Is the Gaze White?

Rush Limbaugh has assumed room temperature.  For years I've looked forward to using that term on his decease; it was one he used to be dismissive of the deaths of people he disapproved of.  (I learned while looking it up that it was also used by R. Emmett Tyrrell, another cigar-sucking, arch-rightist provocateur.)  I considered writing more on the topic, and maybe I will later.

But for now I want to discuss another media personality, generally regarded as a sort of anti-Limbaugh.  Dick Cavett became well-known as a more cultured, intellectual kind of talk-show host years before Limbaugh won notoriety. I watched his show in those days, and while I appreciated the range of people it featured, I was usually left unsatisfied.  I think some of this was due to the limits of spoken versus written discourse, but I also think it was due to Cavett's limitations.

This video, from 1972, confirmed my suspicions.

Jones is tremendously tactful with Cavett, resulting in a sort of jujitsu where Cavett keeps throwing himself in the dirt.  He knows that the conversation isn't going as he expected it to, but he keeps wading into the fray and falling on his face over and over.  Cavett saw himself as a liberal, superior to gross rednecks like Lester Maddox, but like many white liberals he assumed a chumminess with black people that he hadn't earned.  He fully expected Jones to agree with him that Ellen Holly's objections to Anthony Quinn's proposal to play a Haitian were merely "silly."  It's a safe bet that Cavett caricatured her letter, as liberals love to do to this day, but I should see if I can find it.  It doesn't appear that Quinn ever made that film in any case.

Anyway, Jones declines Cavett's invitation to play a round of "Ain't It Awful?", and throws several curveballs that leave Cavett confused.  He keeps insisting on nuance, for heaven's sake!  He might have pointed out -- he seems to hint at it, at least -- that a Hollywood historical epic costs a lot of money, and in 1972 there were few if any black stars that bankable.  Sidney Poitier, perhaps?  It's also hard for me to believe that a Hollywood script about a Haitian emperor in 1972 would have been any good at all; I wonder if Holly's script was ever produced.

Jones also mentions his own desire to play Beethoven, which gets a nervous laugh from the audience and silence from Cavett.  The points Jones mentions wouldn't be such obstacles: his hair (a wig could fix that), and as for his skin color, we now have a hit Broadway play, Hamilton, which plays with such casting issues very freely.  After that Cavett returns to insulting Ellen Holly, which Jones brushes aside more firmly.  I wonder if Cavett could watch this clip now without cringing.

He hadn't learned any better by 1985, when this interview with Richard Pryor aired.

It's the same damn thing all over again.  Pryor just sits there, staring steadily at Cavett, until the latter realizes how nonsensical he sounds; then tries again and again, he just won't let it go.  It's not just the question he's asking -- can white writers write for black performers? -- but the larger assumption that white people can expect to define black people in the arts and elsewhere.  Borrowing Laura Mulvey's speculations about the male gaze in film, the audience for Hollywood films -- which, remember, not only played to non-white customers in the multiracial US but were marketed around the world -- was assumed to be white.  In these clips, Dick Cavett finds black people gazing back at him, and he finds it very disorienting.

We've come a long way since then, though we haven't arrived.  I'm not sure what the ideal should be, but for me it includes a variety of Mulveyan gazes, with women looking back at men, people of color looking back at whites, and the rest of the world looking back at the United States - but also looking at themselves, unconcerned about how they might look to men, whites, America.  There's nothing wrong per se with the male gaze, the white gaze, the USAn gaze, only with the assumption that any of these is objective and should be the norm.

Those Queer Little Things

The first thing to mention today is that it's the eighth anniversary of the blog.  Even if I haven't kept up the pace of a few years ago, I'm still going, still have ideas even though I'm too lazy to write them out.

I've been seeking out and watching movies I liked as a child, to see how they look to me now.  Of course this is generally a bad idea, but it's still interesting, and at least when some other wheezing old geezer complains that they don't make movies like they used to, I can say with conviction, "And it's a good thing, too!"

So this week I watched Please Don't Eat the Daisies from 1960, starring Doris Day and David Niven, directed by Charles Walters, based on Jean Kerr's 1957 book.  I'm not absolutely sure I did see this one before; more likely I saw the 1965-7 TV sitcom, and I know I read a couple of Kerr's books.  Nothing in the movie version called up any memories; by comparison, I remember scenes from The Mountain (1956), which I saw in the theater a couple of times with my mother -- especially the one where Spencer Tracy towed an injured woman across a snow bridge over a deep drop.

But that's not too surprising, since nothing in Please Don't Eat the Daisies has that kind of drama. The closest you get is baby/toddler Adam dropping the paper bag full of water his older brothers handed him onto a pedestrian a few floors below the window of their New York City apartment.  What surprised me is how much more I liked Daisies than most Hollywood movies of its era, even though I could tell immediately that the source material must have been altered to conform to Hollywood Code-era family values.  Generally the fake-looking sets, the absurd gowns and makeup, the stagey acting just frustrate me.  I've been trying to rewatch some of the Sean Connery James Bond movies, and they turn me off within fifteen minutes, not just because of the Cold War politics and Playboy sexism, but because the production values are so bad.

