White

by Bret Easton Ellis

  And the next gateway I passed through was when I saw my first pornographic film: I was in the ninth grade and a wealthy friend who lived in Bel Air (his father owned a football team) had a sleepover and through some vague connections had obtained a VHS copy of a recently produced porn movie. The film felt incredibly taboo—and that night so transgressive that forty years later I can still remember the pattern in the massive bedroom’s wallpaper that lined the second floor of the mansion my friend lived in. Even at fourteen (try imagining now a fourteen-year-old boy who has never seen porn before) I knew it was terrible—unattractive performers, poorly shot, edited by a sloth—but it still offered a jolt, and I understood that I had now crossed into another world with no looking back. It wasn’t until we were mobile Southern California boys at fifteen and sixteen, with cars at our disposal, that we began obtaining and trading cassettes like contraband—and I use that word because at a certain point the availability was so fraught with frustration and difficulty, and there were so many impasses, that these tapes were surprisingly hard to come by. Our needs demanded an incredible amount of sheer will and planning, but the testosterone-crazed energy of adolescent sexuality helped us get what we desired so badly, and the hunt itself was also part of the pleasure.

  Some ’70s feminists complained about Playboy, and porn in general, and as males we were confused: What was wrong about looking at and objectifying beautiful women (or men)? What was wrong about this gender-based instinct to stare and covet? Why shouldn’t this be made more easily available to horny boys? And what was wrong with the idea of the male gaze? Leaving aside everything we now know about toxic masculinity (whatever that is), no ideology will ever change these basic facts that are ingrained by a biological imperative. Why should we be turning away from our sexuality? My male friends often wondered, Who is empowered here? It’s certainly not me. I’m staring at this beautiful woman I desperately want and who I’ll probably never meet. That was the majority teen-boy feeling, which intensified the fantasy of it all; doesn’t this slight sense of punishment and disdain overlaying the enjoyment always add to the experience? The feminist reaction to Playboy seemed unfair because our options pre-internet were so severely limited—maybe a couple issues of a magazine per month—that to apply moral criticism to our desires seemed cruel.

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  Today the idea of actually going to a store (Le Sex Shoppe was our usual stop in the San Fernando Valley) and renting or buying porn and having that be the only source for a month is unthinkable and impractical, yet in that long-gone world it’s how men dealt with the need to obtain sexual images—and since they were so rare we imbued them with a deeper meaning and perhaps made them more powerful and erotic than they actually were. Then, in the late 1980s and into the ’90s, DVDs soon gave way to the incredible array of pornography on the internet, and I marveled at the amount of choice that was so effortlessly available, compared to what there’d been available in my adolescence and twenties. And yet this abundance changed my relationship to nudity and porn: it made it more commonplace, and somewhat less exciting, just as ordering a book from Amazon was less exciting than walking into a bookstore and browsing for an hour or so, or purchasing shoes online instead of heading to the mall and trying on a pair of Top-Siders while interacting with a salesperson, or buying a record at Tower, or actually standing in line for a movie you wanted to see. This cooling of excitement on all levels of the culture has to do with the disappearing notion of investment.

  When you went to a bookstore or record store or movie theater or newsstand, you took the time to invest a greater amount of effort and attention in these various expeditions than you would by clicking a few buttons—effort and attention that were tied to a deeper attempt to connect with the LP, the hardcover, the film, the porn. You had a rooting interest in enjoying the experience because you’d invested—and were more likely to find gratification because of this. The idea of dismissing a book after five pages on your Kindle, turning off a movie in its first ten minutes after buying it on Apple or not listening through a whole song on Spotify wasn’t an option—why do that after you’d driven to the Sherman Theater on Ventura Boulevard, the Crown Books in Studio City, the Tower Records on Sunset, the newsstand on Laurel Canyon? But what happens when things are almost automatically available—when a novel or a song or a movie or a naked woman or five naked women or a naked woman engaged in an orgy with five hung men is only a click away? When nudity and the idea of sexual gratification become so routine you can instantly hook up with someone and see naked pics of that soon-to-be sex partner within seconds, an exchange as casual as ordering a book on Amazon or downloading a new release on Apple—then this lack of investment renders everything the same. If everything’s available without any effort or dramatic narrative whatsoever, who cares if you like it or if you don’t? And the pulse-pounding excitement—the suspense—of the effort you once put into finding erotic imagery has now been lost with the lo-fi ease of accessibility, which in fact has changed our experience of expectation. There was a romance to that analog era, an ardency, an otherness that is missing in the post-Empire digital age where everything has ultimately come to feel disposable.

