THERE IS no one model of gay authorship or a single pattern of gay sensibility to fully describe the work of the five directors in my book. Although Pedro Almodóvar, Terence Davies, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, and John Waters didn’t invent gay-themed cinema, they have played overarching roles in making it more explicit, accessible, and acceptable. Gay directors no longer have to hide away on screen and off. There is much less coded and condemnatory treatment of gays—in front of or behind the camera—than there was when they began their careers in the 1970s and 1980s. Gay directors, in fact, may have the advantage of being partially liberated from the pressures that culture exerts on straight directors to conform their films to mainstream notions of male domination and female subordination.1
The greatest challenge in writing this book was to balance my necessarily critical and detached approach with my passionate admiration for all of these directors’ accomplishments. I have avoided the issue of the directors’ private lives, an interesting subject worthy of serious biographers but not particularly relevant to the scope of my book. I once asked Almodóvar what kind of lifestyle he leads. Pausing for a brief second, he said: “My life is dominated by work. I have dedicated all my time to the profession. I would love to enjoy an intense sex life and adventures, like those of my characters, but I am totally surrendered to work, perhaps because I have to justify that I am a self-made man.”2 Work has consumed the lives of all five filmmakers, showing utmost dedication to their careers, which they perceive as a calling. “I like to work, that’s when I’m the happiest,” John Waters has repeatedly said. “I’m like a workaholic. When there isn’t any project getting on, it gets boring.”3
Nor have I dealt with the directors’ level of comfort with their own homosexuality, which is variable. Almodóvar has acknowledged: “Every artist needs to have secrets. Secrets enrich your life, and they add riches to your work, but secrets can become asphyxiating. A prime example is handling homosexuality. You don’t have an obligation to talk about this, but you have an obligation to face it yourself, otherwise you are condemned to a very painful life.”4 And painful it has been in the case of Terence Davies, who, by his own account, has suffered from being homosexual. What matters to me as a scholar is the reality that all five are openly gay (though they came out at different ages and phases of their lives) and the channels through which they have expressed their sexuality in their films. This is based on my belief that, ultimately, the film—or any artwork—is more important than the psychology and motivation of the artist behind it.
In examining these directors, I have not adopted any particular theory. I have used the more general concept of gay, rather than queer, based on my assumption that queer suggests more radical political positions on gender, desire, and sexuality. Moreover, surveying the literature, I have read several essays that raise the question of the extent to which queer may be a hipper, cooler, all-pervasive term for what used to be known as gay studies up to the 1980s.5
What unifies a diverse volume like Gay Directors, Gay Films? is its comparative perspective and methodological strategy. My project was motivated by a theoretical interest in nonnormative expressions of gender and sexuality that are still considered “deviant” from the viewpoint of mainstream society and the dominant culture, despite the progress made in accepting alternate lifestyles and same-sex marriage. Jointly, the five directors have been prime carriers of innovative aesthetics within the realm of cinema. Each director has made personal films that have challenged societal taboos, particularly in the areas of sex and gender. Their commitment to individuality is driven less by a need to be irreverent or a disregard for authority than by a genuine interest in changing reality, on screen and off. Their work is based on the shared belief that there always should be on-screen representation of the “marginal” aspects of society.
Instead of going from a general theory to a particular film, I have taken the opposite direction, going from a particular work to a more general framework, constructing in the process the director’s distinctive vision and unique sensibility. While analyzing the films (individual trees) of each director chronologically and placing them in the social-historical contexts in which they were made, some interesting patterns (woods or forests) emerged. Gay Directors, Gay Films? describes the work of five influential directors who have largely enjoyed successful careers inside and outside mainstream cinema. I have tried to address the tensions between the directors’ singular visions and the narratives they have made. It’s what auteurist critic Andrew Sarris has referred to as a film’s “interior meaning” in his seminal book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions.6
My reading of the films in this book is not “alternative” or “subcultural” but a legitimate reading standing alongside other kinds of readings. This reading shows that each director has created a distinctive way of looking at the world—a weltanschauung—and each is aware of this fact. Almodóvar has said: “The main difference among directors is their private reality. I think one auteur is different from another because he has his own morality, but when I say morality, I don’t mean ethics. It’s just a private point of view. I mean you can see a film by Luis Buñuel and you know exactly that it belongs to Buñuel, because it’s just a way of thinking.”7
All five directors qualify as auteurs from both a thematic and a stylistic standpoint. For example, most of Van Sant’s films, whether explicitly or implicitly gay, deal with outsiders and outcasts, observed from a detached and nonjudgmental perspective. He has been consistently attracted to American youths—their confusion, alienation, and disturbance. In his best work, he has illuminated what it means to be an outsider living on the periphery of society. His films have centered on unusual characters seldom seen in mainstream cinema: hustlers (Mala Noche, My Own Private Idaho), thieves and junkies (Drugstore Cowboy), a fame-obsessed murderess (To Die For), violence-driven high schoolers (Elephant), and a troubled, suicidal youth (Last Days).
