A Very Queer Inauguration: Notes on Camp Redux, post-Trump

 

I didn’t watch the inauguration. It is not that I have grown cynical about politics; rather, the cynicism of too many others had me feeling too angry to invest the time to get up and spend a day watching it. It is also not that I was afraid of possible violence, though that possibility was distinctly real. I watched 9/11 unfold live and, not even a month ago, the live coverage of the Capitol Insurrection on January 6. I have found that I prefer to wake up to read news that is already over than watch it happen live. But I also suspected that the actual ceremony would be okay given the extraordinary measures taken to defend the grounds around the Capitol for this event. In any case, I just slept all day. It felt wiser than expending the energy for riveted attention after four such terrible years of non-stop disaster unmitigated by the extreme apoplexy of Trump supporters anytime anyone would dare hold him accountable or ask for mere decency to prevail.

 So, I only caught the highlights on YouTube and Facebook. Those highlights included a woman of color sworn in as Vice President, replacing a man so white his every appearance on TV was a screaming reminder of the constructedness of whiteness as a concept. I watched Amanda Gorman’s spoken-word masterpiece. I have no words for Gorman’s brilliance beyond offering my profound respect and my emotional response that I can’t quite articulate yet. Well, beyond the obvious—what a world where art is part of public life again. Thank God.

 After I saw a meme on Facebook from a gay friend wishing he could go grab an overpriced vodka drink while watching a JLo queen perform the soon-to-be smash hit crossover “This Land Is Your Land”/”Let’s Get Loud” I watched that video, too, to see what all the fuss was about. I heard Jennifer Lopez not only ad lib a classic of the American musical canon to include her own mega-hit; I also heard her speak Spanish from the dais at which would be sworn in the next president of the United States.

 Then, of course, I watched a video of Lady Gaga performing the National Anthem.

 If the safe response to the inauguration has been a proliferation of a meme of an old white man in a coat and mittens sitting a little too grumpily for my taste on the stage—and I admit, I’ve traded more than one Bernie meme since Wednesday—then the heart of the ceremony that will actually last beyond tomorrow is the cipher for the lived experience of America I just documented above:

 A woman (of color) sworn in as Vice President—joined on the stage by a Latina superstar who spoke the most widely used language in the Americas, a young black girl who put words to the promise of an America still becoming great, and a queer icon giving voice to the old song we hang the hat of our identity on.

 Lady Gaga stole the show for me—because I was watching from queer America. Worn out and late to the party but connected to the world through vicious memes that amount to present-day reading, we queers in queer America have had some bad years.

 The moment that has stayed most heavily with me since the night of the 2016 election was an interrupted moment in the coverage on MSNBC. As the pundits were starting to grasp that the results were not going to turn in Clinton’s favor, they began to speak bluntly about the forces in America that were speaking back to the last eight years. One pundit, a man whose name I can’t remember but whose words I won’t forget, began explaining, “I don’t think liberals realize how angry conservatives are. People in these states are still very upset over gay marriage.” At this moment, another pundit weighed in, not to cut off the first speaker but to riff for a while on their opinions about the shocking turn of events. The original pundit never came back to his comments—as if he were done speaking. As if, fundamentally, the progress too far for Trump voters was not just the black president or healthcare, but LGBTQ+ rights, which saw an expansion under Obama’s tenure unprecedented in history and with relatively little even recent history to foreshadow the sea-change of the Obama years.

 In fact, Obama ran in 2008 as a vocal opponent of gay marriage. He would end his time in office having seen gay marriage come to fruition and the dawn of a new political visibility—trans rights. Don’t get me wrong, trans rights and other matters relevant to queer identities have long been on the forefront of the movement sometimes blandly labeled “gay liberation,” but same-sex marriage had, for at least 20 years, used up all the oxygen in the room. Its attainment via the Obergefell v. Hodges decision simply let other, well-established activism breathe.

 Then we elected a man who held a Pride flag upside down at a rally (it was also defaced with a marker) after an election-cycle that included the Pulse massacre and beside a vice presidential candidate who was 1) rabidly anti-gay, 2) had ignored an HIV outbreak in Indiana while he was governor (it was related to drugs use, but its dimensions were eerily similar to the Reagan administrations playbook that led to the deaths of many queer men), and 3) had overseen the debate on limiting trans rights in Indiana, which he declined to endorse for fear of angering business leaders. He doesn’t get credit for actually giving a shit.

