William J. Palmer The Films of the Nineties; The Decade of Spin (2009)(1)

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.In & Out is amovie where, instead of the usual porno movies, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girlis the entertainment at the bachelor party.In & Out is a movie where on the altarat his wedding, instead of saying I do, Brackett says, I m gay. In & Out is amovie where a Catholic priest in the confessional advises Brackett to have pre-marital sex with his fianc� to prove he s not gay.In & Out is a movie where whenthe central character is aggressively trying to have sex with his fianc� to provethat he s not gay, he looks up and sees Richard Simmons, the ultimate Ameri-can flamboyant gay, shaking it on the TV screen.In & Out is a movie whereBrackett s disappointed fianc�, Emily (Joan Cusack), after throwing herself at TVhunk Peter Malloy who advises her that he is also gay, screams out in frustration, Is everybody gay! In & Out is a movie in which a man can have a completedialogue with an audiotape titled Explaining Your Masculinity in which thecentral proof of masculinity is that straight men do not dance, but, while lis-tening to the tape, Brackett cannot resist the pull of his happy feet and the tapescreams at him to stop: What are you doing? Stop dancing you bitch ballerina!(which is an interesting intertextual allusion to the gay corps de ballet doing SwanLake at the end of Love! Valour! Compassion!).Finally, In & Out is a Hollywoodmetamovie that not only has witty fun with the gay coming-out experience butalso parodies itself in its hilarious send-up of the Academy Awards.The year thatCameron Duke (Matt Dillon) is nominated for playing a gay soldier in a warmovie, the other nominees for best actor arePaul Newman for CootClint Eastwood for CodgerMichael Douglas for Primary UrgesSteven Seagal for Snowball In HellIn & Out is a successful gay movie (and a successful movie) simply because it isconsistently, self-reflexively, and postmodernly funny.Ironic wit rules and makesthe film s gay theme acceptable to the mainstream, nongay audience that it is try-ing to reach, gay kiss and all.The spin strategy of In & Out is, in fact, quite similar to that of Love! Valour! Com-passion!.Where Love! Valour! Compassion! argued that its eight gay men were workingthrough the exact relationship problems that the straights of The Big Chill and Peter sFriends were facing, In & Out argues that the insecurities and self-delusions of gaysand straights are strikingly similar and actually matter much less than we think theydo.For example, Malloy becomes Brackett s mentor in the coming-out process in In& Out. I came out, Malloy tells Brackett, to everyone my folks, my boss, mydog.One day I just snapped.I just got tired of switching pronouns and remember-ing to lower my voice and I couldn t take lying to people I loved. When Brackettasks Malloy what happened, the answer is both nonchalant and predictable.Nothing�%148 The Films of the Ninetiesreally happened. Everybody surprised me, Malloy says, once I trusted them.What the spin strategy of In & Out is saying is that coming out of the closet isn treally that big a deal at all; it s only as big a deal as all of our both gay and straightfears, insecurities, and prejudices make it.In & Out ends with the whole townof Greenleaf, Indiana, coming out in support of Best Teacher Howard Brack-ett.The high school students, the parents, the farmers, the police officers, andthe postmen all declare their gayness in support of Brackett s humanity.In thismovie, not only does Brackett out himself at the altar at his wedding (the centralritual of heterosexuality) but the whole community outs itself at a high schoolgraduation (a central ritual of heterosexual passage).In & Out is a deft and craftyspin movie that triumphs through its ability to laugh at itself.One of the funniest (and postmodernist) subtexts of In & Out is the film sparody of Hollywood and its rituals, especially the Academy Awards.But in thenineties the coming out theme of In & Out became a controversial issue in Holly-wood witness the Ellen DeGeneres Anne Heche tabloid frenzy or the tongue-in-cheek coyness of Kevin Spacey escorting his mother to the Academy Awards.Coming out of the closet in the Hollywood of the nineties was a pretty trickybusiness.Ellen Morgan s Yep.I m gay was a remarkably straightforward way ofcoming out, but the reactions within the industry to DeGeneres and her lesbianlover, Heche, were anything but straightforward.DeGeneres got cancelled andindustry-wide doubt was expressed as to whether Heche could ever play hetero-sexual roles again.Perhaps the most interesting Hollywood coming-out scenarioplayed out around Gods and Monsters (1998), the biopic of openly gay thirtiesmonster movie director James Whale.Sir Ian McKellan, who is also gay, havingcome out in 1988 on a BBC radio program, played Whale, the director of bothFrankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in that inside-Hollywoodmetamovie (a movie about making movies).He was nominated for the 1998Best Actor Academy Award for the part.Gods and Monsters director Bill Con-don defines how Hollywood politics were stacked against McKellan: I showedthe movie to a publicist who handles a lot of Academy campaigns.She said, The only problem is, there s never been a gay man who s been nominated for agay role. She said it right before the [1997] nominations came out, and indeedRupert Everett didn t get nominated [for My Best Friend s Wedding] and GregKinnear did [for As Good As It Gets]. 31Other metamovies that self-reflexively touched upon the problems of comingout in the business of Hollywood, such as Billy s Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998) andLove and Death on Long Island (1997), did not receive nearly the attention gener-ated by Gods and Monsters, yet dealt with the same coming-out-due-to-falling-in-love dynamic.In Love and Death on Long Island, John Hurt, another distinguishedEnglish gay actor playing a gay role, brings the film s whole coming-out premiseto life.Ironically, over the decades, controversial gay roles have been major career-building stepping stones for many straight actors.In 1971 Peter Finch was thefirst actor to receive an Oscar nomination for portraying an openly homosexualcharacter [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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