Kazan Revisited by Dombrowski Lisa;

Author:Dombrowski, Lisa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2011-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

Deanie Loomis (Natalie Wood) swoons for Bud Stamper (Warren Beatty) in a publicity still from Splendor in the Grass. Deanie’s overwhelming sexual desire for Bud takes an unusually masochistic turn. Photo courtesy of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives.

The answer—yes—animates the entire dramatic action of the film, as we are pulled into an obsession that eventually lands Deanie in a mental institution by a camera that endorses her viewpoint, lingering worshipfully on Bud, even following him into the school shower to capture him, self-entranced, in a private moment. Bud’s sexuality is not transactional; a beautiful boy-man, a star athlete, and something of a cipher, he is objectified perhaps more than any male character had ever been in a Hollywood romance. It’s quite possible that Kazan’s aching memories of watching (and wanting to be like) the handsome boys with whom he went to school were in play here. Beatty’s lithe, graceful Bud could have been a lad out of the director’s youth; the film is set in 1928, when Kazan himself was about Bud’s age.

Beatty later said that during the making of the movie, he thought Kazan “didn’t like good-looking guys,” and Kazan’s feelings about the character seem powerfully conflicted; Bud is a decent boy, but also the insensitive, even cruel cause of Deanie’s disintegration.14 With her passion as its motor, Splendor in the Grass plays as an almost hysterical case study of self-destructive sexual need for an only transiently obtainable straight boy. And a queer reading of the film, especially in the context of its middle-aged gay screenwriter’s hopeless crush on Beatty, is hardly a challenge, since Kazan commits fully to Inge’s clear belief that Bud must be completely desired by the viewer for the film to make sense. In the movie’s most shocking scene, Bud, for one moment, realizes the power he has over Deanie (whose ambiguously gendered name cannot be an accident), and he starts to become aroused by his own cruelty. “You’re nuts about me, aren’t you?” he says to her as he leans against a wall, closing his eyes in a semimasturbatory fugue as the voracious Deanie slides down to crotch level. “At my feet, slave. Tell me you love me, tell me you can’t live without me.”

“I would go down on my knees to worship you . . . I would. I would,” she says in reply. “Where’s your pride?” he asks her later, appalled as she keeps pursuing him. “I haven’t any pride,” she says. These torrid, masochistic-orgasmic exchanges—in a studio movie from 1961!—are many things, but nobody would call them heteronormative. In fact, they hew remarkably close to a voguish sixties dramatic notion of homosexual relationships as twisted power struggles.

Kazan presents Bud Stamper as a more sensitive Stanley Kowalski in training, a young man learning to use and abuse his sexual charisma (tellingly, Inge leaves him settled down in working-class squalor with a Stella of his own). But both characters are pretty clearly heterosexual; a queer reading of either film depends entirely on how much

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.