolutions you’ll undoubtedly hear in the coming weeks will be tied to. Instead, change and reinvention can be personal. It can be slight and specific. It can be rowing into your imagination or coming to understand your self-worth. What’s crucial about change, though, is that we don’t forget who we were and how we used to be. 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Millennial Comedies

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Reinvention appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

This time of year lends itself to these types of movies and, as you can probably tell, I don’t like most of them. I could spend the next few hundred words explaining why but, well, what’s the point? There’s nothing less cool than taking time out of your day to talk about why you don’t like something (unless that something is harmful or dangerous). Instead, it seems a better use of my time (and yours) for me to talk about the films I do watch around this time of year, albeit not ritualistically. Instead, I watch these movies some years and, then, maybe I won’t the next.  So this is what might be called “My Alternative Christmas (Film) List.” 

Something Sentimental…

If you’re partial to something loving at Christmas, something that feels nice and isn’t concerned with all the terrible things happening out there, I’d suggest Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 film The Little Shop Around the Corner. It follows two department store workers during the run-up to Christmas who dislike each other by day but, without realising, correspond via love letters at night after the answering of a “lonely hearts” ad in the newspaper. The film, based on a Hungarian play, inspired the likes of Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail and has all the makings of a classic romantic comedy: two bickering central lovers, played by Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, who explore how thin the line between love and hate really is. 

If this sounds too twee, then love with a more cynical edge is offered in Billy Wilder’s 1960 masterpiece The Apartment. C.C. Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon, is a down-on-his-luck office worker in New York City who lets his bosses use his apartment as a place to take their mistresses. One of them is Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), who operates the lift in Baxter’s building, a young woman who wants love but looks in all the wrong places. Her affair with her married boss leads her to some dark places and to the apartment over Christmas but, this time, with Baxter. Like When Harry Met Sally (another film you could maybe watch around this time of year because, well, why not?), it sets its finale on New Year’s Eve and offers a classic “running through the city to be with the one you love” scene. 

Something Darker… 

There is, however, room for something darker at Christmas. It can’t all be cheerful, can it? The darkness could be found in John Houston’s 1987 film, The Dead. Houston’s last film stars his daughter, Anjelica Houston, in an adaption of James Joyce’s short story set during a Christmas party. The movie, like the story, concerns itself with those who aren’t present at this time of year, who haunt the edges of our lives and who we can’t forget. As the party progresses, the discussion moves to politics and the disputes taking hold of Ireland at the turn of the century, the nature of religion in Irish society. It captures, quite perfectly, how this time of year can, for some, feel quite melancholy. 

Even darker, maybe, is Tim Burton’s 1992 film, Batman Returns. Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman is everything you might ask for; standing in a skin-tight PVC catsuit, stitched together herself, in front of a neon sign that reads “Hell Here”. Her performance, perhaps one of the greatest ever given in a superhero movie, is majestic. It’s equally terrifying and heart-breaking as Pfeiffer moves from the timid and sad Selina Kyle to the confident and revenge-seeking, whip-toting anti-hero. If Pfeiffer isn’t enough to tempt you (and, if so, what’s wrong with you?), then the film also offers killer Christmas clowns, attempted murder, political corruption, and penguins strapped to rockets. This film completely sells itself. 

Something Queer…

If, instead, you want something totally different, you might enjoy Sean Baker’s 2015 film, Tangerine. Over the space of a single Christmas Eve, Trans Sex Workers Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, respectively) go in search of the pimp who has been cheating on Sin-Dee with cisgender women. The movie, shot entirely on iPhones, is a chaotic and wild tale of friendship set in the less glamorous parts of Hollywood. Both Rodriguez and Taylor give excellent performances that are both deeply rooted and vibrant. 

While it may be very different tonally, Todd Haynes’ beautifully distant Carol is another queer favourite. Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, Carol examines queer desire in there 1950s with Cate Blanchett starring as the titular character and womaniser. When she meets Therese (Rooney Mara) and falls in love, the connection brings complications. Be prepared for Blanchett in fur coats as a light dusting of snow falls across upstate New York, and sensual sex scenes in motel rooms. It is also one of the few queer romances set in the past with a happy ending. What’s more Christmassy than that? 

Something Underrated… 

Underrated is one of those words that, when applied to film and TV, is rarely accurate. It’s often used to mean: “Hey, I like this film, and it isn’t talked about every day, all the time, ergo it’s not being appreciated”. However, I’m going to make a case for two Christmas films that are underrated. The first is Die Hard. 

Okay, okay! I know! I just said “underrated” is misused and then named one of the most famous action movies of all time, but hear me out. Die Hard does not deserve the debate around whether it’s a Christmas film or not; it categorically is. It should be up there. It should be number one. The setting is a Christmas party, there are Christmas-themed jokes abound, and it ends with John McClane (Bruce Willis) riding off into the sunset as “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” plays over the credits. Come on?! How is this different from a child creating sadistic traps for two burglars? It isn’t. Die Hard is underrated as a Christmas film because its status is constantly questioned. It’s darker in tone, obviously, and it’s aimed at adults rather than families (which seems to be some unwritten rule that any canonically Christmas film must be watchable by kids. I don’t have time to get into how fucked up that is!). Listen, if I want to spend my time off work watching a sweaty Bruce Willis be all macho in a tank top then that is my right. Moreover, I assert, it should be everyone’s right! Viva La Vie Die Hard! Long live a sweaty Bruce Willis! 

I’ll step off my horny soapbox now and point towards another underrated Christmas film: The Family Stone. Not only is the cast stacked (Sarah Jessica Parker, Rachel McAdams, Clare Danes, Dermot Mulroney, Luke Wilson, AND Diane Keaton), but it is also far more willing to engage with just how annoying the holiday season can be. As Parker’s uptight Meredith goes, for the first time, to spend Christmas with her fiancé’s family, we see all the awkward slip-ups, passive aggression, and slanging matches in the kitchen. This, surely, is what Christmas is like for most people. I refuse to believe it is as harmonious as supermarket adverts suggest. Let’s face it: Christmas is annoying. Sure, it’s fun and can be good, but it’s never without a hitch. Let’s just embrace this fact and allow The Family Stone to be our beacon. And, if you will allow me – in the spirit of Christmas – to step onto my horny soapbox once more: DERMOT MULRONEY IN A TURTLE NECK! HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!

Also Read: Who Did It Better: Miracle on 34th Street

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On An Alternative Christmas appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Not long after this, with different friends who were new parents, we talked with genuine passion about our respective parking situations (me, in a block of city-centre flats with no designated parking space, and them in a terraced house on a popular street near the centre of their village further North). The baseline was that neither parking situation was sufficient and the powers that be (in my case, the people that manage the building and, in theirs, the council) were not acting appropriately. It created in us the type of specific rage that causes you to write a strongly worded email. With others, too, there were conversations about iPads made for children so they can hold them easily, the nature of museums and art galleries essentially becoming theme parks that allow kids to run-ragged while ignoring everything within them, and pointed dismay at the sanitised cartoons and “bubble-wrapped” entertainment shoved in front of kids these days that feel infantilising. Inevitably, what linked each of these conversations was the key phrase they ended with; “God, we sound old.” 

Of course, the word “sound” is doing the heavy lifting here. We are not “old”. Not literally. Most of the people I was speaking with were between twenty-six and twenty-eight, all embedded, to varying degrees, in adulthood. Bins or parking spaces would act as a gateway drug to deeper conversations about responsibility, about how all our decisions seemed to be taking on new weight, with everything feeling both monumental and terrifying. I couldn’t help but notice, too, that these conversations had begun to arise as the idea of turning thirty had become a reality. 

While we can argue all day about the nature of what it means to turn thirty in contemporary culture, when the housing and job markets are abysmal, I couldn’t deny its power. To mention turning thirty was to feel a shift in the room; the move from one decade to the next seemed to act as a marker that everyone wanted to ignore. It wasn’t just my friends, either. On her latest soul-destroying album, 30, Adele takes stock of her life in relation to all the things she thought she had (and then lost) while, in his Netflix special, Bo Burnham notes that turning thirty boils down to his “stupid friends” having “stupid, fucking ugly, boring children”. 

This same preoccupation panics Jon (Andrew Garfield) in Lin Manuel Miranda’s magnificent tick, tick…BOOM! The film is an adaption of Jonathan Larson’s autobiographical musical, first performed in the early nineties before his untimely death at the age of thirty-five and the opening of his most famous show, Rent. As the film begins, Jonathan is haunted by a ticking sound, counting down to his thirtieth birthday. In the first song, “30/90”,  Jonathan, banging out the tune on a piano, sings: “Stop the clock / Freeze the frame”. He is twenty-nine and doesn’t want to turn thirty without having accomplished what we wanted to. He begs whoever he can to stop time, to give a chance to get more done. By thirty, he notes, Paul McCartney and John Lennon had written their final song together, and Jonathan’s parents had two children. So he hands in his notice at the diner he works at to focus solely on his upcoming workshop for his Sci-Fi musical Suburbia and, as a result of his single-minded determination, causes the breakdown of his relationship with long-term girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp).

