On the OffensiveAfter Brüno, Hollywood depictions of gays may never be the same. That's a good thing.
Updated Thursday, July 9, 2009, at 12:03 PM ETIn Movies, Dana Stevens reviews Brüno.
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StumbleUponFilm historians like Tyler and the more strident Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet, have explored the pre-liberation phenomenon of the "professional sissy" (to use Tyler's phrase), best exemplified by campy character actors like Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn. In a more repressed time, sissified men and butch women on-screen served as gaydar activators, barely coded signals that created an unspoken community among closeted filmmakers, performers, and viewers. But the move toward acceptance and assimilation brought with it a reassertion of traditional gender roles. When gay male heroes finally materialized, they were expected to be masculine. Sissies became ever easier to disparage, not least for gays who saw them as Stepin Fetchit-like relics of a less progressive age.
Baron Cohen, who is straight, has been accused of indulging in gay minstrelsy. It's true that he does not "play gay" in the respectably stoic, square-jawed manner of Tom Hanks and Heath Ledger. But Brüno is less a character than a button-pushing social experiment in locating the tipping point of tolerance: How much can he get away with? What does it take to unleash the inner bigot? For his merciless ambushes to work, Brüno needs to be this flamboyant—and this moronic. (Baron Cohen's interview subjects typically reward his deeply stupid questions with even stupider answers.)
The most discomfiting—and incongruous—aspect of Brüno's pinkface masquerade is the character's over-the-top sexual voracity. An early outré-sex montage that features a dildo rigged to an exercise bike establishes that we're not in Kansas anymore. Brüno is a far cry from the prim and prissy old-school sissies, who were all innuendo and no libido. We have long been conditioned to regard effeminacy as a neutered, negative stereotype, but there are moments when Baron Cohen's extravagant prancing—playing out amid what Brüno's trailer calls "real people, real situations"—seems not grotesque but defiant, forcing his foils (redneck hunters, straight suburban swingers) to recognize the screaming presence of Otherness.
In that sense, Brüno could be considered an homage to the proto-gay-lib classic The Naked Civil Servant, a 1975 film based on the memoirs of Quentin Crisp, the author and actor who called himself the "stately homo of England." An exhibitionist flamer in oppressive early 20th-century Britain, Crisp (played by John Hurt) is a magnet for persecution, but he holds his hennaed head up high. "The world is full of Aborigines who don't even realize that homosexuality exists," he declares. "I shall go about the routine of daily living making this particular fact abundantly clear."
3. Homosexual panic
Gay humor thrives on ticklish suggestions of homosexual panic, the straight fear of being hit on (or possibly even converted) by gays. There's also a far nastier side to the concept, given the emergence of the "gay-panic defense" as a controversial legal strategy in cases of gay-bashing. Brüno attacks this idea by subjecting it to ridicule: In an effort to go straight, our mincing hero solicits pointers from a martial-arts instructor in beating up gays.
In the most notorious of all gay-panic movies, William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), Al Pacino plays a cop on the trail of a serial killer in the hard-core leather scene of the West Village. Going undercover, the Pacino character succumbs to the sexy-scary Dionysian ambience (or is it the amyl nitrate fumes?). Villified for linking homosexual and homicidal urges, Cruising has since undergone a minor rehabilitation, with defenders, like critic Robin Wood, who applaud its fluid conception of sexuality.
While Cruising is an ambiguous wallow in the psychology of gay panic, twisting impulses of disgust and curiosity into what Wood calls a "knot of contradictions," Baron Cohen, in his interactions with unsuspecting, camera-hungry dupes, simply induces that panic before our eyes. Brüno is more uneven than Borat and relies more on scripted filler, but one area in which it has an edge is the frisson of risk. On the loose in an Orthodox neighborhood in Israel or in small-town red-state America, Brüno is, in more than one sense, cruising for a bruising. Baron Cohen has acknowledged that the prevalence of homophobia makes it more dangerous to do Brüno than Borat. That constant threat of physical violence—evident even in the segments on TV's Da Ali G Show (like the one below, in which Brüno visits the "gayest part of America: Alabama!")—is central to the experience of watching the film and to its larger political point.
Borat and Brüno are comedies of difference, documentaries of bigotry, and they more or less require the viewer to pick a side. Baron Cohen doesn't play nice, but there's real value to the aggression of his literally confrontational method. How many political entertainments can match the satisfaction of watching Borat trash an antique store full of Confederate kitsch or Brüno compliment an ex-gay preacher/deprogrammer's "amazing blow-job lips"? For the climax of Brüno, which echoes the rodeo scene in Borat, Baron Cohen, disguised as a tough-guy wrestler, starts making out with another man mid-cage match, sending the drunken mob into a horrified frenzy. Leave it to a movie with a talking penis to come up with a brilliant tactic against homophobia: the gay-panic offense.
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Bruno isn't about homosexuals or homophobia or Gay Panic Response. It's about the great obsessive subject of British Comedy; namely, humiliation. The suffering of it, the infliction of it, particularly humiliation when it comes to issues of money and class. Of course, Cohen goes to America, particularly the poor, less-educated states, to "expose" anti-Semitism and homophobia. If he'd done it in the precincts of the hip and Oxbridge-educated, they would suddenly remember that he was just a risen tailor's son and they certainly couldn't give such a presumptuous arriviste air-time on the BBC or Channel Four. It Simply Isn't Done . . . A bunch of Alabama rednecks might be able to kill you or beat you to a pulp, but they can't derail your career as a comedy writer and performer.
-- lump516
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What happened to the Bird Cage?
I thought that movie was wonderfully funny and pointed out typical stereotypes as well. It at least deserves an honorable mention.
-- tokidoki
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