 The first day in office, that new president’s goblins scrubbed LGBTQ+ data from the White House website. They would later implement a ban on trans troops in the military. They ordered all embassies to remove Pride flags—both in countries where they were completely acceptable and in countries where their visible presence is the city-on-a-hill for so many queer people living in fear. They elected three justices to the Supreme Court who all signal a deeply conservative turn—just before the final of those three justices was installed on the bench, two sitting conservative justices bluntly said in public they thought gay marriage was wrongly decided by the courts.

 In the stories and commentaries trying to make sense of the attempted coup on January 6, all the oxygen in the room has been swallowed up by admitting the violence of white supremacy as if white supremacy is only a measure of racial division, not also indicative of hatred directed towards LGBTQ+ people and strictly defined limits on gender roles. Only a handful of news outlets mentioned how Don, Jr., to stir the pot, also warned the crowds about how the Democrats supported trans rights before those crowds went on to storm Congress.

 Enter Lady Gaga. Though Gaga is not, herself, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, since at least 2011, she has been THE icon of queer pop culture thanks to her hit “Born This Way” but also her overall approach to art. In fact, in 2013, trans theorist J. Jack Halberstam singled out Gaga’s exceptional artistic vision in the title of his book, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. And if Lady Gaga has produced fewer megahits since “Telephone” and “Applause,” she has stayed active in the spotlight by speaking about against sexual violence.

 She also once wore a dress to an awards show made entirely of meat. She also made that video for “Bad Romance,” the best example of camp visual rhetoric in my lifetime, maybe since camp even began!

 I don’t much abide by Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” as the best touchstone for understanding this distinctly queer form of art. Sontag ultimately disdains a camp aesthetic from the position of someone outside of it. In LGBTQ+ communities, camp is not a theory; it is a practice. The best notes on its definition are performances of it. As a mode of expression that is endlessly subversive, it simply cannot be defined from the perspective of any academic nor other critical discourse, which always already originate in a rejection of queer aesthetics as, at best, low-class or uneducated; as, at worst, unnatural or fake.

 Sontag was, however, sometimes at least a little right about it. Camp is over-the-top. It appears gaudy to the untrained eye (divine and luscious to the eye that knows it). It is so bad it is good; it is also so good it is bad!! It is not kitsch—and to this end, I would offer a comparison. Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations were kitsch; the stop-motion Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer is camp; buying factory-made Christmas ornaments based on the film is “taste”; and if you disagree with me, you just don’t get it.

 Camp is the absolute rejection of the serious, the important, the sacred, the monumental; and yet its aims are deadly serious, its topics of immense importance, its visual imagery Baroque if not Rococo, and its monuments might look like dildos—and all these elements exist together because, it turns out, that is real life.

 Camp is Lady Gaga singing the national anthem at the Inauguration of Joseph R. Biden on January 20, 2021.

 First, let’s set the stage—the west side of the capitol building, a building partly constructed by slaves and which contains statuary to any number of sketchy historical figures and which was also, as was the entire city, supposedly designed to impress and intimidate foreign dignitaries with American might. The particular stage in question was built on this edifice for the pomp and ceremony of the inauguration. The stage for Gaga’s performance actually faces the Washington Monument, which could reasonably be seen as a giant white dick (blank, vaguely classical, a codex with no cipher on land that was once a swamp).

 Gaga emerged on the arm of a soldier—Sol Pendarvis is somewhere in New York right now saying, “I wore it better,” and more than a few realness queens from Paris’s ball probably shouted down from heaven to Gaga as she came into the pale sunlight, “You bitch, you stole my dress.”

 Her dress was the one Scarlett O’Hara would have made from the curtains in that window if she wasn’t, you know, a goddamn Confederate sympathizer and all (but, still, didn’t Vivian Leigh look divine with Tara in the background while in her overwrought accent she declared God would be her witness and she’d never go hungry again? That set designer, those costume designers—tell me at least a few weren’t fabulously subversive gay men). The dress had the circumference of an old tree in a big forest. It was as red as the blood colors on our national flag. Her top was a stately navy blue, more midshipman than business school graduate. She was wearing a gold bird pendant that, were it real, was large enough to actually carry her away. Her hair-so-blonde-it-could-be-white was back in a long ponytail but part of it was braided with brown and wrapped around her head, vaguely reminiscent of a St. Lucia celebration. Her microphone was almost an afterthought, but it was also painted gold.

