The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema by Raz Yosef

Author:Raz Yosef [Yosef, Raz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Jewish Studies
ISBN: 9781136789250
Google: -ZhJzZlSmG4C
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-05-23T04:41:57+00:00

EPISTEMOLOGIES OF THE CLOSET

“Love should never be a secret”: this was the tagline in the advertising campaign for the film Yossi and Jagger.13 The film narrates the story of forbidden love between two Israeli army officers—Yossi (Ohad Knoller) and Lior (Yehuda Levi), better known by his nickname, Jagger—who serve in a snowy base on the Israeli-Lebanese border. The lovers’ homosexuality ultimately remains secret. Jagger, who tries throughout the film to persuade Yossi to express their love publicly, dies in battle—a moment too late to hear Yossi say “I love you.” The only other person present at this traumatic moment is another officer, Ofir (Assi Cohen), who is much more likely to interpret Yossi’s confession as an expression of love between brothers-in-arms than as an expression of romantic attachment, especially since he thinks that Jagger has been having an affair with Yaeli (Aya Koren), a female soldier with whom he himself is in love.14 Also, in Jagger’s parents’ house during the Shiva (the weeklong Jewish mourning period), Yossi is unable to declare his love, the love that dares not speak its name. While Yaeli, who was in love with Jagger, lies to his mother by telling her that they were having a romantic relationship, the only thing that Yossi can say to his lover’s bereaved mother is that Jagger loved the song “Your Soul,” by the famous Israeli singer Rita. Thus Yossi can share his secret with the film’s viewers alone, the only witnesses—apart from the gay protagonists, of course, who know throughout the film about his queer affair. Homosexuality, therefore, remains at the level of cinematic narrative, trapped in the closet, buried in the coffin along with Jagger’s mutilated body.

“The closet,” claims Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “is the defining structure of gay oppression in the present [i.e. the twentieth] century.”15 The closet is a structure that describes the denial, concealment, or erasure of gay and lesbian people. It points to the absence—but at the same time hints at the presence—of homosexuals in a society that in various ways—sometimes delicately, sometimes less so—dictates heterosexuality as the preferred if not exclusive norm for identity and existence. Being in the closet means to lie and conceal, to be silenced and invisible. We cannot be in the worldwithout pretending to be something we are not. Michelangelo Signorile discusses of the closet in terms of trauma:

The closeted, as captives, suffer such profound psychological trauma that they develop a relationship to their closets similar to that of hostages to their captors: they defend them—lulled into a false sense of security and blind to the trauma they experience—and are threatened by those who are out.16

However, coming out of the closet is not an experience of liberation from the trauma of homophobia. Instead, coming out, whether by choice or not, places gays in a new framework of oppression, as David M. Halperin argues:

If to come out is to release oneself from a state of unfreedom, that is not because coming out constitutes an escape from the reach of power

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