Derek Jarman’s Edward II
Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?
This one is different from most of the other texts on my reading list as it isn’t strictly a work of theory. Rather, it is a hybrid which mixes theory with reportage and mainstream (relatively) criticism. B. Ruby Rich is the person who invented the term New Queer Cinema, which describes the corpus of films from the late 80s through the mid 90s that worked to bring queer voices to audiences through independent cinema. Rich traces this era’s predecessors in one chapter, then spends much of the back half of the book exploring some new avenues that opened up outside of the relatively localized (in time and space) phenomenon of NQC, including sections on “Queering Latin American Cinema” and the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian stories in films like Brokeback Mountain and Milk. Rich’s primary contention is that NQC was a vibrant and exciting movement/moment, even if it was always somewhat compromised by audience and (therefore) capitalist desires.
Rich is keen to point out, from the beginning and throughout, the privilege given to white gay male voices in this movement, with people like Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes able to launch successful mainstream careers off of their NQC beginnings while creators of color and lesbians were less likely to break through in that way. She mostly also speaks of the filmic incarnation of the NQC, only deigning to write about television and the effects it had on the aims and financial viability of NQC via figures like Ellen Degeneres. She also mentions, briefly, what she calls a New Trans Cinema that she saw just beginning as she was compiling and adding to this text. It seems to me that the NQC and NTC are related if different movements/moments, and I’m curious as to what current and future scholarship will have to say on that front.
Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?
Rich doesn’t do much debating here, her aim is more historiographic/photographic, reporting her perspective on the films and filmmakers (and distribution venues like queer film festivals and museums) in the moment, and occasionally in retrospect, as in the opening and closing essays. The things Rich is most often in conversation with is the film itself, and sometimes the other popular press critics who perform the same kind of work that she does here. As such, there isn’t the rigorous thought that one expects from the theory-based monograph. What it lacks in that area is made up for in enthusiasm, advocacy (I added like 5 movies to my watchlist based on reading the sections I did alone), and a fascinating sense of a developing canon in process. Many of the essays contained herein feel of the moment and aware of that specificity, much to Rich’s benefit.
The essay on Brokeback Mountain is a bit different, as it takes as one of its main interests the reaction to the film’s success. Here Rich compiles and juxtaposes the way that mainstream media treated the film with “ambivalent snickering” while queer audiences tried to decide if the film was gay enough and audiences outside of the more accepting areas of the US sometimes were able to see themselves on screen for the first time given the film’s wide theatrical distribution (185). This essay was of the most interest to me, as it articulated the kind of event where an element of independent cinema (here queer representation as popularized by NQC) becomes coopted by mainstream filmmaking and creates a cultural moment out of it. I also appreciated Rich’s ability to both advocate for the film’s admirable qualities while giving its critics a proper hearing. Something to keep in mind.
Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?
Depends on the essay. As I said, some are historical in nature, reaching back for antecedents and forbearers, while others operate as film reviews written concurrently with major releases of the NQC (Mysterious Skin, The Watermelon Woman). Still others are opinion pieces on where the movement is currently and where it might go, while others stake claims out for similar movements in other locations.
Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?
Rich lays out in the introduction a four-ingredient recipe for the historical context which gave birth to the NQC: “the arrival of AIDS, Reagan, camcorders, and cheap rent” to which she adds the mixing device of the newly-articulated conception of a queer community and label (xvi). She returns over and over again to these five elements, tracing their meaning and impact on the creators and audiences of the NQC as well as their development (for instance, the movement from 16mm film to video for cheapness and ease-of-use, which later changes again (for some) back to film as they are able to lure studios into financing their films).
She also argues that NQC enjoyed a brief time in the spotlight as the excitement of audiences to see either themselves or something new on screen led to a boom in money and attention, at least for the white men making these kinds of movies. But when that became less exciting and new, the money also quickly disappeared. However, she notes that the briefness of the NQC’s time in the sun did create lasting changes, with mainstream movies more likely to take on (versions of) the kind of stories and representation that drove the films of the NQC. Late 90s examples like Boys Don’t Cry and The Talented Mr. Ripley are decidedly not as vibrant or interested in advocacy as the films of the NQC proper are, but they also feel deeply indebted to those earlier films and filmmakers.
Finally, Rich argues in the closing lines of her conclusion that we are not living in a post-queer (or post-NQC) world, even though both concepts have gained mainstream acceptance, at least to a point. Instead, she puts the current (in 2013) moment as optimistically “pre-” something. Unsure exactly as to what that thing will be, Rich still powerfully posits not an end of queerness but a continuation in line with the kind of work she does throughout the text to show that NQC/queerness are not codified and ossified categories but fluid and expansive movements/moments.
Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?
I’ve already mentioned most of this here, I think the text works best as exactly what it is, a report/retrospective look at a cinematic movement and moment in time and place. Its greatest strengths are as history and advocacy, not theory, though Rich does offer some useful explanations for what NQC is and why/how it works.
It intersects with one of my major interests, the mainstreaming of independent aesthetics and topics, while also interacting with feminist and race-based theories of film and filmmaking politics.
Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?
New Queer Cinema, queer, mainstream, independent, representation, aesthetics, cultural studies
Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?