 She sang the National Anthem well if a bit loudly. Lady Gaga is not Whitney Houston nor Beyonce, but she can still hit a solid note. She syncopated the time of the song, enough to make it her own and draw away from comparisons to other divas who have performed it at Super Bowls before.

 It was the campiest thing I have seen in America in at least 4 years, y’all, and here’s the thing—Gaga absolutely knew what she was doing and she absolutely nailed it in terms of living up to the enormous seriousness of the moment—we are in mourning in a pandemic while we fear our former president will still plot a coup, so signing the National Anthem to honor the swearing in of the new president is not just a parlor trick on a dark and boring night with friends. And yet it was always right on the edge of unseriousness—because it was campy and askew from expectations. It was a performance! As if maybe the entire ceremony was a performance, the great drag show of America that, if we could just imitate it, we too could be as fabulous as all that.

 Fitting, of course, for the America that could emerge from this moment. After all, it was Joe Biden who “accidentally” let slip in 2012 that the Obama administration was changing its tune on gay marriage in advance of the series of court cases that would legalize it nationwide. I am of the camp who believes that the notoriously gaffe-worthy Biden did not misspeak that day; he was assigned the task of testing the waters and softening the ground for President Obama to “clarify” his position a few days later.

 Joe Biden is the first president to have officiated a same-sex wedding, which makes sense when you realize that, prior to his term as vice president, same-sex marriage was not legal in many places. After his term, the next president and vice president, I don’t know, I guess just never got around to officiating one themselves.

 Biden was sworn in beside the former Attorney General of California, Kamala Harris, who not only performed same-sex weddings in the state house in California but also was the AG who helped dismantle the legacy of Prop. 8 in California, that disingenuous attempt to stall California’s legalization of same-sex marriages after they had begun.

 Harris also was the AG who was given a petition from a man in California that he wanted as a ballot initiative to amend the state constitution. The petition called for executing gays in the streets.

 Kamala Harris is the first vice president to have officiated a same-sex wedding, a side note in history that is, to me anyway, about the size of the world.

 These approximately 2700 words are the second thing that sprang into my head while I was watching Lady Gaga sing my National Anthem. The first thing that popped into my head was a story related by Michael Sherry in his book Gay Artists in Modern American Culture, a thoughtful history of how the paranoias of the Cold War were responsible for rooting out the gaudy excess of early Hollywood and even up to the 1940s. For Sherry, it wasn’t just the Hayes Code that prevented depictions of homosexuality that would diminish queer visibility in the arts. It was also an active rejection of the ostentatiousness of the queer aesthetic conservatives were convinced they saw in the arts and determined to root out in the name of vulgar American capitalism and might. This led to the closeting of queer expression for artists who wanted to be mainstream and a smothering of avante-garde art, fashion, music, and film that maintained the more visible emblems of an aesthetic that can only be described as camp.

 Sherry relates a joke—Question: Is there such thing as a queer aesthetic and does it have an influence on American culture? Answer: No, there is no such thing as a queer aesthetic, and it has an enormous influence on American culture.

 Well, I think there is a queer aesthetic, but I also think it isn’t what most people think it is. It definitely isn’t Modern Family or Transparent or Macklemore rapping about same love or even early Sam Smith wearing three different expensive, fashionable peacoats in one music video (though, admittedly, this last example gets pretty close). It is not something you see only as queer, queer adjacent, progressive, or inclusive, nor trashy kitsch meant to signify on camp but that is not, itself, the real thing.

 Camp is Lady Gaga singing our National Anthem at the Inauguration of Joseph R. Biden, right there on the most important stage in America on its most importantly ceremonial day. It made for a very queer inauguration. It was luscious! It was divine!

 And she stole my dress, y’all. Gaga! That Künstler! That Bitch!  

Outside the Wire and the Endless War on Unnatural Bodies

 

No doubt on its surface the new Netflix film, Outside the Wire, is intended as a commentary on our current war-by-drone approach to international conflict. It is unlikely the film was intended to construct a troubling commentary on the fear of “unnatural” bodies that reads, like too much American cinema, as the convoluted annunciation of anti-trans logic. However, it does. In the excess of its storytelling, primarily in the palimpsest of its construction, the film relies on the purity of a humanist vision that over-valorizes the “natural” body to defeat “unnatural” technologies that challenge the humanist urge for universal truths about “ourselves,” whoever that is supposed to be.

