Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness

Jack Curtis Dubowsky

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137454218
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness uses musicology and queer theory to uncover meaning and message in canonical American cinema. This study considers how queer readings are reinforced or nuanced through analysis of musical score. Taking a broad approach to queerness that questions heteronormative and homonormative patriarchal structures, binary relationships, gender assumptions and anxieties, this book challenges existing interpretations of what is progressive and what is retrogressive in cinema. Examined films include Bride of Frankenstein, Louisiana Story, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Blazing Saddles, Edward Scissorhands, Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don't Cry, Transamerica, Thelma & Louise, Go Fish and The Living End, with special attention given to films that subvert or complicate genre. Music is analyzed with concern for composition, intertextual references, absolute musical structures, song lyrics, recording, arrangement, and performance issues. This multidisciplinary work, featuring groundbreaking research, analysis, and theory, offers new close readings and a model for future scholarship.

Part I

Mad About the Boy: Male Homosexuality and Music in Film

1

Louisiana Story, Homoeroticism, and Americana

Homoeroticism has a long and colorful history in art and literature.¹ Frequently this homoeroticism is more tangible when it involves an appreciation and idealization of youth, often from a safe distance or through sublimation, directing the viewer’s gaze upon romanticized depictions of the body at rest or in action, sport, combat, or dance, for instance. This tradition of homoeroticism naturally extends to cinema as well, where the direction of the camera’s gaze is under complete control of the filmmaker. This chapter examines male homoeroticism in Louisiana Story (1948) and the contributions that music makes towards the romanticizing of male youth.

Louisiana Story is a rustic, languidly poetic film, commissioned by Standard Oil to quietly support the public image of the oil industry. It was made during a conservative postwar period marked by the height of the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood film music and the strictures of the Motion Picture Production Code or ‘Hays Code.’² This period was also characterized by vibrant activity on the part of American midcentury modernist homosexual composers, including the iconic Virgil Thomson who scored Louisiana Story.³ The complexities of the time period both restricted and encouraged queer aesthetics and codes.

The film obsessively follows a barefoot adolescent boy through the scenic bayous of Cajun Louisiana. There is an oil derrick blowout and an alligator, but otherwise the film is remarkably devoid of conflict. The boy loses and finds his pet raccoon, Jo-Jo. The film won awards at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Venice Film Festival; the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress has preserved the film. Thomson won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Music for this score, the only film score to ever win the award.

This chapter situates Louisiana Story as a queer text through examination of Robert Flaherty’s personal life and preoccupations; Virgil Thomson’s personal life; the subversive context of the film; and the imagery, symbolism, fetishism, and use of screen time within the film. This chapter then examines existing explanations of the music, from Virgil Thomson himself and others. Period explications of Thomson’s score exaggerate its position as a preservation or representation of Cajun folk music, and overlook its conventional romantic tropes that romanticize and fetishize the boy. While one can only speculate Flaherty’s inner desires and motivations, Thomson’s score to Louisiana Story reinforces a homoerotic reading of the film. The music is an emotive, romantic nostalgia, not a stylized Cajun portrait or exotica; it focuses more on the boy than on the titular Louisiana.

Situation of Louisiana Story as a queer text

While Louisiana Story can be read as an industrial film, a documentary film, or a poetic visual essay, Louisiana Story can also be situated as a queer text. Contemporary standards may facilitate this reading, but it is corroborated by existing scholarship and a careful study of the historical record.

Tracking the obsessive gaze of the camera and following the ‘eye trace’ – ‘the concern with the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame’ (Murch 2001: 18) – yields insight into the film’s homoeroticism.

Flaherty took his time shooting Joseph ‘JC’ Boudreaux, the twelve-year-old who played the boy in Louisiana Story, lingering over his face, physique, and feet. Editor Helen van Dongen recalled, ‘Bob had to be pushed in completing shots of J.C. who was growing rapidly from a dreaming small boy into a young adolescent’ (1998: 28). Van Dongen noted that Flaherty always got good coverage of the boy, while missing footage of other things, like showing where the raccoon had got to when it was lost. Bob shot ample footage of the boy simply looking around for his lost pet. ‘Though he has a beautiful face, should not be reason to have all sequences same’ (1998: 39) noted van Dongen.

The film’s gaze must be contextualized through the queerness of Flaherty and Thomson; this queerness may not be perfectly coincident with today’s homonormative constructs and conceptions of what it means to be ‘gay’ culturally, sexually, and otherwise. Rather than reduce Flaherty and Thomson to stereotypes that may not apply, or that may be inappropriate for their time period, I relate their queerness to their status as outsiders and to their personal lives and erotic preoccupations.