Though the five do not share the same worldview, their sensibility has been influenced by some similar experiences as outsiders, even when they do not make gay-themed films. The insecurity and ambiguity built into their status as outsiders, especially in the first decade of their careers, has had a strong impact in shaping their creative filmmaking. All five are aware of this; as Van Sant has said, “We are all mavericks and relish our positions as such.”8 It often takes outsiders, gay directors included, to see societal manners and mores with greater complexity and deeper subtlety.
All five directors have subscribed to postmodernism in its most general meaning, a concept guiding them to move beyond coherence of form and unified structure, due to the increasingly incoherent reality we live in and the rapidly differentiated culture we experience. Celebrating the end of “serious meaning,” they recognize that all art forms, high and low, share a community of images and sounds that generate meanings even if they don’t relate to some objective or external reality. They also realize that the new technologies and social media have rendered subjectivity permeable and changeable. Like other independent-minded directors, they have embraced two tenets—self-conscious aesthetics and political (or sexual) militancy—that are anathema in Hollywood, where these concepts have meant financial risk, if not utter failure.
Like all postmodern artists, the five directors have broken down narrative and aesthetic boundaries. However, thus far, they have all operated within the national-state model. Almodóvar’s work is accessible and popular all over the world, but he is still very much a Spanish director whose screen characters, themes, and motifs are grounded in the specificity of Spanish culture. Unlike many foreign directors (most recently, even Chinese and Korean filmmakers, such as Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-Wai, and Zhang Yimou), Almodóvar has resisted tempting offers to go Hollywood or direct a movie in the English language.
Of the five, Davies is the most critical of Hollywood; as he recently said, “It’s difficult when you are not in the mainstream. We are culturally and politically a lap dog of America. We will swallow everything from America. If we’re not careful in 20 years’ time we’ll have no culture at all. The language is despised. But we need to be protected, not ossified.”9 Moreover, though his work is grounded in British history, he is also critical of his own national cinema: “It’s stultifying to hear that another Jane Austen adaptation is being made. If that’s all we can do we should maybe just stop.”10
None of the gay directors is truly religious in the traditional sense of the term, though the work of Almodóvar, Davies, and Waters cannot be understood without considering their strict upbringing and then rebellion against their oppressive Catholic backgrounds. For all five directors, cinema is the ultimate mode of personal expression. For Davies and especially for Almodóvar, cinema is also the psychologist’s couch and the priest’s confessional. But the cinema created by Davies and Almodóvar is universal, transcending nationality without renouncing the specificity of its culture, be it Britain’s Liverpool or Spain’s Madrid.
Though three of the directors are graduates of film schools, with the possible exception of Haynes, none of them is intellectual or cerebral. Perhaps not coincidentally, Haynes is the youngest (fifty-four) of the clique and also a student of semiotics at Brown University. No director has worked exclusively in the indie sector or mainstream Hollywood. Some, like Van Sant, have gone in and out of the indie milieu with varying degrees of success. All five are intensely individualistic directors, but they are also capable of adapting themselves to various genres and different styles. Almodóvar, for example, has effectively meshed the proclivities of European high art with the demands of Hollywood popular entertainment without losing his idiosyncratic approach.
Thematically and stylistically, none of the directors has attempted to hide the medium's unique formal devices in his work; au contraire, they have rejoiced in playing with or against them. All of them, especially Haynes and Almodóvar, have experimented with revisiting and revising the more closed and stable elements of classic Hollywood cinema. All five men have dealt with erotic desire, sexuality, and gay characters, but they have exhibited different approaches to their themes. The only commonality is their belief in continually breaking taboos and challenging their viewers’ expectations, both narratively and visually.