 The main character, Harp, is a drone pilot safely battling an ambiguous enemy in “Eastern Europe” (the Ukraine) from a computer terminal in Nevada. When he disobeys a direct order and fires on a squad of American troops in the field, killing two of them to save thirty-eight others, he is punished not with a court martial but with reassignment to serve in the war zone alongside Caption Leo. Leo is the sole member of a military intelligence division seeking information on the warlord behind the conflict, Victor Koval, who is supposedly nearing his goal of acquiring access to nearly-50-year-old nuclear missile silos scattered across Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Leo turns out to be an advanced prototype AI cyborg who then turns out to be a self-contained Skynet from the Terminator franchise who recognizes that more technology means more and endless war. So, he goes rogue and attempts to fire those nuclear missiles on the United States. Unlike Skynet, Leo decides to kill a million people to save humanity from machines, rather than kill a million people to jump start a machine age, or something like that. He empathizes, maybe, with humans, at least if he is to be trusted. He wants what is best for us, which requires he kill a few (million) real humans to show them how depersonalized and unhuman war has become--it's being fought with drones and cyborgs even! Anyway, Harp overcomes his original faith in Leo to become the hero who stops Leo by ordering a drone strike that nearly kills them both, though Harp manages to escape.

 The final scene of the film has Leo, his cyborg innards exposed by the incendiary rounds Harp has fired into him, laying on top of the open nuclear missile silo as the nuke within it prepares to launch only to have a drone-strike blow up the launch pad and Leo in one genuine clusterfuck of real and imagined military technologies intersecting in the most explosive way imaginable in contemporary visual narrative. We have the old technology of nuclear warheads (and to call them old as if they will ever be obsolete seems troubling though relevant in this context). We have the new and very real technology of drone-strikes and their inherent flaw: though tethered to a human operator, they are just machines. Their use always runs the (significant) risk of dehumanizing death into black-and-white video screens and the rhetoric of “collateral damage” to obviate the horrors of war. We have the very human-looking cyborg, Leo, who has even been programmed to feel pain—so that he can truly empathize with humans—who represents the science fiction of fully independent AI on the battlefield, a possibility that actual roboticists will tell you is much further from a reality than movies imply.

 Additional references to other modes of technological warfare also enter the film. First, Leo is an advanced prototype of more ubiquitous semi-autonomous robotic soldiers (gumps) that serve alongside human troops, though the gumps lack contextual thinking. On more than one occasion human troops worry aloud that the gumps will make a rash decision and fire first, turning opportunities to talk out solutions without guns into shootouts that kill troops and civilians alike. Second, Leo references a “dirty bomb” supposedly detonated by Koval’s troops, but which is actually the work of a resistance group posing as a humanitarian relief organization in the embattled space between US and Koval forces. Leon, it turns out, has been working secretly with this resistance group to end ALL wars by playing the two sides against each other until they can secure the nuclear codes and “kill a million to save a hundred million,” as Leo says to Harp at the end of the film, when the bad guy conveniently explains his plan. This confession, naturally, echoes Harp’s decision to kill two soldiers to save the other thirty-eight at the beginning of the film, the action that got him assigned to Leo in the first place.

 While the film may seem like a fast-paced, action-filled recycling of old tropes about war and the hard decisions required of soldiers in the field, rather than behind desks, there is troubling excess in its representation that escapes too often for comfort. Example: Leo explains to Harp on more than one occasion, “War is ugly,” which can too easily be read as cover for “don’t judge soldiers who kill civilians.” The film was likely in post-production when the current president (I’m writing this on January 17) pardoned soldiers convicted of murdering Iraqi civilians in what was rightly deemed a war crime, so perhaps the implicit message of the film felt right at the time it was being shot, less so on later reflection. But even with the best of intentions, war stories are always doomed to fail anything less than grandly jingoistic goals. This truth extends to stories that try to depict honest examples of courage under fire, for it is likely that no real stories of valor ever come together so nicely as the structure of a 100-minute film allows. It is equally likely that valor itself is an aporia that might exist, at least conceptually, before and after the moment of battle, but that never firms up as a single, touchable point in the heat of the field. Valor is a narrative, and all narratives of war are always flawed by our desire to either overly-humanize or overly-valorize soldiers. The efforts of narrative, filmic or otherwise, to suture that aporia never close the gap fully, whereas war, that eternal incongruity, remains.

