Mark Simpson detects how public information films about policing and justice throw an arresting light on our recent past

The London Times

The Naked Civil Servant is the best and funniest TV drama ever made. And I’m sorry, but it’s a scientific fact.

And like its subject it could only have been made in the UK.  Even if Crisp said he hated England –and he did, over and over again –only England could have made Crisp and The Naked Civil Servant.

So many lines in Philip Mackie’s superb screenplay for the Thames TV adaptation glitter like, well, the icy aphorisms that Crisp filled his eponymous autobiography with.  But it was Hurt’s breakthrough performance as Crisp which is most historic: rendering Crisp, as Quentin himself acknowledged — and welcomed — something of an understudy to Hurt’s Crisp for the rest of his life.

The actual, quasi-existing Crisp, born Dennis Charles Pratt in Sutton, Surrey in 1908, sometimes sounded by this stage (he was nearly 70 when the drama aired) like a vintage car tyre losing air ve-ry slow-ly.  And was almost as immobile.  Hetero dandy Hurt injected a kind of rakishness – a hint of phallicism, even – to Crisp’s defiantly passsssive persssssona that came across rather more invigorating and sexy than he actually was.  Hurt rendered Crisp rock ‘n’ roll when he probably wasn’t even up for a waltz.  When Hurt repeatedly intoned Crisp’s Zen-like answer to the world and Other People and Desire in general – ‘If you like’ – it sounded slightly more aggressive than passive.

(And for me, Hurtian Crisp was further improved and made edgier by what I shall call Hoyleian-Hurtian Crisp: when I met the performance artist David Hoyle in the early 80s when we were both teenage runaways to London’s bedsit-land he would perform key moments from TNCS mid conversation about the weather or who was on Top of the Pops last night, adding a dash of David Bowie and Bette Davis to the mix.  David always succeeded in making these impromptu excerpts sound as if they were flashbacks to his earlier life.  Which, since he grew up a sensitive boy in working class Blackpool in the 1970s watching a lot of telly, they were.)

TNCS, book and the dramatisation, is criminally funny precisely because so much of what Hurt/Crisp says/declaims is so shockingly true.

The line whispered delicately in the ear of the leader of a 1930s queerbashing gang is now almost a cliche, but still has hilarious force: ‘“If I were you I’d bugger off back to Hoxton before they work out you’re queer.”  Some toughs are really queer, and some queers are really tough. Crisp’s truths, particularly about human relationships, are the truths told by someone who has nothing to lose – largely because they’ve already lost everything to the bailiffs of despair.  This is the ‘nakedness’ of the Civil Servant.

Because it was one of the first TV dramas to depict a self-confessed and unapologetic — flaunting, even — homosexual TNCS has been frequently misrepresented as a ‘gay drama’.  But Crisp’s sexuality is not really what TNCS is about – or in fact what Crisp was about.

To a degree it is about being ‘out and proud’, or at least determined to inflict oneself on the world, but not so much as a homosexual, and certainly not as ‘a gay’, in the modern, respectable, American sense of the word. It’s not even, thankfully, a plea for tolerance.  Rather it’s a portrayal of the heroic self-sufficiency of someone who decided to stand apart from society and its values, henna their hair and work as a male street prostitute – and then, lying bruised in the gutter, turn a haughty, unsentimental but piercingly funny eye back on a world which regards him as the lowest form of life.  It’s the blackest and cheekiest kind of comedy — which is to say: the only kind.

‘I am an effeminate homo-sex-u-alll’, declared Crisp to the Universe, over and over again.  And the Universe had no choice but to agree. By being utterly abject Crisp forced the Universe to do precisely as he instructed.  A blueprint for celebrity that was to be repeated many, many times by others before his death in 1999 and even more times after — though usually rather less wittily.

Crisp added that as an effeminate homosexual he was imprisoned inside an exquisite paradox, like some kind of ancient insect trapped in amber: attracted to masculine males – the famous Great Dark Man – he cannot himself be attracted to a man who finds him, another male, attractive because then they cannot be The Great Dark Man any more.  Hence the famous, Death-of-God declaration in TNCS, after many, many mishaps and misrecognitions: ’”There. Is. No. Great. Dark. Man!”’

Strictly 19^th Century sexologically speaking, Mr Crisp was probably more of a male invert than a homosexual and often said that he thought that he should have been a woman, and even wondered whether he was born intersexed (this despite famously dismissing women as ‘speaking a language I do not understand’ — perhaps because he didn’t like too much competition in the speaking stakes).  Either way, he doesn’t appear to have been terribly happy with his penis or even its existence – something homosexual males, like heterosexual ones, are usually delirious about. But then again, perhaps rather than expressing some kind of  proto-transsexuality Quentin’s Great Dark Man complex was merely setting up a situation in which he could remain ever faithful to his one true love.  Himself.

In Thames TV’s TNCS, which begins (at Crisp’s request) with a pretty, pre-pubescent boy as Quentin/Dennis dancing in a dress in front of a full-length mirror, Hurtian Crisp is an out-and-proud narcissist, who simply refuses to take on board the shame that such an outrageous perversion should entail. When he attempts to join the Army at the start of the war he causes apoplexy in the recruiters for being completely honest about his reasons for doing so: he doesn’t mouth platitudes about ‘doing his duty’, ‘his bit’ or ‘fighting Nazis’.  He just wants to eat properly and the squaddies he knows seem to have quite a nice time of it, loading and unloading petrol cans in Basingstoke.  His openness about his homosexuality is palpably less shocking to the Army officials than his honesty about his self-interestedness.  About his interest in himself.

Or as Hurt/Crisp replies as a preening adolescent youth when asked by his exasperated, buttoned-up Edwardian petite-bourgeois father: ‘Do you intend to admire yourself in the mirror forever?’

‘If I possibly can.’

