Top 5 [post-]queer films
for your enjoyment during humility month
As you should already know, pride is over, thus we’ve transitioned into Humility Month. JK. Plz don’t hit us with that “June is the month of the Sacred Heart!” ish.
In all seriousness, we wanted to give you 5 films that are worth watching if you’re into the intersection of queer theory, postmodernism, and religion (which you probably are if you subscribe to this Substack). If you’re a trad, we recommend you use discretion and do your research before watching these films. We wouldn’t want anyone falling into an spergy fit of scrupulosity.
1. I Am Michael (2015)
As you should already know by now, we are big fans of James Franco. We find his whole thing about being gay up until the point of intercourse to be quite fascinating, and echoes much of Quentin Crisp’s stuff about the Great Dark Man and the impossibility of queer desire. He decided to make this film not to “expose” Christian ex-gay culture as a hoax (like Boy Erased tried to do), but because he was genuinely fascinated by the conversion experience of Michael Glatze from queer theory reading, threesome-having, rainbow flag-toting uber gay to ex-gay fundamentalist Christian. Franco highlights the fluidity of postmodern identity categories, and how it’s easy for people who are fixated on abstractions, on “simulations” without roots or any referent in the concrete, to horseshoe from one extreme to another.
2. Those People (2015)
This poorly-produced yet cute little film puts a modern, NYC, Jewish spin on Brideshead Revisited…if Waugh had taken a decadent, pagan route. It does retain the sense of the impossibility of the fulfillment of queer desire—the sense of ephemeral ecstasy followed by a cavernous abyss—found in the book (and the Granada TV mini-series), but doesn’t point to Jesus or Christianity as the solution to this abysmal lack. It kinda just leaves it open. It also plays on the Wildean/Paglian trope of the Beautiful Boy as Destroyer. Again, it’s no masterpiece. But it’s just interesting to see Brideshead rendered this way (kinda as if it were merged with Call Me By Your Name…more on this in our interview with Urban Hannon).
3. Fresa y Chocolate (1993)
Another one that plays on Crisp’s Great Dark Man and Paglia’s Beautiful Boy as Destroyers: gay pagan artist pursues straight communist student. The protagonists interest in art and Santeria (Cuban syncretic witchcraft) confirms so much of everything Paglia has ever said about homosexuality (especially in “No Law in the Arena”). It’s a fun film, especially if you like 90s and/or Latin American stuff.
4. The Happy Prince (2018)
This sweet little movie merges vignettes from the last phase of Oscar Wilde’s life with the short children’s story he wrote called “The Happy Prince.” It’s the only film about Wilde that does justice to his conversion to Catholicism, and accurately shows the pagan/classical Greek roots of his homoerotic tendencies. Eve Tushnet wrote a great review of it. But if you’re a Wildean, you should absolutely watch it.
5. La Ley Del Deseo (1987)
This plays on Freud’s Oedipal theories about the genealogy of sexual inversion, and how male homosexuality easily bends toward Dionysian chaos, possession, and domination. Also Antonio Banderas is brilliant…as is Almodovar.