The Boys in the Band (1970) +

An always challenging film, The Boys in the Band is like the proverbial "layers of the onion" -- I never know quite how what will hit me, what buttons the film will push and what insight the film will amplify. On this viewing, I'm struck by how contemporary it feels. Sure, the cultural references and camp signifiers are way old school and the ethnic/racial tensions in the piece seem grotesque -- but on a fundamental emotional level, I'm struck by the fact that this feels more contemporary to me on this screening than on any previous one. (Basically, I'm thinking about the banal homophobia, self-closeting/fetishizing the straight boy, the sissyphobia, and the tensions between monogamy and polyamory. We may wish these issues were old school but they feel more contemporary than the last time I screened the film, nearly ten years ago.) I remain convinced that the original BITB phenomena is a fundamentally important document -- the play's premiere in 1968 and the film's in 1970 bookending the 1969 of Stonewall. The piece "straddles" the moment of gay liberation, and the characters seemed so dated in 1970 largely because they exist in a universe when gay liberation isn't comprehensible (where, by 1970, gay lib had already started transforming the vision of gay possibility). In a way, this is the part that feels most contemporary. These characters seem to simply want their niche in society, to live their private lives privately -- no remaking society toward goals of equality or social justice, simply an aspiration to maintain whatever privilege they already possess. And this seems to me to be very cognate to our current gay historical moment: a not altogether radical investment, on the part of gays and lesbians, to be included. It's astonishing, on the one hand, how comparable the aspirations are, given how much so much has changed. This time through, also, I was struck by the dimensions of alcohol and drug abuse -- the depth of self-medication going on, how much booze/pot/pills are being consumed, etc. More substantially, I'm struck by the fact that Michael's basically a mean drunk who seems to be trying to get sober. Adam's comments on the film flagged the piece's debt to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf -- especially the cruel party game aspect -- in a way I found very helpful and I found that I responded to this film in much the same fashion. I don't think I knew until this time through that Crowley insisted on using the Broadway cast for the screen version. This provides one explanation for the highly theatrical/broad/big performance by Kenneth Nelson as Michael. At several moments, I thought "this is stage acting" and I'm relieved to realize that it's exactly that. I'm also fascinated by how many among the cast were actually gay (if we're to interpret their late 1980s and early 1990s deaths from AIDS-related causes as signals of this fact). It's a hard movie to watch, one that always burrows into my discomfort in surprising ways, but one which seems to hold enduring potency as a kind of intergenerational gay palimpsest. It will be fascinating to continue revisiting it as the years pass.