My introduction to Kill Your Darlings had been through Tumblr. In a GIF, Daniel Radcliffe is naked, fucked into the mattress by Dane DeHaan. For a queer kid at the tail end of high school, there was something powerful to seeing the boy who grew from Harry Potter (2001-11) to The Woman in Black (2012) and Horns (2013), and the actor from Chronicle (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), together as a couple.
But the process of ripping a file and making a GIF, no matter how banal, is an act of decontextualisation. The person who made the GIF made a sexually charged sequence out of a brief scene, filling in the gaps within the mind, removing the intercutting that undermines the sexual nature of the scenes. Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) being anally penetrated is juxtaposed against an undeniably phallic act of penetration: his sexual partner, Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) is stabbing, and subsequently drowning, his former lover, David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall) – a knife penetrating the skin. The sequences are atemporal – a sex scene that is fantasy (it appears nowhere else in the film, unlike the other flashbacks that are replayed in reverse, as drug-fuelled The Man from Another Place reverse speech) – or a secret between friends shadowed by unspoken desire and a resistant kiss – recontextualised in the knowledge that a man to direct attention towards is no ideal lover, set to the backdrop of an equally atemporal and anachronistic 2005 remix of The Pioneers by Bloc Party.
The Tumblr GIF set is not the film, but a wilful decision to alter the text in an act of thirst. The importance is not the film, but the politics (and liberation?) of getting straight men to represent queer sex scenes on film. The film has far more erotic scenes, with less naked flesh but more suggestion: with his bare ass pointed towards the camera, Ginsberg masturbates at the typewriter, in a drugged haze of the creative process of trying to write, with the threat of being walked in on. Any writer can likely relate to this cute scene: the need for release to engage mental functions.
In another scene, Ginsberg engages a girl, Amanda (Brenda Wehle), at the counter of the library for a quick hookup with a witty pickup line, in order to create a diversion for Carr and William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster) to steal a key and retrieve the restricted books deemed too illicit by the faculty at Columbia University: physical sexuality in exchange for the destigmatisation of literary sexuality. As his penis is sucked, Ginsberg makes eye contact with the fleeing Carr, a power play of eyefucking, managing to cum at the count of 9 seconds, as a boy that’s likely never fucked before, with a girl that claims to have never fucked a Jew before. It’s a charged line that reflects a sense of tokenism of identity and prejudice while trying to deny anti-Semitism: how important really is circumcision (an act that persists far outside of Judaism within American society); how many of the four guys she fucked could have been Jewish without realising their religion or cultural and ethnic identity? (Krokidas himself has Jewish heritage.) But also, how easy is it to suck a dick to orgasm within 30 seconds? Unable to depict female pleasure, we never experience Amanda come; we only see her top lifted up. In the commentary track, Krokidas and co-screenwriter Austin Bunn discuss the inspiration for this scene from 80s teen comedies, which are known to have their own misogynistic problems.
The mechanics of Ginsberg and Carr’s encounter don’t function as sexual: just as an act, going directly into penetration, without the timing (time passes through interspersing) to depict the resistance of bodies, the difficulty, pain, thrusts, lubrication. It’s meant to just be there. It’s surrounded by death and the incredible shot of Ginsberg’s naked, empty, blank shower body, unable to comprehend and recontextualise the sex.
The thirst of Tumblr GIFs often take sequences of non-sexualised nudity, toxic and abusive relationships, sexual abuse – presenting human biology and rape as casual things to get turned on and masturbate over. It’s rare to see loving sex scenes represented. In Tumblr discourse, Call Me By Your Name (2017) is reduced to diverging poles of dissections of age gaps, statutory rape and abusive relationships, or screenshots and GIFs of cum, bum, peaches and blowjobs, as Katherine Connell writes about in Another Gaze, with GIFs placing the film’s queer sexuality on “an eternal circuit, extending our view of the naked gay body that is so avoided in the film”. As Connell elaborates:
GIFs appropriate the strategies of cropping, cutting, and framing […] disrupt[ing] the flow of narrative by isolating short clips. In these moments, GIF viewers must confront the film in new ways.
