What We Choose, What We Receive

Posted on November 15, 2005 in Blogging Film Reflections

UPDATED

Maria: Your old tutor did you a great disservice, Mr. Kynaston. He taught you how to speak, and swoon, and toss your head but he never taught you how to suffer like a woman, or love like a woman. He trapped a man in a woman’s form and left you there to die! I always hated you as Desdemona. You never fought! You just died, beautifully. No woman would die like that, no matter how much she loved him. A woman would fight!

We rented Stage Beauty, a gem of a film about the identities we receive and the identities we make for ourselves. Ned Kynaston was the last of the great male actors who specialized in portraying women. This film begins with this fact and explores what this profession could do to the man who followed it. Kynaston suddenly finds his profession flooded by real women and then outlawed by the king who thinks it immoral for men to feminize themselves.

The question: Kynaston has entertained many male lovers. But is he gay or merely acting out his role? Did he choose his profession or was it forced upon him by his tutor? Does he know who he really wants to be as a person?

These questions are equally important for both the straight and the gay. Are you who you are or who someone else chose you to be? (Rupert Everett — who is gay — played King Charles. No doubt he understands the distinction I make here.) They are, in fact, critical for everyone to embrace and re-embrace throughout their lives. In blogdom, especially, we can give much energy to our causes — so much so that we become the format of our pages more than who we are. Who knows us, really?

Most bloggers have no idea how to speak of the world as a rancid pear and find beauty in the look, the feel, and the smell of that.

* * * * *

Farewell my Concubine is another great film in this tiny genre. It tells the story of two boys raised in the theater — one to portray a king, one to portray the king’s concubine. The latter does not want his role, but is forced into it. Consequently, he becomes confused about who he is.

Both of these films speak of a time when the theater was autocratic, when it expropriated children to make the “perfect actor” to fit a particular part. It was child abuse. Kynahan speaks of living in a pit with fourteen other boys while his tutor turns him into the ideal man-woman for Shakespearean parts. The conditions that the future actors experience in Concubine are shown.

In England, clerics railed against the “feminization” of the men. It was a bad choice of words. The compassionate observer, knowledgeable of the illness called homophobia, would speak instead of gender confusion.

Kynahan, as shown in the film, was a man who couldn’t figure out exactly what he wanted because of his training. His lover loved him because he saw him as a woman. You could call this buggery, but not homosexuality.

In our free world –threatened as it is by the manacle bearers of the paranoid Right — a man can be a man and love another man and be loved by a man who knows he is a man. This is choice, moral and true to the way the person is formed through genetics.

And yet it behooves us to remember that once there were institutions which forced gender on the unwilling. These might be the original models for one of the Right’s most scarring myths, that of homosexuals who “recruit” young boys.