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  In the fall of 2014, while I watched The Imitation Game, director Morten Tyldum’s film about the genius Alan Turing, my interest began to fade and was replaced by a low-level annoyance when I started thinking: Haven’t we moved past such an old-fashioned, antiquated notion about gay victimization—including this ultimate gay-martyr movie? I flashed on my experience of reading Andrew Hodges’s Alan Turing: The Enigma when I was in college—a book that appealed to the gay men I knew not necessarily because of what Turing had accomplished as a code breaker during the Second World War, but because of Turing’s homosexuality—at least that’s what got them interested in the book initially. The divide between the real Alan Turing and the role Benedict Cumberbatch played was distracting since Turing, while in many respects a victim of his times, never really considered himself a victim. He was in all probability a much more nuanced, contradictory and complicated man than the desperate, helpless, fumbling, lovable guy that Harvey Weinstein and company were trying to sell. Turing was a genuine weirdo who often knowingly or unknowingly victimized himself, yet the movie’s victim narrative makes this his defining characteristic. The Imitation Game offers a dark story with a suicide looming at the end, but in typical Weinstein fashion it’s turned into a rousing acclamation of the human spirit: Alan Turing might have killed himself, but in the film’s triumphant ending we learn that without his genius (and, of course, his sacrifice) we never would’ve had the computer or artificial intelligence or the microwave or video games and so on—and moviegoers can walk out feeling good about themselves. And yet The Imitation Game has at its center a brilliant and intellectually sophisticated gay man, something that’s rare to nonexistent in current cinema anywhere, and it was a movie made for a mass audience, not just the art house. It did quite well financially ($230 million worldwide) because it’s about problem-solving and not gay consciousness.

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  Watching The Imitation Game made me think about Andrew Haigh’s 2011 breakthrough Weekend and I wistfully wondered while leaving the theater, What happened? Weren’t there supposed to be more movies like Weekend at this stage in the game? Written and directed by Haigh, it depicts two young men who meet in a gay bar in a city outside of London on a Friday night—just a casual hookup with neither of them the other’s preferred choice. Russell (played by Tom Cullen) is quiet, guarded, self-conscious, a loner, while Glen (Chris New) is more comfortable in his skin, open and angry, and prone to shaking up the gay status quo; he’s confrontational and likes to stir up trouble. They’re both attractive, but not in the stereotypical manner that gay media generally espoused (at least in 2011), meaning they aren’t personalities and they’re not—in that lingo—camp. These are just two guys who
meet, are sexually attracted to each other, go to bed together and wake up in Russell’s apartment on Saturday morning. And so begins, in its quiet, somewhat muted but lyrical style, the movie that generations of gay men had been waiting for: simply about guys who find out things about each other without becoming role models for anyone or anything. They fuck (explicitly), drink, do drugs and admit their frustrations about gay life, and this guileless movie appears to have no overt agenda.

  I remember the tension this caused during a first viewing before it was officially released: after decades of terribly earnest queer cinema was this actually going to be a story we hadn’t seen told so simply before, about two men who—in less than forty-eight hours—make a deep connection with each other and fall in love? Yes, the movie says, it is, and maybe that’s what a lot of movies could be about from now on. Gay men had never been portrayed like this. As we watch Russell and Glen talking and occasionally arguing, we begin to see something rarely depicted this intelligently in movies, whatever their sexual orientation: the opening of consciousness, a study in contrasts, two people changing their minds, their once fervent system of beliefs now subtly shifting because they’re falling in love. There’s no camp here, no gay signifiers; the men are resolutely lower-middle-class and nonfabulous, there’s no melodrama or hysterics, and yet nothing that’s butch or bro. The movie isn’t mumblecore, exactly, nor is it done in a cheap neorealist style—the very good dialogue is obviously written, and it’s beautifully shot on digital video, lo-fi and naturalistic with casually stunning compositions and a rich warm glow. It ends on a railway platform in a train station in Nottingham on a Sunday afternoon with one of them going away, heading to the United States for two years, and it’s quite possible these men might never see each other again. The ending, like the rest of the movie, doesn’t lurch toward dramatic hyperbole or ideology, and it becomes wrenching in its refusal to hype or sell anything; there is no agenda. It’s just a sexy, funny, sad movie.

  There is nothing cute or lovable or tragic about Weekend and it doesn’t succumb to the PSA banality of so much of bad queer cinema floating around the festival circuit. The reviews were good—people caught what this movie was doing—and yet in The New Yorker Richard Brody slammed what he called “the bland sentimentality and dull attitudinizing” that turns “the movie into an empty frame of good intentions.” The key words here are “bland” and “dull”—but for a generation of gay men these qualities amount to a loud wake-up call, indicating that movies about gay men don’t need to have an explicit ideology or dramatic agenda—it’s just cinema, it’s just art. The good intentions of Weekend are exactly what Brody finds frustrating: these are simply people, not stand-ins for some impossibly noble ideal that the corporate gay community longs for and embraces—that upbeat and (yes) bland role model in which everything’s constantly experienced through the lens of identity politics and ideology, and with rules on how people should express themselves within a certain range of propriety. Some in that adamant community took issue with Weekend at initial screenings—according to IFC, who released it—and wished the movie had been more “gay positive,” worrying whether the guys were using condoms and concerned about the amount of weed they smoked, and the beer they drank, and cocaine they shared on Saturday night—on top of which they actually disagreed (blasphemy alert) about the importance of gay marriage. It seemed that some in the smiling corporate gay community blindly refused to understand the movie on its own terms. As A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times, “Weekend is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era.” The shock of Weekend is that there is no political cause at the heart of it.