Robert Flaherty

Director Robert J. Flaherty (1884–1951) achieved fame with Nanook of the North (1922), a worldwide critical and box-office success that depicted Eskimo life in northern Canada’s wintry Hudson Bay area. In 1914, Flaherty married Frances J. Hubbard, who became both wife and collaborator, and he fathered three children. But Flaherty’s filmmaking as a director and producer was consistently homoerotic, in spite of his life as an ordinary heterosexual family man.

Flaherty’s obsession with boyhood and boy actors was noted by his wife Frances, editor van Dongen, and biographers and scholars including Richard Griffith, Paul Rotha, Eva Orbanz, and Richard Barsam. Rotha is of particular importance, since he was a leader in the British documentary film movement, a personal friend and colleague of Flaherty, and devoted years to writing an authoritative academic biography of Flaherty. Rotha notes, ‘After Nanook, all of [Flaherty’s] films […] are haunted by the image of a youth or boy’ (Rotha 1983: 278). These films, like Nanook, Elephant Boy (1937), Louisiana Story, and F. W. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), focus on stories about exotic places with a boy as the central figure though which the story is told. Rotha states, ‘as his life went on, Flaherty began to dislike grown-ups (other than his closest friends) and tried to lose himself in the world of childhood’ (1983: 278–9).

These boys, from ‘exotic’ cultures, had striking appearances and athleticism. There is a deliberate use of casting; while Flaherty was considered a documentarian during his day, he used recreations, imposed storylines, sets, and careful casting to create illusions of magical worlds that nevertheless preserved elements of endangered and disappearing cultures. The selection of these boys is never accidental; they are idealized representations or fantasies of male youth. The way Flaherty treated these boys and the chemistry he developed with them has been documented in firsthand accounts and production stills.

Sabu Dastagir (1924–1963), star of Elephant Boy, was young and charismatic. Frances Flaherty recalled, ‘Sabu, his little brown body in nothing but a tight-fitting breech cloth, was a perfect thing of beauty’ (Griffith 1953: 120). Robert Flaherty’s camera lingered over the boy’s face, physique, and feet in this film also. Flaherty marveled at Sabu’s ability to control the elephant with his bare feet: ‘the elephant, as soon as he had felt the touch of the child’s feet’ (Griffith 1953: 121–22) responded to the boy’s command. Dastagir rode the success of Flaherty’s film to a mainstream acting career, becoming a gay icon and representation of white male fantasy, as evidenced by resultant popular commentary even years later.

The majority of Sabu’s roles were that of a dominated native, usually a sidekick to the white hero adventurer […] [T]here was always a hidden homoerotic subtext which made the half-naked, well-built Sabu appealing to gay audiences. On the screen, Sabu would usually be scantily clad, his bare skin glistening with sweat on his muscular body […] Sabu also seemed to have had an effect on director Robert Flaherty who was said to have been strongly possessive towards the boy, and who frequently shot the semi-nude youth being caressed by the dangling proboscis of the elephant Kala Nag (whose name means ‘black snake’). (Gray 2009)

The ‘black snake’ assertion comes from Kipling’s Jungle Book story ‘Toomai of the Elephants’ (1894–95) that provided inspiration for Elephant Boy (Barsam 1988: 75). Gray’s explicit discourse has been excluded from academia; Rotha tiptoed around such explanations of Flaherty’s known fascinations. Whereas Rotha, writing from 1957 until publication in 1983, must bite his tongue, Gray may speak freely.

Flaherty was ‘strongly possessive’ of not just Sabu, but of Joseph ‘JC’ Boudreaux, the twelve-year-old who plays the boy in Louisiana Story, a role extravagantly named ‘Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Latour.’ Photographer Arnold Eagle’s production stills from Louisiana Story show a physical proximity and body language between Flaherty and Boudreaux that would confirm Flaherty’s preoccupation with male youth.⁴ Flaherty could also be jealous of the boy’s attentions. Ryan Brasseaux describes Flaherty’s manipulation of the young actor:

Flaherty’s working relationship with Boudreaux was also contrived. The director ordered his crew to avoid intimate contact with the boy. Instead, as Frances Flaherty recalled, ‘Bob was insistent that no one should show any affection for the boy except himself. He wanted sole control over him.’ By forging a paternalistic relationship with the fatherless Boudreaux, Bob Flaherty found the key to manipulating his young star’s behavior on and off screen. (Brasseaux 2009: 27)

Flaherty’s well-documented preoccupation with male youth was so pronounced that, to Rotha, as an academic biographer, it demanded explanation. But satisfying this demand was problematic during a time period when conjecture or discussion of alternative sexuality was markedly uncomfortable. These cultural circumstances encouraged only obtuse psychological hypotheses and euphemistic references to ancient Greek mythology.

