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Queer Aesthetics
Wednesday, 29 December 2010 09:47 amLast September, I made a series of posts detailing the ways that the futurist message of The NeverEnding Story movie trilogy ruptures and the reality of the death drive, manifesting here in the form of the incest fantasy, is given a chance to shine through. It is instructive to note that this happens just as the producers of the film lose control of the text—the loss of control being metafictionally, but by necessity unintentionally, paralleled in The NeverEnding Story III itself as the erratic behavior of the recording stylus for the book itself.
The first film is painstakingly crafted, extremely faithful to Ende's novel, and generally considered to possess much in the way of cinematic merit. The sequel is, as sequels often are, less worthy aesthetically, less faithful to Ende's novel, and is in places clearly hobbled together from the pieces the producers found to work with it; the seams are visible. The third film is a cinematic mess—and if it can be said to have any saving grace, this is it, for in this messiness a truth is able to assert itself which is elided in the previous films. (Or perhaps it is a postmodern masterpiece whose brilliance is unacknowledged. Can questions of aesthetic worth be divorced from those of queerness? Need they be? Should they be?)
But are we then merely valorizing bad movies as queer, in a too-simple inversion? The question is, and must be, on some level question-begging. Insofar as we embrace an aesthetic standard which requires reproductive futurism—as a hegemonic understanding of futurism would lead us to expect—then of course a film is capable of being queer only by not being "good.: But while I think cinematic moments of truth are most likely to be found in films like The NeverEnding Story III, Edelman's analysis, found in No Future, of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds demonstrates that this quality is possible, if rare, in films of generally-accepted quality whose production has been (we assume) tightly controlled by its producer. (The issues of intentionality and aesthetic worth seem to be, while not the same thing, to be closely related; that is, The NeverEnding Story III is "bad" because we are unable to see it as either a finely-crafted work or the spontaneous eruption of sufficient genius. The reasons for this seem to be largely rooted in our pscychology as viewers.) Indeed, there may even be some sense in which this distinction might map onto the Kantian one between the "beautiful" and the "sublime."
Neither would one expect being bad to be in itself sufficient to queer a text--one would not expect it, but I do find it surprisingly difficult to support this claim. Those films which are most memorably bad—those of the Plan 9 from Outer Space ilk—do seem to possess this peculiar type of queerness in spades. Perhaps the best exemplar of a non-queer "bad" film would be one of a thousand forgettable romantic comedies. Still, a negative proposition is always a tricky bet.
Whatever the circumstances necessary for this type of queerness to appear in a text, however, it is only with Edelman's queer theoretic approach that it is able to be seen. By its ability to uncover this truth (almost certainly unintentionally) encoded into a text like the third NeverEnding Story film, Edelman's critical theory demonstrates that it is capable of more than just contrarian inversions.
The first film is painstakingly crafted, extremely faithful to Ende's novel, and generally considered to possess much in the way of cinematic merit. The sequel is, as sequels often are, less worthy aesthetically, less faithful to Ende's novel, and is in places clearly hobbled together from the pieces the producers found to work with it; the seams are visible. The third film is a cinematic mess—and if it can be said to have any saving grace, this is it, for in this messiness a truth is able to assert itself which is elided in the previous films. (Or perhaps it is a postmodern masterpiece whose brilliance is unacknowledged. Can questions of aesthetic worth be divorced from those of queerness? Need they be? Should they be?)
But are we then merely valorizing bad movies as queer, in a too-simple inversion? The question is, and must be, on some level question-begging. Insofar as we embrace an aesthetic standard which requires reproductive futurism—as a hegemonic understanding of futurism would lead us to expect—then of course a film is capable of being queer only by not being "good.: But while I think cinematic moments of truth are most likely to be found in films like The NeverEnding Story III, Edelman's analysis, found in No Future, of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds demonstrates that this quality is possible, if rare, in films of generally-accepted quality whose production has been (we assume) tightly controlled by its producer. (The issues of intentionality and aesthetic worth seem to be, while not the same thing, to be closely related; that is, The NeverEnding Story III is "bad" because we are unable to see it as either a finely-crafted work or the spontaneous eruption of sufficient genius. The reasons for this seem to be largely rooted in our pscychology as viewers.) Indeed, there may even be some sense in which this distinction might map onto the Kantian one between the "beautiful" and the "sublime."
Neither would one expect being bad to be in itself sufficient to queer a text--one would not expect it, but I do find it surprisingly difficult to support this claim. Those films which are most memorably bad—those of the Plan 9 from Outer Space ilk—do seem to possess this peculiar type of queerness in spades. Perhaps the best exemplar of a non-queer "bad" film would be one of a thousand forgettable romantic comedies. Still, a negative proposition is always a tricky bet.
Whatever the circumstances necessary for this type of queerness to appear in a text, however, it is only with Edelman's queer theoretic approach that it is able to be seen. By its ability to uncover this truth (almost certainly unintentionally) encoded into a text like the third NeverEnding Story film, Edelman's critical theory demonstrates that it is capable of more than just contrarian inversions.