So why did I mostly enjoy Please Don't Eat the Daisies?  I could tell right away that Day's character, the stand-in for Kerr's persona in the book, had been hobbled: I knew that Kerr was a playwright, quite a successful one.  In the book, which I'm now rereading after many decades, she says that she became a playwright to earn money to hire someone to take care of her children in the mornings.  Her ambition since childhood, she says, was to sleep till noon each day, and since they couldn't hire a maid/nanny on a drama professor's pay, she found a way to earn her own money.  This was a remarkably un-Fifties thing for a woman to say, and I think this writer, who says she admires Kerr a great deal, plays down her subversiveness.  In the movie, Day's Kate Robinson Mackay is a stay-at-home mom;  her husband Larry has just been appointed theater critic for one of the big New York newspapers, but before that he was a college drama professor.  How they afford their maid is never explained, though I didn't think of this myself until I began reading the book.

Day and Niven don't have much chemistry together, but I believed them as a couple anyway.  They may not exude mutual lust or romance, but they do exhibit mutual respect and affection.  Larry is pursued for a while by Deborah Vaughn, an actress whose performance he's panned in his maiden big-time review; it's not clear what motivates her to do so, aside from habit and maybe his evident lack of responsiveness.  Janis Paige, who plays the actress, does a fine job, and it's a shame her part is so underwritten; her performing style is remarkably "natural" and unstagey for the period, and she makes the character likable even though she's probably not supposed to be.

Day, by contrast, shows her limitations as an actress.  She's likable, wholesome and energetic, and she might have done a better job if Kate had been written to be more like Kerr, as a woman balancing work and family, and one who doesn't do mornings.  But she has rigid body language and only a limited range of facial expressions.  It's probably just another convention of the times as well as a sop to Day's history as a singer, but at a few points Kate bursts spontaneously and inappropriately into song.  At dinner with Larry in a fancy restaurant, she slips into a few bars of her hit "Que Sera Sera," which she'd first sung in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much four years earlier.  That's Doris Day singing there, not Kate Mackay.  Later, after the Mackays have moved to the suburbs and Kate has become a volunteer at her sons' school, she breaks out a ukelele and leads a dozen children in the title song.  Then, having joined a local amateur theater group, she sings a duet in rehearsal for their upcoming production; the song is "Any Way the Wind Blows," which had been written for Day's previous film Pillow Talk, but not used.  Waste not, want not!

But despite all this, the general feel of the movie is grown-up, and that is probably why it worked for me, or at least didn't turn me off.  Of course it was made to conform to the Hollywood Production Code, so there's nothing explicitly off-color in it.  (When Kate's mother [Spring Byington] leads Larry into the bathroom for a private chat, we hear her putting down the toilet seat so she can sit down, but we don't see it.)  But there are some entertaining and mildly surprising bits.

When an icy woman barges in one morning to look at the Mackays' apartment, which she's already leased, Adam the toddler cheerfully calls out "Daddy!" from his playpen.  The new tenant looks at him coldly and asks Larry coldly, "What's with him? Queer?"  She hasn't seen him walking around his mother's shoes, as we have, but then this is just meant to establish her as unsympathetic.  Larry replies, "He's confused, like I am."

Later on, when Larry demands to know where Kate and the kids (and the dog) were, she replies angrily that they had a "rendezvous with Rock Hudson!"  This, again, is Hollywood commercialism, but it's also pleasantly meta, leaving aside what we now know (as everyone in Hollywood then knew) about Hudson.

Finally, when the Mackays are settling into the huge, Addams-family-esque house they've bought in Connecticut*, they're visited by the "Welcome to Hooton" committee: a clergyman, another housewife, and a charmingly butch woman in a dress leather jacket and string tie, introduced as Dr. Sprouk.  One of the boys asks her, "Excuse me, are you a lady or a man?"  Kate is embarrassed, but Dr. Sprouk, unruffled, answers affably, "I'm a veterinarian, sonny.  It's somewhere in between."  This exchange can probably be read in numerous ways, but I took it as a relaxed (and therefore atypical) acknowledgment of human difference.  It's too bad the movie as a whole couldn't equal that moment, and a few others like it.  There's the germ of an intelligent grown-up comedy in Please Don't Eat the Daisies; someone ought to make it.

*According to the book -- which is not a narrative but a collection of humorous essays -- they made the move while Jean and Walter were writing the book for a musical comedy, Goldilocks, which opened in 1958.  The filmmakers could have mined some good material, full of comic complications, from such a situation, but chose instead to invent the subplot of Larry being pursued by Deborah Vaughn while he works on his own book about Theatre.