The film also pays homage to Stephen Sondheim, the prolific Broadway composer & lyricist behind several significant musicals. In the movie, Bradley Whitford plays Sondheim in two scenes and, in another, Sondheim’s actual voice can be heard in a voicemail left on Jon’s answering machine. Sondheim, who deeply inspired Larson (and Miranda), also wrote for movies, including the song “Sooner or Later” for Dick Tracy, performed by Madonna, for which he won an Oscar. In tick, tick… BOOM!, Jon aggressively points out that Sondheim had his first Broadway show by twenty-seven. While it’s true that Sondheim’s early works, West Side Story and Gypsy, for which he wrote the lyrics to Jule Styne’s score, have entered into western theatrical and cinematic canon as two of the greatest American musicals of all time, it wasn’t until Sondheim was in his forties that he began to make truly challenging and experimental work that solidified his position as The Greatest. Until then, critics found his musicals confusing and most closed relatively quickly. Yet in 1970,  with Company, when he was forty-years-old, his career changed. Company was followed by Follies when he was forty-one, A Little Night Music when he was forty-three (which was later turned into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor in 1977), Sweeney Todd when he was forty-nine (unfortunately adapted to horrific film by Tim Burton in 2007), and, in his fifties, he finished both Sunday in the Park with George (which many consider his magnum opus and from which tick, tick…BOOM! takes particular inspiration) and Into the Woods (turned into a watered-down film by Disney in 2014). In the realm of Sondheim, twenty-seven was still young, and he went on to produce most of his significant works in later life. He died last weekend, aged ninety-one, with a wealth of adoring fans and a long career of genre-defining work.

On the one hand, Sondheim is an example of the “boy genius” who swooped in and wrote lyrics like “There’s a time for us / Someday a time for us / Time together with time to spare / Time to learn, time to care.” On the other hand, Sondheim is an example of longevity, of trying again and again. In fact, in the final act of tick, tick… BOOM!, Jonathan’s agent tells him this is what writing is; once one piece is done, “you start the next one”. Over and over, as you get better and better, until something sticks. This is what Sondheim did. 

“Old”, then, as a word has a duality to it that can be both literal and figurative, all of which can be summarised in that classic adage: “You’re only as old as you feel.” There are some I’ve met aged twenty-eight who feel older than some people I know in their fifties and sixties, those who’ve used their time to grow and figure out who they are and what they want to say. To me, this seems more valuable than turning thirty with everything you ever wanted because, well, then where do you go? 

It is “old” as a state of mind that creeps in, that slips into a conversation as plain mundanities. It is the worry that the life and vibrancy of youth are giving way to practicality, that a life lived without attention to detail is being left behind over something that is becoming obsessive and riddled with consequences. This isn’t new. In terms of astrology, this period is often called “Saturn’s Return”, defined, by Cosmopolitan, as “a major astrological coming-of-age moment.” It occurs when Saturn returns to where it was in the sky when you were born, which happens “every 27 to 29.5 years.” Meaning, the years approaching your thirties are, astrologically speaking, testing because of fate (and not because, between those years, life becomes “real”).  It’s a big moment, for some. Adele even got a tattoo of Saturn on her arm and wore planet-shaped earrings to perform outside the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles to commemorate the release of 30. 

It may be worth looking to the future, at Richard Linklater’s upcoming adaption of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, which is currently in production (and will be for the next twenty years!). The musical follows a trio of successful creatives who were once good friends navigating success and stains on their relationships. The film will star Beanie Feldstein as the alcoholic novelist Mary, Ben Platt as jaded lyricist Charley, and Blake Jenner as the superstar composer and film producer Franklin.  (Incidentally, Feldstein’s character, Julie, played Mary in the high school production of Merrily featured in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird). Early in the show, when it is revealed that Charley and Franklin haven’t spoken in years, Mary begins to question why things can’t be like they were. She sings: 

We were nice,
Kids and cities and trees were nice,
Everything?
I don’t know who we are anymore,
And I’m starting not to care.

It may be Merrily’s conceit, that it is told in reverse, starting when the trio are successful but unhappy, and working backwards to one night on the roof of their first New York City apartment, when they watched Sputnik blip across the sky, that makes it so affecting. The show ends on a hopeful note, with all three excited for the future. Yet when the curtains drop, we realise we’ve already seen their lot, and it will not hold as much promise as they’d hoped. When the show finishes, we see what Mary is pining for early on, and we understand exactly why. 

It seemed that most of the conversations I was having with friends, as mundane as they may be, ran with an undercurrent of dissatisfaction just like this. Why can’t things be like they were? Why do life’s various obstacles feel much bigger? More powerful. I’ll have to wait another twenty years to see if I still feel this way when the movie comes out, but then, maybe, I’ll be in a different place too. One that is even further removed from now, way past thirty. 

Also Read: The Highest Grossing Musical Films of All Time

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Being “Old” appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

I started thinking about this a few weeks ago, and in doing so realised I am not drawn to movies with straight male leads. I felt this predilection came down to over-saturation, a result of all the straight-male films of my youth. I had seen enough of Stallone and Brosnan, plenty of Skywalkers and Potters, had seen many young men become heroes, and I was bored. Of course, I’d watched men turn bad too: De Niro in the mirror with his pistol, Brando slurring about disrespect on his daughter’s wedding day, Edward Norton imagining Brad Pitt – the list goes on. I’d never felt starved of maleness, never questioned the depths and layers that men contain. It turned out my not being drawn to them wasn’t so much because I didn’t like them on any inherent level, but because I felt they didn’t offer as much as the films devoting themselves to women and queers. As such, I spent my teens and twenties trying to fill in the gaps of everyone else, looking to the movies that didn’t see women as nagging girlfriends or wives, sexual objects to be used, or bodies to be killed just so the male protagonist has someone to avenge. 

When I went back and tried to seek out some of the male-led films I’ve seen recently, however, I realised that not only was I tired of seeing them, but the roles themselves had grown increasingly dull too. It seems to me that, now, they all fall into one of two categories: the Anti-Hero, or the Good Guy. 

The Anti-Hero is, by now, maybe a cliché in itself. This man will do bad things (sell crack, cheat on his wife, kill people, etc.) but he will do it for revenge or for some type of vigilante justice. He may do it out of what he feels is obligation or honour, trapped in a system or family he cannot escape. He will, almost always, have a traumatic past he is attempting to outrun (but can’t), and that will make him stoic and difficult to love. More often than not, a woman will rise to the challenge and serve as the key to unlock him, offering redemption by means of her virtuous, one-dimensional womanhood. The Anti-Hero has questionable morality, too, but we might be able to see, through it all, that they are good, or, at least, some version of good. In short, discussions of their character in reviews, think pieces or books will almost certainly use the phrase “love to hate.” 

In Paul Schrader’s recent thriller, The Card Counter, we see the Anti-Hero at its apex. Oscar Isaac plays William, a man who travels across America going from casino to casino. In prison, he learnt how to count cards, and as long as he doesn’t win too big, the house doesn’t mind. However, his pesky past catches up with him in the form of Cirk (Taylor Sheridan), a young kid hellbent on revenge for how the US Military treated his father. You see, Cirk’s father, just like William himself, worked at the notorious torture site Abu Ghraib, performing horrific abuses of human rights day-in-day-out in the name of “anti-terrorism”. William served time for his participation, while the head-honchos got off scot-free. This real-life scandal, which broke in 2003, saw grinning soldiers posing with the bodies of dead prisoners, alongside video and photographic evidence of totally dehumanising torture including sexual abuse, forced injections, extreme violence, intimidation, sleep deprivation and, in at least one case, murder. Many of those who appeared in the photos, as the visible face of the scandal, received jail time as a result of their actions, while the senior personnel remained mostly untouched. 

I can see Schrader’s thinking here. William was a man following orders from upstairs, and then he paid the price for it. There is a sense of the underdog versus “The Man”, a glimpse of a generational preoccupation that frames those down below as unwillingly complicit, but it doesn’t quite stick. For me, watching a movie that asked me to sympathise with William, who was traumatised by all that he witnessed and enacted—most of which the film refuses to show us (thank God!), perhaps knowing that an audience wouldn’t abide it—was a little much. All I could see as he talked about his past was the real-life images of Abu Ghraib, and how sick to my stomach they made me feel. It seemed that, after over a decade of prevalence, the anti-hero needed to break new ground, to push the capacity for sympathy further and find root in something truly heinous. Consequently, we got The Card Counter. 