 Perhaps more importantly, and noteworthy in a positive sense, this film works to amend common omissions in our storytelling, especially our martial mythologizing. The stars of the film are both black. The majority of the film focuses on the interactions of two intelligent and capable black men who also happen to be soldiers. Meanwhile, the boots-on-the-ground troops are almost all white. Thus, when Harp is accosted by surviving members of the unit his actions saved, the image of white men in uniforms beating a black man in civilian clothes (Harp is dressed as a civilian for his mission with Leo) registers powerfully for so short a scene. We’ve seen too often this scene with real black civilians and other-uniformed men. We have also see too often men with authority over the lower-ranking troops stand by and accept the beating. He had it coming, they always say, for some sin in the past, usually the primordial sin of daring to act freely for which all black bodies can be called upon to atone.

 But all bodies—the one’s that matter anyway—might be black or white, they might be male or female, but they all fit into a binary order in which, despite progress, we still see visible distinctions that put our characters into clear roles. You can always spot the bad guy—well, bad “guy”—by looking for the figure whose arrangement in relation to “natural” categories is, somehow, fraught.

 When Leo explains to Harp why he was made to look human, he challenges Harp to look at his face—the face of a black man—and says that his face was chosen because it is trustworthy. The singularity of this moment as a statement in our current political climate about who to trust (a black man) versus question (a white man in a MAGA hat, per se, or one carrying zip-ties in full battle fatigues) should have been the key moment of the film to challenge our assumptions. Our heroes are on a quest; they are black; their faces inspire our confidence. After all, it seems like just over a year ago that the particular face playing Leo (Anthony Mackie) was singled out by no less than Captain America to inherit his shield. Bucky was probably too coded as gay at that point in the MCU films, and the Cap’ had just magically appeared after his apparently long and very rewarding, if surely boring, heterosexual life with Agent Carter. Cue legacy scene: there, on the Golden Pond of the Endgame of that phase of film history, order was restored when the straight/cis white man bypassed his lifelong bosom buddy and bequeathed his mantle to a black man, who probably needs to find a wife soon—because, let’s be honest, Falcon’s immediate connection with Captain America in The Winter Soldier would be overwhelmingly homoerotic were it not outshined by the real lovers in that film (no shipping required).

 Unfortunately, Leo is not honest; in fact, the climactic battle at the end of the film—the clusterfuck of past and future technologies destroying each other—includes Harp, having shot Leo nearly to pieces, asking Leon why he should believe him now, you know, since he has been lying for the entire film and all. It is at this point that Leo delivers a line directly counter to his earlier claim that his face is one to trust. He says, instead, “I am the face of endless war.” He has made the calculation that technologies, like himself, will only further dehumanize war and so lead to its perpetuation (he seems unaware that we name ages of history after the technologies of battle, and have done so since before the Nuclear Age and long before the advent of the Anthropocene). He is sacrificing himself because he knows he is such an unnatural aberration that a world of cyborgs like him will only lead to more, because increasingly impersonal, conflicts. He is, after all, only programmed for empathy. It does not mean his empathy is real.

 The Terminator redux in the film is definitely excessive. First, Leo convinces Harp to remove a “tracking device” from his central operating system—except “trust my face” Leo is lying. It is actually a regulator that would override his programming if he were to be compromised by his own duplicity. This scene is a direct reference to a scene in T2, though most folks probably haven’t seen the full scene in that older film unless you watch the director’s cut. Second, Leo nearly chokes Harp at the end of the film but decides against full-on killing him. While choking, Harp unloads a pistol into Leo’s groin, where his programmed empathy does register pain but does not deter him. That the pistol shots into Leo’s groin don’t “unman” him is clear proof he is not a real man. Then Harp, upon awakening, grabs a bigger gun with high-powered incendiary rounds that can blow through an armored car, apparently, and shoots them, one-after-the other, methodically into Leo, whose form shifts and sputters with lights upon each impact—basically like Sarah Connor shooting up the T-1000 with that repetitive one-handed cold-cock in the final scenes of Ridley’s Scott’s film.