Maurice (1987) becomes desired as scenes of kissing, bouncing penises and ass shots. Imagine that desire before home video and streaming made nudity and sex scenes so easy to rewind, freeze frame and, if one is so inclined, get off to.
You might question why I’m approaching this film from this way. But Tumblr is one of the main things that helped shape my identity growing up as a teenager. It’s why I eulogised the porn ban on a Medium post and continue to work around the platform’s limitations as much as I can.
But seeing this film as an adult, at a distance from Tumblr thirst, may be something I missed out on as a teenager, but also something I gained more from. The idea of murder may be removed from most people’s friendships or sexual encounters, but many, many people know the experience of fucking somebody that turns out to be not who they thought they were – whether they’re toxic, abusive or awful. The archaic, homophobic nature of “honor killing” that persists to this day in incredibly recent cases, its intersection with repression, desire and one’s own sexuality.
I’ve yet to properly read a Beat book, but I’ve fallen in love with the movement, whether with Gus Van Sant’s intersections with Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and The Discipline of D.E. (1982), Ginsberg in Ballad of the Skeletons (1997), or Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch (1991) characterising Burroughs’ creative process, unique mind and with his own oversight of the production, or the wonderful remixing of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch words in the incredible album Let Me Hang You (2016). Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac et al. have always been ready for filmic versions.
My perspective on this film can only be limited – a gentile perspective – and I don’t claim to know everything about what this film represents for the Jewish community, or even what it means for lesbian women. That being said, the binary expectations, patriarchy, assumed heterosexuality and male/female reproduction within Hasidic Judaism as depicted within this film is gross to say the least: disempowering, a cage, lacking economic independence. It’s easy to see, especially in a situation in the UK where cis, binary, monogamous homosexuality seems to have a degree of greater acceptance (within heterosexual terms) that these confines don’t still exist. Homophobia is otherised: Israeli films like Eyes Wide Open (2009) and In Between (2016) depict the level of homophobia and ‘behind closed doors’ nature of Jewish communities in Jerusalem and Muslim communities in Tel Aviv, confrontational to Israel but foreign to a UK audience. Five decades on on from the underground relationships of films like Victim (1961), it’s easy to get a cute queer romcom with homophobia barely addressed, or on the other end of the spectrum, ‘bury your gays’ level of melodrama. But it’s helpful to be reminded that these barriers still exist: queer history and existence is still erased. It’s still taboo, against the norm, stereotyped, lesbian sexuality received through the male gaze as masturbation material, gross and an easy joke, not something to aim for. Faith communities, and people from different cultural backgrounds – despite the number of accepting, loving and queer people of different faiths and cultures that I’m friends with – have longstanding world views, whether in Eastern Europe or India or Russia or the Middle East – that cannot be erased, even when adapted into British culture, with too many existing institutional structures and shared beliefs to retreat easily.
There’s something sweet and depressing to this film – a teenage romance, where ‘experimentation’ is just a phase – attraction, desire, kissing in the park – that cannot last. And the reunion, years later, where everything and nothing has changed. This film dug up something important to me: what those first, queer kisses really are like, rejecting every homophobe that bullied you in high school, the memories of which still linger as moments of something special. Saying “fuck it” to society and straight couples and every parental suggestion.
Lelio even touches on the false idea of escape: move to New York, and the chemistry will continue, there will be no barriers from anybody. But it’s a false dream – without a visa or money for plane travel – that can never truly be achieved, no matter how much we want it to: a plot device deployed by soppy romantic comedies with a ‘happy ever after’. There’s a degree of acceptance that grows, but the final speech isn’t so much about queerness (though it is about the ability to disobey and the notion of free will) than a shift. The confines that tell women not to speak out – don’t confront patriarchy, don’t argue with the erasure of maiden names from a family’s history, don’t go outside a particular type of girl with a particular man with mediocre sex on the same day every week, the Torah, its surrounding interpretations and the community of Jews around it – as a way to survive. Don’t argue with bringing life into this world and raise a baby within heterosexual confines. These cannot be confronted overnight, but they can still be fought in small, interpersonal ways.
