The Celluloid Closet - Hunter Bardin

    The Celluloid Closet is an interesting documentary about queer films and actors during the history of Hollywood. Many of these films are one that I have never seen before or even heard about until I saw them in this documentary. It was interesting to see how these older movies would secretly portray queer people through innuendos and mannerisms that won't necessarily be recognized by a general audience. Looking at these characters today though, it is easier to tell which characters are supposed to be queer in these films. It was also interesting to see how many of these films portrayed queer people as the villains of their respective stories. It went along with the general consensus of them at the time and you could argue that many people still think that way today. I also thought that it was interesting when they mentioned how Hollywood despite being general for LGBTQ was still being censored by many higher ups. Movies were and still are a business and this led to them mostly being run by very conservative people.  The thing I am more curious about is the direction queer film started to go after this documentary was made. With the general populous movie more to the left and companies as well, there have been major changes in how queer people are represented. 

    The Celluloid Closet came out in 1995 and was probably in production for a few years before that. Given that fact, we are missing about 30 years of queer cinema that has happened since this came out. With the higher inclusivity that we have been seeing with recent generations of people the representation of queer people has changed quite a bit. It hasn't even been six years since gay marriage was legalized in the United States and it would be interesting to see how much that has affected Hollywood. Seeing a "Celluloid Closet 2" would be nice to see as queerness has definitely been shown in a much better light since the original documentary came out. 

Follow-up Post

    After the in class discussion on the film a lot of things came up that I really didn't think about when watching the documentary. When we were discussing what characters we could think of from our childhood that were LGBTQ+ I was just drawing a blank. I can't say that none of the shows that I watched had none in them because once people in class started to name shows all I could think was, "Oh why didn't I think of that one?" Shows like Adventure Time and Glee, while I didn't watch them a lot, were shows that did have multiple prominent queer characters. As a kid I didn't watch too much TV so that could be another reason I wasn't as exposed to these types of characters as other people may have been. 

    It is a nice thing to see nowadays though with more representation being shown in a lot of cartoons. Shows like Adventure Time, The Legend of Kora, She-Ra, and Steven Universe. It feels like it has only been increasing exponentially in the past 5 years which is amazing to see. While I don't watch any of these shows myself, there are many children who do and being exposed to this at young age will help push more representation in the future. When I was younger I can't say I even knew what LGBTQ+ relationships were until my older sister started to watch Glee and explained it to me when I saw it. Now that there is more shows targeted at a younger audience that deals with queer relationships, I think we won't have to worry about kids not knowing anymore. 

    As in my original post I mentioned that seeing a sequel to The Celluloid Closet would be interesting and I would love to see how it covers all of the positive representation we have seen in the past few decades and how things may look in the future.