Flicks Rant: The flicks rant is going to be a bit retro cos I didn’t actually go to the flicks (in the proper sense of going to the flicks) and see anything current this Feb. I saw a Friday night cult screening of
Mulholland Drive, at the Chauvel cinema in Paddington. It was super fun to see on the big screen again after 10 years. Yay for cult cinema. Yay for cute old flicks places still existing and for bothering to run nights like these! MD was super magical to see again and it felt very time-machine-ish, which was really interesting, on a few levels. Fast-forward 10 years and I’m finally out. I’m not some stupid little repressed 15-year-old lesbian nervously getting enraptured by really shit/silly/stilted lesbian content. I can actually laugh and see that scene the way it was written… And I’m more generally, 25, and a proper film geek (that said though, I saw the film with an AMAZING film geek and felt completely out-nerded, she was incredible, and opened my eyes to stuff I’d never seen or thought about before… I’ll come back to that… more generally, seeing it big again helped me see it properly and notice things again for the first time in ages… It’s funny how lazy, and auto-pilot you can get as an audience with a film you’ve seen a billion times… it was awesome to really SEE it again and also to really feel it.) and grown up and not 15 and anxty and stuck in suburbia and monotony and going insane. Sometimes, as an adult, I pinch myself and stop and look at what I’m doing and think “holy fuck, this is my life!” and I try to time travel and show 15-year-old-me it gets better and one day, you/I do all these fun things and have this really great life you used to daydream about when you/I was bored twiddling your thumbs in the corridor of that damn twin cinema. Funny isn’t it, that I got that look-how-cool-your-life-gets feeling while doing something I was actually able to and doing at 15? How retro and circular and strange… “One day you’ll be free and inspired and doing things you want to do… only it will be exactly the same thing, except you’ll have new (older) eyes, ears and heart.” I usually get the feeling when I’m doing something I only dreamed of as a kid, so it was nice. Anyway I was able to see MD first time round, which makes me feel old. Not that I think 25 is old, just that, things I saw as a kid already being cult, has me a little confused… Anyway, they screen heaps of cool stuff, and most often stuff I well and truly didn’t get a chance to see on the big scree. Seeing Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, with my best friend, big, with a giggling audience, a couple of months back was super wonderful. And the screenings are only 12 dollars, which, in this day and age, is pretty fucking cheap, and sometimes, if they’re screening a double bill, it buys you two films which is just plain rad.
So, I worry about writing a reading of MD cos to do a reading justice I’d probably need to write a thesis, not a pithy blog post, and there are wads of MD readings all over the net, and my reading of the film grows and changes each time I watch the film, what’s more, I don’t really think unpacking the plot completely is all that important. For me, Lynch is about atmosphere, humour, ideas, feelings, surreal… tying everything up can be fun, but so can just going with the flow. I remember a friend once staring me in the eyes after viewing it, and he was exhausted and tear-ed up and he said “It’s just a fucking, fucking sad love story.” Which I tend to agree with. A homicidal, fucked up as all fuck, love story… cos when you unpeel the fucked up/homicidal bits it’s about hurt and loss and grief and heartbreak and trying to cope with that pain… with a bit of ego and careerist shit and “Hollywood is against me” thrown in for good measure. I was watching Inland Empire, with a bunch of my wanky friends this month and they all really got on my nerves with their ‘unpacking’ crap. I just wanted them to relax. One of the really wonderful things about seeing MD again at the cinema was doing so with a cinema full of really like-minded Lynch-ers (ew! bad word play! Sorry) … they were awesome! I haven’t laughed so much watching the film in years. It was so, so, fun to share the film with a crowd of strangers and be effected by their affection, and be affected by the effect on them. Everything is heightened when you’re in a dark room full of people feeling a really similar thing. You feel connected and engulfed. Yum.
One of the main things I love about this film is Naomi Watts. Her performance is glorious. I’ve never seen her perform as well since. I think she has a completely engaging vulnerability that she harnesses in the role and she’s brave and sexy and embarrassing and horrifying and had such remarkable range. The audition scene blew everyone away and the girl-without-a-career became A-list, ‘overnight,’ finally. The delicious line between art and artifice was cheekily breached by Lynch on the casting couch I reckon. Watts, at that stage in her career, was Diane (minus the repressed psycho killer lesbian bit.) Watts was the hopeful ingénue in Hollywood struggling with flops and bit parts. And she didn’t just bring wonderful truth to the role, she brought delicious irony. Heaps of the performances in this film are great cos Lynch is a great director, but for, me, Watt’s is soooo much fun.
