Viewer Makes Meaning
By James Tucker

In Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright’s book Practices of Looking, an image’s semiotic meaning is believed to be produced ‘through a complex social relationship’(1) between image, producer, audience and context of seeing. The chapter Viewer Makes Meaning argues that an image speaks to viewers who are tuned into certain aspects of that image and that ways of seeing are influenced by aspects such as age, class, gender, religion and sexual orientation. It is this last example I wanted to focus on, and see how it can influence the semiotic meaning of an image or images. To do so I have focused on two films - Rope (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1948), a mainstream Hollywood film that was censored under the Hays code of the time and Edward II (Dir. Derek Jarman, 1991), a film made by a gay director in conservative Britain.

Rope is the story of two men who commit a murder in their apartment, hide the body under a trunk and hold a party where the guests eat off the trunk unaware of the body inside. The film is based on a true story of two lovers Leopold and Loeb yet their homosexuality is not mentioned in the film itself, despite the fact that the filmmakers were aware of the characters sexualities. The primary reason for this is due to the fact that Hollywood production had to adhere to the Hay’s Production Code upheld by the catholic churches Legion of Decency which censored issues deemed unacceptable to the moral majority of conservative Americans. These restrictions included open mouthed kissing, white slavery and prostitution, nudity and sexual perversion amongst others. However, as narrator Lily Tomlin comments in The Celluloid Closet, “Hollywood didn’t erase Homosexuals…it just gave them a new identity, as cold blooded villains” (2)

Rope is a perfect example of such sexual subtlety at work. There are multiple examples in which, like Rope, homosexuality is hinted at, but never mentioned due to the restrictions of the Hay’s Code. Such films include Dracula’s Daughter (Dir. Lambert Hillyer, 1936) and Rebecca (Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). Arthur Laurents, screenwriter of Rope comments in The Celluloid Closet how that when it came to homosexuality in the films of that period, “nobody realised…that’s how they got by (the censors)”. (3) For me, this raised an interesting question as to how a gay audience of the time would read the film as apposed to a straight audience. My own personal reading of Rope is that it shows two gay men involved in a criminal act, which for considering the time could be a metaphorical act suggesting gay sex. The curtains being pulled for privacy, the lighting of the cigarette, the fear of discovery and the post crime conversation all points – for myself at least, to gay sex. This subtle suggestion becomes even more apparent when Farley Granger’s character Philip asks, “how did you feel during it?” and John Dall’s Brandon replies, “until his body went limp and I knew it was over…and I felt tremendously exhilarated”.(4) Farley Grangers character is consumed with guilt and fear whilst John Dall’s character is proud and excited as he enjoys the idea of marginality. He even revels in the “artistic angle” of the act. Both emotions portrayed by Granger and Dall would have been very probable for gay men of the time.

For a heterosexual audience, it is hard to imagine that these readings would be made unless the history of the true story were known, and even then, whether the criminal act of the murder would be equated as a code for homosexual unlawfulness. Jacques Aumont, in his book The Image, describes writer E.H Gombrich’s principal of the Etcetera Law. (5) Here, the viewer makes up for what is not represented in the image he or she is viewing. The role of the spectator then, is projective. It is not passive, but active is creating meaning. Although Aumont is referring to the still image, it is very possible to correlate this operation of thought with the process of watching a film. Like so many other coded films of Hollywood during the restrictive Hays code, writer Susie Bright, speaking on The Celluloid Closet noted the audience would start to “write a whole other script for what is really going on”. (6) Lee Wallace, writing in Screen upholds this idea, stating that Rope, with its coded homosexual theme ‘raises the possibility of homosexuality within the films story, only to deny it’. (7) He goes on to recognise Rope’s suggestive framing of the male bodies in a too close proximity that recalls the clutch of romance and explains how the Hays code didn’t succeed in cancelling homosexuals, but allowed the issue to be articulated outside the ‘denotative quarantine of the films diegesis’. (8) This would then allow audiences who were ‘tuned in’ to the idea of homosexuality to make a meaning being denied within the films context by the filmmakers. Rope is therefore a film about the pleasure, pain and criminality of homosexuality in a conservative, homosexual image starved society, or it is a cleverly constructed thriller about two men who commit a murder and are dangerously close to being caught. Or it could mean both.

