Deviant sexuality or masculinity in crisis – again?

Paper by Larry Gleeson.

I have chosen the three films, Boogie Nights (1997), The Handmaiden (2016), and Boys Don’t Cry (1999), to compare and contrast their representations of sexuality. I intend to reveal these three films’ depictions (socially, politically, psychologically) of heterosexism and homophobia and show how the films accept, critique, celebrate, and/or blindly accept heterosexist values in juxtaposition to how the films illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual ‘identity,’ Boogie Nights, set in the rawness of the 1970’s is about the revival and assertion of male sexuality following the AIDS epidemic. The Handmaiden depicts explicitly erotic content and is open about its sexuality while questioning what is art and what is not. In Boys Don’t Cry the boundaries of masculinity and homophobia and attempts to address the resultant complications in defining what is homosexual and what is heterosexual are blurred.

In the quasi-high concept, Hollywood film, Boogie Nights, Director Paul Thomas Anderson reveals two aspects of heterosexism. The more visible one is the low art, 1970’s adult film industry where Anderson sets Boogie Nights. The other aspect is why Thomas made Boogie Nights. Much like David Fincher’s Fight Club with men with repressed masculinity retaking it through violence, Thomas is reacting in the same way as Joel Schumacher did earlier in the 1990’s with Falling Down. The difference is Anderson uses sexuality as the device to make Boogie Nights. Seemingly with a nod to dumb white guy comedies and exploitation films, Thomas shows men who are working and starring in the 1970’s adult film industry and focuses on a seventeen-year-old, Caucasian, Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg).

Eddie has been ostracized from his home by the harshness of his mother, telling him he is no good and stupid with a white trash girlfriend. An upset Eddie turns to adult film maker and pornographic film director, Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), to prove his worth. Eddie had told his girlfriend everybody has one thing they’re good for as he straddled her with his gigantic phallus. While sitting in a hot tub, a luxury product at the time, Eddie designates himself as Dirk Diggler and imagines his name in blue neon lights flashing across the screen.

The culture surrounding Diggler is one of excess. Alcohol and cocaine are the two drugs of choice. Before long, Dirk is the top movie star in the adult industry and through his own ego-destructive behavior becomes hooked on cocaine and crystal meth. He no longer is the stud as his off-screen lifestyle has diminished his performance, and his ability to achieve and maintain an erection. Dirk, w is fired after seeing a new talent, Johnny Doe, on set, and threatening Jack Horner. Dirk gets involved in a robbery and nefarious drug deal that ends up in a shootout. According to sociologist Michael Kimmel, author of “Manhood in America “There’s been a `degendering’ of masculinity,” says Kimmel, “The places where we used to prove our masculinity are now coed: the Citadel, the workplace. So, men proving their masculinity has to look somewhat different.” The climax of Boogie Nights is a shot of Dirk’s massive member.

In Boogie Nights the 70’s decade ends with a cuckolded husband killing his wife, her lover and himself, a sign of worse things to come. Interestingly, John Leland, in Rake’s Progress postulates “to explain a movie about the adult film industry in which the fill-the-seats star is a man? This is an inherent ’90s bias. “There had to be a punishment” for all that pursuit of pleasure, says Anderson, especially for the drug use. Through hegemonic negotiation, Anderson added, “Attempting to portray something seen remotely similar in the ultra-conservative 1990’s would have proven antithetical socially.” (Leland) “The men need the boost, says Dr. David Gutmann, professor emeritus of psychiatry and education at Northwestern University. “It’s a desperate assertion of masculinity in its most fundamental terms. All of this stems from a sense of maleness under pressure, under hostile review.” (Leland) Nevertheless, Anderson manages to show men retaking their masculinity with men doing one of a man’s most basic needs through Dirk Diggler, a loose interpretation on the life of John C. Holmes, a.k.a., Johnny Wad, the prolific 1970’s adult film star.

In Boys Don’t Cry, the film’s protagonist, Brandon, a queer, transsexual, female bodied transman passes as a man, with a man’s hairstyle, cross-dresses as a real man with his short hair and trousers and displays traits of a gentleman and has begun engaging in sexual exploration as a man. Yet, after he gets with a young woman, her brothers track him down in a confrontational moment outside Brandon’s cousin’s trailer. Brandon is ostracized from his Lincoln, Nebraska, community. Brandon flees Lincoln for Falls City where he attempts to assimilate by dressing and living like a man without any ties to his former feminine identity. Brandon finds a love interest as a sensitive man and falls for the beautiful but trapped and troubled Lana. This draws the ire of a suitor, John Lotter. Lotter confronts Brandon about Teena Brandon, Brandon’s female name before he changed it. Lotter and his buddy, Tom Nissen, take Brandon into the bathroom and force reveal Brandon’s genitalia. After the forced reveal Brandon is referred to as an “it” by Lana’s mother.