Even though I can’t do this film justice in a section of a blog, I’m probably going to wank on a bit anyway… so bear with me… haha.
My Lynch-ness started at 15, with this film so, though in some ways I find Lynch a tad naff, his work started the ball rolling with my brain thinking about cinema and as it started with this film I’ll always have a soft spot for it even if it too is a tad naff. I really, really love this film, but at the same time, in the same breath, I really, really, get why people don’t so I always feel the need to qualify and justify why I like it… Basically, I’m not an out-and-proud MD fan! Though, apparently I’m much less closeted about it than I thought I was. A friend of mine tells me that the ‘I killed Laura Palmer’ Tshirt I wear, along with my Eraserhead pin, and a little too much gushing about Naomi Watts totally blows my cover on the playing-it-cool-about-liking-Lynch front. Hmmm… The biggest reason that I understand why people don’t like it, is cos it’s a fucking “It was all a dream, and-then-I-woke-up” story, which, everyone knows is THE most unimaginative way to write a story… but we can forgive the Wizard of Oz and, I argue, we can forgive MD. Sometimes, the and-it-was-all-a-dream thing, works, and this is one of those rare occasions… Cos, I reckon it is an examination of dreams and fantasy and how they interact with reality. Cos fantasy is fascinating and subconscious is fascinating and Lynch doesn’t shy away from that. And so, what seems to be a ‘dream’ movie is actually a really deep look at desires and the human mind and how fantasy works.
So, At 15 I walked into this film and it turned my brain upside down. I was working at a cinema at the time, which was handy, cos it meant I could watch the film 6 times without it eating all my pocket money. I was a total Lynch novice and It took me three watches till I even got that Betty and Diane were the same person (which is a testament to Watt’s amazing performance too) … but my projectionist at the time taught me how to read Lynch. My Projectionist at 15 and a lecturer of mine when I was 20 are probably the two most influential film-geeks in my life in terms of teaching me to speak Lynch. My projectionist taught me how to break the films up into symbols and moments. To worry about the truth in moments and when you understand how you feel about the moments the film as a whole will come into focus. “You see Ridiculous…” His voice still rings in my ears… “The opening sequence means that she won the jitterbug contest, does that make sense?” He lent me Lost Highway and Wild at Heart (but said he didn’t like Blue Velvet and refused to lend it to me) and set about educating me. This was exciting for me cos it was it was the first time I realised cinema could do this that it could fuck with linear and fuck with my head. I was smitten. At university, I was told my lecturer, that I had to watch EVERYTHING. That to understand a Lynch film one must understand all of Lynch’s work. That his films speak to each other and inform each other. I haven’t watched everything but there’s heaps to what he taught me. The more Lynch you watch the more you understand, sadly though, the more you want to kill yourself too. I watched far too much when I was taking his course and I think that’s where I found my ambivalence/need to closet. Cos, watching most of Twin Peaks and five films in one weekend leads you to conclude: Lynch is fucked. He’s preoccupied with homicidal lovers and pain and abuse and darkness. And there’s only so much of that I can take. I so often get dobbed into conversations with “Oh Ridiculous loves Lynch, she’ll yarn to you about it” and there I am with some nerd, feeling all compromised and complicated about it and not wanting to carelessly wave the flag of ‘loving Lynch,’ What I’m trying to say is I do, I genuinely do think he’s a fabulous director and storyteller, but I also think he’s fucked, and I can’t work out where I sit with the fucked.
So, (mind the wank) Lynch was a trained painter and I mention this cos, I think, acknowledging his skill as a painter informs a reading of his work. Lynch paints with the camera. But just because he is a painter who works in film does not mean his screens are canvases. Despite his self confessed paintbrush approach to the camera the sensuality and immediacy and engaging quality of his works resembles a stage more than it does a painting. (Ha ha, yep, I’ll always try and bring things back to the stage, but, with Lynch, I think I have good reason!) His early art training creates a theatricality in his films rarely imbued in cinema. It has the theatrical qualities of an artwork, in that; a punter is provoked to interpret and interact with the worlds created. Lynch is resisting the urge to create an illusion of reality because reality is an illusion (a la club Silencio) and thus he wants to tell stories without making them seem real. The exciting thing about art is that an artist can create worlds that do not have to obey the rules of the real world. Lynch can therefore disregard the logic of “real” in preference for the logic of dreams, but the fact is, he does draw upon the real and he does reference what it is and means to be real. Lynch also investigates the consequences of dreams and desires and fantasies as well as the consequences of the real. Most painting is mimetic and based upon some notion of verisimilitude or romantic realism. It is undeniable that Lynch’s worlds look real and feel real which is what makes their bizarre or disturbing undertones more effective, because it does feel real and we are forced to pay attention to what they mean.
