| Subject: Subtext and Ber-Hur |
Author:
Jane
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Date Posted: 12:24:40 04/07/01 Sat
I’m new to message boards, so can I apologise in advance if I’m misusing the medium, but there is something I’d like to say.
I found this message board while surfing around the subject of subtext. I leafed back through the archive and, as part of a debate about Human Error, came across
>We mostly loved Imperfection, with all its subtext,
>and hot J/7 scenes, and what Janeway was willing to
>do for Seven that she hadn't even really considered
>doing for anyone else. But when I mentioned that to
>some of the writers, they thought I was crazy. They
>didn't see it, or at least didn't admit to it.
This quote twanged my memory of a Gore Vidal interview about ‘Ben-Hur’. From what I remember, Vidal’s brief for the scenes he wrote was, a Jewish guy and a Roman guy used to be boyhood friends and now they ain’t. Vidal felt this wasn’t enough to hang an epic story onto, so he reformulated it as, a Jewish guy and a Roman guy used to be lovers, the Roman guy wants to restart the relationship and the Jewish guy doesn’t. This version had far more emotional fireworks to it, so that was how Vidal wrote it and that was how Stephen Boyd acted it. The consensus was that Charlton Heston would freak out at the idea, so no one told him, however it didn’t stop the chemistry between the two actors transforming the film.
I’m not sure if the homoeroticism in Ben-Hur can count as subtext since it was the scriptwriter’s primary intention - maybe the ‘just friends’ reading is the subtext one. However Charlton Heston’s ignorance does prove that just because actors don’t know what they’re portraying doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Cinema is now over 100 years old. TV is a few decades behind. Over this period of time traditions have been built up, along with all the lessons, learnt by trial and error, of what works on film and what doesn’t. Ben-Hur was a major event in the history of cinema (and it’s the deliberate insertion of homoeroticism that I know about) but I am certain there have been countless other gay writers putting in their contribution. What has resulted is the knowledge that you can increase the tension between two same-sex characters if they stand very close, make lots of eye and body contact and keep their attention fixed on each other. There is also the cinematic double-think that it is normal for ‘friends’ on screen to display level of a passionate commitment to each other that would result in sideways looks if encountered in real life. It’s possible that some writers, directors and actors don’t know *why* this works - but (like I said above) just because scriptwriters don’t know what they’re writing doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
As Gore Vidal realised – friendship alone won’t deliver the emotional fireworks that epic storytelling on cinema and TV need.
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