Borrowed Times
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday October 28, 1993
Want to make a movie? As the cost of even a basic feature spirals into the stratosphere, nothing could be easier. All the technology you need probably lurks in your living room.
Just take two VCR units and videos of some favourite films, hook them up, assemble a compilation of dubbed excerpts, edit them together to create a new narrative and add a voice-over.
Deconstruct. Reconfigure.
All illegal, of course - but then, as Jean Genet once said, everything belongs to the inspired thief.
At the 1993 Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, A Meeting Of Two Queens melded and juxtaposed images of two actors to create a relationship between two disparate characters, and to comment upon them. Similarly Mark Rappaport's feature, Rock Hudson's Home Movies, is a look at the work of Hollywood's most famous homosexual.
Rappaport's chutzpah is considerable, his scavenger's sense of opportunity admirable: not only does he "borrow" from more than 30 Hudson films, he even steals the credits for his own film from one of Hudson's.
In this discourse of theft, texts are pliable, plural, open-ended. Reassembled, recontextualised, the films provide a critique of Hudson's screen persona and, implicitly, the entire Hollywood sexual politic.
An actor (Eric Farr) plays the actor, here "confessing" to the viewer in a series of first-person, direct-tocamera addresses and voice-overs. Blandly, rather waxenly handsome, his delivery occasionally graceless, Parr is obviously not Hudson ... but then, by the end, we're left wondering whether we ever saw the real Rock Hudson, so great was the gap between projected image and fact.
Who was he, this man who, in the words of Rappaport, "went from being a great star to a dead fag", AIDS's first famous corpse? It was an earlier time, and silence reigned. In this film, post-AIDS, two words recur time and again: "Say it." Say gay.
As do the same figures (maternal older women; overly affectionate father figures) and the same co-stars: Tony Randall - prissy, neurotic, his characterisations not quite gay but asexual, a neutered foil intended to enhance Hudson's machismo; Doris Day, virginity and repression in the extreme.
Yet under Rappaport's unsparing eye, we witness a parade of inevitably interrupted kisses with female leads, lingering glances between male co-stars, apparently innocent dialogue pregnant with subtext and innuendo and wonder how we ever missed their significance. Like the scenes in Send Me No Flowers, when Hudson, convinced he is dying of a fatal disease - one of many prophetic moments - searches for a new husband for his co-star Doris Day. In Rappaport's words, "a blatant excuse to go cruising".
The film-maker's tone is difficult to ascertain - sometimes he's sniggering at the underlying implications, at others he seems genuinely outraged by the hypocrisy evident behind the scenes. Like the host of faceless, nameless supporting players whose overt, stereotypical homosexuality was amplified and exaggerated to the point of farce. Because they didn't matter - like black Americans, they didn't exist on screen except as a type - just substitute grotesque theatrical camp for servility.
Hudson, however, did exist - as Hollywood's Most Eligible Man, no less; a positive archetype for male values everywhere. Yet his secret life was no secret whatsoever to the Hollywood establishment, which seems to have indulged in some snide casting decisions at the actor's expense.
How many times could he play butch/fem double roles opposite Day? How many times would he find his formidable torso swathed in furs or feathers for comic effect? And how many times could he play a bachelor gay? The answers are found is this intelligent, entertaining essay-film. It's also, for the most part, hysterically funny. See it, but be quick.
Rock Hudson's Home Movies screens until Tuesday at the AFI with a short film, Fire Babies.
© 1993 Sydney Morning Herald