The Personal 100: #86 GODS AND MONSTERS

I watch a lot of queer cinema. Probably a disproportionate amount when I come to think of it but I've noticed that not too many have made their way into my most personal films.

I'm not exactly sure why that is. It'd be easy to say that in my formative cinematic years I had yet to shake off the last remnants of my gay self loathing but I think it was more than that.

I think the hopeless romantic in me didn't connect with the New Queer Cinema that was all the rage when I was falling in love with the silver screen. Its anarchic reaction to AIDS didn't sit well with my lofty, love at first sight proclivities. I got to it in the end, and I love it now, but it didn't indelibly mark me at the time.

Wikipedia rather generously includes Gods and Monsters in the New Queer Cinema bucket. I'm not sure I agree with the assessment.


Actually, I'm not sure I've ever really thought of it as a queer film at all. At first blush, Bill Condon's pastiche of Golden Age Hollywood is too staidly mainstream in its aesthetic and its acting too self-consciously camp to let be lumped in with the defiant, politicised works of Jarman, Araki and Haynes.

But I shouldn't so hastily judge.

The truth is, the representation of homosexuality in Condon's film troubled me back when I first saw it and I think I locked it away in my subconscious to some degree. Instead, of engaging with the film's very knowing take on the interplay between sexuality, masculinity and friendship, I filed it in my memory under "well performed old Hollywood drama" and revered it as such.

I adored Ian McKellen as James Whale, retired director of Frankenstein and its first sequel Bride of Frankenstein. I filed him under delectably camp old film making queen. He'd quickly become a favourite after starring in the stage to screen adaptations of Six Degrees of Separation and Richard III, both which could have easily made it onto this list, and was about to cement his place amongst my favourite actors by taking on Magneto and Gandalf... and his coming out of course.

I loved Lynn Redgrave as Whale's Germanic housekeeper, Hanna. I filed her under repressed (but even more delightfully camp) old lady. She plays such a complex piece of the puzzle here without being too serious. She's actually a riot from one angle and absolutely heartbreaking from another.

I lusted after Brendan Fraser's Boone. I filed him in the wank-bank. He'd been a particular favourite since his brainless turns in Encino Man and George of the Jungle (one of those two films I still love to this day; I'll let you which which that might be). I've always considered Fraser an underrated talent and rewatching this many years on, I stand by that. He's a little goofy (possibly too goofy for this) but he makes that work for him. Yes, half his job is done by the casting director but he's more than capable of pulling off the other half (and his shirt).

And that's what I reduced the film to: three fantastic performances and Condon's devilish unveiling of the "gay mafia" of early Hollywood. It was not a passing remembrance either. In my twenties I probably saw the film a good twenty or so times.

The darkness of the film I conveniently forgot.

Having dinner next door a couple of weeks ago, our neighbour was musing on literary figures he'd suggested pulling over to Melbourne to tie in with this year's AIDS Conference. After tantalising us with some well known options, he mentioned Christopher Bram and the name rang a bell. We eventually figured out that Bram was the author of 'Father of Frankenstein', the book that Gods and Monsters was adapted from and, as happens in these happy circumstances, we both committed to revisiting the film as soon as possible (circumstances are always happy when they end that way).

Settling in to watch Gods and Monsters after almost a decade, I was not alarmed at what I missed per se but of what I'd chosen not to remember. Having lived a few years more, I recognise the cleverness of the film's take on sexuality and masculinity more readily. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to suggest that the film is overly subtle. In fact, a lack of subtlety would still be one of the criticisms I'd level at Condon (the way he handles the anti-Pygmalion paralleling of Boone and Frankenstein's monster is visually heavy handed). It is just that I don't think that I was ready to take McKellen's violent predatory turn at the film's climax on anything but face value.

Back then, I would have much preferred a lot of stuff left unsaid. McKellen's camp is so delicious that I didn't want it sullied by anything so murky as an man with a death wish getting gropey. Now that I've outgrown my prissy Pollyanna ways Condon's climax is far more appealing. The way he and McKellen toy with, and to some degree subvert, the "gay panic" argument makes for a far more substantial film than I allowed myself to remember. Whale's opportunistic, fetishistic manipulation of Boone is exceptionally dark and the WWI paraphernalia that accompanies it makes it just that much more disturbing.

The flow on from that, Redgraves' housekeeper's conflicting affections and the personal tangle of Fraser's gardener/model/executioner doesn't just give thematic texture to Whale's slow demise but a very valid comment on the nature of masculinity and how our sexuality (or in the case of Hanna, her prejudice) boxes us in. All three of them struggle throughout the film to break out of their own personal boxes, just as they continually exert pressure on the others to stay in theirs. And not only to stay in theirs but to be a hyper-version of themselves.

Yet, when it comes to the crunch, neither of Whale nor Boone is able to follow through on his socially ascribed (and mutually ascribed) role, the marine is reduced to a whimpering mess and the frail old man becomes an ineffectual aggressor. They wilfully fail to see in each other the very thing they have been screaming to be recognised in themselves.

In many ways, I did the same with Condon's film. The things I remembered Gods and Monsters for, its recreation of the filming of Frankenstein and the pithy innuendo of the Hollywood party set, have become the film's least interesting aspects. Still enjoyable but somehow insubstantial. And so, looking back, perhaps I was a little hasty in pegging Gods and Monsters as of safe queer cinema. Its movie of the week trappings belie a more unsettling undercurrent and, I guess, a subject that rarely makes it to mainstream cinema (the film did win an Oscar for its screenplay and nominations for both McKellen and Redgrave).

An intriguing revisit and a welcome reminder that the films I carry around with me actually change along with me.

P.S. That's the real Boris Karloff in half costume, by the way. A great photo I had to include.

Gods and Monsters is #86 in my Personal 100, a journey back through my hundred most beloved films.

You can track my progress here.