If you were, perchance, teaching yourself how to read earlier this year, and you were doing it by a radical new method of studying celebrity gossip magazines, you might have tripped over a couple of four and five syllable words that have been bandied about in reference to Guy Ritchie's new film adaptation of
Sherlock Holmes, which I hope hasn't put you off the whole learning how to read thing altogether.
One of those words, which is not really relevant to my story but let's digress anyway, is '
quintessential', and it seems to be favoured mostly by the director himself, with a nice ripple effect
also trickling down to Jude Law if you care that much to bother looking into it.
But for now, let's hear Guy Ritchie talking about his hopes and dreams for
Sherlock Holmes:
'My intention was to get away from the slightly stuffier, quintessential Victorian concepts of men and make them warmer and more accessibly friendly and make them more into the kinds of guys I'd liked to be friends with.'
What a lovely idea, Guy! Please tell us more!
'To me, [the film] was the perfect segue from small independent films to something more ambitious and quintessentially English.'
Now that I've demonstrated I can google articles from almost a year ago, let's move on to that other word beloved of every single journalist who has ever published an article about this movie (which comes out on Boxing Day if you're interested)—
homoerotic. Well, now you
are interested, aren't you?
Whether paired with the word 'undertones' or 'overtones' (both of which I suspect mean exactly the same thing), 'homoerotic' is a word that can be worn casually by some journalists and conservatively, with a seething, bubbling hunger for revenge, by others.
To wit, here is Michael Medved in the
New York Post:
'There's not a seething, bubbling hunger to see straight stars impersonating homosexuals! I think they're just trying to generate controversy . . . Who is going to want to see Downey Jr. and Law make out?'
I am going to want to see Downey Jr. and Law make out, Mr Medved; I am going to want to. Because I happen to believe that homoeroticism, whether in the form of undertones or overtones, is pretty much the best part of any movie I've ever watched.
Which brings me to
From Here to Eternity, that old WWII film starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr and Frank Sinatra.
This week
it was revealed by Kaylie Jones, daughter of
From Here to Eternity author James Jones, that her father was forced to remove a bunch of gay sex scenes from the manuscript before it was published in 1951. The book was made into a film in 1953, which sadly, for me, means that the film version is lacking the original homoerotic undertones of Jones' story. Except that 'homoerotic undertones' is probably a pretty gentle term to use in the case of
From Here to Eternity, because if you read the
original manuscript you will see that these were upfront homosexual scenes of military men giving each other blow jobs, actually. So to say that the original manuscript of
From Here to Eternity had mere homoerotic undertones would be like saying
Top Gun is just about about guys flying planes, which we know from Quentin Tarantino's rant in
Sleep with Me, is not the case:
Anyway, everything is all happening at once, because just this week prime minister Kevin Rudd has been told once again that he really should probably
legalise gay marriage if he's any sort of human. Now, I just want to say that I don't really understand what the big deal is, because I thought gay people could already get married because Tom Cruise has already been allowed to do it twice. OMG! HAI-NG ON! YOU MEAN THAT GAY PEOPLE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MARRY
EACH OTHER! Sorry! I misunderstood. That would involve the actual separation of church and state! Which just sounds too complicated! Back to celebrity blogging. (And I promise no more allusions in my whole blogging career to
Tom Cruise being gay which I know is getting tiresome for us all, and which is just a
rumour anyway and you honestly shouldn't listen to me about anything as I obviously have no idea what I'm talking about and I really, really don't want to get sued.)
Back to 1953. We
were in 1953, if you remember, before I went on that rant proving that we're still living in 1953.
Anyway, the same year that
From Here to Eternity was released without its intended homoerotic undertones or overtones, one other film came out with the most blatantly homoerotic under
and over tones, ever! I am talking about my favourite movie of all time,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.
Now, if you would please just sit back and watch this most incredibly brilliant clip with me and we will all forget our problems and disagreements about what year we are living in, and maybe even just have a nice little summer bromance together. And after watching this, I promise you will never accidentally fall into a swimming pool wearing the the world's most quintessential black jumpsuit in quite the same way ever again.