And boy, did he.  TNCS, which aired slap in the middle of the 70s, was probably more of an inspiration to the glam, punk, new-wave and new romantic generation than to gays in general.  Hurtian Crisp and his hennaed hair and make-up sashaying the streets of 1930s London symbolised in the 1970s the idea of an aestheticized revolt against Victorian ideas of proper deportment and dullness that had dominated Britain for much of the Twentieth Century.  The best British pop music had always been a form of aesthetic revolt, and Crisp seemed very much his own special creation, which is what so many teens now aspired to be.  Crisp was taken for a real original and individual in an age when everyone wanted to be original and individual.  Or as Crisp put it himself later: ‘The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.’

TNCS changed Crisp’s life and made him very famous indeed.  A reality TV winner before such a thing existed, his prize was the chance to move to America.  Since he had loved Hollywood movies from childhood and was later treated like a Hollywood starlet (albeit in air raid shelters) by American GI’s in London during the Second World War, no wonder he grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

But if there’s anything to be learned from An Englishman in New York, the sequel to TNCS broadcast on ITV recently, it’s that it may all have been a terrible mistake.  Even if Mr Crisp never thought so.

Although Hurt turns in a technically fine performance, he seems to have become more Crispian and less Hurtian.  Perhaps that’s inevitable with the passage of time (Hurt is nearly 70, the age Crisp was when he first played him).  Or perhaps it’s simply that his acting skills have increased.  Whatever the reason, it’s not a welcome development here.  And I’m sure Crisp would have agreed.

But much, much worse is the redemptive reek of this sequel.  Everything is made to turn on Crisp’s ‘AIDS {upper case back then, remember} is a fad’ quip made in the early 80s and the trouble this got him into in the US – and why he was a good sort, really.  Despite the things he actually said.  So we see him adopt a gay artist dying of the ‘fad’, fussing over him and arranging for his art to be exhibited.  We discover him sending secret cheques to Liz Taylor’s Aids foundation.  We even hear him explain what he meant by ‘fad’ (supposedly it was a political tactic: minimize the gay plague to avoid a hetero backlash).

Now, this obsession with redemption may be very American and has of course, like many American obsessions, become more of an English one of late – especially when trying to sell something to the Yanks, as I’m sure the producers of this sequel are hoping.  But if there was any point to Crisp at all it was that he was utterly unsentimental – except where royalty were concerned – and relatively free of the hypocrisies of everyday life.  This sequel supposedly about him is full of them.  So forgive me if I’m unconvinced.

Crisp was invincible in his determination to regard the US as the dreamland of the movies of his youth made real: America was as he put it ‘Heaven’ where England was ‘Hell’.  And why not?  If you’ve spent most of your best years deprived of almost every single illusion that comforts most other people, why shouldn’t you have one big one in your retirement?

And to be fair much of what he had to say about the friendliness and flattering, encouraging, open-hearted nature of Americans compared to the mean-minded, resentful, vindictive English is quite true, even today.  But Crisp’s whole approach to life was even more at odds with American culture, even in its atypical NYC form, with its emphasis on self-improvement, aspiration, uplift and success. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style,’ said Crisp, who regarded himself as a total failure.  Could there be a more un-American worldview?  Apart that is from, ‘Don’t try to keep up with the Jones’.  Try to drag them down to your level.  It’s cheaper.’

In an early documentary from the 1960s Crisp, sitting in his London bed-sitting room sipping an unappetizing powdered drink he takes instead of preparing food, which he can’t be bothered with, that ‘has all the vitamins and protein I need but tastes awful’ he describes himself as a Puritan.  Actually Crisp was a Puritan with an added frosting of asceticism.  Crisp was deeply suspicious of all pleasure (save the pleasure of being listened to and looked at) and most especially sex, which he described as ‘the last refuge of the miserable’. And four years of house dust is a very good way of showing how above the material world you are.

It’s a very middle class, middle England, middle century Puritanism – just like Crisp’s background.  But Crisp was also his own kind of revenge on himself, or on the world that had made him — of which he was a living parody.  Ultimately none of us are really our own special creations. The most we can hope for is a special edition.

Crisp’s Puritanism was part of the reason why he could never embrace Gay Lib (‘what do you want to be liberated from?’).  He was recently subjected to a stern posthumous ticking off by Peter Tatchell, an original Gay Libber, in The Independent newspaper prompted by what he sees as the ’sanitising of Crisp’s ignorant pompous homophobia’ in An Englishman in New York. Post-60s Crisp was apparently jealous of a new generation of out queers who were stealing his limelite: he wasn’t the only homo in town any more.

This broadside was a tad harsh and Tatchell sometimes sounds as if he’s on the Army board that rejected Crisp (while accusing him of ‘homophobia’ threatens to make an absurdity of the word) but I agree that the sequel does ’sanitise’ Crisp, though I think this a bad thing for different reasons to Mr Tatchell.  I also suspect there’s some truth to the accusation of ‘jealousy’, but I’d be inclined to put them in another form. Maybe Crisp didn’t want homosexuality to be normalised because if it were it would undo his life’s work.  Likewise, I think Crisp would have loathed metrosexuality.

And as the sequel suggests, in one of its few insightful moments, one reason for Crisp’s failure to answer the gay clarion call was simply that he didn’t believe in causes, or the subjugation of truth and dress-sense to expediency that inevitably goes with causes. Unless that cause is yourself.

Besides, like many ‘inverts’, Crisp was a great and romantic believer in Heterosexuality — the ideal kind, of course, rather than the kind that heterosexuals actually have to live, and which they execute very, very badly.  He used to call heterosexuals ‘real people’ (as opposed to ‘unreal’ homosexuals), but I suspect he thought he was the only real heterosexual in town.  And in a sense, he was.

I can’t leave you without pointing out that while Quentin Crisp may have dismissed Aids as a ‘fad’, Hurtian Crisp became more associated with ‘the gay plague’ than almost anyone save Rock Hudson: literally becoming the sound of the seriousness of the subject.  In 1975 hetero Hurt plays the most famous stately homo in England. The success of this gets him to Hollywood, where four years later in 1979 he is cast in an even more globally famous role – as ‘Patient Zero’ in Ridley Scott’s Alien: the first host for the terrifying unknown organism that enters his body by face-raping him and which proceeds to kill-off in horrifying, phallic-jackhammer fashion his shipmates — two years before the first identified Aids cases in NY.