Each of the five directors has been associated with particular actors over a long period of time. For example, Waters developed and enjoyed crucial collaborations with Divine, Mink Stole, and the Dreamlanders. Almodóvar was inspired by and built the career of Carmen Maura in the 1980s and then did the same with Marisa Paredes and Penélope Cruz from the 1990s onward. Agustín, Almodóvar’s younger brother and producer, is the only figure to have appeared in all of his pictures. Haynes has cast Julianne Moore in several of his features. Van Sant has worked with two Matts (Dillon and Damon), the Afflecks (Ben and Casey), and the Phoenixes (River, Rain, and Joaquin). I have explored the relationship between the directors and their frequent actors, who often function as the filmic equivalent of a theater repertory company. These particular actors have served as effective expressions of their directors’ innermost concerns and feelings. Almodóvar has said this about his actors: “In my films there’s always someone new. But I do like having an artistic family, like a stable repertory, which is sincere and concrete.”11
As noted, the acting in Waters’s earlier films is deliberately grotesque and restricted, though later on, working with Kathleen Turner and other accomplished performers, the acting has become subtler and more realistic. In his focus on youth-oriented stories, Van Sant has largely cast young, often inexperienced and nonprofessional actors. The most subtle and professional acting is to be found in the films of Almodóvar, due to his perception of actors as “the special effects of my films.” Known for his rigorous mise-en-scènes, in which the actors (not objects or décor) are central, he has paid attention to the minute details of acting, guiding his performers in terms of voice, facial expression, gestures, body position, and body movement. He loves actors because, as he has said time and again, “It’s impossible for them to lie to me when I’m directing them. I ask the actors to be completely naked in their emotions.”12
Specific physical settings within which their stories take place have defined the work of all five directors: Waters and Baltimore, Almodóvar and Madrid, Davies and Liverpool, Van Sant and Portland, and Haynes and Los Angeles. In Almodóvar’s oeuvre, Madrid and La Movida have shaped his narratives and characters, manifest in the colorful streets, beauty parlors, coffee shops, night clubs, taxi cabs, and nonstop music.
As members of minority subcultures, the gay filmmakers have revealed within their narratives anxieties, tensions, and ideological cracks (holes in a pattern) that are both personal and collective. They have often imbued seemingly conventional genre films with a multiplicity of meanings; on the surface, the old patterns are maintained, but beneath the surface, the patterns are challenged, reinvented, and discredited.
Almodóvar’s work was explored from feminist and gay perspectives, although not neglecting historical factors. The contours of his work are shaped by the politics and culture during the end of Franco’s dictatorship and right after his death. Almodóvar has placed special emphasis on the libidinal pleasures of individuals’ bodies and their sex organs. His characters are driven by a relentless pursuit of love and pleasure, not of power, status, or money. In his universe, there is no pain without pleasure, and vice versa, no pleasure without pain.
Haynes has created a masterful mise-en-scène of middle-class suburbia, depicted as both strange and attractive by the entry of foreign or alien forces. He constructs spaces whose stability is fragile, always threatened by various outsiders. Haynes’s characters, more complex and multinuanced than those constructed by Waters or Van Sant, are formed by social contexts that can barely contain them. He asks his viewers to respond to the vagaries of history, urging them to engage in readings different from those offered by the dominant cinema.
Of the five directors, Almodóvar has devoted the most attention to the articulation of sexuality, raising the question in film after film of how desire is rendered visible in narrative film. The essential questions of who is looking at whom, in what context, and to what effect run through most of his films. Dealing with cinema’s most risky issues—voyeurism, fetishism, sexuality, and violence—he has challenged classic Hollywood cinema’s notions of male gaze—specifically, the ideas that the spectator-voyeur is necessarily male and that female exhibitionism is always the object of male gaze. He has met that challenge by creating narratives in which the protagonists are homosexuals, bisexuals, lesbians, transvestites, and transsexuals, all of whom have served as objects of desire and all of whom have been subjected to both female and male gaze.