The freedom of escape is a thing of beauty – kissing intensely, taking a Tube into central London, holding hands, feeling the power of good, saliva mixing, wet fucking, hotel room love and embrace and passion and adoration and sex. But there must always be a home and a bed to return to. The film begins with absent chemistry, and bad, lame, tedious, boring sex scenes – before Lelio reveals their history and the true nature of things – the reasons behind resistance and the lack of mutual affection. It blossoms. Paranoia lingers: what happens if their queerness becomes known? The response to queer sexuality is not to embrace it, but bury it inside a loveless marriage, with no pesky hot queer women too busy having lame toilet sex with men on the other side of the globe to interfere. Removing a woman from the community is easier than dealing with these issues.
With the power of the film’s leads, this film easily becomes a ‘woman’s picture’ a la the 1940s and 50s, a male director dealing with patriarchal structures through the words upon the screenplay’s page. Though adapted from Naomi Alderman’s novel, Chilean-Argentine director Lelio isn’t approaching the film as Jewish or British or a woman, and one wonders, with the number of capable Jewish female directors out there, why the film isn’t exempt from the patriarchal structures of filmmaking. But we know why: with A Fantastic Woman, Gloria (2013) and it’s Americanised remake, Gloria Bell (2018), Lelio has been somewhat pigeonholed as a director who can achieve strong performances out of strong, atypical women outside of the norm.
NOTE: This essay was submitted as university coursework toward Coventry University’s BA (Hons) programme of Media and Communications on 28th March 2017, to which I was recently awarded a 2:1. This version incorporates material excised from the final submitted version.
Abstract
In this essay, I explore queerness within diasporas in the Indian film Kal Ho Naa Ho (Advani 2003), and the American film Saving Face (Wu 2004). I discuss how they situate their narratives within New York City as a shared cultural space, drawing in part upon research into Chinese and Indian communities within New York City and the United States (Bhattacharya 2008, Strug and Mason 2007, Li and Skop 2010).
Introduction
Approaching minority and global cinemas, both in production and release, is difficult. How we understand international films is important, as they are often taken as “ethnographic documents” as representative of other cultures (Desnai 2004 cited in Ezra and Rowden 2006:2). Bollywood, producing an average of 400 films a year to weekly domestic audiences of 35 million (Nayar 1997:73), has expanded towards diasporas, partly through deregulation an exemption on tax exports and a greater investment in film finance, seeing an international “mainstreaming of Bollywood” (Thussu 2008:104), utilising a new, global aesthetic (Prasad 2008 cited in O’Neill 2013:256). Kal Ho Na Ho (Advani 2003), focusing on the Indian diaspora in New York City, was the first mainstream Indian film set entirely in the United States, opened in 52 theaters and grossed $1.78 million, one of the highest Bollywood box offices in the US between 1999 and 2005 (Thussu 2008:108).
However, the reach for Bollywood cinema outside of the diaspora is questionable, often ridiculed by Western spectators for “plot twists, unpredictable deviations and deus-ex machina endings” (Nayar 1997:73) that draw attention to its artificiality (Mishra 2002). Within film criticism, focus shifts towards directors within “Third Cinema” like Satyajit Ray, more closely aligned with neorealist movements (Thussu 2008:98). Filmmakers bridging Western and Indian film compromise their intentions, instead largely catering towards Western audiences (Thussu 2008:106), with the release of Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle 2008) met with nationalist concerns over representing India as a “Third World” (O’Neill 2013:255).