Kaleta’s understanding of film painting seems to be as a composition that does not progress and tell a story. A painting based firmly in images and that is decorative rather than narrative. I’d agree that Lynch refuses to define but only but I reckon it’s only to allow for more meanings and stories. Lynch is opposed to a spoon-fed (arg, can’t think of a better word, but Lynch does use the term…anyway.) narrative but he does not disregard narrative. He merely subverts its structure. Kaleta quotes Lynch as saying:
They (Lynch’s movies) mean different things to different people. Some mean more or less the same things to a large number of people. It’s okay. Just as long as there’s not one message, spoon fed… life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be too. (ibid, can you say ibid in a blog? Can you tell I want to be a student? p5, my brackets)
Lynch remains, like the movie camera, the presenter: he shows, he sounds, he focuses, he looks and eavesdrops – but Lynch does not construct the message. He leaves that part of the film experience – interpretation – to the audience” (Kaleta p.18)
As it stands, Kaleta feels that Lynch’s films are paintings that we may interpret but that do not take a narrative journey, they exist and circulate. I reckon he’s wrong and that the way an audience is positioned in relation to his, and the overall emotionally engaging quality of his works has, more to do with theatricality than painting however much Lynch thinks himself to be a painter.
Another Lynch scholar, Martha Nochimson, argues that Lynch does not try to establish an illusion of realism because he believes the real is an illusion. Nochimson describes Lynch’s first 4 films (Six men getting sick, 1967, The Alphabet, 1967, The Grandmother, 1970, and Eraserhead, 1976,) as “his most naked”, (Martha P. Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch, Wild at Heart in Hollywood, University of Texas Press: Austin, 1997, p148.) she feels that “when he was working unambiguously outside of the popular culture arena and had no commercial constraints upon him, he chose to use narrative forms – an observation about his student films so simple and obvious that it never remarked upon”. (ibid) Apparently, “All those who ponder the effects of commercialism on Lynch as an artist ought to consider that in his early work he is what he is later, a narrative filmmaker who wishes to tell stories without falling into illusionist realism” (ibid). From this perspective, Lynch tells stories without positing them as the real. He does not need the illusion of reality to be convincing. “Lynch’s fascination with a world in which the widespread, passionate demand for the closed structure of the story is just as real as the strong, unbound truths of the energy of the subconscious and the random” (ibid p149) According to Nochimson, Lynch is a storyteller who operates in the logic of the random rather than the real.
Barthes’ ‘Reality Effect’ (Okay, now I’m totally recycling from an old essay here, but I think it’s valid so indulge me) is interesting when considering the densely detailed world that Lynch creates. The effect is produced by the accumulation of superfluous details resulting in verisimilitude. “The very absence of signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity.” (Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, Trans. Richard Howard. Basil Blackwell, 1986. p 148.) Layering of details does not produce a real but something that resembles the real. Something of the sort definitely occurs in Lynch’s worlds. There are strange and bizarre things going on but it all feels plausible and hence more disturbing because of a textured and detailed world that is modelled on the real that the audience is familiar with. For example, the arrival of the Mystery Man at the party in Lost Highway is unsettling because the setting is familiar and real. All of a sudden the magical and sinister quality of this character is amplified by the hauntingly plausible context he is placed in. The party moves too quickly but the pace reminds us of the exact feeling of being at a party when everything is moving around you. The party goes silent as the Mystery Man shows off his party trick. We have all borrowed a phone at a party, we have all had experiences with creepy people. The sequence is supernatural but we don’t think it is a trick. We believe that the Mystery Man is both in his house and at the party at the same time because the real and the impossible overlap seamlessly to establish this exchange as fact.
Lynch creates atmosphere and mood so strange and real that it has a disturbing or unsettling quality. In MD, the ‘man out back of this place’ sequence at Winkies is painfully foreboding and the suspense is built up with deliberate performances, ambient music, and a slow, careful, pace. The mundane or banal setting amplifies the horror at the discovery of the sinister creature that lurks behind the diner. The world is super real and disturbing. We feel it with all our senses. ‘Could be someone’s missing’ (During the desire sequence of MD, the coppers deduce that there is someone missing from the accident. Camilla is also missing from the real outcome of her murder, and Diane, in her own way, is missing her.) we are missing, we are taken from reality and placed in this Lynch world which we try our best to navigate only to be spat out again at the other end disoriented. Film and art does indeed have the capacity to create possible worlds that seem real but can operate on dream logic. Lynch's possible worlds are nightmarish and navigating and interpreting them can be harrowing.
