Alrighty then, I HAD been prepping to do this on a Thai martial arts film, but today something hit me like a ton of bricks. Now I know that Johnnie has already done the queering for I am Legend, so normally I wouldn't even go near it, but I just watched the animated comic sequence on the DvD today, and one of them in particular really stood out.
For those who have NOT seen I am Legend, read the book, AND don't remember Johnnie's synopsis from class, the plot is relatively simple: Viral bioengineering cure for cancer mutates into horrible strain of zombie-vampire disease that sweeps across the world turning those infected into monsters who come out at night to feast on flesh. The movie follows Will Smith's character, Robert Neville, as he survives alone in New York and searches for a cure.
The animated comics, however, follow a series of other 'survivors' for a brief time.
"Shelter" [Warning: Extreeeeemely creepy with some animated gore]
-Written by none other than Orson Scott Card himself, incidentally.
This brief animated comic tells the story of a family in India attempting to seal themselves away while the epidemic ravages the world. One member of this family, the daughter Vastala, sneaks off to meet with her lover, Pritam before the family seals themselves away, against her fathers warnings of course. She ends up getting infected and kills her family before reuniting with a likewise infected Pritam and reveling in their mysterious newfound strength together.
Whats interesting about this story is that neither Pritam nor Vastala ever realize they are infected, and they both kill her family only because they see them as shadowy monsters. Likewise, Vastala's family don't recognize her as well, thinking that they accidentally let a raging monster into their haven.
Whats queer about this? Well, other than everything about the exotic, monstrous "other" dynamic that underlies the movie and comic entire, there's plenty there even in this relatively short sequence. We have a secret rendezvous with a lover, touching on the whole "forbidden love" fountain of queer. Also, one can find a "disowning" inherent in the father refusing to let the daughter into the bunker. Above all, however, the most strikingly queer aspect to 'Shelter' is the duality of the monster perception. When either side of this polarized epidemic views the other, they see hideous monsters, and react immediately with fear and rage. Neither group is truly the mindless evil antagonist, and neither perceive themselves as wrong or monstrous, they don't understand the "other's" perspective in any way shape or form.
Now let's take that idea and apply it to the movie itself. How do the Infected see Robert Neville? The lone creature that stalks the city while they sleep, trapping and killing and taking their family members away from them and then mysteriously disappearing without a trace before the burning light of day is gone and it is safe to look for the food they need to survive. And who's to say its wrong to eat one of those hideous hairy monsters? They seem to need no reason to kill, so why should the Infected go hungry? In this perspective, Robert Neville truly IS a legend. The kind of legend told to children to scare them into behaving, else they be taken during the day.
With that in mind, here's the alternate ending to the movie, the one where he DOESN'T just blow them all up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJHVDsLFTb8
You can really see the accusation of "monster" written all over the mind of the alpha-infected as he looks at Robert.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Blog 8
When a director goes to make a movie, they can go to whatever lengths their heart desires to put across one message or another, but the second the film in question touches an audience's eyes, the interpretation of the content is irrevocably passed on to them. Such is "Reception theory". No matter how much the creators and critics want to believe they have sovereignty over the meaning in films, in the end the only interpretation that matters is, well, everybody's. People can take just about any scenario, read in between the lines, and get a level of personal relevancy and worth out of it. For a long time, thats what gay men and women had to do when their stories were deemed "inappropriate" for the silver screen, taking heterosexually intended stories and themes and picking out moments of their own meaning. Take for example the movie Top Gun. Wow. For anybody willing to look for it, there are more 'moments' between Maverick and Iceman than they could wave a stick at. Hell, even the very last lines of the film are just seething with raw man-love potential meaning.
"Queering" a film, is a bit different from "gaying" (?) it, though the process is the same. Reconstructing a film with Queerocity (dibs) as opposed to just, say, homosexuality, is much more broad in its scope of simply looking for sources of present or potential transgressive tensions within a film. Thats not to say, however, that gay or lesbian readings of movies aren't queer. Far from being exclusive, the very nature of queer meaning in a film is inclusive to all shapes and sizes of transgression to be squeezed out of films. Instead of just reading Top Gun as a the moments between the pilots, It could be more generally queered with all of those moments, plus every other moment that any of those men broke the strict gendered rules on manly behavior, or some such.
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