Asian American representation remains a battleground, presented in deeply problematic, Otherized and Oriental roles, often read as “premodern” and “irrevocably opposed to the West” (Rajgopal 2010:141). Rarely does an Asian protagonist have a sense of humanity (Rajgopal 2010:150). Yellowface practices extended beyond Luise Rainer and Katherine Hepburn’s portrayals of Asian woman in the 1930s and 40s (Rajgopal 2010:147) that emerged in part from miscegenation laws, through to modern online debates around the appropriation of an “essentialized” Asia and “whitewashing” in The Last Airbender (Shyamalan 2010) (Lopez 2011:435). Asian American filmmaking emerged out of grassroots student movements in the 1960s and 1970s (Okado 2016:1), but is defined today by “the legacy of enduring Orientalist stereotypes” within action films by Jet Li, Beat Takeshi and Jackie Chan (Mimura 2009:xiv). As Joan Chen commented in an interview surrounding the release of the film, the mainstream now “welcomes” other exotic elements, within martial arts and kung fu films (Canavese 2005).
Produced on a budget of $2.5 million, Saving Face (Wu 2004), Wu’s only feature, became marginalised through all stages of production: initially considered as a direct-to-video release (Leibowitz 2005), it received an R rating in the US and 15 rating in the UK. Distributed under the Sony Pictures Classics subsidiary, this label acts as “a euphemism for a small-studio production” that only offers “mirror images of what the studio does” (Tzioumakis 2006:264). For women within the industry, they are often relegated to an “Otherised” position or presented as “erotic spectacle”, and need to be utilised as new social subjects to tell female narratives outside “patriarchal hegemony” (McDonald 2016).
I use these films as a counter-reading to discuss queer representation and ideology; my reading of the heteronormativity and homophobic attitudes of Kal Ho Naa Ho is not necessarily as the director intended. As Higson argues, audience interpretation of international films depends largely upon their “cultural context”. (Higson 2008:19) Similarly, in analysing Saving Face, this reading goes beyond simple notions of “world cinema”. As Nagib argues, “world cinema is simply the cinema of the world. It has no centre.” (Nagib 2006:35 cited in Dudrah 2012:114) Instead, we should understand diaspora cinema as having no fixed or bounded notion of nation (Dennison and Lim 2006 cited in Dudrah 2012:114).
Challenging heterosexuality: queerness within liminal space
Central to the narratives of Kal Ho Naa Ho and Saving Face are questions of racial and sexual identity. As Hall argues, there is no stable core of self, but one produced within the “discursive formations” of the “modalities of power” that is constituted within representation (Hall 1996), and is an “ongoing” project, creating “open dialogue” between the subject and the external world (Hall 1992 cited in Dudrah 2013).
However, both Indian and Chinese cinema explore identity within the constraints of censorship. All Indian films keep to strict guidelines imposed by the Central Board of Film Classification, with the Supreme Court stating that film “is able to “instil or cultivate violent or bad behaviour.” (Jaggi and Thirumurthy 2015) Censorship acts as a “nationalist discourse” to exclude “oppositional discourses” (Bose 2009 cited in Jaggi and Thirumurthy 2015), and, in turn, many directors self-impose censorship. Within Mainland China, homosexuality is institutionally marginalised, with no literary or theoretical publications allowed in official distribution channels and films censored, not discussed within the public sphere (Liang 2012:130). Films with queer themes are unable to receive funds from the state, largely shown underground through unofficial gatherings and film festivals (Liang 2012:135). Though Kal Ho Naa Ho appeals across the diaspora, Saving Face is unable to reach Chinese audiences. Beyond queer sexuality, Bollywood restricts all sexuality, discouraging elements as mild as kissing (Nayar 1997:88), whilst denying the female body, marked as a sexual body, with nudity and sexuality often banned by censors. Instead, women are presented either as victims of sexual harassment or upholding moral principles (Mehta 2001 cited in Jaggi and Thirumurthy 2015), with nudity and sexuality often banned and a “hierarchical coding” against western cultural behaviour of sexuality and relationships (Jaggi and Thirumurthy 2015).
Kal Ho Naa Ho’s sexuality exists below surface, using innuendo as a “substitute for the unpermitted sexual display” (Nayar 1997:88). Our protagonists spend a night out at Club Nirvana, as we see female bodies on display. Jazz tries to use her sexuality to her advantage at her restaurant, attracting a group of white blue-collar truck drivers, symbols of masculine America, and pouring her coffee in a suggestive way. But this quickly shifts towards her disadvantage as she is forced to remove the patrons.
