{"id":721,"date":"2013-04-10T11:29:51","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T10:29:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=721"},"modified":"2013-04-10T11:29:51","modified_gmt":"2013-04-10T10:29:51","slug":"hollywood-homophobia-a-side-effect-of-economic-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/hollywood-homophobia-a-side-effect-of-economic-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood Homophobia: A side effect of economic crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article appears in the current issue of Solidarity<\/a>. \u00a0Please post any comments there.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Four years ago, the stars of the successful BBC comedy series \u201cGavin and Stacey\u201d made the mistake of starring in an abysmal comedy known as \u201cLesbian Vampire Killers\u201d.<\/p>\n

The movie was quickly forgotten, but I was reminded of it recently when I saw the latest \u2013 and last \u2013 film by acclaimed American director Steven Soderbergh, \u201cSide Effects\u201d.<\/p>\n

Soderbergh’s film could easily have been given a similar title, even though it was not in any sense a comedy.<\/p>\n

But the theme of homicidal lesbians is central to the plot, and the film absolutely reeks of homophobia.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not everyone will have seen it that way, of course.<\/p>\n

When I first heard about the film, a reviewer talked about it revolving around a conspiracy in which the pharmaceutical industry played a key role.<\/p>\n

The film’s tagline was \u201cone pill can change your life\u201d.<\/p>\n

The story seems at first to be about the side effects of a new anti-depressant which may \u2013 or may not \u2013 have contributed to a young woman (played by Rooney Mara) murdering her husband (Channing Tatum), who has just returned home after a few years in jail.<\/p>\n

Jude Law plays the psychiatrist who prescribes the medication, and later becomes a kind of amateur detective, determined to figure out what really happened.<\/p>\n

So far, so good. What follows contains spoilers, so if you really want to see the film and don’t want to know how it turns out, stop reading.<\/p>\n

It turns out that the pharmaceutical company isn’t a protagonist in the story, it’s done nothing particularly wrong, and it doesn’t even seem that the young woman took the pills.<\/p>\n

It’s not the \u201cone pill\u201d that changed her life, or ended the life of her unfortunate husband.<\/p>\n

It was the fact that she had a lesbian relationship with her psychiatrist, who treated her for depression when her husband was taken away by the FBI.<\/p>\n

The psychiatrist, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, would not have been out of place in \u201cLesbian Vampire Killers\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is only at the end of the film that Mara’s character confesses to Jude Law her motivation for killing the unfortunate Tatum.<\/p>\n

She first became depressed when her bourgeois lifestyle ended suddenly as the FBI descended on a garden party to arrest Tatum on charges of insider trading.<\/p>\n

Zeta-Jones seduced her vulnerable, and much younger, patient, and the two conspired \u2013 as lesbians do, apparently \u2013 to murder Tatum when he got home from prison.<\/p>\n

Their relationship was kept a secret from everyone.<\/p>\n

And their motivation wasn’t just love (or lust). There was some scheme to make a fortune by linking a pharmaceutical company to the crime, thereby driving its share price down and reaping millions on the stock market.<\/p>\n

Near the very end of the film, Mara and Zeta-Jones meet up and embrace, discussing where the money has been stashed \u2013 though at this point Mara has betrayed her lover, and is wearing a wire.<\/p>\n

Some viewers and critics didn’t see any of this as homophobic, but others certainly did.<\/p>\n

If there were loads of films made by Hollywood A-listers in which the lead characters were lesbians, \u201cSide Effects\u201d would just be one forgettable movie in which the women were not very nice.<\/p>\n

But how many Hollywood films with budgets of over $30 million feature a lesbian couple at the centre of the story? Very few, I imagine.<\/p>\n

And the linking of forbidden love to murder is quite explicit in \u201cSide Effects\u201d.<\/p>\n

It may not be obvious to British audiences, or even to the British leads in the film, but America is a deeply homophobic country which lags behind much of the world on issues like gay marriage or gays serving in the military.<\/p>\n

Homophobia is explicitly used by the right in America, including even mainstream politicians like Mitt Romney. Where right-wing policies such as austerity or tax breaks for the very rich became unpopular, homophobia \u2013 like racism \u2013 becomes quite useful for the right.<\/p>\n

It differs from most forms of bigotry in that it’s still quite acceptable, it seems, to incorporate homophobic elements in a mainstream film. It would be hard (though not impossible) to do the same with more traditional prejudices, such as hatred of Blacks or Jews.<\/p>\n

There was an uproar in America when Kathryn Bigelow’s \u201cZero Dark Thirty\u201d implied that torture was an important part of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Right-wing politicians like John McCain led the charge on that one, and it’s one of the reasons Bigelow’s film couldn’t be named \u201cBest Picture\u201d at the Oscars.<\/p>\n

No one expects McCain, Romney and politicians like them to speak out against the homophobia in \u201cSide Effects\u201d \u2013 but one wonders why the left, in America and elsewhere, hasn’t been more outspoken in taking on this vile, bigoted film.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article appears in the current issue of Solidarity. \u00a0Please post any comments there. Four years ago, the stars of the successful BBC comedy series \u201cGavin and Stacey\u201d made the mistake of starring in an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-solidarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":722,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions\/722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}