Now for that second type: the Good Guy. He is almost the exclusive property of Marvel movies, of the family-friendly, four-quadrant epics. He is too good, so good his morals put him at odds with the world around him. He sees righteous truth everywhere and feels obligated to fight for it. He will be wary of the burden his work puts on those around him. He will be so good that he will have to push his loved ones away; they cannot decide for themselves whether or not to take on his almighty goodness. Instead, he will leave them, or tell them it’s all too dangerous. The Good Guy is defined, naturally, by his goodness. 

When I teach classes on Character, one of the central comments I hear from my students is that “good” might as well equal “boring”. Yet many of the movies they discuss before class starts, when they talk about their weekends, are filled with these kinds of men. Most recently, Marvel’s Shang-Chi, who sits as the most uninteresting person in a movie filled with one-dimensional caricatures. His desire to be good is, sure enough, framed by a darker past, but his inoffensive nature, and lack of any objective complexity, simply offers him up as a man doing good because he is good.

In all, while it’s a far rockier terrain, women in movies these days get to have more fun. Each year, as the Oscars approach, many performances by women are thrown into the ring with only five-nominee slots available leading to year after year of “snubs”. To think of this year’s line-up: Olivia Colman’s reflective mother in The Lost Daughter, Kristen Stewart’s paranoid princess in Spencer, Lady Gaga’s ruthless wife in House of Gucci, Ruth Negga’s white-passing socialite in Passing, Penelope Cruz’s conflicting mother in Parallel Mothers, Jessica Chastain’s television preacher in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and the list goes on. As for the men? Well, they’re much less exciting, arguably much less profound. They’re all roles we’ve seen in some iteration before (not least because one of them has been played time and time again, by actor after actor). They’re good guys, or they’re anti-heroes. And they are, for the most part, terribly dull. 

Also Read: For Your Consideration: Sci-Fi, Comedy & Oscar Snubs

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On The Search For Difficult Men appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

All this sounds a little like Amy’s “Cool Girl” monologue from Gone Girl; an impossible set of standards that seem incredibly flattening. Of course, the images of how women “should” be are far more pervasive and often sit in relation to capitalist agendas, as chronicled well in Jia Tolentino’s 2019 essay “Always Be Optimizing”. Still, the image of the modern man is continually pushed and then pushed against, especially by conservatives who have a vested interest in tradition. Take, for example, Harry Styles wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue in November 2020, which prompted right-wing commentator Candice Owens to tweet, “no society can survive without strong men”. Yet the act also drew criticism from the progressive left and queer community, who, you might imagine, would surely celebrate the blurring of gender lines. Actor Billy Porter told the Sunday Times he was unimpressed that Styles was the first man to wear a dress on the cover of Vogue, given that he had been doing it on the red carpet for years. The sentiment was echoed online, with people criticising the collective celebration of Styles, given that the act of wearing a dress is far less radical than anything queer people have been doing for decades. 

Last week, for Halloween, Styles dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and created a somewhat similar backlash. One user posted a photo of Styles in the costume next to a screenshot of another tweet: “Bitches be like “HARRY STYLES ENDED TOXIC MASCULINITY” and it’s the ugliest outfit you’ve ever seen.” The aesthetic value of the costume is irrelevant here. Instead, it seems that the underlying message is quite conservative; that straight men should remain within a straight aesthetic, and any attempts to merge with a queer one, or anything that crosses gender boundaries, ought to be met with hostility. 

THE IDEA OF THE MODERN MAN CAME BACK TO ME A FEW WEEKS AGO when I saw Dune and The French Dispatch in the space of two days. At the centre of both movies was Timothée Chalamet, who, like Styles, often draws attention for the way he dresses and is regularly discussed as a symbol of modern masculinity. As critic Guy Lodge put it in The Guardian last weekend, Chalamet’s image presents “a new kind of Hollywood leading man, rejecting macho stereotypes in favour of a kinder, more wholesome delicacy.” As a Hollywood leading man, Chalamet is often compared to Leonardo DiCaprio given, as Interview Magazine put it, “their similar career trajectories and the schoolgirl crushes they inspired during their respective rises to fame”. But perhaps this comparison doesn’t quite fit anymore.

If DiCaprio’s boyish good-looks were his gateway to fame, the one-two-punch of Titanic and Romeo + Juliet leading him to be on almost every girl and gay boy’s mind in the 1990s, he no longer has that vibe. In 2021 he is, perhaps, closer to an older idea of masculinity, especially if one is to analyse his apparent penchant for younger women, his life lived on yachts in sunny locales, and his choice of roles that retain his image as the classic heterosexual leading man. While Chalamet’s role in Dune may push similar buttons as something DiCaprio might have played in his youth, his political activist in The French Dispatch is far from it. 

In looking for this straight male linage—one that has been thrust upon Styles too—the idea of a modern movie star is difficult to comprehend in relation to the “modern man”. Chalamet, to my mind, doesn’t fit in the mould of DiCaprio but, instead, feels closer perhaps to Anthony Perkins, both in body type and in the air of sensitivity that he could portray. He, too, feels closer to the quiet brooding of Montgomery Clift, whose tender presence in films like From Here to Eternity mirrors Chalamet’s in, say, Call Me By Your Name or Lady Bird. In this respect, there is a sense of James Dean, too, with Chalamet often embodying an emotional teen looking to be understood.  What connects these men beyond a particular type of style is their queerness. Perkins and Clift were both gay men while Dean, it is often rumoured, was bisexual. It seems that drawing these lines has the effect of making stars like Chalamet and Styles make more sense within the Hollywood system, that their version of stardom is not wholly new but built upon older Hollywood stars, whose queerness was hidden. That is not to suggest that either Chalamet or Styles are hiding queerness, although it is entirely possible. 

I AM FAR MORE INTERESTED IN A LEFTIST AND QUEER CRITIQUE OF THE “MODERN MAN” than I am in anything right-wing pundits might want to say. Those arguments are hollow and only work to uphold long-standing power dynamics that rely on the diminishment of freedom. Yet the queer and leftist arguments are more complex to unpick and are fascinating when they run close to conservative lines, albeit from a different direction. 

Take, for example, Porter’s discussion of casting during the 2019 Drama Actor’s Roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter. “If ‘flamboyantly…’ wasn’t in the description of the character, no one would see me, ever. For anything,” he said. “Which wouldn’t be so enraging if it went the other way,” he continued, “because straight men, playing gay, everyone wants to give them an award” as if to say, “Thank you for gracing us with your straight presence.” This is a valid argument (one I have made before), one that feels even deeper when, as Porter puts it, you are a person of colour and a “queen”. Gay men, especially gay men of colour, rarely get leading roles in major movies and never get straight parts if they’re openly gay. When you open that out to lesbians, trans, and non-binary folk, the numbers get worse still. 

What made this moment even juicer, at least in the eyes of Twitter, was that he said this in front of Hugh Grant and Richard Madden, two actors who had recently played gay in A Very English Scandal and Rocketman, respectively. In fact, during the short video clip, the camera cuts to Madden looking oddly uncomfortable as if the editor wants to suggest it is him Porter is addressing. In response, some drew attention to rumours of Madden’s sexuality, which has seen him linked with actress Ellie Bamber as well as actors Brandon Flynn and Froy Gutierrez. What followed, then, was a discussion about disclosure of sexuality, the right to privacy, and if sexuality can ever be private. Madden, in 2019, told The New York Times he would not discuss his sexuality or personal life, but, culturally, it raised questions about the regard sexuality is given during these types of discussions. This idea recurred recently with The Morning Show actress Julianne Margulies saying that those debating her role as a lesbian season two of the Apple TV+ series are “making assumptions” in presuming her casting adds to the debate of straight actors playing gay. 

In all this sits the complexity of the “modern man”. Not the one GQ wants you to be, but the one people have been asking for when they talk about ending “toxic masculinity”. That buzz phrase, which has slithered through the past decade to the point it has become almost entirely meaningless, is what fans of Chalamet or Styles claim they are putting an end to. However, this often means crossing into what has often been considered a queer aesthetic, one that exists beyond rigid gender binaries. This, perhaps rightly so, makes some queer people feel uncomfortable, that they might question their intentions. After all, the “metrosexual”, which has included the likes of David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Zac Efron as its symbols, was a capitalist co-opting of queerness to make it palatable, and more importantly, sellable, to the straight male consumer. It is not, then, unjust for queer folks wanting those who engage with a queer aesthetic to have some connection to it beyond the superficial. In short, it is not an irrational fear. Yet it seems prudent that queerness often positions itself as something that breaks down barriers and binaries, something that, in theory, would liberate straight folks from oppressive gender regimes too. In practice, though, as “straight” men break free from a personality defined by Lynx Africa and bootcut jeans and into something akin to visual queerness, it is met with hostility or mocking.

Next year, Styles will appear in Don’t Worry Darling and My Policemen, the latter a film in which he plays a gay man in the 1950s. He, too, if rumours are to be believed, has on the horizon a relatively significant role in the MCU (his first appearance is in the end credits scene for The Eternals, which coincidentally also stars Madden, though just how he will fit into the franchise’s future is unclear). As for Chalamet, up next for him is Wonka, a musical exploring the campy chocolatier’s origins, Dune Part II, and a supporting role opposite his supposed predecessor DiCaprio in Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. It would seem that, as the profiles of these two actors grow and more like them begin to spring up, we can expect more discussion of what a “modern man” truly is. I am not sure, however, that we are entirely ready for it.

Also Read: How The “War On Terror” Changed Hollywood

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On the “Modern Man” appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

In 1993, the year I was born, The Piano won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, making Campion the first woman to win this award A few months later, it took home three Oscars for Campion’s screenplay, and for the performances of its two actresses: Hunter and Anna Paquin (the latter then only 11-years-old.) I’ve sometimes wondered, albeit rather casually if my connection to The Piano stems from being “born” around the same time as its release; if I didn’t think something about its gothic sexuality illuminated what the zeitgeist was like as I entered the world. Either way, The Piano acted as my entry point to Campion’s work. Hers were films, often period pieces, which focused on women. First, there was Ada, a woman who had lost the ability to talk and was married off to a man she had never met. Then there was Fanny’s bubbly and open nature in 2009’s Bright Star and, not long after, Isabelle Archer in Campion’s less-successful adaption of a Henry James novel, manipulated by those around her. There was, too, Campion’s slightly more mainstream effort, In the Cut; a dark erotic thriller that failed to capture much praise but which was, to me, truly exceptional. On television, there was Robin Griffin, the complex and troubled detective who dedicated her life to fighting crimes against women, yet was haunted by her own sexual past. These films and television shows gave me a language for intimacy and, maybe most importantly, desire. 

Last Monday, I saw Campion’s latest feature film, The Power of the Dog, her first in twelve years. The film, which screened as part of the London Film Festival and will be released in select theatres on November 17th before hitting Netflix on December 1st, turns its focus onto men. That is not to say that her male characters have been underdeveloped before. Quite the opposite. Sam Neil and Harvey Keitel in The Piano exude a multitude of complexities; In The Cut’s Mark Ruffalo manages to remain both strangely dangerous and wholly sexy as the detective assigned to the murder case, and Ben Whishaw as John Keats has an air of sensitivity about him in Bright Star. Yet with The Power of the Dog, Campion hones in on masculinity in a focused way, through the image of Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a misogynistic ranch owner and total control freak who exerts his power through bullying and intimidation at any given opportunity. He is obsessed with his mentor, Bronco Henry, who died some years ago but taught him everything he needed to know about riding and life.

In one scene, which is perhaps my favourite in all of Campion’s oeuvre, Phil steals himself away to an isolated glade in the woods near his ranch in Montana and strips down to just his chaps. He takes out a silk handkerchief which he has been storing in his underwear next to his crotch and begins to run the fabric across his naked torso, laying it delicately over his face, taking in its scent. It may take an audience a second to understand who the handkerchief belongs to. Until now, Phil has exerted a toxically masculine energy. He has been emotionally cold to his brother’s new wife (played extraordinarily by Kirsten Dunst), and he has bullied her son both for his lisp and his sensitive, effeminate demeanour. At first, we might wonder if the handkerchief belongs to that emotionally abused wife, his power over her transforming into pleasure. But as he relinquishes himself totally to his fantasy, we see a set of initials embroidered into the handkerchief’s corner: “BH.” Bronco Henry. 

It is no wonder, then, that after Peter, the boy with the lisp, catches Phil bathing naked in the creek, Phil strikes up a kind of mentorship with him and, in many pseudosexual moments, the pair share a cigarette, or thread rope, or straddle the saddle that once belonged to Bronco Henry. Phil attempts to ease his own insecurities by forming a bond with Peter in the image of what he had with Bronco; only now he is the one sitting in that mentor role, and he can wield his power differently.

Power and sex are perhaps two of the most interlinked forces. Some might go so far as to describe sex as a transition of power, back and forth. Whether that is understood through more obvious ideas of power in sex—i.e. sadomasochism, or a Sub/Dom style partnership—to something more nuanced, with things like confidence, arousal, experience, and passion shifting the dynamics of power during fucking. Not to mention, perhaps more darkly, we are often asked to consider the power imbalance when it comes to sex, between a young actress and a big-time film executive, the teacher and the student etc. Others claim that sexual assault and rape are, in totality, all about power too. In all, questions often ask: who has the power after sex? Who has it before? What constitutes power in a sexual context, and then, by extension, what constitutes feeling powerless? As Maggie Nelson, in her book On Freedom, has it: 

Analyzing the power dynamics of any particular scenario can be crucial to our understanding what happened and why. It does not follow, however, that if elements of power exist—as they always do—our agency is extinguished, or that an abuse of power has occurred. The exercise of agency is always a negotiation of available possibilities and pressures; there is no world in which “agency” or “free will” exists apart from webs of relationality, which includes relations of power. Nor will it do to map our own constellations of power onto the psychology of others, for we do not all attribute power to the same people or forces, or feel affected by that power in the same ways. Not all women take kindly to being told that certain people inevitably have power over them; charges of false consciousness or impaired decision-making always risk patronizing the very people for whom they’re intended to care.

– Maggie Nelson, On Freedom

Campion’s filmography arguably understands this better than any other’s. Her films take root, unflinchingly, in those power dynamics. She seems to understand, too, the power of sexuality beyond the obvious. When Isabelle Archer is touched on the cheek by a male suitor, she traces where his fingers have been after he is gone. As Detective Malloy offers to romance Frannie, he fiddles with the charms on her silver bracelet – yet when he offers to fuck her and “lick pussy” that physical bond breaks, just for a second, as Frannie recoils from what she thinks she might want.

In this – a touch, a look, a gesture – Campion knows desire lurks. These quiet intimacies boom with sexuality and tension. It is in these complex spaces between having power and not that she finds drama. In this way, it seems obvious why she is often drawn to period dramas like The Power of the Dog as more than simply a transgressive approach to feminism, or a reclamation of history. In an interview published alongside the script for The Piano, Campion describes this predilection: “I have enjoyed writing characters who don’t have a twentieth-century sensibility about sex.” Without all the signifiers we see now, all the magazines and films that shape our desire, Campion felt she could get at something deeper, something innate in how we feel and what we long for. It is this, perhaps, that led critics to name The Piano the greatest film ever made by a woman (even if such a qualifier feels reductive). 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Anti-Escapism

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Jane Campion appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

The idea that the migration crisis of the novel is part of the “apocalypse” comes later in the book, when certain cities, such as London or San Francisco, into which many have arrived through the aforementioned magic doors, have been ghettoised. There have been violent clashes between “natives” and newcomers, political policy has failed to control this new influx of people, and the boundaries and borders of countries appear “to be somewhat illusionary”, meaning people are left questioning “what role they to play” in this new order.

Hamid’s description of the apocalypse as terrifying but also not yet quite apocalyptic can be so easily lifted from the novel and applied to the state of 2021. After all, in the past few months, we’ve witnessed horrendous images of men on horseback forcing back Haitian refugees along the American border, the ocean caught fire and burned in a wild fury, and we’re still in a global pandemic that has, to date, killed an estimated 4,771,122 people worldwide. In the UK, we are being led by a government that only sees what it wants to see, that is happy to sit back and watch the country fall apart as their friends line their pockets with money from shady contracts which they will then squirrel away in tax havens. It doesn’t quite seem like the apocalypse we were expecting, and yet it feels like, perhaps, that isn’t too far away. 

Earlier this year, Barack and Michelle Obama acquired the rights to Exit West via their production company Higher Ground, which currently have an exclusive deal with Netflix. It is set to star (one of my biggest crushes) Riz Ahmed as Saeed, and Yann Demange will direct. It is one of many projects, both recently made or in-production, that deals with what might be the end times, in worlds that don’t seem too far from our own. To look back at the dystopias of the previous century is to look at beautiful utopias, years in the future, that turn out to be less than perfect. Now these worlds we seek out that appear so grim are merely a stone’s throw away from our current experiences. As Ed O’Loughlin worried in the Irish Times: “Our reality has overtaken, or will soon have caught up with, many of our best/worst fictional futures.” Why is it, then, that we are so obsessed with these worlds? Why does it appear as if they’re becoming more prevalent as our current times get worse? 