Male homosexuality is established through implication and innuendo with Rohit and Aman, embodying a ‘buddy’ or dosti role of “barely disguised same-sex desire” (Gopinath 2000) with greater intensity and devotion than Western understandings of friendship (Holtzman 2010:111), between homosociality and homosexuality.] (Sedgwick cited in Holtzman 2010:113). Neither character is explicitly queer, yet homosexuality is framed as a disjuncture to heterosexuality. Rohit is established as aggressively heterosexual, harassing a woman in an elevator before being confronted by a black security guard. However, the woman defends his actions.
Rohit is also often presented desexualised, although not necessarily asexual; in one scene, he speaks longingly of spending all day in bed with Laila; the frame cuts, suggestively, to him wrapped up in bed with his dog. Later, in a case of mistaken identity during a blind date, Rohit rejects a woman who seeks to initiate sexual contact, moving over to the bathroom as he suffers anxiety around his sexuality. Later, when Rohit wakes up in bed after a night out with Aman, their contact is non-intimate. In order to be represented as queer, Rohit must first lose his sexuality.
These tropes bear an uneasy resemblance to the early Hollywood trope of “the sissy” as mentioned in The Celluloid Closet, reinforcing masculinity and femininity whilst lacking a sexuality of their own. As screenwriter Arthur Laurents reflects, “they were disgusting […] I never understood why people laughed.” (Epstein and Friedman 1995)
These implied relationships suggest an “idealized state” for gay viewership (Prasad 1988 cited in Bhugra, Kalra, and Ventriglio 2015), achieving an “iconic status” amongst gay and lesbian subcultures. (Ghosh 2002:209) Whereas within its native context these elements are “nontransgressive”, they acquire “subversive value”, reclaimed through a “queer lens” (Gopinath 2000).
Unlike Western buddy films, it does not seek to “deflect queerness through comic acknowledgement and disavowal of homoeroticism by the main characters” (Holtzman 2010:113); instead, by disavowing their intimacy to his servant Kantaben, who reads their relationship as queer, it is amplified through “slapstick encounters” simulating oral and anal sex, becoming more acceptable to the viewer than heterosexual intimacy. (Holtzman 2010:115) In their typification of gay stereotypes in Bollywood cinema, Bhugra, Kalra and Ventriglio refer to this trope as “the laughing stock”, where queerness is used as comic relief to titillate the audience (Bhugra, Kalra and Ventriglio 2015). Kantaben’s exaggerated reaction to the mere implication of homosexuality gives a visual image of “visceral homophobia” (Holtzman 2010:123), spilling a tray of orange juice; fainting; screaming. Largely silent, she is denied a voice in which to vocalise her objections.
Although Holtzman argues that the love triangle between Rohit, Aman and Naida creates a “sublimated desire for one another displayed onto the female body” (Holtzman 2010:114), these theatrical character types become increasingly problematic, orienting the viewer towards a heterosexual discourse. Their conflict must be resolved through Aman’s death to allow “normative monogamous heterosexuality to thrive”. (Holtzman 2010:112)
Heterosexuality forms as a “renunciation of the possibility of homosexuality” (Butler 1997, cited in Ahmed 2006:85), creating a “field of heterosexual objects” that indicate “values, capital, aspirations, projects and styles”. (Ahmed 2006:85) In a series of vox pops, an imaginary narrator asks a handful of characters what love means and reflecting on first loves: amongst the subjects, Naina’s younger brother, and Rohit’s dog, Laila. In an early scene, Kammo, Vimmo and Lago pray towards Saraswati to earn the romantic affection of their neighbour. The film’s abundance of heterosexuality becomes almost farcical. Sexuality becomes universal amongst age, race and religion – except gender.