From the beginning, Almodóvar’s goal has been to move toward greater visual explicitness in sexual matters, to remove blinders from cinema when it comes to sexual imagination and sexual action. The most stylishly elegant of the filmmakers, he allows entry into his world through rich mise-en-scènes, composition, lighting, camera movement, color coding, and editing, elements that provide viewers with perceptual patterns that go beyond his own perceptions and those of his protagonists.
Almodóvar may or may not have read Michel Foucault on sexuality, but his work certainly validates the French scholar’s theories of sexuality as a historically specific organization of desire and power, or, to put it differently, the idea that desires, identities, and practices do not line up and match neatly. Almodóvar, like the French theoretician, has shifted the focus from sexual identities to sexual practices. The figures in his work cannot be reduced simply to the two categories of homosexuals and heterosexuals. The transvestites, transsexuals, and transgenders in his films cannot be understood simply in terms of names, labels, or assumed identities. Ultimately, sexual practices are more consequential than gender-driven definitions of gay or straight. In shifting the focus to practices, he has unsettled sociological assumptions, contesting the supposedly stable relationship among sex, gender, desire, and sexual practice. In his work, there are diverse configurations of identities, desires, and practices that go beyond the labels of homosexual and heterosexual.
Van Sant has deliberately fragmented the mise-en-scène and perceptual location in his films, demanding that viewers pay attention to their various parts. He has refused to provide spectators the comfort of stable emotional placement. In his films, the mise-en-scène is never totally accommodating. Unlike Almodóvar’s characters, Van Sant’s have no homes or security, resulting in their habitation of transitional spaces—thus, the prevalence of the road/journey motifs. The antiheroes in his films live in perpetual states of anomie marked by confused identities and self-destructive violence.
The sociopolitical and cultural contexts of the three American figures (Waters, Van Sant, and Haynes) and the Spaniard Almodóvar are vastly different from those of their elders. This contemporary cohort has reacted to timely social factors such as the AIDS crisis, the debates over “political correctness” in the arts, and the tension between the “queering” of American culture on the one hand and the surrounding conservative climate on the other—especially the homophobia that prevailed during the retro (and reactionary) Reagan era.
Their work has benefited from the rise of the gay movement, which prompted a revisionist perspective toward gay cinema. They have also profited from the rising prominence of gay film festivals, which first started in San Francisco in 1976. Almost every city in the United States has a gay film festival, and some more than one—bearing standard names, such as LGBT, or more original ones, such as Los Angeles’s OutFest. Van Sant’s entire career owes its existence to the repeated showings in festivals of Mala Noche, his breakthrough 1985 feature. It took four years for the movie to get a legitimate (if limited) theatrical exhibition, by which time many industry players had heard about Van Sant through the festival circuit. At the moment, gay festivals, like other film festivals, are flourishing across the country, though it remains to be seen how important they will be in the second decade of the millennium, due to the changing patterns of movie viewership.
The prevalent conflation of sexism and homophobia in the “woman’s director” designation is pertinent to the understanding of four of the five filmmakers. A predilection for prominent and sympathetic female protagonists is a distinctive feature of four directors; the exception is Van Sant, whose work doesn’t include many women. Yet no member of this quartet has been labeled a woman’s director in the restrictive (and punitive) way that describes George Cukor, Hollywood’s best-known gay director. As I have shown in my biography of Cukor, Master of Elegance, there are more prominent female figures in the work of Alfred Hitchcock or Michelangelo Antonioni's than in Cukor’s, but neither Hitchcock nor Antonioni was ever described as a woman’s director, whereas Cukor was—largely because he was gay.
Historically disenfranchised and maligned gay men tend to identify with other marginalized and oppressed groups: ethnic minorities, individuals of color, and women. Most gay directors, including this particular quintet, have experienced some form of oppression, even if it is not identical to the oppression faced by women. There are therefore significant links between gay men and women, grounded in the historical marginalization of both groups. Gay filmmakers, like other minority members—and women are a minority culturally, if not statistically—share an ideological construction as victims.