Eight years later, Hurt was the unforgettable fey-gravelly voice for those terrifying tombstone ‘AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ ads (complete with jackhammers) that ran in rotation on UK TV, urging people to read the Government leaflet pushed through their letterbox and practise safe sex.

In other words, The Naked Civil Servant had become a rubber-sheathed civil servant.

Old Spice: interview Crisp gave Andrew Barrow of the Independent a year before his death.

Crispisms

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn’t even want the beastly thing.

The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, “I wish you hadn’t made every line funny.  It’s so depressing.”

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

Someone asked me why I thought sex was a sin. I said, “She’s joking, isn’t she?” But they said, “No.” Doesn’t everyone know that sex is a sin? All pleasure is a sin.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to blow up the Twentieth Century’s most infamous evil genius in his heavily fortified bunker in the East, escape alive and then fly back to Berlin where you will lead a coup, negotiate an armistice with the Allies and save Germany from total destruction and eternal ignominy. Oh, and also save your own reputation which has recently sunk to near Hitlerite levels.

This plot will self-destruct in five seconds….

I finally got around to seeing Missy Impossible IV the other night, the one directed by Bryan Singer with the art-house name: Valkyrie. Although it has by far the most improbable plot – because of course it’s based on real events – and this mission is, we all know (at least those of us who are not American High School students) destined to spectacular failure, for me this is probably the most watchable product of Tom Cruise’s James Bond knock-off Mission Impossible vehicle. And I’m someone who always finds Mr Cruise watchable – even if I like to say unpleasant things about him.

Of course, Valkyrie is not officially part of the MI franchise, but in terms of the way it presents itself it doesn’t pretend too hard not to be. The credits tell us that Tom Cruise is cast as Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the leader of the abortive 1944 July Bomb Plot against Hitler, but Mr Cruise is bigger than Hitler, let alone some German aristo officer who tried and failed to knock him off. Hence Claus von Stauffenberg is mostly just another, mid-Twentieth century, Prussian look for Mr Cruise’s morality-in-action-hero persona, while the twilight of the Nazi regime and the last desperate attempt by Germans to overthrow their crazy Fuhrer is just another exotic cinematic backdrop for his photogenic looks.

The poster for the film also looks like it’s advertising the latest MI (Mr Cruise leading his ‘team’ into the villain’s lair). Even the theme music is the same. In the film Mr Cruise names the secret coup plot ‘Valkyrie’ after listening to the thrilling, high-energy string intro to Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ – which sounds remarkably similar, I couldn’t help noticting, to the start of the MI theme tune.

But Tom Cruise vanity vehicle or no, Valkyrie throws up some interesting themes. It opens by showing us on screen the text of the personal oath that all members of the Wehrmacht had to swear to Adolf Hitler from 1934 onwards:

‘I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be ready, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.’

The oath, which of course the July Bomb plotters were all flagrantly breaking, was one of the favourite reasons often given by German soldiers after the war was lost as to why they continued fighting to the bitter end. Regardless, it was certainly one of the reasons why the plotters had to kill Hitler – and the main reason why their failure doomed them.

The movie is built on the premise that the ‘brave soldiers’ are the ones who tried to kill the Fuhrer, knowing that, as Eddie Izzard (perhaps playing a bargain-basement Philip Hoffman playing a German staff officer) puts it to Mr Cruise in a men’s room: ‘the SS will pull you apart like warm bread’. We spend much of the movie looking forwards to this climax, but alas, in the final reel, Cruise manages to get himself shot before the SS arrive.

Odd to think though that what essentially was a ‘til-death-do-us part’ marriage vow that every German soldier had to make to Hitler came about largely as a result of the murder of homosexual SA leader Ernst Rohm and much of the rest of SA leadership during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, the first extra-judicial killings by the Nazi regime, justified shrilly by Goebbels – who of all the Nazi leadership was genuinely, passionately,  devoted to Hitler – railing about the ‘degeneracy’ of the SA leadership and claiming, falsely, that they were planning a coup. (Rohm, much more socially radical than Hitler, did though want the SA to replace the Wehrmacht – in part because he saw it as being run by counter-revolutionary aristocrats like Stauffenberg. The Wehrmacht was so grateful to Hitler for backing them and eliminating Rohm they were happy to pledge alleigance to him after President Hindenburg’s death the following year, effectively making Hitler dictator.)

But then, Valkyrie is a heavily homosocial movie with some distinctly homoerotic overtones: almost everyone in it apart from a couple of telephone operators and Stauffenberg’s long-distance wife, is male and the romantic interest in the movie is provided by the spectacularly cute and devoted young blond male aide de camps resplendent in tailored Hugo Boss uniforms that all the generals have tagging along, including Mr Cruise (his lad played by Brit Northerner Jamie Parker ). In the opening scene of the movie, Cruise is badly wounded in North Africa trying to save a young soldier; at the end Parker voluntarily puts himself between the firing squad and Mr Cruise – facing him in death. And also meaning that Cruise sees Parker’s handsome face instead of the muzzles of the firing squad. This, the film seems to suggest, is the right kind of male soldierly devotion. Devotion to ugly evil old Hitler the wrong kind.

Even more than most Hollywood films Valkyrie is extremely fetishistic, openly revelling in the ‘sexiness’ of German Second World War uniforms (thanks to Hugo Boss, everyone in Second World War re-enactment societies wants to be the Germans). Perhaps this is because the subject here for once is ‘good’ Germans. ‘Real life’ though can be even more absurd than Hollywood: the actual Stauffenberg decided to assassinate Hitler himself after a previous assassin lost his nerve during an inspection by Hitler of… new uniforms.