Watching film is an act of voyeurism, an act that Lynch explores and assesses making the us (the audience) all too aware of ourselves. He seems to be testing what we are comfortable with experiencing. “This is particularly relevant for the key scene where frank and Dorothy make love while Jeffery looks on. What is unusual about this scene is its theatricality. One wonders whether the characters do not enter, speak, move and behave solely to please the voyeur, knowing full well they are giving him a show. As when Isabella Rossellini dressed only in her bra and panties crawls about moaning and then gets up, with apparently no other reason than to be seen by Jeffery and us.” (Michel Chion, David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian, British Film Institute: 1995, p93) What I find interesting is that Jeffery just watches does not try to protect her, and we, like him, watch too. Experiencing the scene without doing anything to help. In MD Betty convinces Rita to take a walk and phone the police about the accident. She says: ‘It will be just like in the movies – we will pretend to be someone else!’ Just like Diane who is pretending to be generous and desirable and talented, Just like actors who pretend to be someone else, just like voyeurs who pretend to be someone else, and just like someone masturbating who fanaticises about someone else.
One interpretation, when I’m being cheeky, that I feel is plausible for MD is that it operates not under dream logic, but under masturbation logic. Diane, tormented by Camilla who was not freed from her desire as she hoped she would be through her murder, needs to come to calm herself. As she violently masturbates the film tremors in the same spasm shakes that it did on the way to Silencio when the fantasy started to unravel. Perhaps Diane creates and recasts her reality in order for her to orgasm.
“Mulholland Drive is both a film “about” fantasy and a film permeated by fantasy at every level: in its setting, its narrative structure, and its visual techniques, the film reflects constantly on the experience of the fantasising subject. Lesbianism operates in the film as a site for the exploration of fantasy- it occupies a strange twilight realm, somewhere between a dream and a cliche” (Heather K Love, Spectacular Failure: The figure of the Lesbian in Mulholland Drive, New Literary History, University of Virginia. 2004 p121, 122.)
) This helps us to appreciate that MD is not just a ‘and then I woke up’ story. The fantasy is what provides coherence to the real.
Lynch’s films speak to each other… places and rooms and curtains and lamps and lipstick and blood and darkness and mirrors and clubs establish themselves again and again until they become familiar. In life we are constantly having experiences that are encoded with past experiences… when we, say, I dunno… catch a train, we can remember other trains we have caught. Lynch basically establishes a Lynch-world memory. The more Lynch movies we have experienced, the more settings and faces and feelings become familiar. The films may not just evoke in us our own history or experiences but our Lynch history or experiences. The same actors appear as different characters and the same characters appear played by different actors. The connection I most enjoy is Twin Peak’s Special Agent Cooper speaks to Diane in tape recordings… and in MD Diane learns that it is all a tape recording. (Which makes the fact that Laura Palmer is in the audience at Club Silencio pretty groovy right?) Everything is an illusion. It looks real it feels real but it is not. It is quite clear from the Silencio scene that Lynch does in fact enjoy the illusion of reality and that theatricality is evoked vividly. Theatre is illusion at it’s yummiest. Yum.
Oh shit. I just wrote eight pages on Lynch. Whoops. Better stop now. Maybe I’ll write some mo later… Anyway. Yep. I saw Mulholland Drive at The Chauvel this Feb. eeep!
