ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES
In the creation of art, the verb is there to authenticate the subject with the same name.
The first two changes are to my mind unambiguous disasters that have effectively handed over the future of American cinema to stupid, tasteless merchandisers with none of the old studio heads’ savvy. The current moguls, without imagination or vision, have no compunction whatever about forcing their demographic conclusions on audiences, both developing and exploiting the spectator’s passivity in relation to the film industry and eliminating most options outside it. The third change, on the other hand, despite the overall damage it’s done to the social and theatrical aspects of moviegoing, also carries a new, radical potential: spectators can become active, critical, creative, and selective–not only more discerning in what they choose to see but producers in their own right.
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Unfortunately, neither my own form of play nor scratch videos remained a creative outlet for many people; the purely passive recording of the creative works of others took over. But in 1989 Jean-Luc Godard broadcast the first two parts of a projected ten-part TV series still in progress, Histoire(s) du cinema; essentially this series raises the art of scratch videos to the complex polyphonic level of symphonic fugues and Finnegans Wake. (After many screenings at European festivals, these two parts recently premiered in New York at the Museum of Modern Art’s Godard retrospective; whether they will be shown more widely is still unclear–it’s virtually impossible to subtitle them.)
Then, while we hear Doris Day sing the title song of Pillow Talk, we see a color still of Hudson looking out an autumnal, windswept window in Written on the Wind; over this appear the words “Rock Hudson,” followed by the remainder of the video’s title, so it reads “Rock Hudson’s HOME MOVIES.” Hudson’s name remains on the screen to become part of two other configurations: “by Rock Hudson and MARK RAPPAPORT” and “starring Rock Hudson and ERIC FARR.”
By assigning Hudson a hypothetical voice in this matter Rappaport opens up a fissure in the Rock Hudson text that no amount of studio hype and industry gush can close. For as the video repeatedly shows, the countless movies in which Hudson appeared, always in stereotypical heterosexual roles, were not so much indifferent to Hudson’s homosexuality as they were hyperaware of it, with the grotesque consequence that double entendres and innuendos about Hudson’s sexuality abound. Some of these allusions were undoubtedly accidental, though they’re certainly ready to be unpacked as Freudian slips–“the return of the repressed” in all its fury. Hudson’s apparently passive and compliant response to this constant humiliation becomes equivalent in certain ways to the spectator’s passive and ultimately alienating relationship to Hudson’s false roles and postures, a relationship held in place by the same ideology. Whatever the source of these Freudian slips, it’s impossible to imagine that Hudson was unaware of most of them, and the bulk of Rappaport’s video explores this disquieting fact, outlining a lost chapter in film history that can be perceived today only speculatively, through a fictional gay Hudson we can now juxtapose with the fictional straight one.
The most staggering number of index entries undoubtedly are the clips of men cruising one another in Hudson’s movies; by my count, there are five dozen examples in the video, and their cumulative impact is both devastating and hilarious. These instances of male flirtation are presented in various subcategories (such as the male cruising in Douglas Sirk movies and what Rappaport calls “pedagogical eros”) and even certain sub-subcategories (such as the moments of physical contact between Hudson and Otto Kruger, the teacher figure in Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, and moments of lustful eye contact between Hudson and Tony Randall in the 60s Doris Day trilogy of Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, and Send Me No Flowers). We’re also given samples of Hudson’s apparent on-screen flirtations with Kirk Douglas, Burl Ives, John Wayne (“putting the make on Duke”), Earl Holliman, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Vittorio De Sica, among others. Rappaport clearly does not feel obliged to limit his observations to Hudson movies, showing us the same suggestive dialogue between male buddies in two versions of A Farewell to Arms filmed a quarter of a century apart–one between Adolphe Menjou and Gary Cooper, the other between De Sica and Hudson.
