In Sick and Dirty, the film scholar probes the queersubtext of midcentury Hollywood films.
How did you decide which films to include?
I chose ones that I felt were historically significant not only for the stories they told but also for the stories behind the stories. I felt like once I had the bookends to the narrative, which are director William Wyler’s two adaptations of the play The Children’s Hour, I wanted to fill in the 25-year period between the two with films that represented the times but also moved us toward social change. By the time the book ends in 1961, we’re hardly there, but the production code has been amended, and the films that I deal with were these tiny milestones along the way.
Why revisit these movies now?
WhenI started writing, I thought this book was an excavation of film history. I felt that these films were undervalued from years of scholarly neglect and that it was time to recoup them. It wasn’t until I was pretty far into the writing process that I realized this feels particularly relevant, considering that the central text of my book is The Children’s Hour, which is about the perceived toxicity of queerness and mainstream society’s attempts to eradicate it. That tied into a lot of things that I’d been thinking about in terms of our current situation with education, censorship, and book bans. We’ve been assuming that we’re in this perceived “post-gay” world where everyone’s feeling accepted, but that’s a myth, and so tying all that together made me think there’s a new story to tell.
You suggest that Wyler’s first adaptation of The Children’s Hour was more successful than the second despite having to disguise the play’s queer plot points. Why?
I think one of the reasons why people are still so enamored with the films in this book is that what’s happening under the surface is more interesting than what’s above it. Yes, we have representation now, but there’s not much left to the imagination. There’s something exciting about movies in which desire is coursing underneath the surface. That’s why a movie like These Three, which is the 1935 adaptation of The Children’s Hour and a completely de-gayed film, is so much more fascinating to watch. By the time the 1961 version came out, hearts were all in the right place but there’s less to unlock. There’s more social righteousness, and I don’t think social righteousness has ever made for great cinema. Because the code forced artists to imbue their films with mystery, it made for movies that ironically stand the test of time.
Are there lessons that you’d want contemporary filmmakers to pull from the book?
Your characters don’t always have to do the right thing or reflect your politics. Let characters be ambivalent or be flawed. Let there just be that mystery.
