Daphne Merkin on a book called "Sleeping with Strangers"
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/books/review/sleeping-with-strangers-david-thomson.html
I highly recommend this article by a woman I've tracked (mainly in the "New Yorker") for over TWO decades, Daphne Merkin.
I'm intrigued by Thomson -- who, Daphne writes, has written a BUNCH of books on the film industry and the homoerotic [in my caae, lesbian] aspects thereof.
Because I enjoyed the piece so much, let me quote from it a bit:
"...Already with the first sentence of 'Sleeping With Strangers,' Thomson establishes himself as an independent mind, positing a definition of moviegoing that complicates the by-now tired idea of film as an inherently voyeuristic genre: 'The movie screen is a window, and the trick of the medium is to let us feel we can pass through it....'
"...we are part of the picture instead of outside it. It is an expansive definition, one that upends the whole notion of film as predominantly catering to the infamous 'male gaze' beloved of feminist film critics (although Thomson later on dutifully devotes an entire chapter to this very trope)...
"...the erotic life of movies shapes and misshapes us, codifying our fantasies, shooting an arrow into them and occasionally showing them up as bogus...
“...'Rather,' he writes, 'I want to extend the proposal that the atmosphere of all movies had a gay air' [sic!]. He is referring specifically to films of the 1930s made in the wake of the Production Code, but in truth he sprinkles hints throughout the book that he considers the medium of cinema conducive to the subversion of smug heterosexual pieties..."
________
A plea to a certain girl I know who enjoys movies -- NOW, V, will you please read the article, for heaven's sake?
I highly recommend this article by a woman I've tracked (mainly in the "New Yorker") for over TWO decades, Daphne Merkin.
I'm intrigued by Thomson -- who, Daphne writes, has written a BUNCH of books on the film industry and the homoerotic [in my caae, lesbian] aspects thereof.
Because I enjoyed the piece so much, let me quote from it a bit:
"...Already with the first sentence of 'Sleeping With Strangers,' Thomson establishes himself as an independent mind, positing a definition of moviegoing that complicates the by-now tired idea of film as an inherently voyeuristic genre: 'The movie screen is a window, and the trick of the medium is to let us feel we can pass through it....'
"...we are part of the picture instead of outside it. It is an expansive definition, one that upends the whole notion of film as predominantly catering to the infamous 'male gaze' beloved of feminist film critics (although Thomson later on dutifully devotes an entire chapter to this very trope)...
"...the erotic life of movies shapes and misshapes us, codifying our fantasies, shooting an arrow into them and occasionally showing them up as bogus...
“...'Rather,' he writes, 'I want to extend the proposal that the atmosphere of all movies had a gay air' [sic!]. He is referring specifically to films of the 1930s made in the wake of the Production Code, but in truth he sprinkles hints throughout the book that he considers the medium of cinema conducive to the subversion of smug heterosexual pieties..."
________
A plea to a certain girl I know who enjoys movies -- NOW, V, will you please read the article, for heaven's sake?