4 - Coming Out Of The Closet

Coming Out Of The Closet

By Nighat, Stephanie and Mélanie 

Introduction

In class this week, we covered the topics of stereotypes and hegemony. To elaborate on these two topics, we watched a movie in class and one at home. The first was The Celluloid Closet and it portrays the evolution of the image of homosexuals in cinema in the past century. The second documentary we viewed was entitled Reel Injun. This film shows how the image of Native Americans was distorted through Hollywood movies. Both movies recognize that older American movies are misleading and misrepresent certain minorities of the population.

First Screening: The Celluloid Closet 

The Celluloid Closet is a 101 minutes documentary directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman that came out in 1995. It shows footage that was assembled from 120 different Hollywood movies from the 1990s. We can observe how both gays and lesbians were represented on screen through 100 years of Hollywood images. Although at times Lily Tomlin narrates in the documentary, it mostly shows interviews and scenes from older movies. There are gay directors, actors and script writers who are interviewed as well as actors who have played the role of a gay character.

This film clearly presents issues concerning the homosexual image in the world of cinema. People used to deny the existence of gays and lesbians. Some would think it was a disease and it could be ‘cured’ with the help of religion and God. Some even went to the extent of admitting a member of their family or a friend into an electroshock treatment, which was believed could ‘cure’ them. Then Hollywood began to show a bit more of the gay community on screen; a gay person would soon be seen as the ‘sissy’. The ‘sissy’ was the gay character in a movie that looked effeminate. He wore tight pinched clothes, was often represented with a thin dark mustache and he was usually very skinny. He was not the usual man but he was not quite a woman either. In the 1932 movie Call her Savage, we can clearly see what a ‘sissy’ is meant to be when the two gay men go hoping from table to table. They were basically people to be laughed at. 

After the ‘sissy’ came the ‘villain’. This was another form of character to represent gay people. This time instead of being laughed at, the gays and lesbians were feared; they were cold-blooded perverts who had no hearts. Dracula’s Daughter is the perfect movie to represent the lesbian ‘villain’ in 1936. And of course, the movie ends with the lesbian vampire getting killed by a bow and arrow: how classic. 

The last way to represent gay characters was to portray them as being ‘victims’. This time we pity them and they feel terribly guilty for being homosexual. The 1962 movie The Children’s Hour is about a child’s accusations against two lesbians. It is never brought up that the two girls are actually lesbians but as the many interviewed people said; the audience had to learn to read between the lines.    

With the Hays Code, the rules for movie contents were stricter than ever when it came to gays, lesbians and generally any sexuality on screen. People were authorized to change lines, characters and even plots in order to avoid the topic of homosexuality. 

Seeming gay was almost as bad as being gay so it was the time to act like a man even if you were gay and effeminate. Tea and Sympathy released in 1956 shows a scene where a boy tried to walk like a ‘man’ because he is scared of what people will think of him. In fact, you could get arrested for being in a gay bar and your family could force you to get electroshock treatment for believing you were gay. The reason this happened? Hegemony. Control, dominance, discrimination and power are all aspects that important people want. At the time, it was rich white men who controlled the world we lived in. In cinema, it was the same men who took over. It was these men who controlled Hollywood who also managed to gain control over our lives, our ideas and our thoughts. Hegemony is the reason dominant groups like rich white men, as oppose to gays and lesbians, have the power to control the world. The public then sees the lives of these men as natural and totally normal. Stereotypes are ideas believed to be right and widely agreed upon. All the movies showed in this documentary, or the majority of them, show us many examples of stereotypes. Stereotypes such as the three characters presented still exist today. They usually generate strong feelings such as hatred or fear. It is because of stereotypes that even today in other parts of the world people still have these feelings towards homosexuals. Instead of seeing someone as an individual, on a complex unique basis, we see them as a type. This is where most Hollywood movies stop their descriptions of the characters that sometimes require more description. A type is simple and general and it is the easiest way for a public to watch and understand a movie. But is it enough? 

