Pillow Talk, some comments and questions (Sinkah, Ameutruist (sp) )

bah if you'd asked this yesterday morning i could have watched it w. dr vick last night — she wd see it w.fresh eyes

but it's very good on how the middle-class domestic dramas of the 30s and 40s (as written eg by n.coward and t.rattigan) had SUPER-ENORMOUS gay subtexts which many non-gay but sophisticated playgoers knew all abt and enjoyed—and also about how much of this wz played out in clothes and "mise en scene" blah blah

but i don't iknow where PT stands in relationship to brit theatre: possibly nowhere much

anyways a list of maybe maybe not queer signifers (fuck thats such a mouth full--can we just call them lavendar snuggles ?)

1) the jokes about anaylsts and mothers (there are at least three of them)
2) the scene in the bar, mentioned in the celluiod closet, where rock convinces doris he is gay--but this ends with a pretty hot kiss which means sensitive does not equal queer--but also at the end, there is this really tense stare down b/w rock and tony randall, which seems to hve more baggage then just rivals, it lasts too long for one...and the bar is actually called
3) when doris day talks about being a consenting adult--we are 21 we should be able to do what we want.
4) rock hudson in a pink bathtub
5) rock hudson showing his chest to tony randall
6) the whole design subplot, including the ott camp apartment that ends the film (but then the girl ends up at that place, and the place is designed as a punishment but rich fabrics, the colours, the moose head, its this weird reversal of bachelor masculinity)
7) the colour (cosmetic colour or obsessively formalist colour)
8) a certain wry urbanity
9) the ongoing obstetrics office jokes maybe ?
10) the music that tells of the big discovery (the big discovery scene is told entirely by music) makes it as insanely dramatic as hitchcock, veritgo, etc---the high drama used for the domestic, the hi/lo can be an example of camp
11) smarmy desk clerk scene (cf ews and alan cumming)
12) the ghost walking montage (it goes from the most cloying and domestic tourist shit to times sqaure at night, the narrative might subtextually guide from there)

alot of this is reaching, alot of this is b/c gay folx like it, alot of this is much weirder or more hidden or more complex then i have given credit for, im not sure if its theban hordes wanting lavendar snuggles--the bar scene is the one most cited as explicit in its queerness, but they use it as in introduction to heteronormativeness.

the various disparate mindsets of the production collective = u&k to unpick? (gay foax a-smugglin + straight foax in on the joke + straight foax NOT in on the joke)

also: "50s gay=coded" translates easily (and fairly) enough into "coded=gay", as far as audiences are concerned: the queer reading honours the hidden/latent intention (which somewhat fux w.old-skool auteurism)

what wz the last one i recommended!?

off to the wars...the one on the english civil war.
kicked my ass it does.

by "sirk-style" i mean "look for some of the strongest ideas in the so-called 'marginal' elements" (viz semiotics of decor)

in film (and pop) you have a bunch of craftsmen hired work on difft elements: any given director may be at sea with - even indifferent to - some of these elements, in which case the hireling is able to sneak counter-ideas in among the whole production

i'm dubious abt treating a POEM (solely) as an artistic unity (as opposed eg to a clamour of ghostly voices): this goes a hundred-fold for a movie

"So Functional for its Purposes: Rock Hudson’s Bachelor Apartment in Pillow Talk." STUD: Architectures of Masculinity. Joel Sanders, ed. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. 28-41.

"Reading this quintessence of 50s masculinity through Pillow Talk, through Playboy Magazine, and through promotional material that helped construct Hudson's star persona, Cohan shows how that persona was always a function of the homosexual closet that bachelorhood, on and off screen, encoded. The split role that Hudson plays in Pillow Talk, like the two bedrooms in the film's Playboy-style bachelor pad, create a duality that makes visible the performative quality of Hudson's masculinity."

i think that by all the doubt i was expressing in the points above, and by making fun of it, i was saying im not sure this exists, or if it exists, then who is putting it in?

how can you avoid reading the marginal elements in this film, when it is so central (esp. costume and decor--is there another movie which makes it more integral?)

i never understand what they mean by 'function' in sentences like that!! [actual gay men are a 'manifestation' of an Ideal closet? is that it? help!]

all i meant wz, just bcz the directors (or indeed stars) didn't "intend" something to be read into a film, doesn't mean it isn't actually really there, esp. in anything only makeable by emloying hundreds of people, some w.more freedom than others

[nrq i think there are queer theorists who do pretty much argue that, viz bersani sorta kinda; also "function" in mathematical terms is pretty open-ended!!]

i dont hink this is being read from the 60s, from a cult pol kind of way, because i think that these texts were ignored unti queer semoticians moved them from arent they fun to wait a minute something is happening here.

(ie from celluiod closet to rock hudsons home movies?)

and i think you are underselling the weirdness that is encoded in the marignal elements, in how the marginal elements are recentered (and how things like score jangle the nerv es in a way that seems subversive)

in this film its like a fight in the kitchen, everyone trying to rest control

also lavendar snuggles for all.

re marginal elements: i am purely talkin abstractly anthony, not abt pillow talk specifically, it's too long since i saw it

i guess i'm trying to tease out the content of yr ambivalence about whether you're reading something into it that isn't there, and proposing (in the abstract) a way of exploring this

my kneejerk on PT wd be that it is a canonic "queer text" by intention!! but like i said i haven't seen it for an age and my reading is over-informed by all my lesb chums who think DD is superhott

can we talk about the hats now?

http://www.homevideos.com/freezeframes918/pillowtalk23.jpeg

i need to see that!

My wife and I watched this with my parents last week during vacation and, completely left-field ending aside, it was really really funny (I particularly liked Doris Day and Tony Randall driving back from CT)

it's been ages, i need to rewatch to see if i like it.

The pacing was decidedly different from modern comedies, much more willing to drop you into a scenario and let amusement spin out of understandable exasperation rather than trying to make every character Real and Nuanced. Rock Hudson's scheme makes absolutely no sense whatsoever in terms of sustainability, particularly after he falls in love with Doris Day, but it doesn't really matter because the charisma between them works so well. Also Tony Randall slays.

losing nominees to this for the original screenplay Oscar in '59: The 400 Blows and Wild Strawberries