In acting, the problem of the unmarked case is always a difficult situation for an actor. Michael Pitt, who stars as Matthew in The Dreamers, the blond, semi-square American from San Diego seduced by the more-Parisian-than-thou twins. It’s not an unfamiliar situation for the 22-year-old Pitt, who played the anti-Rob Brown in Finding Forrester & the troubled Tommy Gnosis against John Cameron Mitchell’s inspired over-the-top sex-change-botch-job-turned-failed-rock-star in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

 

The contrast between the roles of Matthew in the Bertolucci movie & Tommy Gnosis in Hedwig are interesting, because as Matthew Pitt has to hold his own as an actor in a role that the director himself seems confused about, whereas in the more strongly conceived Hedwig, all of the energy in the film virtually drains away whenever Pitt comes onscreen. It is precisely his inability to stand up to Mitchell as an actor that keeps that film from being the finest musical in the past 20 years.*

 

The problem of the unmarked case, of course, haunts everything in society, not just cinema. One of the more enlightening aspects of the gay marriage hoo-hah is simply how the existence of another model, any other model, suddenly highlights an entire chain of presumptions about “normal” marriage that heretofore may have seemed invisible. Not the least of which is the way in which the entire idea of the state’s insertion into the process transforms what may otherwise appear to be a personal or spiritual ritual. Gay marriages quite obviously don’t threaten straight ones, which only points up the ways in which the so-called Defense of Marriage Act itself really isn’t about marriage so much as it is about codifying homophobia. Now of course, George W & Co. have imagined even further, more horrific ways to attempt that.

 

Straight white males, for good reason, have some insight into what it feels like to be the unmarked case – it feels “normal” & “natural.” Which is precisely why the instances that prove revealing & enriching artistically, whether in film or poetry or whatever, are those that either deconstruct or overstate the case. In that latter sense, it is precisely the overblown macho at the heart of Olson’s Maximus that is one of its more endearing qualities – Olson’s absent-minded professor is also (always already) Archie Bunker.

 

Much of the debate of homosexuality in this country has to do with definitions of sexual orientation & identity. It was, after all, the gay community itself that, in the late 19^th century, promoted the model of homosexuality as a “disease” – the alternate choice back then was “crime” – only to see that solution turned into an excuse for a half-century of torture in medical contexts. The conception of it as “identity,” on which much of the current rhetoric of gay rights still rests, however, fails to acknowledge the plasticity of identity itself. And because gay rights activists, as well as the Christian right, are deeply wedded to identity as such, we are, I suspect, a century away – at minimum – from fully understanding what any of these terms really means.

 

Which takes me back to my irritation at the less-than-successful elements of The Dreamers. To the degree that Bertolucci wants to make this a film about sexual obsessiveness, sort of a Last Tango for kids, he confuses it by bringing in the third party – not the American Matthew, but the brother Theo. He tries to resolve it at one point – it may even be the high point of the picture – in having Theo bring home a girl from school so that he too can share in what Matthew & Isabelle have going on. Isabelle, shut out of his sexual adventure, pounds the walls with jealousy & fury. But the extraneous element of the fourth party – who is in the movie only to set this one scene up – points to Bertolucci’s incompleteness of vision. In actuality, to have made this film a true tale of obsession, he would have had to make Theo & Matthew lovers as well. He flirts with the possibility early on, just to let us know that he is aware of the issue, but fails to follow through. And in this respect, one might say the failure of The Dreamers is precisely that its sexuality is too gendered.

 

 

 

* A position it cedes not to such overblown messes as Moulin Rouge or Chicago, both of which were filled with actors who don’t particularly do well acting, singing or dancing, but to Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, which succeeds in part because it, like Hedwig, is conceived of as a “small film.”