The key assassination attempt scene at the Wolf’s Lair is uniform-related in the movie: in order to get some privacy to arm his briefcase bomb, Cruise asks one of Hitler’s flunkeys ‘Do you have anywhere I can change?’ showing a tiny shaving cut bloodstain on his crisp starched white shirt-collar (we saw him deliberately nicking his neck earlier). All in all, you can’t help but think it a terrible shame that the Red Army was going to arrive at Berlin the following year and get everyone’s uniforms very dirty indeed.

Most of the other lead actors in Valkyrie are British. Perhaps to lend a sense of Old World classiness to the proceedings that Mr Cruise, as an all-American, clean cut, apple-pie, autoerotic action hero isn’t able to – shouldn’t do . Or perhaps because they’re cheap. Whatever they cost, their faces lend character and credibility, and perhaps even a little Shakespearean gravitas (though perhaps not Eddie Izzard). Tom Wilkinson puts in a particularly seasoned performance as General Fromm, whose opportunistic vacillation helped seal the coup’s fate (he also played a corrupt East End Godfather in Guy Ritchie’s latest homosocial and even-more-bumming-obsessed-than-usual gangster movie Rocknrolla.) But Mr Cruise looks strangely out of place amidst all this – less like the altruistic Prussian officer than one of the British luvvies’ American male escort.

Valkyrie manages to play a little with Mr Cruise’s own celebrity and global narcissism (which today’s audience of course identifies with). It places much emphasis on Stauffenberg’s missing right hand, two fingers on his left hand and his left eye in North Africa, almost presenting this as the reason for his joining the resistance. Stauffenberg was a born warrior from a long line of warriors so he probably was less concerned with his wounds than we are: this motif only really resonates because it’s Tom Cruise, the most famous and recognisable actor in the world, one of the most officially desirable men in the world, whose entire film career from Risky Business onwards has been based on his heroic determination to see himself as a sex-object – and make you see it too.

The frequent close-ups on Cruise’s eye-patch and glass eye which he keeps in a silver box also seem to reference Minority Report, where he goes through an agonising eye-swap process so he can escape arrest. Apparently, Mr Cruise was attracted to the role of Stauffenberg because of what he saw as the resemblance of his profile to that of the warrior aristocrat.

In fact, any similarities there are between the two men’s profiles only throws into greater relief the dissmilarities – both in terms of their appearances and their character. At 46, Cruise often looks younger than 37-year-old Stauffenberg did in 1944 because looking forever boyish is Cruise’s job – it certainly wasn’t Stauffenberg’s. Most obviously of all, the difference between their profiles is that Mr Cruise is demotic, whereas Stauffenberg is aristocratic. Put another way, Mr Cruise has a much bigger schnozzle.

I do have one major complaint about the film, however. One of the greatest comedy moments of the Twentieth Century is missing. A scene sadly uncaptured on film at the time which would in itself almost justify making this movie (though probably not the mass execution of the plotters and much of the non-Communist German resistance). While he himself was left largely unscathed by the attempt on his life by Stauffenberg, Herr Hitler’s apparel was less fortunate. The bomb blew off the Fuhrer’s trousers leaving him unceremoniously debagged.

Now that Risky Business, with its career-making dancing-in-your-underwear-on-the-sofa scene is over a quarter of a century old, I bet Mr Cruise wishes that he could achieve that effect more often.

 

Thanks to Pedro for insisting I watch this film.

By Mark Simpson (Originally appeard on Guardian Unlimited, 28 Jan 2009)

‘If a bullet should enter my brain, let it destroy ever closet door.’ So says Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, the gay activist who became California’s first openly gay public official. Any concern that this may be a slightly melodramatic statement is quelled of course by the knowledge that Milk was famously killed by a bullet to the head in 1978 by a disgruntled, possibly anti-gay colleague. So instead it becomes an epitaph – and this film’s marketing slogan.

Lauded by critics, laden with no less than 8 Academy Film Award nominations, including Best Film, and Best Actor, lavished with praise from editorials in straight and gay newspapers, director Gus Van Sant’s Milk, recently released in the UK, is, everyone agrees, that avenging ricochet from Harvey’s skull shooting down prejudice, fearfulness and dishonesty.

There’s only one small problem, however. It isn’t. With award-winning hypocrisy, Milk actually bundles Milk’s sexuality out of sight. This movie, far from ‘destroying every closet door’, builds a brand new bullet-proof one around it’s subject’s sex-life. Milk you see is living a lie.

Harvey Milk, the famously horny middle-aged sexual libertarian in 1970s Free Love San Francisco, who combined cruising and political campaigning – and had a taste for men half his age – is presented in Milk as a serially monogamous chap looking for The One to make house with. True, Harvey is allowed to be a bit flirty, but essentially Harvey is presented to the world as a very domesticated Mary – apart, that is, from his political altruism and desire to battle homophobia which, sadly, stops him settling down into fully-fledged home-making bliss.

Likewise, apart from one safely post-coital scene, Mr Milk is allowed one brief, badly lit, giggly heavy petting scene in his bedroom (the one place where probably no one had sex in 1970s SF) – filmed in long shot from another room. I don’t really have any great interest in seeing Sean Penn shagging in close up (ten or fifteen years ago it would have been a different story), but given the reluctance of the film to acknowledge Milk’s real, radically libidinal lifestyle (you might just call it ’slutty’) this just seems like more coy emasculation.  Come out, come out wherever you are – but only if you’re decent.

Apparently a bathhouse scene was filmed, but it ended up on the cutting room floor. I have no idea whether this was Van Sant’s call or the studio’s, but with that snip Mr Milk was effectively spayed. Many gays and liberals are indignant that Milk didn’t win a Golden Globe this January, but they should be more concerned the movie has no balls.

