Filed under: Directors | Tags: Elephant, Gay, Gus Van Sant, High School Musical, Milk
by Eitan
e, correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears to me that Milk will be Gus Van Sant’s first film since My Own Private Idaho to deal explicitly with gay themes. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. After the nightmare of Elephant, which makes an offensive and tokenized use of a gay relationship in order to explore a cynical aspect of the Columbine shootings, it’s nice to see that Van Sant is reconnecting with a theme where he’s done relatively well in the past.
My problem with the shower scene in Elephant is not so much the idea that these two characters are written as both psychotic murderers and secret gay lovers — it’s the fact that Van Sant so casually and shortsightedly buys into the bigoted mythos about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, which was concocted by right-wing groups (along with their crackpot video games/Marilyn Manson theories) to toss another “evil inclination” into the stew of the twisted Trenchcoat Mafia psychology. When we watched the film at my house, you remarked that you trusted Van Sant to make this kind of statement about young gay men because he himself is a gay director, and to a certain extent that’s true. Still, I think it was a cheap ploy. In JFK, for example, Oliver Stone creates a kaleidoscopic image of every single conspiracy theory out there — mafia! LBJ! Military industrial complex! Castro! The two Oswalds! Stone makes the conspiracy theory stirfry work because he’s so damn ambitious. When Van Sant tries the same thing in Elephant, by throwing in a bunch of refried theories about the massacre, it simply doesn’t work. The gay part especially.
The truth is, I know that Van Sant is incredibly capable of handling gay themes, which is why Milk is near the top of the list for this winter. I wonder if they’re going to show Dan White guzzling down Twinkies…
I read an interview with Lucas Grabeel (yes, of High School Musical fame), who plays a photographer and friend of Harvey Milk in the upcoming biopic, and I was struck by a comment he made about working on a gay-themed film where nearly every actor was straight and the director was the only gay man on set. I’d like to point to Grabeel as a great example of an actor who has played a gay character who was truly written to be both unambiguously queer and unambiguously a charming role model for children. Of course, the director of High School Musical, Kenny Ortega, is gay himself, but it’s hard to find characters like that in children’s entertainment. The HSM movies are both pretty trashy, but it’s hard to ignore the merits of a character like Ryan Evans, who communicates his queerness in the most explicit way that one can in a Disney movie.
The Times of Harvey Milk won Best Documentary Feature in 1985. If Milk were to win Best Picture, would that be the first time that a Documentary Feature and a Motion Picture covering the same topic both won the highest Academy Award honors possible?
shot / reverse shot 
Filed under: Commentary, Directors | Tags: Elephant, Gay, Gus Van Sant, Milk, The Times of Harvey Milk, The Wire
by Elliot
I think the difference between how you and I view the shower scene in Elephant–and how we view the movie in general–is that you seem to think that Van Sant was trying, with his portrayal of the Harris/Klebold characters, to explain their motivations. I see it completely differently. Sure, he borrowed some details from the case files (the first-person-shooter video game, for example) but this film is more about its own style. If Van Sant were so interested in characters, he would have crafted some himself, rather than letting the rest of the cast just play themselves. As for the homosexuality, I don’t think it’s meant to be read as a factor into their decision to kill. Rather, I thought is gave much greater depth to the characters, making them far less the cookie-cutter villains they could otherwise have been. As you know, I’ve been catching up on HBO’s The Wire, and one of my favorite characters is Michael K. Williams’s Omar Little. Omar is pure evil, but he’s also gay. It’s not homophobia–in fact, one of the most sympathetic cop characters on the show is a lesbian–but juxtaposing scenes of Little mercilessly shooting drug dealers with a shotgun and scenes of him lovingly caressing his latest young love interest (okay, he’s also a bit of a pederast) give the man far more depth and personality than the usual villains we see shooting people and then bedding gorgeous women. All it does is flesh the character out; I think you’d have to be a bit homophobic yourself to see it as directly related to or inspiring his acts of violence.
As for Milk, I’m looking forward to this one quite a bit, both as a fan of Van Sant and as an admirer of Sean Penn. That’s not to mention the great story, of course. Still, a Milk Best-Picture win would be far from the first to match the subject of a previous Best-Doc-Feature winner; Schindler’s List could be paired with any of a number of Holocaust-themed documentaries that have taken the big prize. If you haven’t actually seen The Times of Harvey Milk, by the way, you have to check it out. I’ve never cried at a movie, but–and I’m totally sacrificing my man-card on this one–I don’t think I’ve ever come closer than during the candlelight parade sequence of this terrific film.