The author of the Salon piece, Chelsea Hawkins, describes the problem thusly: “What was missing on the set of Blue is the Warmest Color were the people who actually engage in same-sex relationships, people who understand lesbianism and queerness in a way that someone who is heterosexual does not.” Hawkins quotes a blogger (identified simply, and somewhat mysteriously, as Kate) to flesh out this critique: “A narrative about queer people as directed and portrayed and produced by straight people cannot be considered a work of queer cinema in the same sense that a film written, directed, and portrayed by queer people is.”
On a political level, I completely get this. Perhaps the greatest privilege accorded to the dominant group is that of writing the history books and all of the trimmings in the form of literature, theater, music, etc. And in the case of queer people, up until only the very, very recent past, they were summarily written out of the entire story, unceremoniously left on the cutting room floor. Under such circumstances, it would be surprising if LGBT folk weren’t a bit possessive of their narrative, in order to a) exercise some self determination over the stories that get passed off as queer, b) express a certain amount of pique over the fact that straight storytellers, who for millennia pretended there was no such thing as queer, are suddenly queuing up to tell those very stories now that there is a bona fide market share to be had, and c) wonder why it took a straight director to win the Palmes d’Or for a queer flick.
I am also reminded of the hullabaloo surrounding the original plan in Hollywood of signing up a white male director to make the major motion picture of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Controversy erupted, and things were set right when Spike Lee was ultimately hired on to direct. Again, politically, this makes perfect sense for essentially the same reasons eluded to in the Salon piece about Blue. Part of me rejoices that Lee was in charge of Malcolm X, and it is the same part of me that wonders, given the descriptions of the sex scenes in Blue as soft core porn, if Kechiche was capable of depicting anything other than a male fantasy. (To explain why I haven’t yet seen the film I would draw upon the wisdom of Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction, who explains “My girlfriend is a vegetarian, which pretty much makes me a vegetarian.” My wife doesn’t see movies, which pretty much means I don’t see movies.)
But as an artist, I find the backlash against Kechiche’s Blue more than a little disheartening. To understand why, it might help to explain that I spent the last two years of my life writing a novel centered around two main characters, one of whom is a woman, as oppressed a group, of course, as ever there was. Getting inside her head and giving her an authentic voice was the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do as an artist. In comparison, spouting off on this blog about the (hopefully) odd angle from which I see the world in a way that is reasonably entertaining and provocative is mere child’s play. And I have been given advice from a reader whose opinion I trust and value that my efforts to bring my character Shoshana to life were successful, if successful is a word that starts with the letters u and n. I never do things half-way, oh no, writing about a woman for this white male Episcopalian wasn’t enough. Shoshana, if you didn’t happen to know it, is a Jewish name. For an Episcopalian, a lovely middle name to pair with Shoshana would be Rose. Except Shoshana means rose, which makes Shoshana Rose sound a lot like naming your daughter Boutros Boutros, which has little to recommend itself other than possibly predestining her for a career as Secretary-General at the UN. All that said, it boggles the mind to think of all the things I don’t know about being either Jewish or female. Which is both a) a perfectly good reason to never write a novel about a Jewish woman, and b) the best reason anyone who isn’t a Jewish woman could possibly have to write a novel about a Jewish woman.
Because one of the very best ways of dismantling the violence of cultural dominance is the good faith effort to incorporate the perspective and voice of the Other in one’s works of art, especially if one, like me, is inescapably a member of the dominant group. This is more and not less true given that one may ultimately be, again like me, doomed to failure in one’s efforts to depict the Other, and is one more occasion when Beckett’s famous equation (the humanities’ equivalent to Einstein’s E=MCsquared), “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”, rings absolutely true.
I would also argue that it is well nigh impossible to make art today without crossing the Rubicon of Otherness. The commitment to making art in our times may very well consist of fidelity to just that. And thank God for the sublime failures in that quest: Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Henry James’ aptly titled Portrait of a Lady and the aforementioned Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It are indispensable examples of men trying their damnedest to write women. Going the other way, it would be impossible to deploy more convincing male characters than did Eliot and Austen in their respective masterpieces, Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice. Clearly, with a nod to Orwell, us artists are all failures, but some failures are more equal than others.
In writing a novel it was, of course, my dream to rival James, Eliot, and Austen. The astronomical odds against my doing so don’t in any way detract from the nobility of my undertaking. Go big or go home. And it is this intentional reckless abandon in constructing one’s ambitions, an act necessary, if not sufficient, for the making of great art, that is lost if we fence off certain stories for certain artists. In fencing off one’s turf, as blogger Kate is quoted doing above, one also fences one’s self in. Such an artist can no longer shoot for the moon of making great cinema, cinema so confident that if it was a basketball team it would play anybody, anywhere, anytime. Instead these artists make queer cinema, which sounds as unheroic to me as scheduling a bunch of teams you know you can beat. I’d rather be a failure.
I would note that John Waters happens to be gay, but no one thinks of his movies as queer cinema. They just think of his movies as great cinema because his movies are bloody brilliant. And if it is true that all great artists have big egos (though not all artists with big egos are great), then here’s to blind ambition that fails to see all the things it doesn’t see, allowing one to imagine what it might be like to be someone else. I want to live in a world that celebrates Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” but also makes room for Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto,” lest we find ourselves relegated to artistic ghettos where there’s no point in making art anymore because you already know exactly what it’s like to be me.
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