It’s true that genre films and television have often aimed to reflect the issues of their time. Horror, famously, is filled with metaphor while fantasy has often reflected our political systems or histories. Perhaps, in their allegorical nature, those who enjoyed these in the past (or even now) were able to do so as a form of escape, the messages washing over them without be too direct. Yet, it can’t be denied that, in our current times, interest in dystopias has risen, and studios are trying to meet that demand. Production on a television adaption of Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic novel Station Eleven began before the majority of the world shut down due to Covid-19, and the finished product is due to air on HBO Max later this year. An adaption of the 2013 videogame The Last of Us, set in a post-apocalyptic future, is coming to HBO too. Over at Hulu, The Handmaid’s Tale has just aired its fourth season and is gearing up for a fifth. On top of that, the streamer recently premiered its post-apocalyptic series Y: The Last Man in which, all at once, all the men in the world bar one die mysteriously. Apple TV+ has just premiered Foundation, based on stories by Isaac Asimov, about a new empire, long in the future, that is not all it’s cracked up to be as it’s led by those who are driven by self-interest. As for the big screen, The Matrix is returning, as well as A Quiet Place for a third time. 

This craving speaks to what might be considered “anti-escapism”. In an article for NPR, Jason Heller wrote, “The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever, and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it.” Is this true? That our obsession with the end of the world is more than mere schadenfreude linked with some defeatist mentality, but rather a form of affirmation? Proof that our world is not yet as bad as it is in these shows or movies – that it can be salvaged? For how long will that be the case, though? We seem to be living in the times that novelists and filmmakers of the past warned us about as, day-after-day, the likes of Atwood, Orwell, and Bradbury are proven right. 

Still, I can’t help but wonder if it is better this way. To look the future in the eye and, perhaps, inspire some sort of saviour. I keep thinking of Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film adaption of Ready Player One, in which the opposite is true and citizens of a ravaged world escape into a more exciting, virtual one as a means of coping. In the age of the internet, it might seem like that would be what we want, yet it doesn’t appear to be the case. We are not yet ready to give up on the physical world just yet, we’re not content with disappearing online, and perhaps that is what our appetite for dramas on the end of the world proves. In all the bleakness of the futures they present, we can see the one thing we need most: hope. 

Also Read:

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Anti-Escapism appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Since 1997, the pair have been an unstoppable force in Spanish cinema, a power second only to the genuine love they seem to share for each other. At the 72^nd Oscars, when Almodóvar won Best Foreign Language Feature for All About My Mother, Cruz, alongside fellow Almodóvar staple Antonio Banderas, had the honour of giving it to him, shouting his name out like an excited school child as she opened the envelope. “He’s my safety net,” she told the press at Venice two weeks ago. “He can ask me to do something that can really scare me, but I know he will be there.”

I have long believed that the partnership between Almodóvar and Cruz is one of the greatest in cinema history, likely for the very reasons Cruz mentioned. Cruz’s performances for Almodóvar are fearless; they are risky and brutal, vulnerable and tender. That working relationship that blends with the personal offers us, the audience, hours of cinematic genius. Yet when the idea of actors and directors working in pairs comes up, the two are rarely mentioned. Instead, we hear tell of DiCaprio and Scorsese, or De Niro and Scorsese. People talk of Hitchcock and Stewart, Burton and Depp, Spielberg and Hanks. As if the only way greatness can be achieved is if it’s reached by two men – usually straight and white. 

Those beacons of greatness, who often make heavily masculine and male-centric films, are why Cruz and Almodóvar are so often left out. “Great movies” are about violence, they are about men seeking revenge, they are about men on a mission, they are about men. Almodóvar’s movies, while occasionally violent, are often colourful melodramas, queer and camp, that exist on a different astral plane. They explore the lives of outsiders, of the working classes, of women and the world of sexuality. Yet when it comes to “greatness”, their films exist as victims of, as Emily Nussbaum once noted, “an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior.”

Almodóvar and Cruz are not alone in this rarely recognised space either. Catherine Keener has appeared in five of Nicole Holofcener’s six feature films, exploring the complexity of the female experience from their twenties into their forties. Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst have done something similar, with Dunst appearing in four of Coppola’s films, each offering a nuanced look at the life of young women. Julianne Moore has appeared in three of Todd Haynes’ films, including a tremendous turn in the Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven. Michelle Williams has repeatedly blown audiences way in her films with Kelly Reichhardt, the next of which is currently in post-production. At the same time, Tilda Swinton exuded her now-trademark complexity in six of Derek Jarman’s films in the eighties and nineties before his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1994.

If this list seems overwhelmingly white, it’s because it is. While black men have found some repeated success in pairings like Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan, or Spike Lee with Samuel L. Jackson and Denzel Washington, they rarely get included in that pantheon of greatness. Though, admittedly, if their films conform to that idea of violence and masculinity as central, they tend to do better. As for women of colour, Ava DuVernay has worked with David Oyelowo three times, while Teyonah Parris appeared in Nia DaCosta’s recent Candyman reboot and is due to appear in The Marvels—the upcoming sequel to 2018’s Captain Marvel—directed by DaCosta. 

The point of all this listing? For nearly a century, the film industry has continually pushed an unquestioned narrative onto its audience that male art is great art. Everything else is left out of those discussions. That which deals with the male experience is what cinema is all about, and whatever else filmmakers cover it does not hold that same value. Take, for example, the outcry each time it’s rightfully suggested that a number of women directors have been snubbed for Best Director any given year. “MaYBE iT’s AbOuT wHo iS bEtTer aT tHe jOb?” people scream on Twitter, battening down on the unquestioned assumption that all the men who are nominated are, ipso facto, better than the women who aren’t. 

In her response to Lady Bird leaving the 2018 Oscars empty-handed, Hunter Harris wrote for Vulture that “Greta Gerwig made a movie about what generations of male auteurs saw only as background noise.” Specifically, she made a film about mothers and daughters. The characters who, in the movies of men, are often side-lined. They wait for their husbands to come home, they chastise them for making bad decisions, they complain, they put their feet up on the car dashboard for the camera to zoom in on, or, like Anna Paquin in Scorsese’s The Irishman, they have a single line (that amounts to seven words) in a movie that is basically the length of a mini-series. 

This is not to say that straight male directors are incapable of understanding experiences outside their own; some do often, and do it well. Most, however, rarely do. Spielberg has overwhelmingly cast men as his leads. Scorsese’s movies often feature one woman at most amongst a sea of male violence, while Tarantino, for all his “feminist” hype, creates two-dimensional women that are reduced down to their bodies. It suggests, perhaps, a lack of empathy or interest in experiences outside their own which itself is cultivated by the very narrative their work upholds.  

The straight male directors of today are not leading the charge in their male-led ideals but instead continuing a legacy that dates back decades. In Recollections of My Non-Existence, Rebecca Solnit writes that the constant centring of the straight white male experience is a longstanding problem, with broader effects than we may think. There is a problem “with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of sole self.” For women, people of colour, disabled folk, and queers, we spent our childhoods being someone else. We had to. Imagination was the centrepiece of our childhood, finding ways wherever we could. It is where we learned to empathise

Perhaps, as a queer person whose strongest friendships have often been with women, I see something of myself in the work of Almodóvar and Cruz, knowing how specific and open that bond can be. Perhaps, whilst also being a social-political vendetta I’m writing about, it is also a personal one. I find it frustrating each time I read a list of “Best Actor and Director Pairings” and they’re not on it. I find it disheartening that work that questions the idea of the patriarchy is subjugated to the work that upholds it. 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On The Hollywood Trickle-Down

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Underappreciated Actor and Director Pairings appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

When the discussion turned to the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, one by one, each of us disclosed the details of various things that had happened to us. There were stories of unwanted advances on work-nights-out, reassessments of consent in light of this new movement, and a lot of self-blaming regarding how things had all played out. While our experiences all differed, we all had one distinct thing in common: we had told no one. We had not sought out workplace protocols, or been to the police, or reported our experience in any other way that might have presented itself. Instead, we all decided that it was our personal burden to bear. 

Now, as those once disgraced stars return to work or get out of jail on a technicality, I have been wondering about that night. At the time, it seemed to illuminate all we had been discussing in the news; the power dynamics at play and the ideas of shame or guilt were so strong that none of us had reported it. And yet, now, around four years later, nothing has changed; those actions we spoke about that night remain just as horror stories told between friends. 

Thinking back to the night and the sense of promise in those early stages of the Me Too movement, I began to wonder about something. In the 1980s, the devil himself, Ronald Regan, introduced a new economic policy that came to be known as “trickledown economics”. It has since been widely discredited as a viable solution but, under his plan, the wealthiest received tax cuts on the incorrect assumption that those rich folks would then invest that money into jobs or society, and it would “trickle-down” to help the poor. In actuality (as most rational people might have guessed would happen) they did not spend it but rather hoarded it for themselves. This policy pushed as a way of helping more impoverished communities did not affect them in the proposed way. Instead, it meant that, with less money being paid in taxes by the wealthy elite, services and programmes that the poor in America relied on were cut or severely underfunded.

Essentially, this same idea can be applied to Hollywood—only without one specific Republican figurehead. Instead, mainstream feminists suggest that Hollywood is the perfect battlefield in the fight for equality, but fail to consider what that really means for the average person. 

