Veronica’s March Recommendations
GAY PRAIRIES AND RANGES: A collection of recommendations centered on queer love found amongst rolling hills or on horseback.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)
Ang Lee’s iconic Brokeback Mountain is perhaps the most obvious pick for this month’s theme. While all of Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis’ (Heath Ledger) time together is tragically secret, limited, and often emotionally fraught, Brokeback Mountain softens and romanticizes the common experience of gay love existing only on stolen time by placing it within beautiful vistas and quiet nature—sheer and total intimate focus amongst running creeks and stunning mountain ranges.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969)
Handsome Texan boy Joe Buck (Jon Voigt) may strike out to New York City to make his fortune as a (particularly inept and unprepared) hustler, but his subconscious psyche stays deep in Texas. Much of Midnight Cowboy takes place in Joe’s flickering remembrances of his mother, and of traumatic, nightmarish events on the hood of his car among a riled mob. While homophobic slurs and accusations are often bandied, and just as often rejected between the two men, Joe’s eventual business-meets-personal partnership with con man Rico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) takes on a certain dedicated intimacy with a definitively homoerotic texture.
MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)
Following the travails of two hustlers—the very wealthy, Scott (Keanu Reeves) who is “slumming it” for a few years, and the dysfunctional and narcoleptic Mikey (River Phoenix) — My Own Private Idaho is striking in its explicit gay text, speaking to desires ranging from fantasy-ridden interactions with clients to earnest love and longing with nuanced fluidity. Much like Midnight Cowboy, even when Mikey is in the city his psyche is littered with images of a quiet, Americana-toned past, with imagery that sits somehow both haunting and soothing.
DESERT HEARTS (1985)
A cinematic lesbian classic, Desert Hearts follows the slowly unfolding, surprising (at least to Vivian) spark between recently divorced professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) and young artist Cay Rivers (Patricia Carbonneau). The film takes place amongst farmhouses, rolling plains, and the occasional brief snippets of the quaint and comforting lights of Reno hotels, bars, and casinos. Desert Hearts’ quiet, comforting, and simple visual space gives one room to breathe, and to feel as if they are blossoming alongside Vivian.
CALAMITY JANE (1953)
Calamity Jane is a tried-and-true 1950s Technicolor musical, with Doris Day portraying the butch, rough-and-tumble historical gunslinger Calamity Jane. Somewhat laughably now, Day as Calamity is regularly confused as a man, despite her barely-hidden movie star locks and miles-long lashes. But what’s particularly thrilling about Calamity Jane is the film’s thrumming lesbian subtext, apparent almost campily when Calamity picks up a femme-y wannabe star and brings her back to perform in the small Western town of Deadwood. The two women literally shack up and paint their names on Calamity’s cabin while singing about the magic of a woman’s touch in a delightfully inadvertent mid-code queering.
(An aside: If one would like a grittier, more openly and wonderfully lesbian take on Calamity, they should look to the television series Deadwood).
Alisha’s March Recommendations
AN IRISH SENSE OF HUMOR: This week has wrecked me in ways I didn’t know I could be wrecked. For the first three days, I couldn’t sleep, and then the latter half I slept too much. Two days in a row I slept through my alarm, waking up without memory of ever having turned it off. My body feels mealy, like I’ve been gnawed upon by some cruel monster, and my eyes ache. I couldn’t stop crying yesterday, and when I did, I couldn’t stop feeling anxious, my thoughts chasing their own tails endlessly and in circles. I’ve not been good at distracting myself, and when I try, I feel guilty. I think about how distraction is such a luxury. But I am alive, I am here, and I have to go on.
I turned to films and shows and found only the following to be successful in consuming me. What they have in common is a dark Irish sense of humor. The act of following the dialogue through the accents is all-consuming, which is good, conducive to distracting. And beneath the humor there is a darkness, which allows for the art itself to not be too jarring. Black humor is lukewarm, like an in-between that respects my mental state even as it works to make me laugh.
DERRY GIRLS (2018-2022)
I finished this series in three days last week and wept for much of the third day as I neared completion. It’s beautiful. Following a group of teen girls in the ‘90s in Northern Ireland, the show is endlessly loveable. It’s about friendship and surviving a turbulent and transitional moment in time, the final decade of the 30-year-long period referred to locally as The Troubles, and internationally as the Northern Ireland Conflict. It’s about the salutary power and visceral necessity of family and community and laughter, about the need for love to survive, and, for this reason, it was instructional to me. This show is a gem and a balm, a companion as much as it is a reminder of companionship.
BOYS FROM COUNTY HELL (2020)
This is a horror comedy about a vampire from an early Irish legend called Abhartach, who, by some scholars, is believed to have inspired Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula in the writer’s legendary novel. It follows a young man and his construction team who, in preparing the land for the construction of a bypass, accidentally awaken Abhartach after demolishing the cairn that marked his grave. This film is irresistible for its warm humor, entertaining for its delicious genre throwbacks, and compelling for its world-building. But I am most gelled to it for its endearing backbone — at its core, it contains a story about love and life, the necessity to persist despite, and perhaps armed with, the fact of death and loss.
A FILM WITH ME IN IT (2008)
Mark (Mark Doherty) is an out-of-luck actor who is having a very bad day. He lives in an apartment that is falling apart, which his landlord won’t fix because Mark owes him three months of rent, and his girlfriend is about to leave him. But the day goes from bad to worse to even worse when in a series of freak accidents, people start dropping dead around him. With the help of his likewise out-of-luck friend Pierce (Dylan Moran), Mark tries to figure a way out of his impossible and dire situation. This film surprised me with how much it made me laugh. Moran is his usual, and therefore delightfully hilarious, sardonic self as a screenwriter who drinks too much, despite his commitment to quit. He can only have one pint, he says right after attending an AA meeting. This film is so deliciously meta as it simultaneously cheekily nods to and explodes narrative tropes, plays around with our understanding of film logic and notions of absurdity, to the extent that it at once feels controlled as a Rube Goldberg machine and unpredictable as a choose-your-own-adventure game. It truly is an all-encompassing gem.
PERRIER’S BOUNTY (2009)
Similar to A Film with Me in It, Perrier’s Bounty charts a very bad couple of days for Cillian Murphy’s Michael. At the film’s beginning, he is merely troubled because he has to repay his loan to Brendan Gleeson’s Perrier, a fearsome gangster. But then a friend of his kills one of Perrier’s debt-collecting cronies, at which point Perrier places a bounty on Michael’s head, and things go from very terrible to even worse. There’s a lot of action and a lot of swearing, but there’s also a sweet story about love and forgiveness. This film is a good time.