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By John Demetry
Those who love art can boycott Showtime. That cable channel is remaking the
British television phenomenon, Queer As Folk, under the directorial
guidance of Hollywood's favorite fag and hack, Joel Schumacher. He gets
projects in on budget and on time, but he doesn't know from art.
His flashy trash style-and flashy trash politics--makes his work accessible to 30-second tv spots and to video, TV, and cable sales. That's why Hollywood loves him, but his films (Flatliners, A Time to Kill, the last two Batman atrocities, Lost Boys, etc.) aren't just bad cinema, they're bad television! My point in saying this is that I fear what may be lost in this Hollywood highjacking. Because the focus is only on money, any work of art that finds a greater value is dangerous. Last week, I bemoaned the lack of a work produced by queer culture to carry on a new wave powered by the tidal force of Patrice Chereau's 1998 Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. (For those who missed the soul-expanding 'scope theatrical release, you will have to make do with the letterboxed video or DVD now available. Make haste!) Even though I looked forward to the Reeling 2000 screenings of Queer As Folk and Queer As Folk 2, I didn't expect more than good television. Make no mistake: Queer As Folk isn't just great television, it's great cinema. Subject to its t.v. medium, Queer As Folk is an actor- and writer-based work, but it still makes imaginative use of distinctly cinematic language and theatrical tropes. The collection of directors sustains expressive visual motifs. Slow motion, overhead shots, freeze-frames, cross-cutting, and Gregg-Araki-style monologues set against blasts of kitschy color underscore the emotional and social consequence of the characters' travails. Even with the same foundation, the fast-cut, flat Schumacher signature will diminish the actors and the material. In a combined six-plus hours, writer Russell T. Davies creates a massive, Altman-style spectrum of characters refracted through the three leads. Turning 30, somewhat stuffy Vince Tyler (Craig Kelly II) lives vicariously through the man for whom he's sustained an unrequited love since they were both 14. That man is-say it with the most wistful British accent you can muster-Stuart Alan Jones (Aidan Gillen). Jones finds a new trick or two every night. He's hot stuff. As the series opens (and the dance clubs close), Stuart picks up 15-year-old virgin Nathan Maloney (Charlie Hunnam).
Friendship and "family" becomes indistinguishable out of social necessity. Stuart provides the spunk to impregnate his lesbian friend. Vince's mother takes Nathan into her home to keep maternal watch over his entrance into the gay scene. Stuart and Vince are referred to as "an old married couple." "Except we don't shag," quips Stuart. "That is a married couple," his friend retorts. With his deftly constructed narrative, Davies focuses this post-AIDS crisis reconsideration of the "queer family" with a funeral in Part One and a wedding in Part Two. A sense of communal and personal responsibility, political and psychological growing pains, creates a tribe of conflicted individuals. Death and love has made us realize the magnitude of queer experience-and its moral challenge. Davies reconciles that revelation with a rainbow-flag view of human experience. He explicitly offers "Queer As Folk" as queer folktale while also exploring the need for the ritual celebration otherwise denied us. Davies (and the long running time) gives each supporting character-family, friend or foe-narrative space to create piquant portraits of social diversity (Nathan's best school friend counters his accusation that she is just another fascist heterosexual oppressor: "I'm Black and a girl. Try that on for a week.") The three leads, particularly, are spectacular-as richly drawn a triangle of masculinity as that which anchors Those Who Love Me. An extra-critical note, all three of them are hot. Significantly, in very different ways. The camera constantly luxuriates in their faces at moments of important decisions-each of these motion portraits gives off a different heat. As brought to life by Gillen, there's no wonder that Vince and Nathan are head-over for Stuart Alan Jones. Gillen and Davies collaborate on a classic characterization; Stuart's a seductive asshole. His line-readings are quick-witted and lacerating, but he just as easily slips in earnestness and intelligence. His "King of the World" swagger is a turn-on, but it's a blatant cover; not a bluff, but not really earned either. Stuart sees his constant shagging as a rebellious act, bolstered by showy displays of dissent. The crowd went wild when he smashes the jeep he's about to buy through the office window of a homophobic car salesman. Unfortunately, Stuart is also a manipulator, a drunk and a drug user who prefers a fuck to love. He sees that as flip-sides to the same radical coin, but it's made safe by his pampered, high-class life and by Vince's adoration. That's what frustrates and attracts both Vince and Nathan. They live vicariously through Stuart's wild ways, but also suffer the heartbreak. Vince may not have the guts to do more than say "Fuck off!" to the subtle and not-so-subtle acts of homophobia that increase his shame, but he does have the guts to love Stuart even though he thinks he's unworthy. Kelly doesn't play Vince's puppy-dog devotion in one-note. It's constantly, heartachingly challenged and re-awakened, as are all aspects of his life. What Kelly intuits as an actor is how to portray this internal struggle to precisely mark what makes his love and his life worthwhile-and therefore expresses the worth of our lives and loves. With the shifting tones in his voice when Vince breaks up with his coddling boyfriend and, unwittingly, makes a decision that saves Stuart's life, Kelly measures the degree of Vince's-and Stuart's-incompleteness. The director not only cross-cuts between Vince and Stuart in this sequence-moral decision cut with suspense-but also stages the breakup as a cell-phone conversation: "You're breaking up. We're breaking up." The cell-phone joke runs throughout the series, but here it's shown to be more than a clever gag on hip gay life, but rather one of many felicitous expressions of a modern challenge: "Only connect." A "will-they-or-won't-they?" dramatic scheme given spiritual weight, Vince and Stuart's souls-indeed, everyone's-seem to hang in the balance in that overhead freeze-frame on the dance floor that concludes Part One. More than the other two, Hunnam faces the risk of playing a symbol. Nathan represents Stuart's slipping youth, which makes him the ultimate, dreamy challenge to Vince's love.