Additional Screening: Reel Injun 

Reel Injun, released in 2009, is an 85 minutes long documentary film directed by Neil Diamond, who is a Native American from the Cree tribe up in the north of Quebec. During his youth, he grew up watching many American cowboys’ movies, which he enjoyed a lot. However, he realized that all of his friends and him would always favor the cowboys more that the Native Americans in the Hollywood movies. Praising for the other side made him realize that he was forgetting all the beauty of his Indian culture and heritage. "Cheering for the cowboys, never realizing we were the Indians" was the poignant thought that motivated Diamond to make Reel Injun where Native American will be portrayed in a different way compared to other Native Americans movies.

The structure of this documentary resembles a lot to the documentary viewed in class: The Celluloid Closet. Both of these films are divided into various decades, in which each decade demonstrates how the stereotypes of their portrayal in the movies have changed over the years.

The documentary begins with demonstrating how Native Americans were represented in the beginning of Hollywood movies.  At first glances the portrayal of the aboriginal people seems very accurate to the audience but when the director interviews an Indian activist Russell Means, the viewer learned that the Native Americans weren’t too happy about the way they were represented in Hollywood. They were represented as white people imagined them.  As the documentary progressed, we learned the portrayal of the aboriginal people got worse in the Hollywood movies during the 1930’s because of the Great Depression. They were portrayed as savages. All the movies released in that era showed Native Americans fighting. An example of a movie where Native Americans are viewed as the “bad people” is in Stagecoach.

This movie was released in 1939 and directed by John Ford.  The concept of hegemony was shown in the movie with the savage portrayal of Native American and white people playing them on the big screen. This indicated that the ruling group of Hollywood were the “white people” and the Native Americans were excluded from it. They would occasionally appear as a prop but not great importance was accorded to them. John Ford gave the Native Americans Indians a new image: “savage fearless people”. Later, in the western era, the image of cowboys taming Indian tribes dominated the screen of cinema became the new way of showing that white people are superior to them.

Iron Eyes Cody was one of the best actors who portrayed the Native Americans correctly in the Hollywood movies.  He fit the perfect image of what people thought the American Indians should be. What is ironic though is that Iron Eyes Cody did not belong to an Indian heritage but represented the aboriginal people very well on the big screen.

In the 1960’s hippies were viewed as the Native Americans. This new image of them was also portrayed in the movie Geronimo, released in 1962. Also, in 1973, the aboriginal people started revolting against the injustices they had been suffering for such a long time. To raise awareness, the Hollywood actor Marlon Brandon, who won the best actor for his role in Godfather during the 45^th academy award, refused the award and asked Sacheen Littlefeather to go on stage. She raised awareness of treatments of aboriginal people in Hollywood and made a stand for the Natives at Wounded Knee. 

Sacheen LttleFeather's Speech: 

The documentary finishes off by demonstrating that nowadays the Native American people are portrayed much better than they were in the olden times. Nevertheless, Native Americans still wish that the directors would chose actors that belonged to an Indian heritage so they could capture the essence of their culture when on screen.  In 1988 their wish came true! Smoke Signal became the first movie to depict an accurate image of Native Americans on screen. For the first time, it showed Native Americans as real people, as they are today and no stereotype content was shown.

What made the film special to watch is how Neil Diamond added some sarcasm and some cartoon illustrations to accentuate and exaggerate the stereotypes of native Americans that were being portrayed in Hollywood films.

In the documentary, Diamond acknowledges to his viewers that when a culture is represented from the point of view of an outsider on the big screen, the audience does not receive the right information and it is from there that stereotype are created. For instance, in elementary school, in History class, whenever the topic of Native Americans showed up in our textbook, they were always depicted as people having red paint on their faces, wearing headbands and riding horses. This illustration of them was completely false, especially their clothing. At the beginning of the documentary, Diamond shows a small glimpse of the movie Smoke Signal, released in 1982, known to be the best movie that ever portrayed Indians in Hollywood cinema. We see a glimpse of the character saying: “You know the only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV? It’s Indians watching Indians on TV”. This shows how inaccurately the Natives were portrayed in the early years of Hollywood Cinema.