There are not many women in Van Sant’s work, not even in secondary roles. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and To Die For are his only pictures featuring female protagonists. In Drugstore Cowboy, two members of the quartet are females, but the focus is on one male, Bob Hughes. Van Sant has shown strong empathy for male outsiders. “Directors have to fall in love with their lead characters, because the lead character is the spokesman for the universe the director is creating,”13 he once joked. “When we’re casting guys, there is the extra conflict of interest of falling in love with them, but I don’t allow that to happen. In France, directors say they have to make love to their actors, but they’re French, and I’m more Calvinist.”14
Due to his conservative upbringing and repressed personality, Van Sant has shied away from depicting sexuality in a graphic way—in sharp contrast to Almodóvar. Van Sant has acknowledged that
a gay director who is directing a straight sex scene is removed, which helps. He can objectively see what the dynamics of the two characters are. But when you’re making movies, it’s like designing and building. If you’re designing a room and you’re gay, there are some things that will be affected—maybe the shape of the room, the interior decoration. But when you’re talking about just getting people through doors with the right kind of perspective, your sexuality doesn’t necessarily apply. A sex scene is architecturally rendered by the filmmaker. The actual sexuality of the characters is the last thing you come in contact with.15
Viewed historically, each director, having begun his career in the 1970s or 1980s, had to deal with gay liberation (especially in the case of Waters and Almodóvar) and later on with the culture of AIDS and the unfortunate consequences of discrimination and rampant homophobia. Van Sant and Haynes have made specific movies dealing with AIDS as well as other movies that are allegories of AIDS. Nonetheless, the work of Almodóvar, Haynes, and Van Sant (but much less so that of Davies and Waters) cannot be fully understood without taking into an account AIDS and its impact on our culture.
All five directors have had to contend with the restrictions of political correctness as an ideology and a practice. Throughout his career, Almodóvar has had to deal with repeated charges of exploiting rather than illuminating the sociocultural elements of rape, which his adversaries claim occurs in too many of his films. But I don’t recall many critics complaining that there are “too many murders” or “too many villains” in Hitchcock’s films. Almodóvar’s detractors seem to disregard the fact that each rape is vastly different from the others, depending on the text’s circumstances and tone. The rape in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! cannot be placed in the same category as the rapes in Talk to Her and The Skin I Live In because they serve different narrative, dramatic, and emotional purposes. Similar observations can be made about the use of drugs in Almodóvar’s films, which can provide the source of humor, as in Dark Habits and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, but also the source of illness, tragedy, and devastation, as in All About My Mother, Bad Education, Volver, and The Skin I Live In.
All five filmmakers have spoken against reductionism—namely, the reduction of gay artists (and gay screen characters) to sexuality as the single, or most prominent, aspect that defines their personalities. They have also refused to reproduce dominant stereotypes of homosexuals, such as the Sissy, the Suicidal Youth, the Gay Psychopath, the Seductive Androgyne, and the Bisexual. Instead, they have tried to present “more real” or “realistic” gay men and lesbians. They realize, as Anneke Smelik has suggested, that for straight viewers, using old, negative stereotypes confirms prejudice and that for gay spectators, their use might encourage fear, self-hatred, and anger.16 On the other hand, these directors also realize that presenting only positive images is not the solution and that images of gays and lesbians cannot be seen as simply “true” or “false.” Gay Directors, Gay Films? has focused on the social contexts and the conditions under which various entertainment institutions have created, maintained, and perpetuated ideological and cinematic stereotypes that gay directors have set out to challenge and abolish.
Aiming to establish connections between gays and other marginalized minorities, Haynes destabilizes the division between dominant and subordinate individuals by disturbing the usual space allotted to “others” in society’s broader structure. Like Almodóvar, he avoids any form of labeling because labeling permits those in power to feel secure and to perpetuate the status quo by drawing boundaries that separate those who have from those who have not.17 Moreover, to label is to judge, and to judge is to limit the range of possibilities of his characters and the range of interpretations of his viewers. No character in his films can be adequately understood or fully contained through sexual labeling; in most cases, socioeconomic status is more important as a defining criterion. He empowers his disenfranchised individuals in fantasy worlds, which they create apart from their oppressors. In Poison, nothing that the jail’s wardens do can prevent the prisoners from engaging in imaginative sexual intercourse (a plot device that served as a climax in Martin Sherman’s Holocaust drama, Bent). In Velvet Goldmine, Arthur rehearses in his imagination the bold declaration of his sexuality to his parents.