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  Chilliness, coldness, remoteness, distance, austerity, minimalist: these are words that can apply to the styles of some of the greatest filmmakers, the ones who operated with a God’s-eye neutrality. This doesn’t mean their movies lacked passion, but rather that they relayed their vision of the world without emotional hyperbole or the kinds of aggressive editorializing that Hollywood largely favors over subtlety and indirection. The very nature of the medium encourages bigness, momentum, the expansive flourish and visual spectacle—why make a movie if it has no style?—and there are the rare filmmakers who fused the two, managing to be both emotionally indirect and grand: Hitchcock, Antonioni, Kubrick. But for the most part restraint doesn’t really play in mainstream American filmmaking or even in the American vernacular; it’s an aesthetic our filmmakers have rarely embraced. Yet the very notion of looking at things you shouldn’t be seeing—and most movies are narratives about secrets—itself implies a passive, voyeuristic approach to one’s subjects, and this is reflected in how an audience watches a film: as passive observers.

  Sometimes this smoothness, calmness and distance, this remove and lack of sentiment, is really the essence of the voyeuristic experience. The camera can either editorialize and force you into certain feelings or play it entirely differently by showing things neutrally and ask you to bring something to the picture, which might, for example, have a complicated and contradictory character or a morally ambiguous nature at its center that the movie isn’t going to simplify or resolve for you. Sometimes these are the movies that offer the greatest pleasure when you aren’t swept along by a tide of forced feelings but carried away by their indirection and style, responding to the mood and atmosphere, rather than the more obvious components you find in most American movies—the overemphatic screenplay, for instance. But that’s not to say those movies aren’t also enjoyable; I’ve loved certain Spielberg movies though not in the same way I love an Antonioni or Bergman or Godard or Rohmer movie. Hitchcock’s greatness often lies in how cold and daunting he can be—so cruel and withholding. That kind of emotional austerity can end up moving you as powerfully as a truly sappy love story. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon displays the hallmarks of this approach: the visual beauty is staggering; the director’s control is as hypnotic as is his showmanship; and the main character is remote, cold and unlikable, as he holds center stage for three hours. Yet this overview of his character yields greater dividends than it would have if Kubrick had opted for something more emotionally conventional or overtly comical—if he’d gone all Tom Jones in his adaptation of Thackeray’s comedy of manners. The remoteness of Barry Lyndon is what gives it an alienated majesty.

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  In the fall of 2016 I happened to see two movies back-to-back, randomly, for no other reason than they opened on the same Friday, and this inadvertent pairing seemed instructive, since Moonlight was written and directed by a straight man (Barry Jenkins) and King Cobra by a gay man (Justin Kelly). I don’t believe that only gay people should direct gay-themed films (many of them absolutely shouldn’t) but in the case of a film like Moonlight that is, at heart, about gay male desire—the whole thing hinges on this, its third act completely dependent on it—the result strikes one at times as the strained progressive attempt of a straight artist to present a particular notion of what it’s like to be gay. The actual visual depiction of desire in Moonlight is pretty much nonexistent, and in the few flashes of it the movie seems obviously not the work of a gay sensibility—by which I mean, basically, the dude-on-dude gaze—and this undermines the movie for me. In effect, the entertainment press lionized it not because it was a great film but because it checked off every box in our current obsession with identity politics. The main character was gay, black, poor, bullied and a victim.

  The aesthetics of King Cobra aren’t as fancy literary as Moonlight, yet its ideology is more interesting on a certain level because King Cobra tells a true-crime story whose lead characters just happen to be gay within all its crazy real-life drama, and it’s not about bullying or victimization or marginalization or inclusivity, all things many of us don’t respond to in American movies. (Give us dancing! Give us bank heists! Give us monsters! Give us spectacle!) In Moonlight, Chiron’s a black kid who got a losing
ticket in the birth lottery and grows up poor, whereas the gay white dudes in King Cobra are distinctly middle-class and therefore have more opportunities to squander their privilege, and they do so spectacularly. Moonlight is overly invested in Chiron’s pain because without it the movie wouldn’t exist—this is a victim narrative. Which isn’t to say that people like Chiron—or the insecurity of black hypermasculinity, not to mention the enormous fragility of black life in general—don’t exist, merely that their narratives tend to hit the same ideology, and that a filmmaker needs to work harder, perhaps, to uncover the volition in them. The teeming sexuality of King Cobra—and the business of gay masculine desire, the filming and selling and buying of it—is what gives the movie, for some of us, an urgent claim on our attention, a cinematic charge. Gay men as superficial capitalists driven to crime seemed to me, in that moment, a more progressive step in post-gay cinema than yet another anguished-victim scenario. Your white approval of Moonlight was supposed to make you feel virtuous. And while it’s nice to feel virtuous, it’s worth considering whether feeling virtuous and being virtuous are actually the same thing.

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