situation: bears hot on my heels
Dec. 12th, 2012 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitNine days until Yuletide stories are due (oh my!). My plan was to use today and tomorrow, my days off this week, to finish the draft. Naturally, yesterday I came down with a cold and I feel icky and fluff-brained.
In other news, I watched The League of Gentlemen (the 1960 movie about British ex-officers robbing a bank, not the much later TV comedy series). I found it enjoyable--there's some good dialogue and characterization, plus all the fun of watching them plan and carry out the heist. It's marred, though, by a kind of sexism I think of as endemic to the 1950s and 1960s, probably as backlash to women's active public roles during the war: women characters are few, peripheral, and all fit into the opposed stereotypes of the passive fuckable object to be acquired or the castrating bitch.
Interestingly, however, and perhaps not surprisingly given that director Basil Dearden would go on to make Victim (an Issue Film about the injustice of the British laws against homosexuality and the way those laws made men vulnerable to blackmail) the next year, The League of Gentlemen includes a gay man depicted in a fairly nonjudgmental way. Captain Stevens is not a shining star of perfection (we're told that he was a fascist supporter in his youth and was cashiered from the army over a sex scandal, and he's currently being blackmailed) but all the other characters have been similarly disgraced; it's why the plot's mastermind recruits them in the first place. He is shown as reliable, tough, a good soldier; he's not vilified or stereotyped, and the one character who makes some homophobic remarks (not wanting to share a room with him etc.) is, I think, implied to be a bit of a jackass for doing so. Stevens doesn't get much characterization, but what's there is unobjectionable.
According to the IMDB forums, in the novel by John Boland that the film is based on, it's actually a much more prominent character, Major Race, second-in-command to the plot's mastermind Colonel Hyde, who is gay. When the film was made, Race was made straight (we see him early on with a woman he's been having a passionate affair with) and his homosexuality transferred onto minor character Stevens. The reasoning behind that decision is obvious and not admirable, but it has unintended consequences. Race in the film is a gay stereotype in every aspect except actually being gay: he's languid and camp, calls everyone "old darling," and enjoys doing the washing-up because it reminds him of his beloved mother. He also develops a UST-filled relationship with Hyde, moving into his house early on and becoming fiercely, personally devoted to him. He even gets to say to Hyde, in a tense situation, "If you think I'm leaving without you, you're mad."
Meanwhile, the man who's textually identified as gay is conventionally masculine and works, as of the film's opening, as a boxing trainer. The film accidentally provides something I and a lot of other fans of queer characters are always looking for: a character whose queerness is not their whole story and who Does Plot Stuff While Being Queer.
I'm now desperately curious about the original John Boland novel (in particular about how the UST and domesticity of Race and Hyde translate when Race is gay). Unfortunately it's out of print and copies of it sell for biggish bucks on the internet. I'll have to try Interlibrary Loan, I guess.
In other news, I watched The League of Gentlemen (the 1960 movie about British ex-officers robbing a bank, not the much later TV comedy series). I found it enjoyable--there's some good dialogue and characterization, plus all the fun of watching them plan and carry out the heist. It's marred, though, by a kind of sexism I think of as endemic to the 1950s and 1960s, probably as backlash to women's active public roles during the war: women characters are few, peripheral, and all fit into the opposed stereotypes of the passive fuckable object to be acquired or the castrating bitch.
Interestingly, however, and perhaps not surprisingly given that director Basil Dearden would go on to make Victim (an Issue Film about the injustice of the British laws against homosexuality and the way those laws made men vulnerable to blackmail) the next year, The League of Gentlemen includes a gay man depicted in a fairly nonjudgmental way. Captain Stevens is not a shining star of perfection (we're told that he was a fascist supporter in his youth and was cashiered from the army over a sex scandal, and he's currently being blackmailed) but all the other characters have been similarly disgraced; it's why the plot's mastermind recruits them in the first place. He is shown as reliable, tough, a good soldier; he's not vilified or stereotyped, and the one character who makes some homophobic remarks (not wanting to share a room with him etc.) is, I think, implied to be a bit of a jackass for doing so. Stevens doesn't get much characterization, but what's there is unobjectionable.
According to the IMDB forums, in the novel by John Boland that the film is based on, it's actually a much more prominent character, Major Race, second-in-command to the plot's mastermind Colonel Hyde, who is gay. When the film was made, Race was made straight (we see him early on with a woman he's been having a passionate affair with) and his homosexuality transferred onto minor character Stevens. The reasoning behind that decision is obvious and not admirable, but it has unintended consequences. Race in the film is a gay stereotype in every aspect except actually being gay: he's languid and camp, calls everyone "old darling," and enjoys doing the washing-up because it reminds him of his beloved mother. He also develops a UST-filled relationship with Hyde, moving into his house early on and becoming fiercely, personally devoted to him. He even gets to say to Hyde, in a tense situation, "If you think I'm leaving without you, you're mad."
Meanwhile, the man who's textually identified as gay is conventionally masculine and works, as of the film's opening, as a boxing trainer. The film accidentally provides something I and a lot of other fans of queer characters are always looking for: a character whose queerness is not their whole story and who Does Plot Stuff While Being Queer.
I'm now desperately curious about the original John Boland novel (in particular about how the UST and domesticity of Race and Hyde translate when Race is gay). Unfortunately it's out of print and copies of it sell for biggish bucks on the internet. I'll have to try Interlibrary Loan, I guess.