By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them

When Brokeback Mountain became a middling hit a couple of years ago,there was speculation that its success might inspire Hollywood to dust off some long-stalled gay projects. Patricia Nell Warren's 1974 novel The Front Runner, about the love between an Olympic runner and his coach, or Peter Lefcourt's The Dreyfus Affair, about the coming out of a gay pro baseball player, were titles I saw mentioned. According to IMDB, both of those are scheduled for 2007 release, but only Dreyfus is listed as in production, meaning a script is being written. The Front Runner, like Jesus, has been on the verge of coming for a long time now. We'll see.

But now we're seeing the first fruits, so to speak, of Hollywood's new gay-friendliness: I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James as two straight firefighters who pose as gay in order to get domestic partner benefits. Though it isn't scheduled for release until July, there's already a thriving controversy about Chuck and Larry in the IMDB message boards, based on the trailer. (One user reported having seen and enjoyed a preview screening.)

Based on the trailer, I see no reason whatsoever to see this film. (If someone else wants to pay for my ticket, I'll consider it, just so I can write about it from a better-informed perspective.) Not because it makes gays look bad, but because it makes straights look bad. Haw haw haw, at their wedding (a wedding? I guess a mere domestic partnership wasn´t funny enough) Sandler slugs James when he starts to obey the rabbi's (Chinese [though played by a gwailo in the true Hollywood tradition], with a thick accent and thicker glasses) instruction to kiss his new husband. The wedding is an expensive affair, but apparently there was no rehearsal, so the instruction apparently came as a complete surprise. Recovering his balance, Sandler explains that that's how they get it on in their household, and the rabbi leers approvingly. Haw haw haw, what fresh, inventive humor! Could I ever get tired of seeing a straight guy prove his manhood by violence at the threat of a man's lips on his, erm, lips? (And I'm just as annoyed when queens express disgust at the thought of kissing a woman. I've kissed a few women in my time, and a few straight guys have kissed me, without any detectable nausea. Bigotry is disgusting; kissing is not.)

But as I said, this all makes straights look bad, not gays. Not that Sandler's going to relax and give James a smooch later on, I daresay. The hot city attorney (Jessica Biel, looking a bit leathery, but I'm not a straight boy) who investigates the pair to see if they're really gay, decides to seduce Sandler (whose boyish charms, such as they are, are fading). So there are numerous shots of Biel undressing in front of Sandler, assuring him that her breasts are real, etc., while Sandler drools like a bloodhound over a bowl of fresh chopped liver. Haw haw haw, what creativity! Who's ever seen anything like this before, a straight guy going cross-eyed over a pair of female breasts? Just in case you might suspect that Adam Sandler might be turning queer, even in a movie; don't worry, boys and girls, they checked his pulse and other vital signs after the daily breast exposures, and he's still All Man.

It's really daring of Paramount to blaze this trail. Of course, this trail is already as well travelled as, erm, well, you know, I don't think I'll go there. Anyway, Chuck and Larry appears to be a cross between Some Like It Hot (which was a lot more daring, even for the early 21st century let alone the 1950s), the Hope-Crosby Road movies that featured a lot of fag jokes, and a green-card comedy like Green Card or Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet. (Mark Rappaport´s documentary The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender contains a good look at the male-anxiety fag jokes in the Road movies, by the way.)

In The Wedding Banquet, a gay Chinese pretends to be straight to provide a young Chinese woman with a green card, and incidentally trick his parents into stop nagging him to get married. It has plenty of humor, plus some pathos, and its relatively weak production values don't get in the way. The Wedding Banquet did quite well, both in the US and in Lee's native Taiwan, and stayed popular enough to be remade as a stage musical. Fourteen years later, emboldened by the breakthroughs of GLBT independent cinema, Hollywood is still giving us shite like Chuck and Larry.

But hey, I'm the very model of a modern post-modernist -- I know there's no such thing as progress. I don't think Chuck and Larry will do any real harm; it's just a symptom, not a cause, of the homophobia that still saturates American society. If it confuses marriage with civil union with domestic partnership, well, most Americans (including gay ones) are confused. I don´t object to gay humor itself; I was very entertained, for example, by The Naked Gun movies, which portrayed Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Neilsen) as a pious homophobe with a weakness for men. ("Sex, Frank?" "Uh, no, not right now, Ed.") If Adam Sandler's character were to turn out to have been a regular in the Ramble (the infamous cruising area of Central Park) in between scouring the singles bars for babes, that might be funny. Or funnier, at least. And of course there have been plenty of gay comedies, where gay men and lesbians made fun of our own foibles, often to hilarious effect. Straight people are welcome to laugh at us with us, as far as I'm concerned. But, even if Chuck and Larry contains a few liberal platitudes about the importance of tolerance and acceptance for Them (i.e., Us), this kind of comedy is concerned with keeping the boundaries sharply and clearly defined. It's been done, you know? On the basis of the trailer and the excuses that are already being made for Chuck and Larry, I'm not even slightly tempted to spend my money to see it.