So why did it happen? Why is the ‘closet-busting’ film about Harvey Milk so fearful of its subject’s own sex-life? His own masculinity? Well, partly because a glossing over of human details, especially in regard to sex, is what becoming a saint usually involves – even a gay one. But probably the main reason why his sexuality has been bundled back in the closet is because that’s exactly what today’s US gay rights campaigners are doing with gay male sexuality itself in their crusade for gay marriage. In order to try and persuade an unconvinced American public to support gay marriage under the rubric of equality, gay male relationships are being presented, rather disingenuously, as ‘just the same’ as male-female ones.

Van Sant and others have even suggested that if Milk had been released earlier it might have helped prevent the passage of Proposition 8 last November, which re-banned gay marriage in California. Personally I think that’s absurdly far-fetched, but the wishful-thinking involved does give you some idea of how Harvey’s actual lived life has been appropriated to current political expediency. Just as the campaign for gay marriage is sometimes more about respectability than equality, Mr Milk’s historical sexuality wasn’t respectable enough for his hagiography. So it was surgically removed.

It’s impossible of course to know what Milk’s own attitude towards gay marriage would be today if he had lived – though whatever you do don’t mention that to the gay marriage zealots who have installed him as their patron Saint - but it’s pretty clear that while he was alive he believed in relationships as open as his closet door:

‘”As homosexuals we can’t depend of the heterosexual model”,’ Randy Shilts quotes him as saying in his biography The Mayor of Castro Street (a book which also documents how many of Milk’s political and community contacts were forged in bathouses). ‘We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don’t have to pursue it. We should be developing our own lifestyle. There’s no reason why you can’t love more than one person at a time. You don’t have to love them all the same. You love some more, some less and always be honest about where you’re at. They in turn can do the same thing, and it opens up a bigger sphere”.’

When I tell you that middle-aged Milk was explaining to one 24 year-old lover in San Francisco why he had another even younger one in Los Angeles you may decide you find this view self-serving. You may find it inspiring. You may find it naïve. Or courageous. Or immoral. Or realistic.  Or corny.

What’s not debatable however, is that this is how he lived his life and created his politics.

But you won’t find it in Van Sant’s pasteurised Milk.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2009

Mark Simpson on the metrosexual from outer space

‘It’s going to take a while for me to get used to this body.’  So says a shaking Keanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood Still, staring wide-eyed at his disobedient hands trying to hold a glass of water and convey pathos.  Both end up on the floor.

Keanu is now a 44 year-old highly-paid Hollywood actor, so one can’t help but wonder whether he will ever quite get used to his body.

To be fair, he’s talking as Klaatu, the alien from outer space with bad news for the human race, who has just been reborn into human shape because his original form ‘would only scare you’.  I don’t know about you, but I find the shape of Keanu Reeve’s hyper-plucked eyebrows a little scary as well.

In the superlative 1951 original directed by Robert Wise, still a gold-standard for Sci-Fi more than half a century later, Klaatu was played by a 42 year-old Michael Rennie who was a rather better alien and actor.  As in the remake, Klaatu is shot by the Yanks for parking his flying saucer on the grass and generally being alien.  At the hospital where his wound is treated the doctors, all of them male and all of them smoking like emphysema hasn’t been invented, excitedly discuss the exotic new admission, like a 1950s blokey version of contemporary gossipy celeb watchers.  ‘How old do you think he is?’ asks one.  ’35, maybe 38’, replies another, unfiltered, high tar superking-dong dangling from his lower lip.

‘He’s actually 78!’  ‘No!!’

Time travel not space travel turned out to be the industry of the future.  Much as I love the angular, aquiline Michael Rennie’s performance in the original  – and unlike Reeves, he actually inhabits his own body – by the suspended animation standards of today’s male Hollywood star he looks much closer to 78 than 38.  He looks, in other words, rather more like today’s Clint Eastwood than Keanu Reeves.  Keanu is actually two years older than Rennie’s Klaatu, but looks about 30 if a day.  But then, I’ll bet he doesn’t smoke, or eat anything served in a diner.

1951 would have been much more amazed by 21st Century man than anything from outer space.  If Keanu Reeves had landed in Central Park in 1951 the US Army wouldn’t have known whether to shoot him or kiss him.   The original film was made just before post-war consumerism really got into it’s 50s stride and the America it portrays looks almost pre-war.  Dowdy, even.  All the civilian men save Klaatu wear big hats and lumpy suits and look rather bovine and almost deliberately unappealing.

Director Scott Derrickson seems to have noticed this too, and cast John Hamm, nasty retrosexist – but very appealing – Don Draper in Mad Men, the TV drama set in the early 60s, when men were men and women were secretaries, as the tweed-jacketed leader of the scientific team charged with saving the planet.  Underlining that the patriarchal past is indeed history, Hamm turns out to be a false saviour, and instead Mother Earth is saved by a single female astrobiologist and her ringleted mixed-race stepson whose soldier dad died in the Iraq war.  The film seems to suggest he’s better off without him: the US Armed Forces, not the alien bent on wiping us out are cast as the movie’s bad guys – trigger-happy idiots with seriously dodgy moustaches whose machismo just hastens our demise.

In the original, Klaatu’s human helpmeet Helen is played by the wonderful Patricia Neal, a woman who had one the most concave and most hypnotic faces in Hollywood – it’s practically a radar dish of emotion – who works as a secretary.  In the remake, the Secretary of Defence is a woman: Kathy Bates doing her best Hillary Clinton/Madeleine Albright.

The biggest changes that the future held out for us turned out not to be flying cars or Martian colonies, and certainly not Ipods and email, but alien gender roles.  Unfortunately for the remake, and possibly for the future we’re actually living in, Neal’s character is much feistier, sympathetic and more watchable than the latter-day career (super)woman played by Jennifer Connolly.

1951’s Klaatu spoke with an English accent: partly because Rennie was from Wakefield, in Northern England, and partly because in 1951 English was the scary foreign voice of authority.  Keanu’s Klaatu on the other hand speaks with a Neo accent: this remake was developed as a (hybrid) vehicle for The One.  Unfortunately, in an attempt to make the film eco-friendly and now-ish, there’s more than a little Al Gore in Klaatu too, which in movies not actually made with PowerPoint is not a good thing, and his character falls between two melting icebergs.