Rope fits in with a tradition of gay films representing gays as criminals. Countless examples of this trend include Sebastiane and Caravaggio (Dir. Derek Jarman, 1976 and 1986), Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Dir. Pier Paolo Passolini,1975), Querelle (Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982), and more recently The Talented Mr Ripley (Dir. Anthony Minghella, 1999). As David Gardner notes, these films represent identities far beyond the margins of an accepted social order, in terms that both ‘privilege and give voice to an alternate aesthetic’. (9) He goes on to say ‘often what is admired from the margins is simultaneously unacceptable to the norms of the society at large.’ (10) The visibility of a gay protagonist as criminal could then be seen as a positive representation – in that, as with any subculture, it subverts the mainstream culture. As David Gardner discovers, writer and filmmaker Jean Genet (whose novel was the basis for the film Querelle) has demonstrated that there is ‘ample power in a ‘bad’ representation, providing that there is upheaval of societal norms’. (11)

The next film in question, Edward II is a further example of this idea of gay man as criminal. It is the true story of English King Edward who ruled from 1307 till 1327. Historically assumed to be homosexual, Jarman’s film depicts the King’s relationship with his lover Gaviston and the resultant turmoil that this created. The film differs in setting, time period and era of production from Rope. It comes after the legalisation of homosexuality in England (its country of production) and also during the paranoia and fear associated with the AIDS crisis. Therefore any readings of this film would be heavily influenced by the context of viewing. Despite legalisation, the Thatcher government had introduced Clause 28 in 1988 and there was still inequality in age of consent for gay men - thus constant policing of gay activity. Society was largely conservative, in panic over the AIDS virus and in confusion over its ability to be transmitted.

In keeping with the gay as criminal tradition, King Edward murders the man who killed his lover Gaviston, in an act of revenge. The film also features homosexual imagery such as naked male bodies and gay men kissing and in sexual activity. Both images have the power to shock or delight. David Gardner comments that ‘in a resistant reading, they signal strength and activism: the shock value of a declaration of ones marginal desire, the insistence of ones existence, the dramatisation of the struggle itself.’ (12) So, even if an audience member sees these images as negative or even repulsive, Gardner seems to be qualifying Jean Genet’s belief in the power of even a possible ‘bad image’. The sexually explicit images in Edward II, along with many of Jarman’s other films constitutes Richard Porton’s belief in the ‘political importance of sexual dissidence’ (13) in that sexually explicit images have the power to shock, and shock is a very powerful political tool.

From his earliest feature film Sebastiane (1976), Derek Jarman’s films have focused on the personal experience within the political struggle. Martin Quinn-Meyler notes that as a gay man, Jarman was opposed to what he called “hetersoc” (14) – meaning the heterosexual hegemony and its oppression of homosexual desire and imagery. He used his story of King Edward to oppose the heterosexual majority that “continues to control offices of the state and institutes of civil society”. (15) For a gay audience then, Edward II’s sexually explicit imagery of homosexuality would be important to present identifiable imagery that allows for a pleasure in looking, so often encouraged for heterosexual audiences, yet denied for homosexuals. This fact is emphasised by filmmaker Jan Oxenberg when she comments how “we are pathetically starved for images of ourselves”. (16) Secondly, for a straight audience, the images could cause nothing more than disgust. But for Jarman, this is the precise reaction he would have been aiming for from a conservative audience.

For a homophobic audience, King Edwards killing of a layman could represent the criminal inherent in the perverted, lawless homosexual who threatens the state and normality. However, for a gay audience, it represents the understandable reaction of a homosexual man, deep in despair at his unaccepted love for another. He is a man who has been so far forced to outlaw his only love Gaviston, in order to protect his kingdom. Contemporary gay males could identify with this feeling - whereas Edward relinquishes his true love in order to protect his position as monarch, many gay men of the late 20th century have had to conceal their sexualities in order to protect their jobs or families.

Edward II is, however, mainstream enough to allow the King an obvious diegetic motive for his murder. Many films such as Caravaggio (Dir. Derek Jarman, 1986) and Querelle (Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982) take the even more subversive route of having ambiguous motives, where the act of criminality is fundamentally a resistant act to undermine the repressions of a heterosexual society.

Other symbolic readings in Edward II are possible – for example, Queen Isabella’s vampire like biting and blood sucking of her brother’s neck is not merely a horror cliché but is, as Quinn-Meyler puts it, a ‘supreme transgression of a sexual taboo inseparable from AIDS.’ (17) This reading would be all the more apparent when seen in its time of production due to the heightened anxiety over the virus. I have to admit that the image meant no more to me than perhaps a misogynistic representation of the evilness of Isabella’s character. An interesting rhetorical question is whether this lack of reading is due to my reviewing the film 14 years after its production, and because of the decline in media attention on the AIDS illness.

