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Saturday, December 13, 2008

Milk, The Movie

Disappointing.

I'm baffled over the hype. The Rolling Stone review reads like a groupie's blog posting - it can't find enough superlatives. We're encouraged to see it as The Great Civil Rights Movie of the year.

The reviewer fails to notice:

a) There is one female character in the film. A minor one. Last time I checked, civil rights were about both halves of the human race. Last time I checked, the gay rights movement was 50% women, for fuck's sake.

b) There are two men of colour in the film. One is the obligatory Asian geek on Harvey Milk's elections team. The second is Harvey's second lover, played as a wince-out-loud, devoid-of-complexity-or-backstory stereotype of the neurotic, self-obsessed Latino drama queen. Who Harvey doesn't "have to talk to about anything" when he comes home.

And I went in wanting to love the film. Ready to be "uplifted", "inspired", all the cliches I loathe. Come on, Gus Van Sant. You've got to know you could have done better.

posted by shailja at 8:27 PM

2 Comments:

Blogger Olin1984 said...

Hi Shailja,

I just saw Milk, myself. 1 week after seeing the documentary, "The Life and Times of Harvey Milk." I recommend the latter.

While Gus Van Sant's film has its moments, I thought the whole treatment of Diego Luna's character strange. Why introduce the suicide of a character who elicits no sympathy? While this is partially due to Diego Luna's acting, I would also point to Gus Van Sant as being neglectful.

You're right in that hardly any women star in this film. This is partly Gus's directorial choice and partly due to the sexism of (gay) men of that time. It was the "Gay Rights Movement," and lesbians weren't much included. Also cast aside were the queens who were too feminine for the leaders. Sylvia Rivera, a traswoman (the namesake of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in NYC), was one such person.

The rift between gay men and lesbians was there in the beginning, partially due to sexism and partially due to the different social spaces that they inhabited. This rift lessened significantly during the age of AIDS in the 80s b/c so many gay men were dying and it became clear to them that they couldn't do it all on their own. It became clear that many of their allies during this period were lesbians and bi women.

12/28/2008 8:29 PM  
Blogger shailja said...

I hear you on the sexism of the gay rights movement in the 70s, Olin.

But what separates a hagiography from a nuanced exploration of a life, is the willingness to examine problems and contradictions. Gus Van Sant could have chosen to highlight the exclusion of women in a dozen ways. He could have given speaking parts to non-queer female players in the story, like Diane Feinstein, or Dan White's wife.

He didn't.

Thanks for the comment on the exclusion of queens like Rivera - that's a piece I wasn't aware of.

12/29/2008 11:10 AM  

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