Where 1951’s Cold War Klaatu was a warning against our warlike instincts, 2008’s Klaatu is recast as the avenging angel of Gaia: the earth is a living organism and we’re an infection that has to be zapped.  ‘It’s not your planet,’ he tells Kathy Bates.  Accordingly, instead of a polluting flying saucer, Keanu flies around in a giant glowing zero emissions new age crystal ball.  Eco show-off.

But if the Earth/America is dying as a result of our voracious consumerism, then Mr Reeves must bear quite a bit of responsibility for that himself.  You don’t get to look fourteen years younger than your birth certificate without using a lot of product.

Hypocrisy however is the least of the film’s problems.  The present has, as it usually does, undone our dreams for the future – even the dystopian dreams.  Since it went into production a couple of years ago, the environmentalist message – or conceit – of the film that human industriousness threatens to destroy the world has been upstaged by what increasingly looks like the collapse of the global economy.  A special effect to end all special effects.

When Klaatu unleashes his Day of Judgement whirlwind, a huge CGI swarm of unstoppable nano-locusts laying waste to everything in their path – trucks, tanks, oil refineries, Manhattan – it looks a bit underwhelming and pointless.  After all, we know something even more voracious and destructive has been there first.  Called bankers.

Once upon a time Hollywood movies could make the world stop and stare and sometimes even ponder.  Stand still.  The magical 1951 original helped define an era and fired young imaginations for decades.  Those days are long gone.  This remake, like most movies today, won’t persuade anyone to even sit still.

© Mark Simpson 2008

Mark Simpson straps Mr Bond into a rim-chair and aims a knotted rope at his nuts

‘I’d rather stay in a morgue!’

So sniffs Daniel Craig in the latest Bond vehicle Quantum of Solace when presented with less than salubrious accommodation in La Paz, Bolivia. Instead of checking in, he sweeps off to a flash five star Wallpaper magazine hotel even more preposterous than his new movie’s title.

The audience at my local cinema seemed to mistake this sniffiness for quippiness and giggled nervously – perhaps out of desperation for any gags or relief at all in this morgue-like movie that I for one was very sorry I’d checked into: a couple of deathly hours that felt like a very long dark night of the soul indeed.

I quite enjoyed, in a slutty kind of way, my one-night stand with the new 007 a couple of years ago in Casino Royale, especially the way that Craig’s glistening tits announced that Bond had finally become his own Bond Girl, but this was a rematch that made me want to lose his number big time. In fact, by the end of it I desperately needed his BMW defibrillator from Casino.

So yes, I’m feeling a little bitter and jaded, not to mention used and abused – and not in a good way. So bear with me while I get pedantic on Mr Bond’s perky ass, strap him into a rim-chair and aim a knotted rope at his nuts.

For starters, ‘morgue’ is an Americanism, and Bond is meant to be a very British kind of action hero in a very British franchise. 007 resorting to such lazy transatlantic tics is tantamount to the Queen greeting heads of state with WASSSSUP! and a fist-bump. Adding hypocrisy to inaccuracy, this film has some very creaky anti-Americanism in it – tempered, equally creakily/cynically, by a ‘good guy’ CIA man with dark skin who is clearly meant to be Obama in a trenchcoat.

Worse, the ritzy hotel Craig checks into instead of the dowdy down-market one he’d been presented with has a cold, impassive, glossy magazine black and white décor that looks much more like a mortuary than the one he sniffed at. And in fact it ends up one: a dead body is placed on his swanky bed later in the film (dipped in oil, a jarring, ill-conceived visual reference to a much superior, gloriously trashy film from another century, another civilisation: Goldfinger - black gold, geddit?).

I’d like to think that the deathly boutique hotel was a deliberate commentary on the morbidity of consumer culture, but given the murderous lack of wit on evidence in this undead movie I suspect it was rather unintentional. Likewise, the way that the cancellation of an AWOL Mr Bond’s credit card by his MI6 Sugar Mummy Judi Dench is presented as one of the worst chastisements possible, almost on a par with losing his girlfriend in the last movie.

Perhaps the most unforgiveable thing about a film as expensive as Quantum is its cheapness – a cheapness it thinks is ’seriousness’. If Quantum is a hotel, then it’s one of those fashionable ones that charges you the earth but doesn’t bother to change the bedding. The destruction of the villain’s lair sequence at the end, which should look orgasmically expensive, instead looks like something papier-mache exploding in a sub-par episode of Thunderbirds (come to think of it, Craig does walk like a Thunderbird…). Cheaper still is the use of Sony product placement instead of Q’s gadgets: show us something we can’t buy, please.

Cheapest of all is the quick-cut editing used during ‘action’ sequences, such as the car chase which opens the film. Instead of extensively storyboarded, carefully choreographed and laboriously shot fights and chases presented for your lazy, scopophiliac enjoyment, you get a blur of bad editing that is literally unwatchable on a big screen unless you enjoy the sensation of your eyeballs bleeding. An episode of Top Gear is much better shot than Quantum. Actually, even the made-for-TV ads that appeared before the film, crudely blown up for cinema, are better edited. Because you can see bugger all, this kind of editing could make John Sergeant look like an action hero.

Tellingly, the last Bourne had the same infuriating jump-cut mania. And while Casino made a superannuated Bond franchise look like he’d got his mojo back from the less stuffy American Bond rip-offs like Bourne, Quantum just looks like a more tedious, lower budget – more ‘morgue-like’ – Bourne Identity.

At least Craig gets his tits out again – though only once, during the film’s only sex scene (and of course, this being the new out-and-proud metro-Bond we see much more of his tits than his lady friend’s). But the flash of his tits is almost as cursory as his terrible seduction line: ‘I can’t find the stationery. Perhaps you can help me?’ A chat-down line almost as resistible as this movie.

