Tonisha Spratte Blog 10

Blog 10:  Savage Nights! (rawr!)

That French movie we watched was really something else.  I know it was based off of a true story but it just didn’t seem realistic!  There was just so much going on in that movie, it just didn’t seem to slow down, as one classmate put it.  There were quite a few different themes and subjects being touched on.  There was that of love, death and mortality, relationships, sex, race, and sexuality to name a few.  I realized that the main character, Jean, reminds me of Charlie Sheen in the way he lives his life, wild and fast.  Jean is really confused as to what he wants to do with his life.  He doesn’t know if he wants to be with a woman or a man, be in a relationship or not, he doesn’t know how to be faithful and is really self-absorbed.  Which I can understand to some extent, he does have AIDS and is dying slowly, but dang.  I just think they are naturally crazy people.  I think that the old saying, “birds of a feather flock together”, really applies to this situation.  Jean was a narcissist, Laura was crazy, and Samy was a sadomasochist who didn’t love people but inflicting pain on people and himself.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Iris Young’s article on the lived body.  It seems that Jean and Samy didn’t fully embody all of the typical stereotypes of a masculine man or all of the stereotypes of a gay man.  There were many times when gender roles were challenged or crossed.  At one point in the movie Laura says “two men together, it’s so strange” or something like that.  Also, Jean wasn’t a flamboyantly gay man, he didn’t seem gay to me until he started eyeing Samy like he wanted to take a bite.  He did many masculine things such as boxing, having sex with girls, and being selfish.  He was much more open and accepting of his sexuality than Samy, who, in the beginning of the movie, denied that he was gay and towards the end, when someone asked if he was gay he just ignored the question, left the room, and went to go have sex with Jean.  I’m thinking that Samy was gay but his biggest attraction was to pain.  So there’s a dichotomy between two gay guys, one who is open and out of the closet and one who is engaging in sexual activities with men, but just peeking out of the closet. 

And speaking of closet, what about that closet case, Laura?  That girl was just plain crazy and, honestly, I do not think it was love.  I think it was craziness.  But I digress.  So in all, this movie was a wonderful addition to the course, it really embodied a lot of the topics we have been covering in class allowing us to see them in action.  Although the movie did have me confused at certain points throughout the plot, it was still good.  This leads to the question of is this a representation of gender roles breaking down in society or is it just in this one community?  Because, there seemed to be a wide acceptance for gayness and queerness throughout the movie and I wonder if that can be pervasive throughout the Western world or is it just a French thing?