Some things may happen when you watch two different movies in the same week: having nothing in common, you can't help suspecting that somewhere, somehow, they have a connection - a relevant one. So I was trying to figure out what could be the link between Brüno and Precious: I had watched the first one because it just had been released in DVD in the States and the second one because Oprah Winfrey had decided - and I agree with her - that America had found the equivalent of a new Color Purple. Alas, all I could find at first was that both movies are eponymous, provocative and successful, but this was not meaningful enough. Thinking more about them, or letting them haunt me for a while (I love to do that!), I sensed that both Brüno and Precious were cast as anti heroes more than heroes, and that they were looking for fame in a strong, obsessive way. The content of the fame they were looking for did not matter, by which I mean the reason why they would become famous, or the talent that would explain why they deserved celebrity. Fame mattered above all as a goal, regardless of its means, as the reward changing one's life in a magic, arbitrary way.

Brüno thinks he's already a star, he just needs people to realize it and worship him as the idol he's always been. As people are ungrateful, or blind enough not to recognize him as an innate star, Brüno flies from Austria to Los Angeles in order to help the whole world understand he's simply fabulous and incredible. His obsession with stardom requires all his time and energy and does not leave space for anything else: Brüno doesn't have any sense of ethics or spirituality; he has no time and no will to deal with existential issues about his or other people's lives. Brüno embodies what happens in a society based on consumption, individualism and political correctness: the advent of an empty, cynical consumer enjoying life as an endless TV show and requesting his slice of fame - but much more than the 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol thought everyone could claim. The inhumanity of Brüno comes from the fact that he stands for the unbearable, yet comic paragon of a narcissistic subject ready to destroy people and insult their values if it helps get the attention of the paparazzi. Brüno is not just a caricature of a shameless, unscrupulous dandy desperately trying to make it in LA, he is more the vision of horror we can sometimes see in the mirror because we live in this society in which entertainment and the privatization of morals culminate in the quest for stardom as the ultimate, superficial and only thing worth wishing for.

Another interesting question raised by Brüno is "How can you become a star when you're openly gay?" The movie articulates the double bind analyzed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of The Closet in a brilliant way. This double bind is still functioning today. I like to interpret one of the scenes of the movies, when Brüno is getting anal bleaching, as a metaphor describing how society is processing our subjectivities through the lens of marketing and idolatry. Far from being eccentric and crazy, Brüno is like us and shares the same cultural determinations: he's just one step further, showing us the way. At this point, the comedy is a tour de force; it becomes political satire and leaves us with a sense of emergency.

Precious is definitely further away from Brüno's selfishness and self confidence. It's euphemistic to say that life has been tough with her since she's always been beaten by her parents, raped by her father who ended up giving her two kids and one virus (HIV), and not to mention exploited physically and psychologically by a resentful, cruel mother in a poor, dangerous neighbourhood in Harlem in the 1980s. Her mother keeps telling her that she's stupid and useless, that she should have aborted instead of raising such an ugly animal. For the spectator it's a miracle that Precious (what an ironic name) manages to grow up in this constant hell. When she's being raped by her father, or whenever she's trembling on the verge of despair, Precious runs away from reality and finds herself sexy and glamorous on the stage of her dreams, surrounded by smiling, beautiful boys watching her with admiration and tenderness on the beat of nice music. Then Precious wakes up, back to the abuse and humiliation.

Her quest for fame should not be understood as capricious, it's rather a survival technique, a line of flight to distract her from the unsustainable rumination of pain, lack of love and loss of luck. Thanks to an alternative educational program ("Each one teach one") and the chemistry with her lesbian teacher (Miss Rain), Precious discovers a sense of dignity and the expressions of care and trust in the gaze of compassionate new people in her life (Mariah Carey as a social worker - actually very convincing -, and Lenny Kravitz as a nurse to die for). Step by step, she builds her own self, enjoys some privacy away from her mother and, above all, gains the power and the will to speak for herself, to write in her name - hence her memoirs, on which the movie is based, and by now its international fame.

Thus, stardom means a lot for both Brüno and Precious, and in the end they both achieve it, but here trajectories are just opposite: Brüno proved how inhumane he is willing to become in order to be a star - just any kind of star -, whereas Precious was reached by fame as the indirect consequence of a long, hard, emotional initiation to integrity, courage and self esteem. Eventually, what Precious and Brüno have in common, in spite of their striking contrast as cinematographic genres and psychological characters, is that they both point the crucial impact of the quest for stardom from a sociological perspective, and the space for political agency attached to it.

The first time I watched Twilight was too late: the whole world had already seen it, but I did not mind having my own opinion instead of listening to everyone talking about it. On my way to Frankfort, flying Lufthansa, I was enjoying my third glass of Cognac when I felt ready for an interview with Robert Pattinson.