Though maybe he was being serious. Maybe Craig, who can act when given the chance, had decided – since no one else had bothered - to write himself some lines and a plot.

By far the best, sexiest and most luxurious scene from Quantum doesn’t appear in the film at all. It’s the Sony HD ad that has been running on heavy rotation on telly for the last few weeks which portrays a well-tailored, well-groomed, cheek-sucked Craig as a kind of CGI Saint Sebastiane, lacerated by slo-mo explosions. He doesn’t say anything, just shares his pale blue masochism with us.

At under a minute and free of charge it’s the better Bond not by a quantum but by a country mile.

Timing is everything for an actor, and Newman’s curtain-call, coming as it does amidst meltdown on Wall Street and panic on Capitol Hill, and at the end of a decade defined by the twin disasters of 9-11 and Iraq, is nothing if not dramatic.  The myriad obituaries and tributes to Paul Newman in the last few days have been richly deserved, but his passing seems to symbolize more than just the death of a great and well-loved actor, or even the curtain falling on one of the last products of the Hollywood studio system.  It seems almost to mark the demise of the American Dream itself.  A dream that is looking more and more like a distinctly mid-to-late 20th Century reverie.

But what a reverie! Newman was stunning in his youth, like a neo-Classical Florentine statue brought very magically to life: those proud cheekbones, that straight nose connecting with his thoughtful brow, the square dimpled chin and his tight little (non-steroidal) boxer body, that claspable neck, those white teeth, those pouting lips and those preternaturally pale blue eyes, more inviting than penetrating, that seemed to contain in their coolness, the un-spoilt, exciting, abundant promise of America’s plains, lakes and shining seas. The fact that in his personal life he turned out to be an extraordinarily generous and socially-concerned chap makes that promise even more poignant.

Newman, who himself was part of the ‘Greatest Generation’ (he served in the Pacific during the Second World War), was the post-war American Dream made beautiful, friendly flesh. Somehow, projected on silver screens around the world in the 1950s and 1960s, this demigod managed to be entirely desirable but also entirely approachable. In other words: American. Everyone, male and female, wanted to buy him a drink and be his buddy or lover or both – and, crucially, thought they could be. Newman was one of the actors (all from the 1950s and 1960s) I watched as a kid on TV that made me announce to anyone that would listen that ‘when I grow up I’m going to move to America to become mates with those blokes in the movies!’.

In terms of projecting the American way of life around the world, Hollywood’s Paul Newman was worth more than a fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers - and probably rather more fun in bed.

It’s no accident that Newman’s two most popular movies were both buddy-love vehicles with the (almost) equally all-American Robert Redford: ‘Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid’ (1969) and ‘The Sting’ (1973). Newman seems to have been slightly exasperated that most people had missed the point of ‘Butch Cassidy’: that it was a film about male love – a male romance. It was in many ways the original and much superior Brokeback Mountain, thirty years before the tedious, mawkish Ang Lee ‘remake’. For my popcorn money, Butch/Newman’s and Sundance/Redford’s love for each other is much more convincing and affecting than that of their Noughties men’s-fashion-shoot-with-a-Western-theme counterparts, despite never being consummated.

Newman’s tough vulnerability and deliciously flawed masculinity seem to have made his relationship to homosexuality symbolically central to his cinematic persona; the fact he seems to have been a very happily married heterosexual in ‘real’ life only adds to his mythos.  Below is a YouTube clip of Newman (with a Placebo soundtrack you can mute), pouting peerlessly as Brick in the 1958 movie version of Tennessee Williams classic ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ as an all-American jock struggling with his secret love for Skipper his buddy who has committed suicide, Big Daddy’s expectations of a grandson and the ‘mendacity’ of family-values American life.

Because of the mendacity of 1950s Hollywood, the movie-version of William’s script bowdlerised Brick’s latent homosexuality.  However, such was the troubled erotic power of Newman’s appearance on the screen that the original meaning still somehow shines through, despite the baby-making happy ending.

Perhaps it’s just me, but all these years later Elizabeth Taylor, wonderfully youthfully glamorous as she is here, now sometimes looks less like Brick’s wife and more like his incestuous young mother.  There was already something not quite right about the American Dream back in the 1950s, and Tennessee Williams couldn’t leave it alone.

As for the rest of us, we couldn’t leave Paul Newman alone.

Is the husband of the world’s most famous ‘gay man trapped in a woman’s body’ a homophobe?  Or a conflicted homophile? Or both?

Promoting his new book, Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone has been claiming that absurdly straight acting Guy Ritchie’s homophobia is one of the reasons why he and his slightly more famous sister are no longer on speaking terms.

You don’t have to buy Ciccone’s memoirs though to unearth evidence that Guy has some ‘issues’. Just watch his homoerotic homosocial and homophobic gangbanger movies – all the ‘homos’ are here.  As luck would have it, there’s another due out shortly, called ‘RocknRolla’.  I’ve yet to see it, but apparently, it’s even more ‘homo’ than his previous films – and no less confused.

In the meantime, here’s a diagnosis I penned for the Independent on Sunday eight years ago when Ritchie’s second film ‘Snatch’ was released. Like Eminem, another gangster/gangsta groupie who came to prominence around the same time as Ritchie in the early Noughties, the homophobia in his work seems like a kind of highly conflicted and highly erotic homophilia.

Actually, it’s more like homomania – literally being unable to stop thinking and talking about bumming and practically drawing pictures for us. (Which is probably what I have in common with him – though I’d like to think I’m slightly more self-aware.)

In Ritchie’s world – as in Em’s – buggery is the only kind of sex there is. The only ’snatch’ in ‘Snatch’ belongs to men.

Just what sort of a guy’s guy is Guy Ritchie?

Mark Simpson wonders whether Madonna’s husband is a gay man trapped in a straight man’s body

(Independent on Sunday, August 27, 2000)

`Do you have big brave balls,” asks human Rottweiler Vinnie Jones in a stand-off moment in Guy Ritchie’s new movie Snatch, “or mincey faggot balls?”