In her decoding “Highway and Home: Mapping Feminist-Transgender Coalition in Boys Don’t Cry,” Elizabeth Schewe argues Lotter and Nissen relate to Brandon as a man.” Seemingly Lotter and Nissen are suffering masculinity crises as neither has political or economic power. After the forced reveal of their male counterpart, the two take Brandon to an isolated area, and proceed to rape and assault him. Afterwards, Lotter still refers to Brandon, as “little buddy. After the assault, Brandon makes a formal complaint and is psychologically raped during the interrogation by Sheriff Laux (Maestu).

Unconsciously, Boys Don’t Cry, is homophobic, and transphobic as Lana’s involvement with an outed Brandon is met with disgust and disdain. Lana’s mother tells Lana, “I don’t want “it” in my house.”  Also, knowing Brandon is a female, Lana rebuffs Brandon’s attempt to kiss. Yet, in the next scene, Lana didn’t care when Brandon came clean. Lana got intimate with Brandon, taking the dominant top position during their intimacy as the two made plans to go to Memphis. Immediately following their intimate reunion Brandon is murdered by Lotter and Nissen.  According to Karina Eileraas, in “The Brandon Teena Story: Rethinking the Body, Gender Identity, and Violence Against Women, “…Brandon was killed ‘because he was a female who dressed like a man.’ In other words, Brandon’s rape and murder can be appropriately construed as extreme forms of gender- and sexuality-based discrimination, domination, and violence.”

Throughout Boys Don’t Cry (1993), Director Kimberly Peirce shows how heterosexism dominates in rural, early 1990’s through marginalized/toxic masculinity and displacement of two losers, John Lotter (Peter Sarsgaard) and Tom Nissen (Brendan Sexton III). Both, Lotter and Nissen, have served prison and jail time, and Peirce makes her point of transgender discrimination socially, politically, and psychologically through their brutal sexual assault and murder of Brandon Teena. In addition, what Pierce left out of the film is quite telling. Tom Nielsen had been in association with a white supremacist organization. Peirce, in a “radical erasure of blackness,” leaves out Phillip DeVine, a disabled, black trans who was murdered along with Brandon Teena and Candace and was engaged in miscegenation with Lana’s real-life sister, Michelle. (Riley) In addition, Peirce homes in on the problematics of distinct categories of sexuality as either strictly homosexual and/or heterosexual due to the fluid nature of human sexuality. The film also blindly accepts heterosexist values and in a twisted sense celebrates heterosexism through John and Tom’s homosocial behaviors.

In the 2016, non-linear, avant-garde, period piece, foreign film, The Handmaiden, Park Chan-Wook reveals the operations of heterosexism through the political, social, and psychological 1930’s Korean culture through the mise-en-scene, visual iconography and literary design of the Victorian-era. Park subtly intertwines heterosexual objectification with an artistic vision of femininity and female sexuality between a Korean, indentured servant, Sook-Hee, and a high class, imperialist noble, Lady Hideko, of Japanese ethnicity. Park also critiques heterosexual values.  The females depicted in The Handmaiden are very subservient and have no consent in the home. Sook-Hee is in servitude while Lady Hideko reads out passages of pornographic texts for her Uncle Kouzuki ‘s gentleman guests – seemingly the primary role Kouzuki has groomed her for. Her social conditioning included aspects of bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM). In addition, Lady Hideko wears leather gloves, a BDSM accessory, to keep her hands soft and to protect the pornographic books she handles. In one scene Kouzuki whips Lady Hideko’s backside and asks the imposter Count Fujiwara, “If you pity her so, why not take her place and let her whip you? In the film’s next scene Lady Hideko is reading a text interspersed with her whipping the gentlemen who sit, titillated by her reading.

Park illustrates the problematics of sexuality and sexual identity through Lady Hideko. Lady Hideko is trapped by her Uncle Kouzuki on the estate grounds, as he is planning to marry her, in a marriage of convenience, for her inheritance once she comes of age. In the meantime, however, Lady Hideko’s uncle has monetized her in a different way, forcing her to read (and, at times, act out) rare and contraband, contemporary, East-Asian pornography. These books are sold to visiting affluent Japanese and Korean men, but the performances or “readings” seem to be the main attraction. The narratives often present sex as violent and repressive, and the performances seem to be taking a physical and emotional toll on Lady Hideko when Sook-Hee arrives. Her perception of sexuality is warped, both by her life as an entrapped woman and her constant exposure to strange and violent sexual narratives. It is in the scenes of tender, frank sexuality and homoerotic love that Lady Hideko and Sook-Hee overcome class consciousness and find expressive freedom and liberation from their culture of repression, of commodification, and of the warping of female sexuality and the female image. (Cook)