It is apparent that both films are polysemic and the meanings produced are based on not only your own particular sexuality, but also the time and political/social culture in which the films are viewed. It is important to note, as filmmaker Isaac Julien states in Queer Looks, that there is no ‘homogeneous (gay) audience’.(18) As with heterosexual society, homosexual views are influenced by race, class, sex, and cultural context as well as ones own unique personal experience. Jeffrey Weeks also insists on this lack of homogenous gay culture by saying ‘homosexual behaviour does not give rise automatically, or even necessarily to a homosexual identity.’ (19) Jarman himself certainly did not share the view of many homosexuals that gay people should be “normalised” (a belief held by many Stonewall activists) and this is why he became synonymous with images that would shock, and not accommodate the ignorance of mainstream society. Despite the inability to identify any mythical collective ‘homosexual look’, it is still important to acknowledge that sexuality is an integral part of a person’s perception of the world and that (as demonstrated in this essay) it has the ability to affect the meanings of a film – both intended by the producer, and perceived by the viewer.

Endnotes

1. Sturken, M & Cartwright, L., Practices of Looking! An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.45
2. The Celluloid Closet, Dir. Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, USA, 1995
3. ibid.
4 . Rope, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., USA, 1948
5. Aumont, J., The Image, BFI Publishing, London, 1997, p.60
6. The Celluloid Closet, op.cit.
7. Wallace, L., ‘Continuous Sex: The Editing of Homosexuality in Bound and Rope’, Screen, Volume 41 No 4, Winter 2000, p.376
8. ibid., p.376
9. Gardner, D., ‘Perverse Law: Jarman as Gay Criminal Hero’, in Lippard, C., (ed.) By Angels Driven: The Films Of Derek Jarman, Flicks Books, London, 1996, p. 32
10. ibid., p.32
11. Gardner, op.cit, p.38
12.Gardner, op.cit, p.51
13. Porton, R., ‘Language Games and Aestetic Attitudes: Style and Ideology in Jarman’s Late Films’, in Lippard, C., (ed.) By Angels Driven: The Films Of Derek Jarman, Flicks Books, London, 1996, p.136
14. Quinn-Meyler, M., ‘Opposing “Heterosoc”: Derek Jarman’s Counter Hegemonic Activism’, in Lippard, C., (ed.) By Angels Driven: The Films Of Derek Jarman, Flicks Books, London, 1996, p.119
15. ibid., p.119
16. The Celluloid Closet, op.cit
17. Quinn-Meyler, op.cit, p.127
18. Julien, I., ‘Filling the Lack in Everyone is Quite Hard Really…’, in Gever M., Parmar, P., & Greyson J., (ed) Queer Looks, Routledge, London, 1993, p.51
19. Weeks, J., ‘Inverts, Perverts and Mary Annes’, in Gelder, K., & Thornton, S., (ed.) The Subcultures Reader, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 269

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aumont, J., The Image, BFI Publishing, London, 1997

The Celluloid Closet, Dir. Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, USA, 1995

Gardner, D., ‘Perverse Law: Jarman as Gay Criminal Hero’, in Lippard, C., (ed.) By Angels Driven: The Films Of Derek Jarman, Flicks Books, London, 1996

Edward II, Dir. Derek Jarman, UK, 1991

Julien, I., ‘Filling the Lack in Everyone is Quite Hard Really…’, in Gever M., Parmar, P., & Greyson J., (ed) Queer Looks, Routledge, London, 1993

Porton, R., ‘Language Games and Aestetic Attitudes: Style and Ideology in Jarman’s Late Films’, in Lippard, C., (ed.) By Angels Driven: The Films Of Derek Jarman, Flicks Books, London, 1996

Quinn-Meyler, M., ‘Opposing “Heterosoc”: Derek Jarman’s Counter Hegemonic Activism’, in Lippard, C., (ed.) By Angels Driven: The Films Of Derek Jarman, Flicks Books, London, 1996

Rope, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Warner Bros., USA, 1948

Sturken, M & Cartwright, L., Practices of Looking! An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford University Press, 2001

Wallace, L., ‘Continuous Sex: The Editing of Homosexuality in Bound and Rope’, Screen, Volume 41 No 4, Winter 2000

Weeks, J., ‘Inverts, Perverts and Mary Annes’, in Gelder, K., & Thornton, S., (ed.) The Subcultures Reader, Routledge, London, 1997