Haynes qualifies as a queer filmmaker in the traditional as well as the new sense of the term. As Justin Wyatt has suggested, Haynes’s oeuvre is queer by being unusual, strange, and disturbing,18 but in my view, it’s also queer in its deconstruction of gay identities and its reconstruction of gay subcultures. His formal experimentation is based on his belief that the greatest function of film (and any art) is to provoke, to disturb, and to unsettle. Like Almodóvar (and David Lynch before him), by making the familiar unfamiliar and the ordinary extraordinary, Haynes has helped viewers see the unusual yet still beautiful elements in our everyday lives.
Four of the five directors (the exception is Van Sant) have dissected the screen role of the housewife, working-class and middle-class, Spanish, British, and American. Almodóvar said early on in his career, “If I want a heroine, I prefer a housewife, whose world is much more interesting as a social commentary as well as melodrama,” though he admitted that every class and group (including yuppies) has its charms and eccentricities. His preoccupation with the role of the housewife reflects his own background, a rural family with a strong matriarch moving to the metropolis and fighting for survival. Years later he acknowledged the impact of similarly themed Italian neorealist features—specifically, Rocco and His Brothers, Luchino Visconti’s 1960 masterpiece. “I tried to adopt a sort of revamped neorealism with a central character that’s always interested me: the housewife and victim of consumer society.”19
More than other directors, Almodóvar and Haynes have exposed the sociocultural mechanisms that construct gender roles, but they have done it in different ways. A postmodern intellectual, Haynes has dissected gender analytically from a deconstructive academic standpoint, whereas Almodóvar has done it more intuitively. Both directors have struck a blow against the monolithic accumulation of patriarchal film conventions by critiquing gender stereotypes, but Haynes has done it via serious melodramas, whereas Almodóvar has tackled those issues in various genres: satires, farces, comedies, melodramas, film noir, and even horror-thrillers.
The family institution has been of central concern to all five directors. “As a subject, the family never fails and never disappoints,” Almodóvar said. “I found that when I shot What Have I Done to Deserve This? people began looking at me with different eyes, sort of ‘he’s modern but also sensible.’ The family is always first-rate dramatic material.”20 Though phrased differently, Van Sant has expressed a similar opinion: “Families are interesting stuff. The dynamics of whatever family you have is an orientation that you apply to the outside world. Maybe it’s just the most interesting thing that I know.”21
Van Sant and Haynes have not said much about the impact of their birth mothers on their lives and careers, but Almodóvar, Davies, and Waters have, and Almodóvar’s worship of his mother is also reflected in his casting her in major roles in his pictures until she died. In his features, Almodóvar has analyzed the complex dynamics of three-generational families, a clan absent from most American films (and reality). Reflecting his own background and the family tradition in Spain, extended families, including patriarchal and matriarchal grandparents, abound in his oeuvre.
There is also more concern with the relationships between siblings, be they two brothers, two sisters, or brother and sister, He acknowledged: “I love the sense of fraternity, and I have always enjoyed movies with siblings. Warren Beatty being beaten up in the parking lot for watching his sister’s loss of honor in Splendor in the Grass. … Thrilling Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas and his silent visit to brother Dean Stockwell.”22 And he does not shy away from depicting the camaraderie between female siblings (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Flower of My Secret) as well as the rivalry between male siblings (most manifest in What Have I Done to Deserve This? and Bad Education).
Van Sant’s work differs radically from that of Almodóvar (and Waters) in that his protagonists either are products of broken families or have no biological families at all. On one level, My Own Private Idaho is the sad tale of two surrogate brothers in search of a missing mother. For Van Sant, newly formed families, based on shared lifestyle or occupation, are far more significant than birth families. In Mala Noche, the Mexican drifters form sort of a community of hustlers. In Drugstore Cowboy, we meet Bob’s mother only once; and the surrogate family that the four drug addicts establish is far more significant. If families of procreation are seldom seen in Van Sant’s work, it’s because his protagonists are high schoolers or adolescents, too young to have families of their own.
