'In Dallas Buyers' Club and Philadelphia there's there's this idea of a straight saviour. In both cases the lead character is not only a straight man but a homophobic straight man who saves the day and saves gay men.
'There are two things that really bother me about it; the first is that when the Aids crisis started gay men didn't really get much help from the straight community, and so they had to mobilise themselves and that is not honoured by those films.
'And the second is that the characters are not just straight they're homophobic, and so there's an assumption on the part of the filmmakers that viewers need a homophobic character as a point of entry and I don't think that's true anymore.
'And of course there are other narratives - I mean now HBO made The Normal Heart, which is a great counter-narrative to those. So there is great stuff being done, but when you look at it on the whole, especially in feature films, I think it's a very sad depiction of gay culture.'
Screenwriter Abdi Nazemian talking to HuffPost Live.
Nazeiman first wrote about this last year in an essay for Hollywood Journal, Save Me, Straight Man.
Update: The Virtual Closet, Abdi's Op-Ed for The Advocate on the headless torsos of Grindr, and our 'online dating' shame/shaming.
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Philadelphia is what, 20 years old?
ReplyDeleteI think he's right that 'we' don't need a homophobic character to lead us into the story anymore, but that probably wasn't the case in the early '90s.
Mostly though I just wanted to say that Philadelphia is a shit film really, but it isn't quite true to say that the Denzel Washington character is the saviour - it's the actions of the Tom Hanks character that affects change in the hummaphobe, he's not a helpless victim. I really didn't like the film all that much, but the relationships between the two main characters and way in which the relationship moves the story forward isn't as one-sided as the dude above makes out.
Also, it has Quentin Crisp in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo!