The House Next Door

The sad part is, society is still not at a place where the reverse could happen. The idea of an openly gay actor playing straight and making that challenge into part of the film's marketing campaign is almost unimaginable. It just couldn't happen and even if it could it would drive people away from the movie rather than pull them towards it.

This is a naive article for presuming that social attutudes could have moved along faster than they did. I think the popular embrace of this movie has been remarkable. And yes, there was a certain amount of bravery required to make it and act it in even today. It could not have been made ten or even five years ago. Prior to this there has never been a gay love story told at the Hollywood level, with stars, that was only and explicitly about the love between two men, and not primarily concerned with some other issue or plotline.

"Brokeback Mountain" only seems tame if you never leave your little bubble of enlightenent and or hipness. Leave the coasts and you'll understand just how daring it is. Give Ang Lee, McMurtry, Ossana and the actors their due. If a movie like this is no big deal, why haven't there been 50 of them?

I should qualify the above by saying there has never been a movie of the sort I described that was a hit. Obviously there was "Making Love," but it tanked.

I don't think he ever said the movie was no big deal. In fact he ackowledges it as an economic and artistic success.

The writer's beef is with the society-wide presumption that the stars are being brave by playing these parts. In a career sense that might be true, but it's not true in an artistic sense; for a straight man to play gay or a gay man to play straight requires the actor to tranpose one object of desire for another, and one set of social rules for another, but the emotional core of the story, one intelligent creature's love for another and how that love is hampered by circumstance, is universal. To me that doesn't seem as huge an imaginative leap as playing, say, Napoleon or an eight year old child or a man raised by wolves. the BROKEBACK boys were required to transpose universal feelings, not invent new ones. They were pretending to be other people. Which isn't to say there was no work involved, just that the attention paid to this aspect of BROKEBACK tells me we are not as far along as we might wish.

To the BROKEBACK team's credit, they've explicitly said they don't want to be called "brave," and not just in a faux-humble aw-shucks way. Producer James Schamus said something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing a quote I didn't use), "If this movie changes anything, it might be the last time straight actors are called brave for playing gay."

The thing is, though, it is at least mildly ballsy for young straight male actors to play gay roles in a culture where much of their perceived worth rests on their ability to get teenage boys to identify with them, and girls to desire them. (As the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham said once of the requirements for pop stardom, "The girls have got to want to fuck them.") Of course, as innumerable articles have by now noted, and I can verify from my own experience, Ledger and Gyllenhaal's vulnerability in BBM just makes them *more* attractive to the fairer sex -- ironically proving that much of the country, even in so-called red states, is in fact more progressive than quote-unquote "liberal" Hollywood, or much of the media for that matter.

On principle, I don't believe in using the word "brave" to describe *any* performance -- unless you're actually inside the actor's head, or know them exceptionally well, you have no idea what personal demons they might be confronting or exploiting in order to get to where they have to be. The hype over the supposed bravery of the BBM performances has a lot to do with the bass-ackwards way most people conceive of acting -- or, rather, Acting. It's assumed that playing away from your own identity is harder, and therefore more worthy of praise, but for all we know, it might be easier to play a lesbian serial killer than to dredge up the pain of a lost love. If there's bravery in BBM, it comes not from being gay, but the way the main actors expose their vulnerabilities on screen -- a far more dangerous act than simply being gay.

The reason society doesn't make a big deal over gay actors playing straight roles is because gay men and women, actors or not, are required to "play straight" all the time. Obviously Clearly knows this and he's just being rhetorical. It would be nice if we could just praise the quality of the performance and not its supposed degree of difficulty, but in a post-Method world, it's unlikely we'll ever get back to that point.

Sam, your comments open a door to a much larger issue, which is the various false ways in which the profession of acting has been framed by the media. This falseness runs the gamut, from cartoon Method cliches (i.e., spending months "researching" a role by living among the sorts of people you'll be playing) to the Old Hollywood presumption that it's really more about performers' personal backstories and how they relate to other performers (for example, when an ex-wife and ex-husband act together, there's invariably a flurry of questions about what it was like to reawaken those old emotions, as if the performance is inherently more problematic than acting opposite a former college sex partner who gave you the clap and then stole a bunch of your stuff). There are some very delicate, very real mechanics involved in acting, and a core of mystery and intuition, but I don't think the entertainment press has the patience, the guts or the vocabulary to really get into it, and more importantly, I doubt the public cares.

The general public seems much more interested in the mechanics of filmmaking than the mechanics of acting. Why is that? Is it because at least directing can be analyzed in terms of scenes and shots, but acting remains somewhat intangible no matter how you unpack it?

Almost as annoying as the idea that it's "brave" to play gay (particularly when you have the hetero credentials of Heath and Jake) is the coverage of anyone who gains (or loses) weight to play a roll. When stick-girl Renee Zellweger gains enough weight to look like a normal woman for "Bridget Jones' Diary," the coverage was such that you would think she had voluntarily amputated a limb to get into character.

And I meant "role," of course. I guess I was thinking about Renee eating actual carbs in the pursuit of acting greatness.

Didn't Nicolas Cage have his front teeth pulled for BIRDY?

Yeah, Cage did have a couple of teeth pulled for that part. He also had a huge dragon tattoo drawn on his back so directors wouldn't ask him to take his shirt off anymore, and then he got a great part in "Moonstruck" and took off his shirt anyway, and we just had to assume that the character, and presumably other Cage characters, had an elaborate dragon tattoo. Cage is very talented but I'm afraid that at his worst, he's an example of what Sam is alluding to, the misunderstanding of the method and the enshrinement of its dumbest notion, that you're not a real actor unless you're living on the edge and making big statements onscreen and off. Sam is right when he says the real risk isn't playing gay, but being vulnerable. By which I think he means not being too concerned about seeming cool and in control.

henreyfive said:

"The idea of an openly gay actor playing straight and making that challenge into part of the film's marketing campaign is almost unimaginable."

Rupert Everett's story seems to be a good example of this. Before coming out, he seemed to play a fair amount of leading straight men. Since the big reveal, he seems only to be cast as gay or asexual men ~or~ he does voiceovers in animated films.

Ian McKellen is one of our greatest actors, but since coming out to the general public, he too seems to only play gays, asexuals or (worst of all) villains!!!

Since I do not know if these are career choices made by these two men, I can only surmise that neither of them are ever offered "straight guy" roles, or rather that if they do audition for them, the roles are given to others.

Does anybody know something I don't in regards to this?

RE: Everett & McKellen

Although it is noteworthy that neither of these two men were anywhere near as well known (depsite having both been around for ages) until AFTER they came out of the closet.

Maybe it's got something to do with being British. Will Americans accept a gay Brit actor more easily than they will a gay American actor? Stupid food for thought.

Ruediger: Actually, one could make the case that coming out did not affect either man's celebrity, but did affect the types of parts for which they were considered.

McKellen seems to have made peace with the idea of playing gay men, sexless authority figures or bad guys, and as such he's nearly cornered the market. (Back when he was in RICHARD III, he invested the part with a cutting queer sensibility. Was that before he was officially out? I can't recall the chronology.) But it would be interesting to see in in an autumn-of-the-patriarch role, or an old-yet-virile-heterosexual part, the sort of thing Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery and Michael Caine still play. But I can't imagine anyone in the business considers him for such roles.

Ditto Rupert Everett, who was considered as a possible James Bond before he became the hunky superqueer icon, and continued to be considered for that role, albiet somewhat counterculturally, afterward. Everett is simply an amazing actor, as charismatic as anyone who has ever played Bond, and technically a superior performer to all, including Connery. He could have been not just Bond, but one of the top leading men in the world, a combination of Cary Grant and Ewan McGregor, if he hadn't made the decision to say "Fuck it" and come out. He is a cultural hero to many, and his decision certainly hasn't dimmed his talent or charisma one whit, but I am sure it has affected the sorts of roles he gets offered. The fact that screamin' hetero Heath Ledger can play gay and not destroy his career is a sign that things have advanced. But the fact that an openly gay demigod like Everett can't avail himself of a wider array of straight roles proves that the entertainment business shouldn't start patting itself on the back anytime soon.

PS: Yes, I think Americans, and everyone, will accept a gay Brit before they will accept a gay American. I am not sure why this is. Maybe because Americans fancy themselves an intrinsically more hetrosexual, evem macho country than England?

Ah, for Cage in his tooth-pulling, cockroach-eating phase. Like a lot of male movie stars of a certain age, he seems to be at war with his ego these days, too often phoning it in as an action-movie hero to convince his audience he can still get it up (see Ford, Harrison).

Looking over Everett's filmography, it seems he has been the best thing in a lot of lousy movies. I've missed a few here and there, but it looks like he hasn't been in an all-the-way through good one since IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST in 2002. Do they just give all his parts to Jeremy Northam?

In all seriousness, I think it's easier for Americans to accept gay Brits because a certain class of British men posess what we think of as gay characteristics whether they're gay or not -- to a good many Americans, Hugh Grant might as well be gay if he's going to be so well-dressed, witty and self-effacing. Blame Oscar Wilde.

To pull this back on topic, I think the reason that the mechanics of acting (and filmmaking in general) are discussed in such limited terms is really a matter of salesmanship -- both in terms of what studios will publicize to sell a movie and what journalists focus on to satisfy their editors. It's difficult, and not "punchy," to describe what actors might need to go through to get to a certain emotional place, but it's easy to focus on superficial transformations -- fluctuations in weight, accents, pretty women playing ugly women -- and, failing that, a change in sexual orientation. The more subtle aspects of acting are much harder to talk about, and I say this as one who is often at a loss to pin down exactly what about a performance works or doesn't, except how in functions in the larger scheme. What makes Jesse Eisenberg so amazing in THE SQUID AND THE WHALE? Fundamentally, I don't know, but I do know without him the movie would have no heart.

Acting's not made up of tracking shots and focus pulls, and it takes a lot more effort to see what an actor is doing than when and how the director chooses to move the camera. It's much easier to focus on obvious mechanics. But while I may be tremendously impressed by an actor who phsyically transforms him or herself, I could go pretty far down my (theoretical) list of favorite performances before I hit the first one. After seeing the Maysles' portrait of Truman Capote, I'm even more stunned at Philip Seymour Hoffman's incarnation, but it doesn't prevent me from feeling like he's about to win an Oscar for his 17th-best performance.

Maybe this is stating the obvious, but when straight actors play gay characters, it becomes something the Academy (and an awful lot of film critics) can suddenly recognize as "acting." Playing gay has now joined the list of affliction and affectations that greatly increase your chance of a nomination: playing an alcoholic, a cancer patient, an Eastern European, an Appalachian coal miner, etc.

What I think is being kind of skipped over here is that the unspoken components of their roles that are getting Ledger and Gyllenhall called out for "bravery" aren't the emotional ones but the sexual ones. What I think has much of the public so impressed with the actors is their ability to act out the sexual aspect of love with someone of the same gender, not their ability to pretend to love someone of the same gender. Agreed, it's still silly to call it "brave," but as an amatuer actor I can see how it might be more difficult to act out physical love with another man than emotional love. In one sense, at least, what the two actors are doing here *is* harder than what, say, Tom Hanks did in Philadelphia.

Now. the writer is correct in noting that gay actors have been doing the same thing for years without getting recognition, but then that's a much larger complaint about how society tends to assume the straight viewpoint, and not one that has any different resonance in Brokeback.

Tosy and Cosh: A useful distinction. Thanks for making it.