As you've probably heard, Alexander is a really, really bad movie. Not Showgirls bad — Glitter bad. Any time you've got the vacuous Jared Leto reciting lines like "By the sweet breath of Aphrodite," Angelina Jolie speaking with a Transylvanian accent and Colin Farrell sporting a hairdo that rivals Patrick Swayze's in Road House, you know something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
But the media has decided Alexander is a flop because it's too gay. Apparently Colin Farrell making out with two different men is too outrageous for moviegoers. (Not to mention the Greek lawyers trying to sue Warner Brothers on Alexander the Great's behalf.) Typical. Thank God for gayness — it's becoming such a convenient stratagem. Are you a corrupt governor about to be exposed as a crook? Come out of the closet. Are you running for re-election with unpopular economic policies and a messy war abroad? Tar your opponent as an advocate of gay marriage. Are you a bloated, egotistical film director of an unfocused, poorly written, overacted multimillion-dollar historical spectacle? Say the hero was a homo. That'll distract 'em!
Poor Oliver Stone — he's getting it from both sides. The moralists say he's wrong to portray one of history's greatest heroes as gay, and gay activists claim he's a coward for not making Alexander more explicitly homoerotic. In some ways, they're both right. As has been readily acknowledged by all sides, the notion of sexual categories such as gay, straight or bisexual was completely foreign to the ancient world. Yet Stone insists on using modern signifiers of sexuality. Jared Leto's Hephaestion, Alexander's true love, is dewy-eyed, soft and girlish, the dancing boys effeminate and hairless. Apparently, he's incapable of imagining a same-sex attraction between conventionally masculine men. It's Stone's lack of imagination, his desire to explain Alexander the Great using pop psychology, that is the fatal flaw of this movie.
And the controversy surrounding the film's "gayness" is not so much a smokescreen as an indicator of a larger failure of imagination. It's a lack of empathy and knowledge that continues to allow gays to be cast as universal scapegoats. The bedrock of your society seems to be falling apart? Blame the gays. Lose the election? Blame the gays.
People can blame gays because, ubiquitous as we are, we remain invisible. In spite of Will and Grace, for most of the New America, gay people continue to exist largely as an idea, a fiction, a spectral Other that can easily be blamed for any number of problems from moral decay to bad movies. Just like fanning the flames of anti-Semitism generated publicity for The Passion of the Christ, so the inflaming of homosexual hysteria has gotten people talking about the trashy Alexander. But using prejudice to explain away a botched movie is just a step away from using prejudice to explain away real social and political problems. And that's not just disingenuous, it's dangerous. n°
Andy Horwitz is a writer and performer living in New York City. His monologues have been called everything from "high-octane, raucous comedy" to "inquisitive and insightful." His writing has appeared in Heeb, The Seattle Stranger and various anthologies. He edits the alternative performance blog Culturebot.org and in 2005 ran for Mayor of New York City, a performance project documented online at andyformayor.org.