From the psychological point of view we could say, with Jung and Wilhelm, that the boy represents an archetype deeply embedded in Flaherty’s subconscious and the center of the mandalas he constructed in the form of films. It would be difficult, however, to speculate on the archetypal myth – Atthis, Adonis, Ganymede, the infant Dionysus. On the other hand there is Freud’s thesis that ‘the goal of mankind is childhood.’ Newton Rowe [… believes …] that by the time Flaherty left Savaii his character was fixed and did not change further. […] According to Rowe, Flaherty was unconsciously but instinctively in search of Freud’s Nirvana principle and its forerunner in Tahitian life. He believes that Flaherty was in search of perpetual happiness and that he found happiness among the Eskimos. (Rotha 1983: 279)

Biographer Rotha squirms and trips over himself to avoid stating the simplest, easiest explanation: maybe Flaherty just liked adolescent boys. It seems reasonable to suggest that artistic fascinations and observed behaviors indicate that Flaherty may have had a particular ‘erotic age orientation’ (Bering 2013: 169) that otherwise did not interfere with his life and work. I do not mean to suggest or imply anything nefarious here, nor is there any evidence to suggest any kind of untoward behavior on the part of Flaherty, nor is there any reason to demonize Flaherty for such an idée fixe.⁵

Coupled with this potential erotic age orientation is prudishness uncharacteristic for a lifelong world traveler who, at the age of twelve, ‘went into the Canadian gold fields with his father, where he lived for years among gamblers, miners, prostitutes, gunmen, and Chippewa Indians’ (Taylor 1949a: 32). By all accounts, Flaherty was bold and adventurous even in his youth, and coming of age amongst such people would suggest knowledge of and liberal attitudes towards, if not even actual experience with, sex. But biographer Rotha relates, ‘of all his hundreds of stories and anecdotes not one was about sex’ (Rotha 1983: 278). Ernestine Evans, a longtime friend, recalled that the evening a final work print of Louisiana Story was screened for Standard Oil, Flaherty had a small group to dinner. ‘The main topic of conversation across the dinner table, she recalls, was the Kinsey Report, which had just been published. Flaherty was disgusted’ (Rotha 1983: 252).

Flaherty’s dislike of grown-ups later in life, as described by Rotha, might suggest a ‘lost childhood.’ Flaherty’s prudishness might suggest a cover for his own interests, or a discomfort with sexuality overall, given his own possible predilections. We cannot really know. But knowledge of Flaherty’s background and familiarity with his other films encourages a reading of Louisiana Story as a queer text.

Virgil Thomson

Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) belonged to a generation of gay American composers that also worked in film, such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, and David Diamond, who together were highly influential in creating a distinctive and original compositional sound in the United States. Their work in film did not tarnish their primary reputations as composers of serious ‘art’ or ‘concert’ music, even if other composers who worked more regularly in film had difficulty establishing concert careers. This circle of gay composers is explored in depth in musicologist Nadine Hubbs’ book, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound (2004). Hubbs looks at how these composers helped forge a unique ‘American’ sound, one that proved useful for many films as well. Virgil Thomson, who studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, was part of a 1920s American expatriate circle that included many queers. He worked with Gertrude Stein on two operas, Four Saints in Three Acts (1928) and The Mother of Us All (1947). Thomson was able to leverage his position as a powerful music critic for the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954 to advance his career, as well as his position in society. Although he kept a decorous public image, he was privately known as ‘a campy homosexual whose personal identity fell under the rubrics of “pansy” and “fairy”’ (Hubbs 2004: 14). This dichotomy would yield awkward results in Thomson’s conservative 1966 autobiography, Virgil Thomson.

In 1922, at the age of 26, Thomson began a frustrating, unrequited, yet mushy love-relationship with Briggs Buchanan, who was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Mad About the Boy: Male Homosexuality and Music in Film
• Part II Fighting the Patriarchy: Dykes, Misogyny, and Gender Fear
• Part III Queering of Genre
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index