We don’t entertain any doubts about the circumference of Vinnie’s testicles – and not just because he flashes a gun big enough to make Linda Lovelace gasp. What’s more, with the birth of Guy Ritchie’s son Rocco, the whole world knows that the 31-year-old writer-director of the spectacularly successful Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels has balls big and brave enough to impregnate Madonna.

But is this middle-class gangster-groupie so sure about what kind of balls he himself dangles? On the basis of his curiously sexually ambivalent output, it seems Ritchie – like his vast, appreciative young male audience – is more than a little worried about the possibility that he might have “mincey faggot balls” after all.

Let’s not beat around the bush here: the Lock, Stock and Snatch genre – and the lad magazine culture from which it seems to have sprung – is a kind of gay porn for straight men (or, rather, straight boys). As with his first film, Snatch is obsessed with buggery. Its “mockney geezer” dialogue is thick with references to “‘aving me pants pulled down”, being “bent over”, “full penetration”, and being “f–ked”. This isn’t very surprising since, as in Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and the spin-off TV series he executive-produced, women are conspicuous by their absence – the only snatch in Snatch belongs to other men. Hence the obsession with “hard men” and “pussies”; those who take and those who are taken. The erotics of Ritchie’s cinematic universe seem to be that of the prison showers (or the public school dormitory).

Ritchie is a hot ticket at the moment because, in an age of masculine confusion, he is the pre-eminent example of a rising phenomenon: the homohetero. Exclusively and adamantly heterosexual in the bedroom, the homohetero is nevertheless entranced by masculine images, forever fantasising about a world of homosociality that is just a dropped bar of soap away from homosexuality. Could it be that Guy Ritchie – who lives with the woman famously described as a gay man trapped in a woman’s body – is a gay man trapped in a straight man’s body?

Perhaps this is why Snatch begins with a jokey disavowal of homosexuality. “Turkish”, the central character and narrator (played by the very handsome “man’s man” Jason Statham), introduces himself and “me partner, Tommy”, adding quickly, “I don’t mean `partner’ in the sense of ‘olding ‘ands.” And there’s certainly a lot to disavow. The nearest thing to a sex scene in Lock, Stock was the lovingly shot, soft-focus, all-male pub party where the lads get very drunk, wrestle and light each other’s farts, before falling into a blissful, exhausted post-orgasmic sleep. In the first episode of the TV series, they try to flog some dodgy porn to a fence. “It’s not gay, is it?” he asks, worriedly. “Do we look like a couple of rear-gunners?” the pretty boys retort.

Well, now that you ask, yes.  After a fashion. Certainly, as shown in his films, Ritchie’s relationship to masculinity is a bit “gay”. Like Loaded and FHM – lad mags selling a commodified, aestheticised masculinity back to a generation of young men alienated from it in their own lives – it’s the supplicatory, nerdish and slightly masochistic perspective of the wannabe. Take Ritchie’s idolatrous, near-erotic camera-worship of “hard man” Vinnie Jones. The most memorable scene in Lock, Stock features Vinnie repeatedly slamming a car door on a man’s head in slow motion to uplifting music. The power of this religiously intense scene stems from the way that much of it is shot from the point of view of the victim – Ritchie and the audience are looking up admiringly at Vinnie “doing his nut”. It’s a moment which Jean Genet could have directed.

Ritchie can be touchy about his image. Asked a few worshipful questions recently about his taste in clothes by FHM, he became a tad defensive, spraying about the words “fruity”, “queeny”, “f—ing fruit-tree” and “mincey”, and declaring that he would be happiest “in a gladiator outfit” (a leather skirt?).

But then, Ritchie’s disavowal is deep-rooted. Though he now denies claiming anything of the sort, Ritchie is famously said to have reinvented and relocated his past: “I’ve lived in the East End for 30 years,” he was quoted as saying last year. “I’ve been in a load of mess-ups … I’ve been poor all of my life …” It was subsequently revealed that he spent much of his childhood at Loton Park, the 17th- century home of his baronet stepfather. Coming from this background, Ritchie understands that “street” is sexy – and that, conversely, middle-class balls are “mincey faggot balls”. “They’re poofs. Soft as shite … faggots” is the verdict of one of Ritchie’s crims in Lock, Stock on the clownish public-schoolboy ganja growers – who are humiliated and dispensed with early on in the film.

It’s not just the nice middle-class boys, though. In a post-feminist era, most men are wondering what a masculine world might look like. As Brad Pitt puts it in another homo-hetero movie, Fight Club: “We’re a generation of men raised by women. Maybe another woman isn’t what we need.” (Appropriately enough, Pitt makes an appearance in Snatch, reprising his Fight Club role as a bare-knuckle fighter.) No wonder a generation of boys is so interested in seeing “big brave balls” at the cinema.

But this fascination doesn’t come without its own anxieties. And, ironically, it’s the squeamishness of Ritchie in particular – and homoheteros in general – about actual homosexuality that gives the lie to their lowlife fantasies. In Lock, Stock, one of the lads explains the perfect scam: place an ad for “Arse Ticklers Faggot Fan Club anal-intruding dildos” in gay magazines, and wait for the cheques to roll in. Then, send out letters saying that you’re out of stock and enclose a cheque stamped “Arse Ticklers Faggot Fan Club”. “Not a single soul will cash it!” we’re told. (Obviously Ritchie didn’t know many fags when he wrote that.) It could be said that Ritchie and lad culture have been running that scam ever since the appearance of Lock, Stock – selling us a promise of something titillating that never quite arrives.

All in all, it seems both a paradox and entirely apt that big brave ball-fixated Ritchie lives with the ultimate gay icon: a woman whom many men would consider to be the biggest ball-buster in the world; an older partner whose own success and fame easily dwarfs his. But watching Lock, Stock, Snatch et al, maybe Ritchie’s interest in Madonna isn’t so surprising. As he puts it himself: “I like her, because she’s ballsy”.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008