There has long been an idea that narratives played out by celebrities, not unlike Greek Gods for ancient men, represent something about how we, the ordinary people, live our lives; that some lessons are to be learned, or that somehow it will shift the culture. When the news explains that celebrities are fighting for equal pay, speaking out against sexism, homophobia or transphobia, or commenting on experiences of sexual harassment, it feels as though the suggestion is that a trail is being blazed, that the fruit of celebrity labours will be borne for us all. And yet, increasingly, these actions seem further and further removed from the reality of most people. Recently, when Scarlett Johansson filed a shocking lawsuit against Disney, mainstream feminists online lorded the power move of a woman demanding what she’s worth. However, while the essence of the politics at the centre of that suit may be the same as that of other equal pay disputes, the practicalities are not; one millionaire suing a corporation does not a feminist movement make. In fact, those affected by the gender pay gap are not those in the corporate world or Hollywood, but they are primarily black and brown women who stand to earn, on average, around 40% less than their white male colleagues and approximately 20% less than their white female ones. These women will not see the rewards of Johansson’s feminist stance. 

In her book The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan writes on the nature of this problem; when intersectionality is merely performative or a buzzword to be thrown around to suggest “wokeness”, feminism fails. She writes: “To reduce intersectionality to a mere attention to difference is to forgo its power as a theoretical and practical orientation.” Meaning that feminism which focuses only on the commonality between oppressed groups—instead of explicitly considering the experiences of queer, disabled, and black and brown folks, as well anyone who sits at an intersection between those things— only allows the least oppressed to benefit; typically rich, white, cisgender women. 

To consider this in relation to the #MeToo movement is to think about the benefits of such a movement and who was rewarded from it. For example, many mainstream feminists found retribution in men being outed as predators and celebrated if any charges were brought against them. I can understand this impulse; I even felt it myself occasionally as someone who has experienced assault. Yet to cheer for carceral punishment as a kind of win when those structures—the law, the courts, prisons, the police—are institutions riddled with sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and racism feels like murky water to wade in. #MeToo may have encouraged many people to speak up as a social movement, but only those with the privilege to enter into systems without the fear of prejudice will have seen results. If you have spent the past few years watching people who look like you be murdered by police, are you going to go to them to report a rape? If you have seen a legal system wrap itself in knots about whether your gender identity or sexuality is valid, do you think you’ll feel that that same legal system—made for and by cisgender men—will come down on your side? If you have felt unsupported by a system that sees your disabled body as a burden, would you feel safe reporting the violation of that body? 

It all interestingly ties together with a sense of the political upheaval of 2020; what is the role of carceral punishment when, for so many, those systems oppress more than they liberate? What use is police reform when forces refuse to accept the racism within their ranks is systematic? What use is reform when “1500 accusations of sexual misconduct, including sexual harassment, exploitation of crime victims and child abuse, have been made against police officers in England and Wales” between 2012 and 2018? 

This is all the stark reality for most people who do not exist within those certain privileged classes, or Hollywood, but the jeering and excitement at men being brought to task by those same institutions that abuse so many women and trans folk feels like an odd feminist stance—celebrating the hand of state power being wielded against someone you dislike is often recourse that leads to that same hand being wielded against your own. 

This criticism is not a new one. In the early days of the movement, prominent black feminists like Roxane Gay and Ava DuVernay pointed out the racism at work already in the selective outrage and the tunnel-vision regarding the end goal. The idea that Me Too was to focus explicitly on sexual harassment and how to, legally, seek justice was to remove all sense of intersectionality and act as though everyone was on the same playing field and had the same protections. Srinivasan again: “he problem with Me Too as a mass women’s movement isn’t just a lack of ‘consistent’ application of concern and outrage across racial lines.’ Instead, the “fundamental problem is the presupposition that any such movement should be grounded in what women have universally in common.” Where Hollywood feminism falls short is in its refusal to see lines of race, class, sexuality, and disability. 

In that pub in 2017, my friends and I hadn’t felt we could seek help. For some of my friends, it was for fear of losing their job and having nothing to fall back on; for others, it was a sense of societal shame that wasn’t erased from their families or friends in the way people in the movement were suggesting it could be. As for myself, I was among the 85% of gay or bi men (at the time of my assault, I identified as male) who had not reported to a police force that has a long history of homophobia and violence against queer people; not to mention a stunning lack of awareness when it comes to sexual assault between men—something Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You highlighted so excellently last year. 

It cannot be denied that the Me Too movement has had its benefits in terms of discussion and consciousness-raising as well bringing to light just how prevalent these types of actions are; but enough time has passed now that we can see the holes—the very ones Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, and Louis C.K. are slipping through. Given that the focus was on legal justice, what do we do now that it hasn’t been served? 

Also Read: The Journey of Black Widow

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On The Hollywood Trickle-Down appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

As stand-up comedy goes, Burnham, like other comedians such as Bill Bailey, Hall and Oates, or the late, great Victoria Wood, has always used well-written parody songs that are keenly focused on the ways in which our modern times are fucking us up. Inside is a significant step forward. Made in the isolation of the pandemic which, Burnham admits, had profoundly negative effects on his mental health, the special dissects our world, which is increasingly spiralling towards destruction, and it feels like something very new; totally personal and wholly political.

When I think about the comedy I watched a child, that inoffensive four-quadrant comedy, the kind that fills arenas or primetime slots on a Saturday night, I wonder if there’s much interest in that now. Of course, it’s still a booming industry, and a lot of the more, shall we say, “classic” comedians still release DVDs in time for Christmas, but they don’t have the cultural relevancy they used to. As a kid, jokes by comedians like Peter Kay, Jimmy Carr, or Michael McIntyre bled into the lexicon of my family and friends, onto the playground too, but that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Instead, that type of comedy gives way to smaller, more intimate, hybrid pieces of work that blur the lines between humour, cultural criticism and memoir. Of course, this type of work isn’t new, but it has become increasingly more impactful.

As the poet Cathy Park Hong points out in her essay on stand up, most of what comedians say, when written down in front of you, isn’t funny; it is, in fact, all about the delivery. Indeed, to read Burnham’s lyrics to “Welcome to the Internet” is like reading a very depressing rhyming poem, but to see him perform it with a manic grin and the gusto of the ringleader to a dying circus desperate for your custom gives it all an eerie feeling that you can’t help but laugh at. Elsewhere, during Inside, Burnham flits between more cultural commentary, including two short songs on the billionaire and real-life supervillain Jeffery Bezos, the ethical implications of hiring unpaid interns, and how certain American white women use Instagram. For other songs, he moves into more personal territory, like in “All Eyes On Me”, which explains his five-year break from comedy due to panic attacks, or “Problematic”, in which he unpacks his history as a comedian that cut his teeth on the internet and all of the questionable things he’s joked about.

Burnham isn’t the only comedian excelling in the more personal realm, though. I recently re-watched Jenny Slate’s 2019 special Stage Fright, which Rachel Syme, for The New Yorker, described as “not so much an hour of punch lines (though it has plenty)” but rather “a daffy window into Slate’s influences and anxieties and appetites, a way to show viewers exactly where she came from.” Slate’s special indeed runs deeply personal; she includes interviews with her parents, sisters, and grandparents about their upbringing and the house they lived in. At the same time, her final run of jokes revolves around her attempts to rebuild herself following her divorce. Slate’s special is intensely personal and earnest, yet it doesn’t aim for the same cultural target as something like Inside. Instead, Stage Fright manages to say a lot about women in Hollywood, depression, and anxiety without going for the jugular. For example, she critiques what it means to be a woman, and, to quote Syme again, when she tries on her grandmother’s old clothes in one documentary section, she magnifies “the push-pull tensions that come with loving clothes while also wanting to reject the male gaze or the need to conform to any specific beauty standard.”

This seeming shift in comedy, away from that universal observation (“Hey, what’s the deal with aeroplane food?”) and into examining a more particular milieu of what it means just to be alive in what feels like the end of days is difficult to pin down. Might it be sensible to assume this shift comes as a response to an attack on comedy? It’s certainly possible. In post-Trump, post- #MeToo world, the peddled image of so-called “edgy” comedians being rounded up in a witch hunt, the reprobates – your Cosbys and C.Ks – being banished (well, kind of…) is used to mark the death of comedy. Often these jokes are marred by stereotypes or broad generalisations, which comedians like Burnham and Slate avoid. Yet, for the most part, the best comedians have adjusted to this new reality, have stuck to the golden rule of comedy, and continue to “punch up”. The shift into more personal work that ties politics to experience is certainly less “preachy” than standing on a stage and shouting your opinions. It feels more considered than generalising jokes about how wives put up with their husbands, how girlfriends nag and don’t want sex. Still, it doesn’t feel like these comedians are actively running away from it because they’re scared; it simply doesn’t interest them. 

Instead, they’re drawn to a different kind of comedy, one that pulls us in then devastates us. This might actually be better positioned as a response to our over-saturation as a culture than to comedy’s untimely end. Just like Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet” provides a speedy onslaught of bad things, our phones ping us notifications in the exact same way. We have ten years to halt the climate crisis, Greece is on fire, police brutality still faces little consequence, news boats loaded with cameras chase dinghies carrying refugees across The Channel, your Cosbys and your C.Ks get off with a slap on the wrist before planning “comeback” tours. We face a constant barrage of bad news until we can’t really take it in anymore. So comedy works around it. 

These days, comedians with a message work to disarm us. Park Hong writes that “Real laughter is an involuntary contraction that bursts out like an orgasm.” Meaning that we’re vulnerable to laughter, and being made to laugh is a revealing thing about your sense of humour, about who you are. It often means that when comedians like Burnham, Slate, or Hannah Gadsby, for example, shift into something soul-shattering, we feel it so much harder because we’re already open. 

Yet, even then, I don’t know if we can really take it. It seems like our saturation is akin to slapping more and more paint onto a wall before it’s fully dry first. We can’t absorb anything and it’s detrimental to our existence. It’s been a month since Inside debuted on Netflix and, after a series of think-pieces and a solid critical response, the special has been dismantled for parts and repurposed for Tik Tok videos that remove the lyrics from their context. It seems these comedians want to tell us something, and part of us wants to hear it, yet we aren’t totally willing, or maybe we’re not even able, to listen.

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On the Return of Carrie Bradshaw

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On the ‘New’ Stand Up appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Then Carrie begins her famous opening monologue, with reference to Edith Warton’s classic American novel: ‘Welcome to the age of un-innocence’. We see Carrie’s face for the first time, played with an almost bristling edginess by Sarah Jessica Parker, as she types at her desk, smoking, face lit by a neon sign outside. She continues: ‘No one has Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has Affairs to Remember. Instead, we have breakfast at 7AM and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible.’

In this opening, Sex and the City sets out its mission statement. It aims to deconstruct the idea of romance and to break down what is real and what is fantasy, what we tell ourselves we want and why we want it. In each episode, Carrie will try to unpack a new question using her own experience and that of her friends Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda – all of whom often represent different schools of thought. Charlotte is more traditional, with a strong belief in love; Miranda is more level-headed and often cynical about what she’s supposed to want; and Samantha bucks all traditional ideas in favour of a life lived in pursuit of pleasure. Meanwhile Carrie, throughout the show’s run, oscillates between these positions, trying to make sense of a world that is getting crazier and crazier. 

It’s this dissection that gave the show its legacy. For six years, the four women sat around a table in a coffee shop or restaurant and discussed the pros and cons of giving head, what kind of power games are at play when it comes to anal sex, whether married couples see single people as a threat, and all other types of societal pressures. As someone who first watched Sex and the City in high school, as a queer person who was having no sex or romance, it took up a special place in my heart. I’ve had a practically unshakeable obsession with it ever since, and Carrie has always been at its centre. 

So, I got to thinking about Carrie Bradshaw. Over the past week or so, I have become obsessed with the on-set photos that kept emerging from the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That, which is currently filming in New York. Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda are back on the streets, meeting in coffee bars or outside museums to discuss the woes of their fifties. And I couldn’t help but wonder; where is Carrie now, and is she still a mess? 

I use “mess” in the most loving of ways because I am the same kind of mess. To me, the show’s protagonist is a stark reflection of all the hang-ups I have in terms of insecurity, vulnerability, and attitude. Not to mention, despite the ruthless “Carrie-Bashing” that’s become in vogue, I still see her as one of the greatest characters in American television history – a more realistic version of the anti-hero trope we hear about in relation to numerable male characters.

The more I re-watch the show the more I realise that Carrie’s arc – that of a woman broken down by the classic idea of love – is the best example of the show’s mission statement. Carrie is a cool, collected, and confident sex columnist who acts as a sexual anthropologist in that opening episode. She’s reached a point in her life where she’s emotionally stable, having sex with exes and getting her face plastered on the side of a bus, but when Mr Big enters the frame, that all begins to unravel. She finds herself changing, worrying he won’t like the person she is. Instead, she presents the ‘together Carrie’ that means her emotional outbursts, in response to his repression, come off as unhinged or left-field. The show to me is about how one woman loses herself by craving the love of a man she isn’t meant to be with. It is not, as some think, a great romance, but actually closer to a six season-long fuck-up.

What strikes me as most interesting is how the show’s finale, in which Mr Big and Carrie reunite in a classical romantic fashion in Paris, was not the original intention.  The show’s creator, Darren Star, who handed the series over to Michael Patrick King during its run, said the ending betrayed his original feminist vision, “which was that women don’t ultimately find happiness from marriage”. Elsewhere, Emily Nussbaum, whose interpretation of the show comes closest to my own, thought the ending didn’t work either. She wrote: 

“And then, in the final round, “Sex and the City” pulled its punches, and let Big rescue Carrie. It honored the wishes of its heroine, and at least half of the audience, and it gave us a very memorable dress, too. But it also showed a failure of nerve, an inability of the writers to imagine, or to trust themselves to portray, any other kind of ending—happy or not. And I can’t help but wonder: What would the show look like without that finale?”

This is not to say that the final season has no merit. In fact, it’s the opposite. Nussbaum points out that Carrie’s relationship with an emotionally cold Russian artist serves as an example of just how much the pursuit of a fairytale can leave you in the lurch. The fifteenth episode in season six, ‘Catch-38’, is one of the strongest, as Carrie reconciles the fact that the Russian doesn’t want kids and she isn’t sure she does either. Ultimately, her decision to forgo children remains radical today. 

Now, perhaps, with the reboot, the writers are beginning to course correct. According to Page Six, rumour has it that the new show will see Carrie and Mr Big in the (POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT!) throes of a divorce, perhaps realising what half the audience already knew; they’re not right for each other. Maybe now we’ll see the show – under its new name – return to its original intention after getting slightly lost in the glitz and glamour of the movies. 

This might all just be my wishful thinking. The idea of Carrie, presented as “the last single girl”, has always been meaningful to me, and the idea that she might now be facing the ramifications of her poor decisions when it comes to Big – much like me, who is still very much fucked up by my first love – would place a beloved character I care for back in my orbit. Either way, am I ready for more Carrie Bradshaw in any capacity? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Also Read:

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On the Return of Carrie Bradshaw appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

The phrase “queerbaiting” dates back to the 1990s, as a variation on the term “race-baiting”, which alluded to politicians, specifically, who were accused of saying deliberately inflammatory things about a particular group as a way of attempting to undermine certain political messages or ideologies. The idea here was to hope those who were “baited” would react in a way that could then be used to further push a message that certain ideas or opponents were too emotional, unprofessional, or reactionary. In this original form, queer theorists discussed situations in which politicians would try to use suggestions of queerness as a synonym for weakness, perversion, or being untrustworthy. 

Cut to the early 2010s, when users on Tumblr began to repurpose the phrase in a different context, thinking of the term “baited” as if it were like a fisherman applying a worm to a hook. To them, to be baited was to be tricked, to be lead to believe that queerness was present in the media they consumed without it ever being confirmed. It was no longer an accusation thrown at someone; instead, it was a suggestion that appeared in TV shows such as Sherlock, Supernatural, and Teen Wolf. Fans searched for hints of a relationship between Sherlock and his right-hand man John Watson and picked up on other characters suggesting Sherlock’s sexuality was something other than straight. Meanwhile, a quick search for the terms ‘Supernatural’ and ‘gay’ on YouTube brings up numerous videos with titles like “Dean Winchester being a disaster bi” or Dean and another character, Castiel, being “boyfriends for 20 minutes”. The character of Stiles Stilinski on the MTV show Teen Wolf courted the edges of confirmed queerness with throwaway lines and suggestive looks. I didn’t watch any of these shows back then, but looking at the compilations put together by fans, it’s easy to see where the annoyance stemmed from. It may be too much to connect it with another modish phrase of the past decade, “gaslighting”, but its effects are similar. Fans online drove themselves crazy trying to prove two dudes were boning, and the creators of those shows fed into it in an effort to have their cake and eat it too.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about films and TV shows that people read as queer without the creators intending it. Here, the creators of the shows in question heavily leaned into their fans’ queer readings and deliberately built them up in the hopes they could retain that loyal queer fanbase, the one that would make GIF-sets and publish fanfiction online, whilst not isolating the casual straight viewer who bulked out the ratings. 

