Blog 8

-Top gun, being 'received'. HARD.-

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.