shot / reverse shot

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?