“Savage Grace” & Sexual Politics
I’ve been looking forward to the upcoming movie “Savage Grace,” starring Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne (pictured) and scheduled for 2008 release, ever since I read the book the film is based on. Today’s Guardian has a full contextual look at the story and the issues surrounding it:
Tom Kalin doesn’t make happy, clappy, crowd-pleasing gay movies. There are no gay teenagers on sunny council estates urging us to see that gay love is truly a “beautiful thing”. There are no happy endings, no camp laughs and certainly no songs by the Mamas and Papas. Instead, there is violence, murder and, in his latest film, Savage Grace, an incestuous relationship between a woman and her gay son.
Based on the award-winning book by Natalie Robins and Steven ML Aronson, Savage Grace tells the true story of Barbara Daly, an aspiring American socialite who marries Brooks Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune. The marriage isn’t a happy one and from the moment he’s born, Barbara develops an unnaturally close attachment to her son, Tony. Starting in 1946 and spanning almost 30 years, the film travels through many glamorous locations and features a number of attractive young men engaged in homosexual acts.
But the world it portrays seems cold and bleak, and there are no characters that gay audiences will hold to their hearts or wish to claim as their own. Kalin may be gay, but his film offers none of the wish-fulfillment of Beautiful Thing or the romance of Brokeback Mountain. It harks back to a time before gay went mainstream, before Will and Grace, before Queer As Folk, before the age of gay romcoms like Adam and Steve. It harks back, in fact, to Kalin’s last feature film, Swoon – released a full 15 years ago, and one of the prime examples of what was known as New Queer Cinema.
Coined by film critic B Ruby Rich in 1992, New Queer Cinema was a term used to describe a group of films that did the festival circuit that year and seemed to suggest a break away from past gay films’ obsession with providing so-called “positive images”. There was nothing polite or well-behaved about these films. They weren’t seeking approval, or trying to show the world what nice people gay men and women were. Instead, they revelled in their own outsiderdom, referencing outlaw figures such as Jean Genet and generally rubbing people’s noses in the dirty business of gay sex. Like the queer political movement of the time, these films were energetic, irreverent and full of fun, but also deadly serious. How could they not be, when death and dying were a daily part of the gay experience? Though few films spoke of Aids directly, they were all shaped by it.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in Todd Haynes’ Poison. A film split into three separate narratives, Poison parodied the 1980s preoccupation with body horror (as evidenced by films like The Fly), while simultaneously paying homage to Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, and offering a mock documentary about a boy who escapes his humdrum suburban existence by flying away. Viewed together, these three strands amounted to a gay view of the world far removed from the earnest narratives favoured by earlier generations of gay film makers. Poison was brutal, sexy, playful and knowing, and was clearly the work of someone who knew their film history and probably had a degree in semiotics.
Equally bold was Kalin’s Swoon, which retold the true story of Leopold and Loeb, the notorious gay child-killers whose murder of a young boy had already inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion. Mixing elegant retro chic with wry humour, Swoon made an uncomfortable case for its two protagonists as gay antiheroes, cold-hearted killers with the looks of matinee idols. Also troubling was Gregg Araki’s The Living End, in which two HIV-positive gay lovers take to the road after accidentally shooting a cop. Later, they shoot a queer-basher, which provoked angry outcries at some gay festival screenings and loud cheers at others. And then of course there was Derek Jarman’s Edward II, in which Christopher Marlowe met contemporary gay activism, and a burning hot poker became a symbol for something even more terrifying.
To understand where these films came from and why they had such an impact, you have to remember that the early 90s was a particularly dark time in modern gay history. It was a time before combination therapy, before an equal age of consent, before the repeal of Section 28 in the UK and the introduction of gay civil partnerships. People were dying from Aids, and people were angry. Both Kalin and Haynes had a background as activists. Kalin was a member of both the Aids activist group Act-up and the New York art collective Gran Fury, responsible for many of the images used by the direct-action group Queer Nation. Before Swoon, he’d already made a name for himself as the director of They Are Lost to Vision Altogether, a superior piece of Aids agit-prop shaped by his experiences as an activist. As for Jarman, he’d been living with Aids for several years by the time Edward II came out, and was actively involved with the Queer Nation’s British equivalent, OutRage. For Jarman, film-making had always been a political exercise. Now it became even more so.
That’s where New Queer Cinema came from, but where exactly did it go?
Jarman died in 1994, leaving behind a body of work that encapsulated everything New Queer Cinema stood for, and a final film, Blue, that was literally “lost to vision altogether” – describing as it did his descent into blindness. In 2005, Araki finally fulfilled the promise of his early films with Mysterious Skin, a film based on the cult novel by Scott Heim and displaying all the qualities of New Queer Cinema at its best – a cracking script, solid performances and a mixture of raw sexuality and visual lyricism that puts most gay movies to shame.
But the man to really watch has been Todd Haynes. Following the success of Poison, he made Safe, a film starring Julianne Moore as a woman whose sense of identity is eroded as her immune system breaks down. In some ways, it was a departure for him – a film about a heterosexual woman without the camp sensibility that made his earlier Karen Carpenter biopic, Superstar, such a cult success, or the stylish homoerotica that was one of the key selling points of Poison. Some gay critics even accused him of selling out and pandering to a straight audience. But it didn’t take a genius to work out that Safe was still very much a gay film. “What I loved about New Queer Cinema wasn’t that it was bunch of film-makers making films about gay people,” Haynes told me at the time. “What I loved was the fact that it was a bunch of films that all had their own different stylistic or formal approaches to the stories they were telling. People were thinking about the way narrative works and the way we see the world. Whether we’re looking at a gay character or a straight character, we will see the world differently.”
There were gay and straight characters in the films that followed. And critics gay and straight alike were disappointed by Velvet Goldmine, his ambitious but ultimately rather messy tribute to glam rock. But then came Far From Heaven. A radical reworking of Douglas Sirk with Julianne Moore’s 1950s housewife married to repressed homosexual Dennis Quaid, the film earned Haynes an Oscar nomination and confirmed him as a major talent, and one who’d outgrown the role of poster boy for New Queer Cinema. His latest film, I’m Not There, is a meditation on the life and legends of Bob Dylan, with the man himself played by six different actors, including Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett.
But what of Kalin and Savage Grace? In some ways it bears all the hallmarks of New Queer Cinema. There’s the same fascination with criminality we saw in Swoon, the same interest in what B Ruby Rich described as “historical revisionism”. There’s the same raw sexuality, stylish photography and strong aesthetic that characterised the best of those earlier films. There’s even a chilling central performance from Haynes favourite Julianne Moore.
But to quote Bob Dylan, the times they are a-changin’. Gay life today is very different to gay life 15 years ago. We no longer speak of “Aids victims”, but of people with HIV living long and healthy lives with the aid of combination therapy. We are no longer as angry as we once were, and with good reason. Most of the battles for equality have been won. Gay men and women have more legal protections than at any point in history. No more the outsider, New Queer Cinema has been superseded by a new queer sense of belonging. Whether we still have the same taste in movies remains to be seen.
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