My interest in vampires started last year, when I attended a seminar on European Romanticism in which I discovered - while reading Romantic Agony, by Mario Praz - that vampirism was the perfect trope to condense the main features of Romanticism: beauty as evil and fatal, seduction as a contagious disease, sexuality as deeply perverse and gender as confused. Lord Byron, because of his open bisexuality and scandalous incestuous affair with his sister, and certainly due to his tormented poetry and exotic odyssey in Greece, is said to have inspired the first vampire in Romantic prose: Lord Ruthven. Vampires, indeed, embody the otherness: they come from far away (Orient, Transylvania, etc), speak the universal language of seduction and prefer infection rather than reproduction. I guess you get the picture: there is something queer about vampires because these creatures are both mysterious and scary, because their sexuality does not fit the standards of heterosexual normalcy, and because their appeal mixes the Freudian concepts of eros (the libido) and thanatos (the death drive) in a disturbing, asocial way.

Having this definition of vampires in mind, try to imagine my shock when I started thinking about how the movie Twilight updates vampires. I was more than ready to decipher some subversive insights about Edward and the Cullens, but overall -- and for the first time of my life -- I had to face that Edward's kind of vampire is a cleaner, ethical, and more politically correct edition. Let's just think about his lifestyle and values: he explains to his lover, Bella, that he's not like other vampires, that he decided with his family to stop living by night and to stop eating human blood. Rather than a critique of kinship, he is very close to his family and he studies just like humans in order to become - like his father - a productive employee in the capitalist system. The least we can say is that, indeed, he's looking for integration when vampires have always and obviously been defined as dangerous, seductive and contagious outsiders. Edward and his family are,in short, vampires who have been recuperated into mainstream society!

The break is even more explicit when it comes to sex: Edward refuses to have sex with Bella (no sex before marriage?) and this embracement of chastity is based on health: he does not want her to convert and become a vampire - on the contrary, he's determined to reject any sexual temptation in order to protect Bella's status as human. The metaphor here seems to be clear: no sex with a beloved girl, her virginity is her treasure and the best way to express the purity of feelings is to block any sexual intercourse that could bring not just the loss of innocence but also pregnancy or AIDS or any other STI.

Edward and his family have made the decision to go mainstream, and by doing so they created a model of vampire without vampirism - by which I mean the adjustment to standards of humanist values and the will to deny one's origins and history. On the other hand, as a striking contrast with the Cullens, James, Victoria and Laurent, who are "old school" vampires, are faithful to their ancestors and keep on hunting for fresh, organic human blood. In the movie they clearly appear as evil whereas Edward, beautiful, melancholic and respectful of Bella's health, appears as the empathic hero par excellence. It is quite a tour de force that Twilight, both as a novel and a movie, managed to turn vampires into harmless, chaste, politically correct creatures -- and I am very impressed by this subversion of a subversive archetype (the negation of a negation becomes an affirmation).

But here I need to distinguish my admiration vis à vis a work of art and my frustration when it comes to its political message. Twilight can be used by conservative people as a propaganda to promote the fear of sex in the name of a religious, normative, disciplinary vision of love. If vampires don't scare us anymore, if reactionary people who hate sex manage to use them in order to promote chastity, then it's scary to think that even the most sexually transgressive archetypes in our society can become the object of a cultural castration. However, if I remember well the end of the movie, Bella begged Edward to infect and turn her into a vampire, which could leave a bit of hope in the next episodes of Twilight about the resistance to human norms and the will to embrace the status of vampire. Hopefully, Bella will be inspired by Lady Gaga's lyrics and whisper in Edward's ear: I am freak, bitch!

Cover of Gay City Anthology, Vol. 2

From our friends in Seattle:

Call for Submissions (short form) Gay City: Vol.3- Repulped Lurid covers, sensational titles, scandalous storylines: the books of gay pulp were denounced and sometimes even banned but they also informed and delighted readers. Gay City Anthologies is currently seeking fiction, poetry, art, comics and photography that revisits, renews, reacts, reshapes and reinterprets the gay pulp genre of the '50s and '60s. Don't just imitate the genre; raise the bar as far as you can and make it relevant to modern issues. Happy endings are not always required but the work must reclaim positive representations of gay people and culture. Despite pulp's sometimes pornographic roots, we are not looking for erotica at this time unless it has something unique and very literary to say. For complete guidelines and important submission details contact Editor Vincent Kovar at anthology@gaycity.org.

Deadline for submissions is April 1st, 2010.

Peter from Gay City gifted me with a copy of Volume I -- some very lovely stuff inside!