The first love scene is from Sook-Hee’s perspective and is repeated later in the film, without objectification, from Lady Hideko’s perspective. Park goes to great lengths in framing this scene. Park constructs exquisite cinematography with a nearly symmetrical ‘God shot” perspective of two intertwined, female bodies engaging in erotic homo sex between Lady Hideko and Sook-Hee. Through editing, the next shot of Sook-Hee making art, Park encodes and connects the erotic “God shot” of Lady Hideko and Sook-Hee with art through the Kuleshov effect. This depiction of homo sex between Lady Hideko and Sook-Hee stands in stark juxtaposition to the hetero sex in Boogie Nights, and the graphic rape scene in Boys Don’t Cry.

In one of the most telling and cathartic scenes in The Handmaiden, Sook-Hee, tosses Kouzuki’s pornography collection, dumping books containing graphic depictions of sex acts into the water, and throws ink onto his erotic-themed tapestries. Lady Hideko looks on without gratification. Susan Cook argues in Kinking the Canon that Lady Hideko and Sook-Hee must run away from Kouzuki and Fujiwara to become totally free and fully liberated. In the film’s climactic scene, Lady Hideko and her one-time servant, Sook-Hee, gain closure having escaped Fujiwara on a ship in a taboo homosexual relationship ringing of a happy ending and eroticism. Unconsciously, The Handmaiden is homophobic as the love scenes between Lady Hideko and Sook-Hee are secretive and Lady Hideko dresses as a man in order she and Sook-Hee to board.

These three films’ depictions, socially, politically, psychologically, of sexuality including heterosexism, homophobia, and transphobia are as relevant today, and probably more so, than when the films were constructed. At the 2023 heteronormative, heterosexist Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention, an annual political conference attended by conservative activists and elected officials from across the United States (Wikipedia), dominant, white patriarchal ideological hate speeches were given, ignoring biological essentialism, and calling for the eradication of transgenderism while also claiming transpeople do not exist. Furthermore, in cisgender fashion, the incoming Trump Administration has declared it will strip LGBTQ+ people of transgender healthcare, along with federal civil rights movement protections against employment, education, and housing discrimination (ACLU). Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprising, the lack of sexually explicit depictions of homoerotic relations and the capitalist filmic erasure of transgenderism prevails today as young filmgoers, despite their overt support of a person’s sexual rights and freedoms, claim to not like on-screen exhibitions depicting explicit sexuality, transgenderism, and homoerotic sexual relations. (Crosara)

Works Cited

ACLU.org. https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/trump-on-lgbtq-rights-rolling-back-protections-and-criminalizing-gender-nonconformity. Accessed December 8, 2024.

Benshoff, Harry M., Griffin, Sean. America on film: representing race, class, gender, and sexuality at the movies  Third edition., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021.

Cook, Susan E. Kinking the Canon. Representing Kink: Fringe Sexuality and Textuality in Literature, Digital Narrative, and Popular Culture. Lexington Books. Lanham, Maryland. 2019. Pgs.107-110.

Crosara, Nic, Sex Onscreen. Diva. Twin Media Group Limited. Apr. 2023. Pgs 62-64. 2023.

Groeneboer, Jan, J. Erasure Through Representation in Boys Don’t Cry. Studies in Gender and Sexuality. 2023, VOL. 24, NO. 2, 131–134https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2211912

Leland, John. Rake’s Progress. Newsweek. Vol. 130, Issue 19, p. 72-73. 1997.

Maestu, Nice. Film Studies 109, Film Criticism and Culture, Santa Barbara City College. Fall 2024.

Schewe, Elizabeth. Highway and Home: Mapping Feminist-Transgender Coalition in Boys Don’t Cry. Feminist Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2014) pp. 39-64.

Selke, Lori. Boogie Nights: Vivid Video and the women at the helm are helping to reinvent pornography — from the inside out. Lori Selke gets the NC-17 inside scoop. Alice; New Britain. Vol. 1, Issue 2. March 25, 2022.

Smith, Stacy, L. et al. Inequality in 1,700 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ+ & Disability from 2007 to 2023. https://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-popular-films-2024-08-02.pdf. Accessed Dec.5, 2024.

Snorton, C. Riley, ‘DeVine’s Cut: Public Memory and the Politics of Martyrdom’, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis, MN, 2017; online edn, Minnesota Scholarship Online, 20 Sept. 2018), https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9781517901721.003.0006, accessed 10 Dec. 2024.

Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Political_Action_Conference. Accessed Dec. 5, 2024.