HARVEY & JACK, MILK (2008)
Most every straight guy I know has tangled at some point with the Sexy Crazy Girl (y’know, the one that stole your wallet and set your bathroom on fire but looked so damn good in that little plaid miniskirt), and most straight girls have their horror stories about that Hot But Psycho Bad Boy all their friends warned them about, to no avail. From Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Leslie Mann in The 40 Year Old Virgin to Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise and Mark Wahlberg in Fear, Sexy Crazy Girls and Hot But Psycho Bad Boys have been well-represented in mainstream cinema over the years. And while independent films (not to mention six seasons of The L Word) have provided numerous rainbow-flavored versions of the aforementioned archetypes, the gay characters depicted in most Hollywood films are usually too sexless and/or noble to fall into the sorts of messy romantic entanglements that pit brains and common sense against libido, heart and instinct. Gus Van Sant’s Milk, of course, was a recent and notable exception, dramatizing not only Harvey Milk’s heroic struggle for gay rights, but also the concrete realities of the complicated human relationships beneath all the abstract rhetoric. Like Hillary and Julia Goodridge, who recently got divorced after helping to pave the way for same-sex marriages in Massachusetts (yeah, MA!), Sean Penn’s Harvey Milk is only human as he fights for human rights. Like any number of hard-working professionals before and since, he has trouble balancing his personal and professional life, and falls into a mid-life crisis affair with Diego Luna’s clingy, troubled good-time-guy Jack Lira. For those who haven’t seen the movie, let’s just say that, in the tradition of countless real world and cinematic Crazy Girl/Bad Boy relationships, it doesn’t end well.
BOBBY & HELEN, THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK (1971)
Not giving your characters last names to make them more universal is always generally kind of a cheap trick, but Joan Didion co-wrote this, so I suppose we should just let it go. The Panic In Needle Park outdid Requiem For A Dream by nearly 30 years through a really simple expedient: just show people shooting up in needle close-ups. You don't need the anal dildo or hallucinations then. Bobby (Al Pacino) and Helen (Kitty Winn) don't use at first; he just deals, and she stares adoringly. Then he starts "chipping," she sneaks some while he's sleeping to see what it's all about, and much OD'ing, jail time and bad decision-making ensue. They're a couple who accelerate each others' downward spirals; thanks to one of Pacino's early galvanizing performances (before the ham set in) and Winn's essentially passive, worshipful gaze, it works.
MIMI & OSCAR, BITTER MOON (1992)
Oscar, an older American expat writer meets Mimi, a hot young French girl on a bus in Paris. After the initial meet-cute hot romance ensues. Years later we meet Oscar again, a broken man, as he tells his story to an awkward young Brit (Hugh Grant) on a Mediterreanean cruise. Don't let the presence of Hugh Grant fool you. This is a Polanski flick. The gist is that a man hasn't truly loved a woman unless there were animal masks and water sports invoved and he treated her like shit. Conversly, a lady never really loved a man unless she let him dismantle her self-confidence brick by brick and then took her revenge by putting him in a wheel chair and flaunting her magnificently muscled lover in front of him. Sounds like fun, no?
GEORGE & SHERRY PEARY, THE KILLING (1956)
There may be no film genre richer in sordid, back-stabbing, and generally unrewarding relationships than that of film noir, and they never got nastier than when Marie Windsor, star of Cat Women of the Moon, was in the room. With her heavy lids, bottle-blonde Wilma Flintstone 'do, a nose that she seemed to be looking down at men from even when they were taller than her, and a voice that could make any line sound withering, Windsor was born to nag, and in Stanley Kubrick's classic caper movie, she's partnered with an actor who was such a natural sucker that he first made crime movie history getting sold out by Sidney Greenstreet. Loitering around their apartment, Windsor casually reduces her short hubby to asking why she married him --"You used to love me. You said you did, anyway." -- to which she responds that he hasn't exactly delivered on those promises he made about hitting it big and setting her up in style, adding that she doesn't mind the lack of money so long as she has "a big, strong intelligent brute like you" to be down with. Even Homer Simpson would have trouble missing the sarcasm. The final proof that this marriage cannot be saved comes when she finds out that her husband George is involved in a million dollar racetrack robbery scheme; rather than just wait for him to pull off the heist and show up at home to wave the dough in her face, she just can't resist getting her boy toy -- Vince Edwards, all muscles and smirk -- to oil his own gun and go try to rip off the robbers. Poor George finds out that his lovey-dove has set him up for the last time when he hears Edwards break into the room, look around for him, and ask, "Hey, where's the jerk?"
STEVE BOLANDER & LAURIE HENDERSON, AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973)
When American Graffiti begins, the plan is for Steve and his buddy (and Laurie's sister) Curt to go off to the East Coast and attend college; this means that his relationship with Laurie will be going long-distance, but not to worry -- Steve has thought about that and proposes to Laurie that they strenghten their bond to each other by seeing other people. This goes down about as well as you could expect. Bad as this is, those of us who actually know people who saw the momentous event of their high school graduation as a cue to marry their first serious dating partner will recognize that the real sign of horror to come arrives when Steve and Laurie take to the dance floor, and she clings to him with such fierce tenacity that his bare back must look as if he'd gone a couple of rounds with Lon Chaney, Jr. She then forces him to recognize the depth of his "true feelings" for her -- defined here as his acquisitive male jealousy -- by flouncing off and landing in Harrison Ford's lap. Come dawn and they're so solidly committed to each other that Steve isn't going away to college anymore, which means that in a few years, he'll have someone handy to blame for the fact that he's stuck in a shitty job in the same podunk town he grew up in, and she can't look at him without thinking about the twenty minutes when she was Indiana Jones' girl.
Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six & Seven
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Sarah Clyne Sundberg, Phil Nugent