Stonewall movie 2015 version-review
(BTW the Stonewall 1995 movie is on youtube, and better IMHO)
September 22, 2015 10:01 am
Stonewall Is Terribly Offensive, and Offensively Terrible, Vanity Fair
LINK>>>http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/09/stonewall-review-roland-emmerich
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But more troubling was how Emmerich seemed to be framing the story, with Jeremy Irvine playing some beautiful, blond angel from the Midwest, sent to the Village to marshall the non-white, gender-queer street kids into action. Which, y’know, is certainly not how the Stonewall riots, which were largely incited by drag queens and trans women of color and lesbians, actually happened. And yet there was Irvine in the trailer, looking corn-fed and fit in a white T-shirt, while various characters closer to the demographic of the real Stonewall rioters slinked around him in the dark. So, there was hue and cry about that, as well there should have been.
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What this really is, I think, is the filmmakers tending to their personal preferences and prejudices, and then blaming the system. Darn it, this is how it has to be, because that’s how the world is. We have to literally see a black character hand Danny a brick so Danny can be the first to throw it and the first to cheer “Gay power!” (This is the moment my screening audience, of professional critics, was lost to groans and laughter for the rest of the movie.) We simply must redirect as much history as possible through a white, bizarrely heteronormative lens, or else, the thinking goes, no one will care. People like Emmerich throw up their hands at this supposed inevitability and say, “That’s just the way it is.”
Which, of course, is nonsense. When Straight Outta Compton is earning $60 million on its opening weekend, it’s nonsense. When Tangerine is earning rave reviews and art-house dollars, it’s nonsense. When a show like Transparent is winning Emmys, it’s nonsense. But Stonewall demands that we accept Emmerich’s evasive, self-serving sociology and then has the audacity to ask that we be moved by it. We’re not.
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Maybe it’s asking too much to get a smart, accurate Stonewall movie. After all, a heck of a lot of straight history has been schmaltzified by Hollywood, neatly edited and tidied up, so why shouldn’t gay history get the same shitty treatment? But that this film was directed by a gay man, written by a gay man, with an obvious intent to educate, uplift, and inspire, in this particular political climate, and is still so maddeningly, stultifyingly bungled serves only to show us how ridiculous the concept of a monolithic “gay community” really is. Stonewall at least does that bit of good: it illustrates how systems of privilege and prejudice within a minority can be just as pervasive and ugly as anything imposed from the outside. And that’s an outrage. So how long until someone throws a brick through the screen?
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