Decades in the Closet

Being a film enthusiast, I'm often attracted to efforts at analyzing the medium itself. One such effort that recently came to my attention was the 1995 documentary film The Celluloid Closet. Inspired by a book of the same title by Vito Russo and completed after his death, the documentary examines the depiction of gay and lesbian characters in (primarily Hollywood) movies as it evolved over the decades.

The film packs a great deal of material into a brisk hour and forty-five minutes. It includes clips from over 100 different movies spread across seven decades, as well as interviews with several screen writers, actors, and LGBT scholars. I could summarize the interesting "phases" of film history identified in the documentary, but you might as well just proceed straight to the documentary itself if your interest is piqued. Instead, I want to focus on some of the thoughts raised within the film and inspired by it.

First, the documentary makes a solid case for the social power of film in general. While the specific focus is on gay characters, I think you're really made to realize something about movies that you don't consciously think much about -- people of all ages really do take a lot of social cues from popular entertainment. Even films that primarily offer escapist fantasy built on no provocative ideas can still be populated with characters that an audience member might want to imagine being... or being with. Many people have noted how recent depictions of gay characters in entertainment (more recent than this documentary, even) have helped impact the way people think about gay people in real life. A less appreciated, less talked about point this movie makes is that the depiction of gay characters can also have a very important formative impact on a gay person trying to come to terms with their own identity.

Second, the film is -- thankfully -- getting to be rather dated. It's 17 years old this year, and just as it was (cautiously) praising a new evolution that had recently begun in gay depictions at that time after decades of dribs and drabs, so that period seems like dribs and drabs next to the larger diversity we have today. And yet, some of the points raised in the movie still mostly hold true today -- it seems gay characters are still more commonly used for comedy than drama; lesbians are still more widely and easily accepted by general audiences than gay men.

But since the film is fast becoming an historical record of a particular time, it's worth noting something interesting about that time. Made in 1995, the movie was hopeful about a broadening acceptance right on the horizon. That acceptance has come, but it was not right on the horizon. In fact, in the very next year, 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act as a preemptive strike against any states that might be about to legalize marriage equality. (I've written more previously about DOMA.) In short, it got worse before it got better.

But ultimately, how much you like this documentary is probably going to depend more on your enthusiasm for the history of film than it will on your opinion of gay people (fictional or real). There are fun details here about a number of different movies. But as the movie itself is more and more becoming a Hollywood relic, it may not offer enough for anyone but the film buffs. I give it a B-.