The Wonders of the Invisible World by David Gates

Author:David Gates [Gates, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Literary
ISBN: 9780307765901
Google: DI0D9LO7FX4C
Amazon: B0043M4Z7U
Barnesnoble: B0043M4Z7U
Goodreads: 9408603
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Finn McCarthy made documentary films. Or had until six years ago, when he was looking for a place to land and was approached by the college’s Department of Communication Arts. That was the year his film about children’s street games had been nominated for an Academy Award. He’d meant to show these children (filmed in Newark, Liverpool, Mexico City and Connecticut) as members of a savage tribe with alien customs and ceremonies; it had bothered him, therefore, that two of the three reviews he’d gotten had called it “sensitive.” For whatever reason, he hadn’t been able to get going on a new project since. It was his course load, his inability to travel. It was the too-comfortable life here: dinner parties with tolerant acquaintances in a tolerant college town. It was his house, the first he’d ever owned, which had needed everything done to it. It was James.

But at long last he had a new project in mind. Which would damn well not be called “sensitive,” either. And which would get him once and for all, at the age of fifty-two, out of the closet. (James gave him guff about that, but that was just James being James.) Finn had ignored the whole Stonewall business and everything thereafter; bully for them, of course, but. He was damned if he’d be ghettoized as a quote unquote gay filmmaker; anyway, his work wasn’t political. Lately, though, he was beginning to wonder whether avoiding the subject in his films—well, not avoiding, just not obsessing—hadn’t been a mistake, esthetically. When he looked at his old work nowadays (which wasn’t often), it felt impersonal to him. Put together to a fare-thee-well, of course. Surely there was a way to get closer in without being either confessional or, God forbid, polemical. Assuming he wasn’t too old to want to.

What he’d come up with was a film about the makers of gay porn videos. Which, if it worked—if he could get the time and the funding and of course the access—would be a sort of oblique self-portrait in addition to whatever else. His films had always been about subcultures: American Indians who worked building skyscrapers, a leprosarium in what was then Southern Rhodesia, country music fans. The children and their street games. But a subculture based on being homosexual and making films: how could this not end up being his best work? Or so he sometimes thought.

He’d gone so far as to begin collecting videos; he’d also written part of a first draft of an essay on the implicit formal conventions of film pornography. If he could finish this and get it decently published—he’d try Film Quarterly first, then Sight and Sound—it might help with the funding. The biggest problem, aside from outright censorship (the Mapplethorpe business still had everybody running scared) was that these days such a subject could only be a downer: even safe-sex porn had a “Masque of the Red Death” aura. Which was all to the good as far as the film was concerned.

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