In Saving Face, queer sexuality exists both in opposition and accepted within Chinese American society. Wil’s lesbian identity is “incidental” to the film’s dominant plotline (Metzger 2009:225). The film follows a “mutual exploration” of “illicit” inter-generational sexuality and lesbianism, through Ma’s identity as a pregnant divorced woman. (Wong 2012:315) Both Ma and Wil exist within reverse roles that create a “queer temporality” (Freeman cited in Metzger 2009:232) and an “asynchronous configuration of time”, facilitating a rethinking of the normative (Metzger 2009:232): Ma experiences a “belated adolescence” of blind dates as Wil fields her suitors with idle conversation.
As reviewer Elbert Ventura emphasises, Wil’s relationship with Vivian is immediately politicised, as “the offhanded depiction of a genuinely sexy lesbian love affair between two Asian-Americans seems a defiant statement against the neutering of minorities on American screens” (Mitsuda and Ventura 2005), whilst avoiding the (cisgender, heterosexual male) psychosexuality of mainstream lesbian desire bracketing the “first decade of the twenty-first century” within Mulholland Drive (Lynch 2001) and Black Swan (Aronofsky 2010) (Bradbury-Rance 2015). In the audio commentary, Wu defends the sex scene, making clear it would be “disingenuous” to present lesbian sexuality as “shameful” (Wu 2004).
Wil inhabits a “queer diaspora” and “hybrid identity” (Hall cited in Wong 2012:315), rendered invisible through questions of race, colonialism, migration and globalization. As Ahmed writes on intersectionality, “I am not a lesbian one moment and a person of color the next and a feminist at another. I am all of these at every moment.” (Ahmed 2017:230) Wil’s identity becomes liminal, eluding the “network of classifications” and the “positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial”, creating a space of encounter and conflict. (Turner 1969) Wil’s physical appearance immediately contests cultural values, wearing a v-neck and dark pants that recall the ‘new woman’ of the Cultural Revolution. (Metzger 2009:232) Like Chiron in Moonlight(Jenkins 2016), Wil must seek to resolve identity contradictions where no identity can be more dominant than the other.
Ma and Wil shift from being Otherised by the community to finding a newly restored embrace by the community; in a sense, Ma’s atypical, socially shunned relationship is ‘queer’, disrupting the multiple boundaries of mythic and essentialised understanding of the ‘homeland’, patriarch and monogamy. (Wong 2012:315)
New York City as identity space
New York City acts a space of a “diasporic homeland”, with a high number of Chinese (1.6 million) and Indian migrants (1.6 million) (Li and Skop 2010). More than a city, New York City becomes a symbol. Kal Ho Naa Ho, presenting New York to international diasporas, relies heavily upon symbolic imagery. Kal Ho Naa Ho’s New York, from its opening aerial shot of the “business capital of the world”, is contained by Times Square, the Empire State Building, street vendors, Starbucks cups, American flags, Pretty Woman, Gap t-shirts and multi-ethnic basketball played upon suburban streets. This representation of New York contains a version of the diaspora as a desired space of wealth and luxury (Mishra 2002), but as assimilated and integrated.
Though the Bollywood of 1950s independent India presented Western materialism as a “foe” corrupting morally upright Indians through the promiscuity of modern city life, Western popular culture and ideals have become increasingly subsumed into Indian life, with images of ‘Vamps’ fading in favour of “(Utopian) cosmopolitan India.” (Nayar 1997:77) Queerness becomes presented as Western ideology. Rather than appeal to domestic audiences, Kal Ho Naa Ho is “calculated to appeal to NRI [non-resident Indian] audiences”, invoking the hipness of queerness within the Western diaspora (Holtzman 2010:122), which in turn reinforces the right-wing “nativist idea” that “homosexuality is catalysed by time spent in the licentious West”. (Holtman 2010:124) Homosexuality becomes Otherised, as acceptable to white Westerners and South Asians, but unacceptable within Indian communities. (Holtman 2010:123)
Rohit’s father’s confrontation with Rohit in a strip club, attempting to reinforce his heteronormativity following his friendship with Aman, follows this idea. Rohit’s father says:
This is America. Everything is possible. Oh, the horror. I asked for a daughter-in-law. Instead, I’m blessed with a son-in-law.