Theatre Rant: Speaking of that collective audience feeling thingy… Sometimes you can feel really compromised, and want to vomit, when you’re caught in a collective spirit you don’t believe in. That’s how I felt this month when I went to see Don Parties On. (STC, Dir Robyn Nevin) UGHHHHHHHRGHARG! I had to have a really long, hot, shower to scrub this awful production out of my senses. DISGUSTING. I felt complicit in this really smug, pretentious, self-congratulatory, version of left-wing theatre-going with an audience chuckling to themselves over bad jokes and crappy crap. Not sure what possessed me to go see it. Well, actually, I do know… I was curious. I did a bit of work on Don’s Party (the film, Dir. Bruce Beresford, 1976) last year. See, the gaps-in-film-where-lesbians-aren’t really interests me and Don’s Party had an interesting example of cutting-the-lesbian that I poked around in, so in my I’m-attempting-to-be-the-lesbian-nerd-of-Sydney as well as a bit of theatre-nerd and general-nerd, I was interested in Williamson’s follow up, and, what, if anything, he did with lesbians this time round. I can’t tell you entirely, cos I left at interval. (Which I loved. I haven’t done it in ages. I forgot how empowering leaving the theatre is. ) So, they mention lesbians in the first half and somewhat derisively… Jenny (Sue Jones) has a go at Kath (Tracy Mann) for being able to raise and provide for her children properly… while she, wah wah, woe is her… had a one die of AIDS, one who’s a drug addict, (I think it was?) and one who’s a lesbian… Kath calls her on the lumping-the-lesbian-in-as-a-trifecta-of-terrible thing and says something along the lines of “Lucy has a lovely partner… wank wank.” So, as far as the first half goes, lesbians are mentioned (weirdly) but absent. Lesbians being absent from our stage bothers me and I’ll rant about it a bit later under my Mardi Gras rant, wait for it. Meanwhile. The play is awful. The jokes are really bad and badly written. There is heaps of repetition for no particular reason. The performances are pantomime, which is odd, cos I know perfectly well all these actors can actually act. I’ve been blown away by some of them on other occasions. (Mann, for example, in Inside Out, 2009, Dir Tom Healey, knocked my socks off.) Little wonder they sucked though, I’m not sure why Robyn Nevin has a career, she reeks. And, as a rule, I’m going to try not to piss on people on this blog too much, cos pissing on artists isn’t very nice. But she deserves it. Talent-less, up-herself, bitch. The only reason I can cope with King Cate and Queen Andrew running our theatre company, despite not being qualified, is cos at least Robin Nevin doesn’t reign any more. Ugh!
Theatre (ish) Rant: Cos I don’t want to talk about this in the same breath as DPO, and cos it wasn’t strictly and entirely theatre… in the fourth wall, sit down, interval, sit down, then leave sense of theatre… This Feb, I attended The Pan Dimensional Halloween Syndicate First Birthday Bonanza and it was magic, magic. It’s one of those underground warehouse spaces in Sydney where creative kids organise fun events and they’re cheap, like 10 dollars at the door and you get a night full of amazing performances and you can byo or buy cheap beer from a makeshift bar at the back. I’ve been to plenty of these spaces over the past 5 years (sadly, a lot of them get shut down as fast as I hear about them) but this one was especially awesome. Surprise, surprise, it was much more theatre-ey than other spaces I’ve been to. (Lots of the other spaces are more gig-ish.) This one was all cabaret and culty. You entered and were greeted by creepy costumed peoples and you wound your way round a dark rickety alley and then climbed into another space with small stage and a room full of tables filled with costumed characters waiting for the show to begin. I was there to see Button and Grime, who is a friend of mine (who also goes by Gemma Lark) and her piece, not that I’m biased, was utterly gorgeous. It was burlesque-ey take on little red riding hood. Lark, being an ex-dancer, moves gloriously. She performed in a huge Betty-Boop-esque mask that she made herself cos she’s also a rad designer/puppet-maker/set-maker/artist. Her piece examined woman as faceless, woman as puppet, woman as fairytale, woman as caricature of sexy, and the number was heartbreaking, thought provoking… and fucking sexy. So I went for Lark, (and loved Lark) but stayed and enjoyed all that a yummy Sydney underground event had to offer! It all felt very Rocky Horror, full of gorgeous misfits (what really struck me, was I spied a misfit I once knew in amongst the crowd, he was one of those bizarrely awkward people and he attended a Rocky Horror night I once staged, and was a little creepy and we kind of punished him for it by stopping inviting him to things and I felt really bad about it, not bad enough to resume inviting him, but, you know, bad, so seeing him there, happy (in a weird dressed-up-dancing-on-his-own way) made me really happy that nights like this exist for people like him to go to and that he’s not at home alone) with a place to go and be themselves and don costumes (the dress code was ”15th-19th century halloween with aliens and dimensional travelers welcome..”) and feel free, and uninhibited, and sexy, and whatever. It was really unpretentious, and so could have been pretentious, so I was super impressed. It was completely charming but also, crazy spooky and surreal and Lynch-ish. This gorgeous (but creepy) in character narrator ran the whole evening and had the crowd in the palm of his hand. He spun yarns like a proper storyteller and embroiled audience members in his tales. So it all went a bit theatre-sports at times but in a really organic nice way and I was so impressed by how the crowd went with him and how uninhibited the people he picked on were. They relished painting his stories with him. And he’d demand the audience scream “halleluiah!”… and we all would… again and again…no one was above it or shy. The music (accompanying the narrator’s antics) was all live and performed from a loft above the stage. The performances, breaking up the narrator’s spooky theatrics, were fantastic. Kael was hypnotic with a gorgeous belly dancing performance. And Psychonanny and the Baby Shakers and Mother and Son gave great sets. It was a tad too hot for dancing but people were anyway and they were both rad and rocking. And then, at midnight, narrator dude led everyone in a huge streamer-and-party-popper frenzy of birthday mayhem and halleluiah! Theatrical, fun, underground, magical, … yum.
