Queer Cinema of Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss

Film genres define as formulated structures to making films in terms of its semantics and syntactic approaches (Altman, 1984). Due to the generalised style of making films, it created a standard idea that films are to have the same target audience who are straight males known as the phenomenon “the male gaze”. However, the emergence of films that went against these standardised ideologies became more prominent including Queer Cinema which is recognised for practising an avant-garde style of making films (Sullivan, 2003). It also made its debut at the Toronto Film Festival as a film genre that attempts to re-examine the pre-existing normative ideologies of gender, sexual identity and orientation by questioning the majority society’s belief (Sullivan, 2003). A film such as Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss challenges the concept of male gaze. The film aims to question the heterogeneous style of making films by portraying homosexuality in a variety of ways and not just based on the stereotypes of society. Queer Cinema highlights and values diversity by having different representations of characters in film (Sullivan, 2003). In the report, it is intended to explain aspects of Queer Cinema by analysing how the film, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, applies these aspects to advocate diversity. Therefore, it is also the main reason why I like the film.

Queer Cinema pre-existed for many decades but did not receive proper recognition as a film genre (Sullivan, 2003). The style of film making in Queer films questions the subjectivities of the traditional male gaze (Sullivan, 2003). Instead of taking pleasure in viewing female characters or situations from a heterosexual’s male perspective, these films target different audiences. Manipulating with the pleasures of the traditional male gaze. By manipulating these pleasures, it subverts the style of how mainstream genre films are made (Sullivan, 2003). She also stated that it gained popularity with the prominence of AIDS. With a negative perception towards the term Queer, a concept of New Queer Cinema was introduced to represent the diversity of society.  This style of cinema was led by Gus Van Sant (Sullivan, 2003). However, New Queer Cinema favours the gay perspective which neglects the value of lesbian perspective (Sullivan, 2003).  Since, New Queer Cinema was derived from Queer Theory it encompasses four approaches (Sullivan, 2003). First approach focuses on the audience reception where films create content to target the belief of heterosexual audiences (Sullivan, 2003); second approach still focuses on heterosexual audiences but somehow gotten the appreciation from homosexual audiences (Sullivan, 2003); third approach focuses on the complications of normal romances which results in abnormal relationships (Doty, 1998); fourth approach focuses on the different understandings of what is normal (Sullivan, 2003). As a summary, there are many ways of making films that represent a diversity of relationships which classifies as Queer.

The film begins with the lead character, Billy, being frustrated with his love-life as he was in an affair that gave him no recognition as a partner to his lover. He was also a struggling photographer who was aspiring to create his own series, but he had no means of doing so. Single and broke, he felt as if he lost direction in life. However, he met people who were willing to sponsor his series, and he found the subject for his series. In the midst of trying to help Gabriel, his main subject, figure out his own sexual orientation, Billy eventually developed feelings for Gabriel. Billy event went to Catalina in hopes of them discovering their love for each other. It turned out, Gabriel was interested in men but was not attracted to Billy.

The film included equal aspects of normality and queerness. To further elaborate the statement, the film portrayed homosexual relationships of Billy in terms of the traditional heterosexual relationships context. For instance, Billy had an affair with another unavailable man and a pursuing relationship with Gabriel. Hence, it gave audiences including myself the perspective that homosexual relationships are not weird or dramatized as society tells us. Furthermore, the film represented Billy as a regular man. This is evident when Billy kept asking if he looked or acted gay. It gives audiences an understanding that not all homosexual people are flamboyant but rather there can be of many personalities. The main highlight of the film is how is represented diversity. The film did show society’s everyday heterosexual and homosexual couples, but it also included flamboyant characters with their own definition of a normal life. These characters included the drag queens, Rex Webster and his partner. Furthermore, the film also reflected the stigma of society. Despite homosexual relationships have started to gain societal acceptance, there is still rejection towards the lifestyle. The film showed that through the scene where Billy was telling Gabriel about not being invited to his best friend’s birthday party as his friend’s mother forbid him from coming due to his sexual orientation. The way the film makers created that flashback ambient through polaroid film was unique. Although the film did shows various representations of homosexual men, the film did not represent homosexual women. The film lacked homosexual and heterosexual women characters. This made me feel as if the film had was subliminally discriminatory against women. Furthermore, the film was also very monotonous in terms of the narrative and visual development. To further elaborate this point, the shots were fairly simple and settings were constantly dark. Narrative and visual development were anti-climactic. Overall ambience of the film was fairly flat. Despite the negatives, the positive reviews and intention of the film outweighed the negative critics.

Queer Cinema is made up of films that include some fore of uniqueness that goes against traditional film making techniques and narrative. The films promote dissonance as it challenges the majority beliefs of the homogenous public. Due to how it challenges the homogeneous public to accept the reality of heterogenous society, it receives backlash and rejection. In my opinion, Queer Cinema should not be rejected but accepted. Along with the challenges of traditional norms, the film generates new ideas by showing new perspectives. The films help society to be more progressive by accepting new information.

References

Altman,R. (1984) . A Semantic/ Syntactic Approach to Film Genre. Cinema Journal,

Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 6-18.

Sullivan, N. (2003). A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press.

Doty, A. (1998). Queer Theory. In H. Gibson & C. Gibson (Eds.), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies.

Oxford: Oxford, pp.150.