 That is not the only scene from another film being referenced, though. In both the touchstone for a history of gay representation in film, The Celluloid Closet, and in Netflix’s own 2020 documentary follow-up on trans representation, Disclosure, a key film under scrutiny shows an investigator, having cornered the bad “guy” in a public restroom, pump said bad “guy” full of lead. Said bad “guy” writhes in agony with each gun shot. Blood explodes out of “his” back onto the surprisingly clean tile walls. Said bad “guy” is not a guy, though, or at least not a natural one. He is a “tranny,” in true Hollywood fashion. “He” is a small-framed man passing as a woman to commit various acts of mayhem, robbery, murder—but really he’s a dude! And we all know gender-bending is unnatural, so as both documentaries explain, the ostensibly straight and cisgender audience feels no empathy for him as he is shot and dies. Similarly, we are made to see unnatural freaks as lacking all humanity in, say, a character like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. The unnatural body, especially when revealed to us on screen, is a site of horror, not humanity, and lord know we are not supposed to empathize with its twisted psychosis. The more unnatural, the easier it is for an audience to lionize (valorize?) the hero who shoots that monstrous body full of holes (or wholes? That body was not complete—it was a hazard of admixture, incomplete, subhuman—so why not close out the plot and make whole the narrative by killing that unnatural creature off?).

 One could go so far as to say Outside the Wire quotes another scene from another movie, The Crying Game. The scene of Dil’s revelation has become the source of any number of parodies—what could be funnier than a girl with a dick? Well, not just funny, also potentially horrifying until neutered with a laugh. Similarly, early in Outside the Wire, Harp watches Leo change shirts, signifying on the potential for the homoerotic gaze even if unintentionally. At this moment, Leo “flexes,” after a fashion, allowing his brown skin to become see-through and thus revealing that beneath his skin, he’s not human at all. Harp does not respond by punching Leo or retreating to the bathroom to vomit, but he is visibly stunned. Leo calls him out for his sudden discomfort and then demands Harp’s trust at this moment, or face reassignment. Of course, as the revelation implies, everything about Leo is a lie. He isn’t even human, just fake skin posing in human form. As the commanding officer on base has already told Harp about Leo before sending him to Leo's workshop, "He [meaning Leo] isn't like us."   

 In December 1952, Christine Jorgenson made her debut in American popular culture as the GI who, through the miracle of modern science, had transformed into a girl. Susan Stryker identifies this moment in trans history as connected to two growing fears in mainstream American society that Jorgenson’s transformation exhumes. On the one hand, the advent of a nuclear age led to fear of what science could do to human bodies—and while for some there was potential for positive change, all change can lead to paranoias. On the other hand, there was an already growing fear about the loss of virile American masculinity, which was seen as a measure of the health of our capitalist society. Manly men meant defeating communism (and homosexuals, and maybe also controlling those increasingly unruly blacks about that whole voting thing). From that frame, nothing could be more terrifying than a man becoming a woman through the miracle of science. C. Riley Snorton extends Stryker’s reading of Jorgenson into a black context by pointing out that the narrative of scientific possibility embodied in her transformation must be seen in the context of whiteness. Snorton then identifies black trans individuals from the same period who were not treated so welcomingly by the press, which, at best, had no idea what to do with them, at worst made them jokes.

 And here, in 2021, a black-embodied cyborg gives itself a eulogy about the dangerous potentials of technology. We can’t have a world of unnatural, inhuman robots. We must do anything with out power to maintain only natural, virile bodies, or so says the self-sacrificing cyborg while laying on top of an actual nuclear warhead. Oh my, what dangers await us if we are not careful with our hu(man)ity.

 The film ends with Harp looking longingly at his attractive fiancée, who has been alluded to throughout the film even if she never appears in person. It is important that the real man left standing after the cyborg body has been destroyed have someone to go home to. Outside the Wire does little to hide the forms on the tablet recycled for its production; they remain, the old letters denying humanity to anyone except those we can represent in clear visual frames.

Too many films trade on the image of a hero riding away on his white horse (Harp drives what looks like a white Corsica) to their promised bride, and we are never meant to imagine that bride as anything less than beautiful, their love anything less than natural. I prefer a narrative with more potential for the subversive. Would anyone read the final scene in context with The Crying Game. When Fergus stole Dil’s picture from Jody, he probably convinced himself that the rewards for surviving his particular battle were clearly gendered, too. Cue finale, soundtrack: "When a Man Loves a Woman," that old Shakespearian rag. 

In the aporia we suture with our narratives of valor, we should always look for the bodies we are told we shouldn’t see.