The collaboration of these performers acts out Davies' cascading theme: the Politics of Love. The relationship between Part One and Part Two mirrors the transformations in the relationships of the characters. They complete each other, and together they create a dream realized. (It's not unlike the relationship between Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, challenging social myths. It also links it to the two parts of Angels In America, moving from a constellation of social anxiety to a Brechtian heaven of spiritual possibility). Part One establishes the dynamics of their tribe. It ends with the promise offered by this tribe teetering on the verge of catastrophe and hope. Playing the personal as political, it sets up the conflict between escapism (drugs, meaningless sex, infantalism) and connection (friendship, family, maturity). Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train explores cinema as a ritual experience leading toward revelatory catharsis--ennobling our desire and capacity to make life better. It urges its audience to live life more imaginatively-while mourning the difficulty in doing so--through lives torn between escapism and connection, but within the explicit milieu of a community of artists. Part One of Queer As Folk elevates the passions and foibles of queer lives to grand scale, through which the audience shares the most hopeful and painful aspects of our personal lives with our community. That's not Those Who Love Me-level transcendence, but it does benefit from Chereau's understanding of the power of cinema. That would be a profound enough achievement to make Queer As Folk a great work of art, but Part Two, amazingly--magically!-takes us further. The awesome conclusion, neither esoteric nor campy, comments on the very story we've shared and expands it to epic, mythic proportions. Part Two dramatizes the importance of Vince and Stuart consummating their love to the community they've built precariously around them-most explicitly to the queer future represented by Nathan. Queer people are essentially defined by the nature of their love; oppression cheapens that love-and our humanity. Vince and Stuart take that post-modern fairy-tale spaceship ride into liberation. (A final title card announces: There were many rumors about became of Vince and Stuart. All of them were true.") Hand-in-hand, they "Go West." The allusion is explicit, but it does more than repeat the meaning of the great Pet Shop Boys cover of the Village People disco hit. It takes it to its profound conclusion. Evidence of human aspiration and tainted by terror, the mythology of freedom and manifest destiny represented by America was expressed in terms of the sexual revolution of the 1970s by the Village People. Then, in the face of the AIDS crisis, the Pet Shop Boys examined the dual meanings of this legacy. Now, Queer As Folk transforms it into a mythology of love. On Friday, November 15, a video I co-directed with Amy Thompson and starred in called Go West: An American Experience played at the MIX festival in New York City as part of the "More Heartland Homos!" collection. Obviously, I don't have the distance to criticize it, but I can explain what I was attempting. It depicts my own personal relationship to the Pet Shop Boys song, featuring me dancing in a single take and inviting friends to join me. It also makes use of overlapping quotes from "Revolution to Revelation," Armond White's critical essay about the song and its music video published in The Resistance: Ten Years of Popular Culture that Shook the World. This signals that my amateurish, but sincere, dancing is an act of analysis-of both the mind and the heart. It's a celebration. The video ends with a curious dedication while the music fades out: "Dedicated to Gaston Diaz." Gaston and I are best friends. I, like Vince with Stuart, carry an unrequited love for him. We're roommates. We're self-styled revolutionaries. We're fucked up. We're just regular people. Even though I know he doesn't love me the same way, the reason for that dedication at the end of the video is validated by Queer As Folk. It shows how queer people's capacity for love--a beautiful thing in the face of everything personal and political against it--is an act of revolution. |
Charlie Hunnam plays Nathan 
© 1997-2000 BEI