 If we compare this movie to The Celluloid Closet, we notice that the concept of Hollywood creating the image of stereotypes can be applied to both movies. In the documentary viewed in class, we see that in all early movies gays and lesbians were portrayed as grotesque people being victims of dying because of the way they chose to live their lives. Their image created a fear for homosexual to share their sexual orientation with their friends and family. On the other hand in Reel Injun an inaccurate portrayal of the Natives Americans was made in the beginning of the Hollywood cinema which created a lot of tension between white people and Indians during that time. Luckily, today the portrayal of homosexual people and Natives Americans has gotten better but there are always slight images of stereotypes related to them. For instance, even today the term “homosexual” is attached to the word “sissy” and the words Native Americans are linked to the word “savages”. The concept of Hegemony was clearly indicated in both movies. In Reel Injun the Natives Americans were always excluded from playing their role on the big screen, instead, they were most of the time replaced by white people. On the other hand, in The Celluloid Closet we see that the film industry was mainly responsible in demonstrating that homosexual people are inferior to people who aren’t. They were classified as  “members” belonging to a group delimited by social divisions in. 

The Personal Reflection

After having viewed both Reel Injun and The Celluloid Closet, strong emotions overcame us all. These documentaries were eye-opening, in a heart-rending manner. The Celluloid Closet depicts the terrible ways in which homosexuals were previously portrayed in films. Similarly, stereotypes of the Native Americans that were seen in movies were unveiled in Reel Injun. Both these documentaries succeed at enlightening viewers about the way two groups of people felt when movies distorting their true image came out.

Humans are vulnerable creatures. At the end of the day, we all want to love and to be loved. However, loving ourselves is just as important. When minorities are misrepresented, especially in Hollywood films because of their prominence, these individuals become rather confused. It can be compared to looking at yourself in the mirror. What do you expect to see? You would expect to see a faithful reflection of you. Movies were doing the complete opposite by either not representing these groups of people at all, or giving them false attributes. In Reel Injun, for example, clips from older movies were shown where Native Americans were played by white people and when rather than having them speak an actual Native language, they would simply run English backwards.  We came to the realization that those in power are the ones that define and label others in a society, which is what we call hegemony. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, by definition, hegemony is "the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group." The Celluloid Closet showed that as gay men were introduced into cinema, they were objects of comedy. The men represented were exceedingly effeminate, since that was how the typical, white, heterosexual men saw them as. Why would the latter group be the ones deciding that all homosexuals were sissies? (View Image 1) The two movies definitely enabled us to ask ourselves certain questions and broaden our outlook on movies along with the inequities that accompany them. Movies ostracize everything that is considered abnormal, or out of the ordinary. They represent females a certain way and men in another. Our world however, is not black and white as it is so often portrayed. There is a whole gray area that simply does not get shown. 

    Image 1: A typical “Sissy”. 

What we found lacked in Reel Injun was a rather humorous side. The beauty of The Celluloid Closet was how it covered such a serious topic, yet kept it light for the viewers to watch. This combination allows the audience to fully engulf themselves into the documentary. We believe that Reel Injun would have been even more of a hit by effectively reaching out to a broader spectrum of the audience’s emotion. Both films obtained much credibility because of the numerous informative speakers they contained. The two were assembled in a similar manner, juxtaposing interviews and scenes from other movies.  The filmmakers also managed to captivate not only an audience that was solely gay or an audience purely composed of Native Americans, but rather an audience that encompasses everyone, no matter their race or sexuality. This truly ties in to the beauty of these open-minded documentaries: washing away the labels we use to define each other and referring to ourselves simply as what we are, humans.

Our world is changing and its people are becoming more and more knowledgeable, unprejudiced, and open-minded. We must keep in mind that it wasn’t long ago that slavery was still legal or that women didn’t have the right to vote (To view a timeline of slavery abolition throughout the world, visit:https://www.freetheslaves.net/sslpage.aspx?pid=303).  In the past century, people have been more accepting and loving towards one another, despite our minor differences that would have once not been overlooked. Cinema has to keep up with the world, and portray it for what it truly is.

Conclusion

Open-mindedness is a key value for a better world. Documentaries like The Celluloid Closet and Reel Injun make people more aware of their surroundings, allowing them to develop a critical eye on what they see or hear from different medias. They encourage us to doubt, dissect, and scrutinize the messages movies try to convey. Reality is often distorted, and as viewers, we must learn not to believe everything we see, but rather to be choosy and selective in what we take from movies. To conclude, Reel Injun explored the concept of "hegemony" by showing that the Native Americans were excluded from the film industry and on the other hand, The Celluloid Closet demonstrated the concept of stereotype by showing how homosexual people were portrayed in the films.