Happy Mardi Gras! With added rant about the LGBTQ things I did this month:
Okay, I’m a shit lesbian, I’ve only done two things so far… I attended Fair Day and Queer Thinking. Fair Day was cute. It was super stinking hot and I had no one to go with so I almost stayed home and watched season three of Buffy with the aircon on instead. But, I made myself go, and I loved it, loved it. I forgot how lovely our community can be when they want to be. A friendly old gay man told me (cos I was wearing my I Killed Laura Palmer Tshirt) that his partner loves Twin Peaks but that he thinks it’s rubbish now and can’t work out what he saw in it in the 90s. I bought home made lemonade and looked at cute things I couldn’t afford to buy and admired all the cute lesbians walking by. Hot and crowded but mostly, lovely. (and then I went home and turned the aircon on and watched Buffy… haha…) Queer Thinking, held at the Seymour centre was good. I enjoyed thinking, though my thinking was a little cranky and I hated having to be quiet and listen and not be able to scream things. I only managed to catch two of the afternoon lectures cos I worked the morning. The one I want to talk about, is ‘Gaytown – How theatre translates in an increasingly global culture.’ A theatre panel consisting of Lachlan Philpott, Rick Vieve and Guy Edmonds discussing their works Holding the Man, Bison and Whore. They said some interesting things but they seemed to really not get how theatre works in the audiences-don’t-have-time-machines sense. They wanked on about not wanting to write coming out stories, saying a) that story is a bit over, and b) plenty of stories have been staged and great ones so there’s no need for them to write new ones. This gave me the shits cos a) coming out stores are still relevant, we are still struggling with coming out, and being able to see shows that agree with us that it is hard and explore and examine the process, would still be comforting and nice. It is an incredible experience, and only people who go through it really know how it feels, and its not naff and it is definitely still worth writing about. b) Great, I’m glad there’s all these great text that already exist, but existing does nothing for me, if they’re not being staged I can’t see them. I want to see them. The didn’t address the fact “gay plays” don’t get staged all that often outside of the Mardi Gras time slot. Then they went “wouldn’t it be great if being gay wasn’t a big deal and gay characters gayness was just incidental and not part of the plot.” AHHHHHHHHHHHH! Well, firstly, being gay isn’t incidental yet, so why should our sexuality be incidental in stories, it’s just not fucking true. My sexuality comes up, and does things that effect how my life goes all the fucking time. I don’t get to have in-laws cos my girlfriend’s pretend I’m just-a-friend in front of their parents. I deal with homophobic shit if not daily, then weekly. I dealt with my (long, arduous) coming out. I deal with how to tell strangers or new people who I’m not sure where they stand. I deal with my friends annoying hetronormative shit that they don’t even mean to do. I deal with sometimes “passing” as straight and that making me feel funny. Being gay is fucking hard. Thankfully I live in Sydney, and have pretty cool friends and family so I can’t complain too much but don’t fucking reduce me-in-art to incidental cos I don’t feel fucking incidental. Also, our culture, (and we have a culture,) can be really vibrant and subversive and interesting why would we want to dumb us down and have us as palatable and digestible and inoffensive and “incidental” characters? Ugh! The other thing that was clear to me was that gay men own theatre. Vieve addressed this in passing, and a girl in the audience screamed (and it totally wasn’t me) about how no females had been invited to speak on the panel and how crap that was, which is true. The lesbian, as in most places, is pretty is pretty invisible on the Sydney stages. I’ve never seen a lesbian play. All my big, gut-wrenching, oh-shit-I-identify-with-that, gay texts have all been gay-men texts. This needs to change. It is all well and good to identify with the general gay-is-tough story but the lesbian experience is different. Cos we’re not just gay, we’re women, and being a woman is really hard too. I guess I should sit down and write a play right? Anyway. Queer Thinking is a great idea… we need to keep thinking!
That’s it for Feb 11.
Love.