Emanating from a (mostly) new generation, the NQC embodied an evolution in thinking. It reinterpreted the link between the personal and the political envisioned by feminism, restaged the defiant activism pioneered at Stonewall, and recoded aesthetics to link the independent feature movement with the avant-garde and start afresh. (xv)
Newly invented camcorders enabled the easy production of electronic media at the personal level for the first time in history. A new generation emerging from art school seized the new tools to reimagine cinema with a video eye, revising the medium thrillingly from the bottom up. In the streets, the camcorder enabled the reversal of surveillance: police could now be recorded by the crowds. (xvii)
As urgency and rage began to collapse into despair and frustration for the ACT UP generation, the New Queer Cinema created a space of reflection, nourishment, and renewed engagement. The NQC quickly grew – embryonically at first, with its first steps in the years 1985-91, then bursting into full view in 1992-97 with formidable force. Its arrival was accompanied by the thrill of having enough queer videos and films to reach critical mass and tip over into visibility. An invention. A brand. A niche market. (xix)
That synergy of creative and critical impulses is one of the lessons of the NQC, or so I hope: the power that comes with inhabiting historical time, writing in sync with a moment of palpable importance, a synchrony that endows anyone lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with powers of prescience that might otherwise fall by the wayside. (xx)
Of course, the new queer films and videos aren’t all the same and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary, strategy, or concern. Nonetheless they are united by a common style: call it “Homo Pomo.” In all of them, there are traces of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist, and excessive. Above all, they are full of pleasure. They’re here, they’re queer, get hip to them. (18)
Moments of origin always cast a long shadow. Today’s queer film and video still bear a birthright linked to the umbilical cord of post-Stonewall gestation. There’s a generation of elders that expect film and video to toe an eternally prescribed line of righteousness and legitimacy, while ever new and needy generations recycle the old and add their own requirements. These queer publics want films of validation and a culture of affirmation: work that can reinforce identity, visualize respectability, combat injustice, and bolster social status. They want a little something new, but not too new; sexy, sure, but with the emphasis on romance; stylish, but reliably realistic and not too demanding; nothing downbeat or too revelatory; and happy endings, of course. It’s an audience that wants, not difference or challenge, but rather a reflection up there on the screen of its collective best foot forward. Part of the audience also wants higher production values than the independence can deliver: a queer Hollywood, popcorn movies for a fun Saturday night out. (41)
If we limit ourselves to what we see in the mirror, we’re lost. If we’re scared of anything new or different, or made uneasy by films and videos that challenge our notions of the homonatural universe, we’ll be stuck with the status quo. If queer audiences stay away from controversial groundbreaking work, then the distributors and studios, those who watch the box office like a seismologist watches the Richter needle, will pull out completely. And the queer community will be abandoned, condemned to a static universe, comforted only by the sure knowledge that the earth, alas, won’t move under our feet. (45)
Such films could have signaled a moment of triumphant consolidation for the NQC, yet the opposite would seem to suggest itself: The NQC has become so successful that it has dispersed itself in any number of elsewheres. Lacking the concentrated creative presence and focused community responsiveness of its origin moment, NQC has become just another product line pitched at one particular type of discerning customer. At a time when casting has become essential to getting independent films financed and produced, it’s clear why actors have to be involved. On the other hand, it’s the runaway success of the NQC films that has turned them into such welcome vehicles for actors, reversing the trend that in the past saw actors turn away from films that in any way pushed sexual identity into a zone of ambiguity – a move, in other words, from career poison to career honeypot. (134)
I decided that it wasn’t trying to invent a new style exactly. It was trying to mobilize the most classic and accepted of styles in support of a grand love story, the scope of which we hadn’t seen before with a homosexual theme. In this reliance on familiar forms and mainstream affect, of course, Brokeback was virtually the opposite of the NQC that had come before it, and yet it was impossible to imagine Lee’s film ever being made, or even imagined, without that precedent. (190-1)
Brokeback Mountain was an event movie, one that sought with old-fashioned ambition to straddle marketplaces and move beyond self-identified audiences. That strategy is unlikely to appeal to all members of the LGBT community prepared to cast judgment on any such gesture. Universalism, for good reason, is suspect by now. But what takes its place, then? Limited releases? Mutually exclusive niches in our increasingly niche-fueled society? No-budget digital stories distributed by download? Brokeback Mountain was a mainstream release inspired by a widely read story by an established author, written by highly regarded screenwriters, directed by a name-brand heterosexual director. A post-identity politics epic. And a hit. Whether that’s a good or a bad development will have to be decided, as usual, in hindsight. (199)
Most important for this volume, new queer cinema changed: first it expanded into something, then nothing, and then everything – a relatively rapid transformation from the fringe to the center at the level of subjects and themes. Once taboo or titillating, queers were now the stuff of art films, crossover movies, and television series. Thank you, HBO. Thank you, Focus Features. Or, some might argue, No thanks. As decisively as the outlaw seemed to disappear from LGBT culture, so did the radical import of NQC disappear from the films that it had made possible. Yes, I’m happy to have more rights, but oh how I missed the outlawry of the old days. (262)
When I am asked yet again whether today’s films are postqueer, the kind of term usually intended to signal defeat or compromise or at best stasis, I opt for a different formulation altogether. Far from bereft, I remain optimistic, sure that we aren’t after the fact at all, not post-anything. We are surely and absolutely . . . pre-. (282-3)