In Saving Face, much of its action takes place in Flushing, Queens, a multicultural borough that still has a greater Chinese-American residency than either Chinatown in Manhattan or Brooklyn, presented as a “Chinese enclave” (Metzger 2009:228); Chinatowns have seen increasingly substandard living through new movement towards suburban areas (Li and Skop 2010:303) and the impact of 9/11 (Strug and Mason 2007:26).
Wil’s apartment in Park Slope, an area in Brooklyn that carries “spatial attachment” to the lesbian community but is at risk of gentrification (Giesking 2016:267), also acts as the space of conflict central to Shirin’s Persian and bisexual identity in Appropriate Behaviour (Akhavan 2014). Where districts like Christopher Street in Greenwich Village cater towards the “economic strength” of gay men (Giesking 2016:264), lesbians are often subject to both homophobia within queer spaces, and a sense of recreating territories and borders within heteronormative spaces (Giesking 2016:267). Rather than an “assimilation” of dominant national and local culture, there is a “convergence.” (Li and Skop 2010:303)
Wil’s sexuality with Vivian create an act of defiance within a temporal space (the dance hall) encoded as heterosexual as they dare each other to kiss, creating an “eruptive erotic possibility that might challenge the assertion of norms.” (Metzger 2009:232) As their sexuality is revealed, Wu tries to show a “spectrum” of reactions (Legel 2005), from implicit approval, ambivalence to disapproval, to yells of “revolting!” In the final (pre-credits) shot, Wil and Vivian become miniature, subsumed by the crowd as the camera pans above them, distinct yet accepted within the larger crowd.
Conclusion
Both films work within their genre: Kal Ho Naa Ho, as a globalised Bollywood musical appealing to diasporic communities, is not a film about displacement and discrimination by white America (O’Neill 2013:260), or the intensified post-9/11 hostility where many Indians feel a need to disassociate with their community (Bhattacharya 2008). Saving Face, as a queer “melodrama” about the “reconstitution of family” (Metzger 2009), or, as Wu describes in the audio commentary, an “old fashioned, screwball romantic comedy” (Wu 2004), is “not trying to push the boundaries; I’m just trying to tell a good story.” (Legel 2005) But entertainment, whether innovative or deploying “sentimental sitcom conventions” (Holden 2005), carry impacts. Though representation should not always be the central discourse of film theory, both films implicate political questions around tradition, assimilation, the diaspora and sexual identity, whether intentional or not.
References
Advani, N. (2003) Kal Ho Naa Ho
Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenemonology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press
Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press
Akhavan, D. (2014) Appropriate Behaviour
Bhattacharya, G. (2008) ‘The Indian Diaspora in Transnational Context:
Social Relations and Cultural Identities of Immigrants to New York City’. Journal of Intercultural Studies 29 (1), 65-80, DOI: 10.1080/07256860701759949
Bhugra, D., Kalra, G. and Ventriglio, A. (2015) ‘Portrayal of gay characters in Bollywood cinema’. International Review of Psychiatry 27 (5), 455–459
Bradbury-Rance, C. (2015) ‘Desire, Outcast: Locating Queer Adolescence’ in International Cinema and the Girl, ed. by Handyside, F. and Taylor-Jones, K. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 85-95
Dudrah, R. (2012) ‘Beyond World Cinema? The Dialectics of Black British Diasporic Cinema’ in Theorizing World Cinema. ed. by Nagib, L, Perriam, C. and Dudrah, R. K. London: I.B. Tauris, 113-128
Dudrah, R. (2013) ‘Reading The Stuart Hall Project’. Journal of British Cinema and Television 12 (3), 383-401, DOI: 10.3366/jbctv.2015.0271
Epstein, R & Friedman, J. (1995) The Celluloid Closet. [DVD] United Kingdom: Drakes Avenue Pictures Ltd.