In 2021, the term has moved further still from its original or even updated meaning. It has taken on life as a catch-all term for anything that might be disingenuously marketed towards a queer audience or anything that attempts to engage in any kind of queer aesthetic. For example, the actor and singer Nick Jonas was accused of queerbaiting by making appearances in gay bars to promote his music while playing a gay role on the short-lived boxing drama Kingdom. Beyond that, several other male celebrities such as Harry Styles and Timotheé Chalamet were accused of queerbaiting when they attempted to play with gender, mixing up what they wore on the red carpet, painting their nails, or generally doing anything to stray away from a classically heteromasculine look. It didn’t seem to matter, for the most part, that these stylistic shifts were relatively low stakes. Female artists, like, most recently, Olivia Rodrigo, are accused too if they appear intimate with friends or dancers. Artists who keep their sexuality or identity close to their chest are accused of being too vague, and of “baiting” queer fans by not giving them what they believe they are entitled to: confirmation. Those throwing the accusations don’t seem able to fathom that queerness is not always fixed, nor is it a commodity owned by a specific group.

In this way, the term has become a tool for cultural gatekeeping by queers, one that only allows those who are explicitly queer to mitigate who gets to be queer and how. It makes sense that, after going through often complex journeys to come to terms with their identity, a queer audience would feel protective over what they have found and would be defensive if they think it’s being exploited. However, this approach suggests that queerbaiting is akin to a quasi-form of cultural appropriation as if those who exist within the queer community share a single cultural heritage. In actuality, queerness is broader than these accusations give it credit for, and this approach reinforces outdated ideas that labels can adequately describe sexuality. When fans get angry that Billie Eilish claims she likes girls without explicitly stating whether that is as a lesbian or bisexual etc., they are erasing any opportunity for people, like me or you, to exist in the middle, to float between things in a way that feels natural and, most importantly, without definition. 

Still, beyond specific stars, the term has been launched at film studios too. Specifically, Disney, who offered an “exclusively gay moment” in their updated version of Beauty and the Beast only for it to be, unsurprisingly, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it embrace. They continued on this path with the first “openly gay” character in the MCU being an unnamed man at a group therapy session and then boasting about a lesbian kiss in the background of The Rise of Skywalker. Fans accused the Mouse House of luring queer audiences in with these announcements, taking their money, and then, when they were sitting in the cinema, they realised, like the fish with its mouth around the hook, they’d been tricked and were about to become dinner. 

Perhaps it doesn’t feel right that multi-million dollar corporations are tricking you into seeing a film or watching a show, but that doesn’t mean that queerbaiting is the problem. The issue, instead, sits with how much we are willing to let large companies dictate to us how we should see ourselves. What seems like a more worthy cause would be dismantling the structures that aid this type of behaviour by refusing to take heed of studios like Disney, who, by their own lexicon, are more interested in content and consumers than making any strides towards queer art or representation. 

At the root of the unease around alleged queerbaiting is actually a disdain for the capitalist courting the “pink pound”, the longstanding spending power of queer folk. Specifically, as far back as the 1980s, companies have sought to target the wallets of middle-class white gay men and lesbians, who have, historically, had a more considerable expendable income. Look at the longevity of the careers of artists like Madonna, Cher, or Kylie Minogue, which have been bolstered substantially by their queer fans. Where there is money to spent, capitalism will find it. Yet what makes those fans consider themselves “baited” is that the things they’re convinced to spend their money on, such as those aforementioned movies, don’t adequately include them. Perhaps the outrage that follows is more a person’s manifestation of humiliation that they ever let themselves believe a multi-million dollar company would offer them anything different.

Also Read: How FIlm Changed Me: On Things That Seem Gay (But Aren’t)

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Queerbaiting appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

I am, by far, not the first person to comment on the subtext here. Twitter has been aflame with questions of the boys’ queerness – much to the annoyance of its director – and The New York Times even referred to another queer Italian romance in titling their own review “Calamari by Your Name”. In fact, since preview images first appeared online in January 2020, comparisons to Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 Oscar winner have been abound, and that was before anyone was even aware of the content. But why? 

Queer audiences looking for queerness where they are told there is none is nothing new. The ‘queer coding’ within classic cinema has been well documented, specifically in Vito Russo’s seminal book and the subsequent documentary The Celluloid Closet. Over the past few decades, audiences have become hip to how gayness is portrayed on film, often in the margins, feeding into broad stereotypes, and often used for comic effect. In some cases, queer directors and writers, like Gore Vidal or Howard Ashman, would intentionally fuse a queer subtext into their work so that those audiences who shared similar experiences would catch it. Meanwhile, other filmmakers, often straight, would use the tell-tale signs of queerness as harbingers of evil; the cross-dressing buffalo bill in Silence of the Lambs, the gangster obsessed with his phallic walking cane in The Maltase Falcon, or every Disney villain in every animated movie they’ve ever made. What makes Luca different is that a queer reading of the film is supposedly an alternate one, not intended (or even, it would seem, baited) but, seemingly, some kind of coincidence.

A week after watching what I thought to be young love bloom between those two boys, I watched another Disney release on a dreary Sunday afternoon; Raya and the Last Dragon. Early on, Raya meets Namaari, a princess from a rival tribe who is also obsessed with dragons. The two immediately hit it off, and, within seconds, I texted my friend, “The girls in this dragon movie are lesbians, right?”  Their connection seemed palpable, and a quick Google found the film’s star, Kelly Marie Tran, agreed with me. Tran told Vanity Fair earlier this year that she interpreted the relationship between the two women as more than platonic. However, she was quick to point out that this wasn’t Disney’s official position. 

While Tran may have liked the queer reading of her film, other actors seem less keen. During a recent appearance on Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier star Anthony Mackie discussed how he had difficulty with the queer fan theories that came with the show. Instead of letting the heterosexual bromance live unfettered, Mackie thought queer audiences were “exploiting” something as “pure and beautiful” as homosexuality by running away with their crazy ideas that his and Sebastian Stan’s characters were anything more than good buds. While some defended Mackie – who has appeared in a fair amount of queer films and TV shows during his career – others took issue with his position. To what end can he, the actor playing the role, define how his character is read and received by audiences of any type? 

It seems essential, now, to consider Roland Barthes in this context. Barthes, a philosopher of the late 20^thCentury, thought the author to be “dead” when their work was published. He considered intention to be meaningless in the face of an audience’s interpretation; once the work is in the world, it no longer belongs to one person but to each person that accesses it in their own way. Barthes does away with any sense of authorial privilege and thus gives equal weight to any reading or interpretation of the text. So, to Barthes, to think that Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson are boning in-between episodes is as valid as Mackie’s assertion that they aren’t – maybe even more so. 

Some writers, of course, fly in the face of this. Vladimir Nabokov, who believed wholly that his vision of his work was the only one, is one example, while today, a particular children’s author might be another. Such an author – who, somewhat ironically, I will not name – has spent the years since publishing her wildly successful fantasy franchise holding it with a vicelike grip, repeatedly asserting her authorial privilege as though it were a God-given right. Suddenly, a character that had never been read as gay had, all the while, been a flaming homo right under our unsuspecting noses, and other characters, who could never be read as anything other than white, could have always been black if you, the reader, had not been so closed-minded. To this author, it is you that has been the problem by not seeing the non-existent signs. Instead, they ignore their own wildly poor attempts at diversity with their stereotypical and often offensive names for characters and their anti-Semitic undertones. Still, you, the reader, are the problem. But I digress. 

If the author, or the actor, or the producer, or the studio itself has no power to define how an audience interprets a text, then queer audiences, especially, are going to fill that gap. I suppose if the past decade has taught us anything it might be that queer audiences do and will find themselves in places they have not been specifically catered for, whether that is in fanfiction about Star Wars’ Poe and Finn, or in meticulously crafted fan art of Professor X and Magneto, or wild theories about the intimate relationships between boyband members. This type of instance, that “exploitation” of homosexuality, is more of an assertion, an attempt to say that I belong in this space. This Barthian attempt at claiming media that was not made for them, but to assert that their reading is valid and to search for clues to back it up, is an example of a broader cultural problem. Queerness has constantly, and is still constantly, asserting itself because it is – not just in the movies but in almost every facet of society – marginalised to specific accepted areas. The dominant culture has still yet to accept queerness into its lexicon due to the supposedly homophobic and mystical ‘middle-America’, or the concern not to risk the overseas box office, so queerness will nuzzle its way into the dominant culture and plant its flag. 

Towards the end of Luca, one of the boys reveals himself to be a sea monster. The other, so scared of the potential backlash from this, does not follow suit, and instead is the first to point and call a sea monster a “sea monster”. The look the two share is heart-breaking; their shared world no longer a haven for the pair; now, it is being used as a battering ram. It seems impossible for queer audiences not to find significance in this moment; the moment a secret is exposed, and you’re left out on a limb. The director may not have intended it, even going so far as to deny it, but the queerness is certainly there.

However, for a director to include illusions to queerness intentionally – well, that’s a different story. 

Also Read: How Film Changed Me: On Friendship

Your contribution to Big Picture Film Club will allow us to continue to produce content. No matter the amount your contributions are greatly appreciated.

The post How Film Changed Me: On Things That Seem Gay (But Aren’t) appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.