Gus van sant gay

The characters are relaxed about who they are because they are almost invariably cool. These films are centered on gay identity and the struggles that come with that identity. To Die For features another older/younger sexual interaction,and although it is a heterosexual coupling between characters played by Joaquin Phoenix and Nicole Kidman,it also shows sex as a manipulative gesture from Kidman’s character, completely devoid of emotion.

His films typically deal with themes of marginalized subcultures, in particular homosexuality. Regardless, Phoenix’s pink shorts are incredibly conspicuous and point to another possible factor for how Van Sant’s stylizes his sex scenes: the actors are too young to engage in them. Van Sant has stated that he intended Elephant to be a compilation of all possible factors that contributed to the Columbine massacre including video games, bullying, and neglectful parenting.

Forrester was a decidedly nonsexual take on the older male/younger male mentor relationship found between Scott, the Hal character and Bob, the Falstaff character in My Own Private Idaho and the therapist/patient relationship between Robin Williams character and Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting. The original Psycho provided the prototype for all queer serial killers of the past fifty years, and Van Sant’s Norman Bates is certainly queer, but not the ambiguous androgynous young queers that he does to perfection.

.

were about gay characters.

The androgynous young male is a motif that runs through all the films and allows Van Sant to deal with queer themes in what are often seemingly heteronormative narratives.These androgynous young characters become more prominent and more significant post-Good Will Hunting.After the huge critical and financial success of that film, released in 1997, Van Sant redid Hitchcock’s Psycho (1998) and then made Finding Forrester (2000).

His film, Milk (2008), portrays the life of gay activist, politician, and martyr Harvey Milk. The exception to this might be Milk,in which Harvey Milk carries out two relationships with younger men, but in these cases there are absolutely no issues regarding the sexuality of the partners. But there is another side to Van Sant’s oeuvre that is neither gay nor straight but subversively queer in its ambiguity.

The film is hardly concerned with the crime as much as it is with Alex’s reaction to the crime and the resulting emotions, which are felicitously close to those that any young queer person might feel in a heteronormative high school where every guy is supposed to want to have sex with the cheerleaders. In Mala Noche, the gay protagonist, Walt, is irrepressibly in pursuit of a younger Mexican man, Johnny, but there is hardly any friction in the film over Walt’s sexual identity.

Van Sant claims that he included a kissing scene in the shower because the characters suddenly felt uninhibited because they knew they were going to die. Part of this reputation undoubtedly derives from a desire to claim his high quality and original films for the gay community simply because he is a gay filmmaker. There is beauty without any of the squeamishness of explicitly depicted sex, almost like a painting or sculpture that points to an ideal without the messiness of the carnal.

Immediately before we see the two teenage boys massacre their fellow high school students,they shower together, and it is suggested that they kiss. There is no way to pin them down and thus they are queer and subversive,rather than gay and categorized. One of Harvey Milk’s strategies was to have people in the community come out in order to raise awareness and sympathy for gay causes.