Under the Midnight Sun
Jack Curtis Dubowsky reminds us that even in the days of silent cinema, movie going was not a silent experience. He might well add, in the name of intersectionality that, even when the movies were being censored for gay reference, there has never been a straight cinema. My, can this fellow write. He’s convincing at every intersection in his argument, and it’s a doozy, centering on texts in which film and music interact, texts which to establish another constraint, must suggest a queer subtext,Dubowsky can always back up his opinions with savvy research, and a knack for the perfect quote. He goes back to the contemporary notes of film editor Helen von Dongen, who worked with director Robert Flaherty on his famous documentary Louisiana Story (1948). Von Dongen noted the director’s strange attraction to his twelve year old male star. “Though he has a beautiful face, should not be reason to have all sequences same.” Flaherty is a funny case, isn’t he? Supposedly straight, a dedicated husband and father, he stuffed his documentaries with good looking young guys. And when he had Virgil Thomson doing the music for Louisiana Story, and applying his own pointedly romantic music for a Bayou boy searching for a lost raccoon, he won the Pulitzer Prize (the only time a film score has been awarded the prestigious music award), but a move that perhaps crystallizes “straight” Flaherty as perhaps the gayest of American film-makers.There are amusing typos (“hoards of gay men” on page 101 rather than “hordes”), but it seems as though scholarly books suffer most from typos nowadays, having no budget to use the copy editors they once employed on staff, That said, the book is certainly worth the $100 it may cost you to get your paws on it. As Susan Stryker hints in her blurb, it is an expansive and multitudinous book with valuable, if dense theory, broken up by gossip and scandal of all sorts, like a Derrida under the influence of Kenneth Anger. (This is my own radical paraphrase of Stryker, of course.)The “hoards of gay men” typo comes towards the peroration of Dubowsky’s set piece, on the “failure” of the much beloved Brokeback Mountain (2005). This is perhaps Dubowsky’s most bristly argument, but it persuaded me, and partly because of his musical analysis of the themes composed by the Brazilian composer Gustavo Santaolalla, and the somehow retro feel of what we thick of as the “love theme” from the movie, which has lyrics too and they call it “The Wings.” I remember in 2005 going to a dace club here in San Francisco and hearing a 17 minute disco version of this plaintive, homo-pessimist tune. “The music in Brokeback Mountain,” argues Dubowsky, “reveals a conservative perspective that allows the male couple little joy, happiness, or fulfillment in their sexuality, relationship, or life.” The men I saw at the Midnight Sun were dancing riotously but each had tears bright in his eyes, a little bit of crystal flash.