Ezra, E. and Rowden, T. (2006) Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. Abington: Routledge
Giesking, J. J. (2016) ‘Crossing over into neighbourhoods of the body: urban territories, borders and lesbian-queer bodies in New York City’. Area 48 (3), 262–270, DOI: 10.1111/area.12147
Gopinath, G. (2000) ‘Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema’. Journal of Homosexuality 39 (3-4), 283-297. DOI: 10.1300/J082v39n03_13
Ghosh, S. (2002) ‘Queer Pleasures for Queer People: Film, Television, and Queer Sexuality in India’ in Queering India: Same Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. ed. by Vanita, R. New York: Routledge, 209-221
Hall, S. (1996) ‘Who Needs Identity’ in Questions of Cultural Identity. ed. Hall, S. and Du Gay, P. London: Sage
Higson, A. (2006) ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’ in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. ed. by Ezra, E. and Rowden, T. Abington: Routledge
Holtzman, D. (2010) ‘Between Yaars: The Queering of Dosti in Contemporary Bollywood Films’ in Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema. ed. by Bhattacharya, R., Rajeshwari, M. and Pandharipande, V. London: Anthem Press, 111-128
Jenkins, B. (2016) Moonlight
Jaggi, R. and Thirumurthy, P. (2015) ‘Cut, Clip And Appropriate – A Critical Analysis of Suppression of Alternative Discourse in Indian Cinema through Censorship’. Amity Journal of Media & Communication Studies 4 (1-2), 5-20
Li, W. and Skop, E. (2010) ‘Diaspora in the United States: Chinese and Indians Compared’. Journal of Chinese Overseas 6 (2), 286-310. DOI: 10.1163/179325410X526131
Liang, S. (2012) ‘Contextualizing Chinese lesbian cinema: Global queerness and independent films’. New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 10 (2-3), 127-143. DOI: 10.1386/ncin.10.2-3.127_1
Lopez, L. K. (2011) ‘Fan activists and the politics of race in The Last Airbender’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 15 (5), 431-445
McDonald, K. (2016). ‘Feminist Film Theory’ in Film Theory: The Basics.London/New York: Routledge, 103-115
Metzger, S. (2009) ‘Saving Face, or the Future Perfect of Queer Chinese/American Cinema?’ in Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures. ed. by Khoo, O. and Metzger, S. Bristol: Intellect Books Ltd, 225-240
Mimura, G. M. (2009) Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Mishra, V. (2002) ‘Bombay Cinema and Diasporic Desire’, in Bollywood Cinema Temples of Desire, New York: Rutledge, 235-269
Nayar, S. J. (1997) ‘The Values of Fantasy: Indian Popular Cinema through Western Scripts’. Journal of Popular Culture 31 (1), 73-90
Okado, J. (2016) Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press
O’Neill, P. (2013) ‘Imagining Global India: Bollywood’s Transcultural Appeal’. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 27 (2), 254-266. DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2013.766309
Rajgopal, S. S. (2010) ‘“The Daughter of Fu Manchu”: The Pedagogy of Deconstructing the Representation of Asian Women in Film and Fiction’. Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 10 (2), 141–162
Strug, D. L. & Mason, S. E. (2007) ‘The Impact of 9/11 on Older Chinese and Hispanic Immigrants in New York City’. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 5 (2), 21-44. DOI: 10.1300/J500v05n02_02
Turner, V. (1969) Liminality and Communitas
Thussu, D. K. (2008) ‘The Globalization of “Bollywood” – The Hype and Hope’ in Global Bollywood. ed. by Kavoori, A. P. and Punathambekar, A. New York: New York University Press, 97-113
Tzioumakis, Y. (2006) American Independent Cinema: An introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Wilkinson, K. (2005) ‘Saving Face: Microsoft’s Alice Wu Turns to Filmmaking with the First Feature-Length Asian Lesbian Film’. Lesbian News 30 (1), 24-25
Wong, A. K. H. (2012) ‘From the Transnational to the Sinophone: Lesbian
Representations in Chinese-Language Films’. Journal of Lesbian Studies 16 (3), 307-322, DOI: 10.1080/10894160.2012.673930
Wu, A. (2004) Saving Face. [DVD] United Kingdom: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
musings on films 
You must be logged in to post a comment.