I had met the late French director François Truffaut several times through my friendship with critic Michel Perez. In a spontaneous moment of chutzpah, I once asked Truffaut if the state of French gay cinema would have been different if one of the leaders of the New Wave (Alain Resnais, Eric Roehmer, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette) had been homosexual. After a moment of pause, he said hesitatingly, in French, “probablement.” I do believe that French cinema would have included more openly gay directors and queer films had there been a tradition of gay cinema. Marcel Carne could not afford to be explicitly gay, but elements of gay gaze prevail in his best work (Children of Paradise). Even Andre Techine had to be “cautious” in the climate of the 1970s, and made his most personal film (Wild Reed) in 1994. Indeed, it took a whole generation for a major, openly gay French director, such as the accomplished François Ozon (Swimming Pool, 8 Women), to make strongly personal films unabashedly. Incidentally, Ozon was included in my initial research design but was eliminated due to restrictions on this book’s scope and length.
Despite variability of nationality and social class, all five have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the same artists and filmmakers, which demonstrates the universal power of art. Call it the Anxiety of Influence among gay directors, to borrow Harold Bloom’s concept. I have discussed in some detail the thematic and stylistic impact of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas on the features made by Almodóvar and Haynes. More specifically, the directors have all read in high school or college what Almodóvar has referred to as “the damned poets,” like France’s enfants terribles Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet, creators of radical works of literary density. It’s not a coincidence that the directors have all watched and then studied Genet’s Un chant d’amour. Almodóvar recalled: “In high school, we of course didn’t hear about Rimbaud or Genet, but I knew very soon that there was something interesting in them and read them on my own.”23
Though none of the quintet has defined himself as an overtly political filmmaker, say, in the sense that Oliver Stone is, they have all engaged in sexual politics—in the power relationships between men and women, men and men, and women and women. Domination and subjugation, freedom and control—these are terms that apply to all of them. Critics of Almodóvar have charged that he makes political references in a frivolous and gratuitous way, to the point of trivializing politics by using it for comedic purposes. Those critics have raised the allusions to Shiite terrorism in Labyrinth of Passion and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and the war of genocide in the former Yugoslavia in Live Flesh and The Flower of My Secret. In response, Almodóvar has claimed that his target audience, the younger generation in Spain that came of age in the 1980s, is more interested in seeking pleasure and happiness than in politics per se. Challenged to take a clearer political position, he said: “I’ve never been a member of a political party because I need to keep my independence. But I’m very much on the left. In films, it’s not necessary for characters to talk about politics. The politics is implicit in the story.” And though he does not define himself as an overtly political filmmaker, he has readily acknowledged that all of his films “carry a political commentary” and that just exploring the lives of housewives is “already a political statement.”24
Along with sexual politics, the political denominator shared by these filmmakers can be called the politics of aesthetics. All five have contributed to the democratization of on-screen representation, taking characters that have been (at best) marginal and putting them center stage. They have taken minority subcultures (racial, sexual, or criminal) and made them more mainstream by creating stories in which homosexuals, transvestites, transgenders, drug addicts, and criminals play the leads, occupying unashamedly and unapologetically the center rather than the periphery of the narrative.
For example, Waters has gone way beyond his heroes—Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and Paul Morrissey—in redefining the politics of taste. Warhol had placed several of his sexy models and hunky studs (such as Joe Dallesandro) at the center of his films, but it was Waters who made a legitimate star out of the 300-pound transvestite Divine and a household name out of cute if chubby Ricki Lake. Individually and collectively, this quintet has revolutionized film and popular culture by redefining their range and parameters. I doubt that the stage and movie musical versions of Hairspray would have been possible without Waters’s pioneering movie twenty-six years ago. That said, the five directors are not alone and not the first ones—they stand on the shoulders of giants, and credit should be given to such iconic gay figures as Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and others.
My book has made strong statements about the artistic merits of seventy films, but they are not final assessments. My critical approach is not exhaustive but necessarily partial—yet hopefully useful in shedding light on the work of five talented directors. I have deliberately avoided overall evaluations of what the directors have accomplished because they still have many years of creative work ahead of them. With the exception of Waters, who has not made a film in a decade, the directors are still working. Their careers are still in progress, evolving in unanticipated ways—due to changes of the film industry and society at large as well as inevitable shifts in their own personalities and artistic sensibilities.
Finally, I do hope that the films made by the five directors in the future will justify a second, updated version of Gay Directors, Gay Films?