61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Golden Axe dresses down to its skivvies. Plus: Spore takes on evolution, reaches a stalemate, and takes evolution out for a beer.
Dating Confessions by You "There is nothing hotter than a nice, shy guy. Because it's so damn hot to see what he's like underneath it all."
Scanner by Emily Farris Today on Nerve's culture blog: From our seat at the RNC, Sarah Palin makes Dick Cheney look like Al Gore.
That Girl? by Lynn Harris How the Republicans fell in love with a pregnant, unwed teenager. /dispatches/
REGULARS
posted 12/2/2004
promotion
As you've probably heard, Alexander is a really, really bad movie. Not Showgirls bad — Glitter bad. Any time you've got the vacuous Jared Leto reciting lines like "By the sweet breath of Aphrodite," Angelina
Jolie speaking with a Transylvanian accent and Colin Farrell sporting a
hairdo that rivals Patrick Swayze's in Road House, you know something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
But the media has decided Alexander is a flop because
it's too gay. Apparently Colin Farrell making out with two different men is
too
outrageous for moviegoers. (Not to mention the Greek lawyers trying to sue Warner Brothers
on
Alexander the Great's behalf.) Typical. Thank God for gayness — it's becoming
such a
convenient stratagem. Are you a corrupt governor about to be exposed as a crook? Come
out of the closet.
Are you running for
re-election with unpopular economic policies and a messy war abroad? Tar your
opponent as an advocate of gay marriage. Are you a bloated, egotistical film
director of an unfocused, poorly
written, overacted multimillion-dollar historical spectacle?
Say the hero was a homo. That'll distract 'em!
Poor Oliver Stone — he's getting it from both sides. The moralists
say he's wrong to portray one of history's greatest heroes as gay, and gay
activists claim he's a coward for not making Alexander more explicitly
homoerotic. In some ways, they're both right. As has been readily acknowledged
by all sides,
the notion of sexual categories such as gay, straight or bisexual was
completely foreign to the ancient world. Yet Stone insists on using modern signifiers
of sexuality. Jared Leto's Hephaestion, Alexander's true love, is dewy-eyed,
soft and girlish, the dancing boys effeminate and hairless. Apparently, he's
incapable of imagining a same-sex attraction between conventionally masculine
men. It's Stone's lack of imagination,
his desire to explain Alexander the Great using pop psychology, that is the fatal
flaw of this movie.
And the controversy surrounding the film's "gayness" is not so much a smokescreen as an indicator of a larger failure of imagination. It's a lack of empathy and knowledge that continues to allow gays to be cast as universal scapegoats. The bedrock of your society seems to be falling apart? Blame the gays. Lose the election? Blame the gays.
People can blame gays because, ubiquitous as we are, we remain
invisible. In spite of Will and Grace, for most of the New America, gay
people continue to exist largely as an idea, a fiction, a spectral Other that
can easily be blamed for any number of problems from moral decay to bad movies.
Just like
fanning the flames of anti-Semitism generated publicity for The Passion of
the Christ, so the inflaming of homosexual hysteria has gotten people talking
about the trashy Alexander. But using prejudice to explain away a botched movie
is
just a step away from using prejudice to explain away real social and political
problems. And that's not just disingenuous, it's dangerous. n°
Andy Horwitz is a writer and performer living in New York City. His monologues have been called everything from "high-octane, raucous comedy" to "inquisitive and insightful." His writing has appeared in Heeb, The Seattle Stranger and various anthologies. He edits the alternative performance blog Culturebot.org and in 2005 ran for Mayor of New York City, a performance project documented online at andyformayor.org.
