R E C E N T L Y
Giving homosexuality a bad name. Plus: Madonna's star rises again
The glory of female curvature
The uses and abuses of Chelsea Clinton
Why feminists are co-dependent with philandering Bill
The sexual symbolism of Ted Kaczynski's crimes
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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C O L U M N I S T S
Sexpert Opinion
Bestseller Hell
Lying about genocide
Remember Halabja
Right On!
Word by Word
Under the Covers
Hollywoodland
Second Thoughts
Sound Salvation
Unzipped
The Awful Truth
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A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Hanson brothers are teenybopper idols like sylphlike Peter Frampton or David and Shaun Cassidy in the 1970s. The Hansons are cute and energetic but virtually sexless, unthreatening to the girls whose agitated idolatry is simply a way to "belong," at a particularly stressful time in their own pubertal development. In other words, Hanson fans are essentially a big sorority. The Hansons themselves are blond Anglo angels a world away from urban hip-hop: As sexual personae, they promise to fly you to a clean, airy place without complexity or conflict. Prince William has inherited his mother's bisexual glamour. I was the first, of course, to note that Diana herself had an element of the beautiful boy -- a butch thing that came out in her when she posed for photos like a street hustler or when she was tramping about the landscape in jeans and men's shirts. As a royal, William has also literally fused with the eligible crown princes of fairy tales: His attention-turned-devotion would make any young girl not just princess but queen. History and romance coalesce in that poor youth. May his bashful beauty survive the nubby beard that Mother Nature inflicts on male teens -- and that automatically eliminated Athenian boys from the pederastic sweepstakes. As for Leonardo DiCaprio, he has attained mythic status by prettily dying in both "Romeo and Juliet" and "Titanic." The tragic dimension of these roles has induced the mass cathexis of tens of thousands of girls worldwide, whose repeat viewings of "Titanic" are partly responsible for sending the earnings of that film into the stratosphere. ("How many times have you seen it?" asked the salesgirl at Walden Books the other night at the mall, as I purchased a $5.99 full-size, facsimile copy of the April 16, 1912, Boston Daily Globe reporting the Titanic disaster. "A lot of our customers have seen it five times.") I personally find DiCaprio charming but not particularly incandescent, but my standards may be a bit high, since my mind is glutted with images of male beauty from the Athenian "Critios Boy" and dashing Bronzino ephebes to Rubens' magnificent portrait of George Villiers, the alluringly narcissistic Duke of Buckingham. What was the real reason that DiCaprio ignominiously shunned last week's Academy Awards ceremony, where "Titanic" was the year's most honored film? Could it be that, as a beautiful boy, he knew full well that he would shrink, shrivel up and be castrated next to the eye-popping Rubenesque dynamism of Kate Winslet's jutting bosom? Yes, with her overflowing and even overbearing vitality -- which made Oscar-winner Helen Hunt look like a bald stick -- Winslet in her corn-goddess green gown was woman triumphant, whether the cliquish Academy honored her or not. Dear Camille,
I claimed in print the other day about Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" that you "would understand every nuance of this very sexual -- yet also in some ways 'chaste' -- film, and know how to speak of them meaningfully and with precision." Was Hitchcock the consummately cosmopolitan artist I take him for, or just a shrewd manipulator of quite shallow, back-and-forth audience emotions (as the critic Raymond Durgnat once suggested)?
And please, Camille, what is the title of your forthcoming book on Hitchcock? Can you tell us something about it?
Another admirer,
Ken Mogg (Editor, The MacGuffin)
Dear Mr. Mogg: Thank you so much for your right-on-the-money intuition that I am indeed a Hitchcock devotee. "Vertigo" -- that eerie, ravishingly photographed masterpiece -- captures all of my mystical feelings about women. I once made my friend Stephen Jarratt (who has since died of AIDS) take me to the holy spots of San Francisco that are captured in "Vertigo," from the cemetery of Mission Dolores -- built over a haunted Indian graveyard, according to Stephen -- to the stone pier under the Golden Gate Bridge where Kim Novak jumps into the water. I consider Hitchcock a major artistic genius of the 20th century. My favorite period in his work is the Technicolor sequence that includes (in addition to "Vertigo") "To Catch a Thief," "North by Northwest," "The Birds" and "Marnie." The invitation by the British Film Institute to write on "The Birds" is certainly the greatest honor I have had in my career. It is an awesome responsibility, and I have taken it very seriously. Only a small circle of friends knew about the project until now. Currently in production, the book is simply called "The Birds," and it will be released in the British Film Institute's Film Classics Series this June. (Indiana University Press handles distribution in North America.) I have tried to capture -- in your words -- "every nuance" of "The Birds," a film that has fascinated and deeply influenced me for 35 years. Let the academic drones mess up their heads with boring Lacan, Derrida and Foucault! I have been immersed in Alfred Hitchcock's brilliant imagination since I was a schoolgirl. As an ex-Catholic (like Hitchcock) and as an admirer of canonical Western art (like Hitchcock), I don't need stupid, shallow "theory" to understand great films. Film criticism is a mess right now, overrun by middlebrow ladies, smarmy milquetoasts and pretentious campus poseurs. There's only one culture critic in the world whom I consider worth reading: James Wolcott. When will we see a book of his collected essays that will teach people how to write about popular culture? Postscript: Boston and Washington, D.C., were under Italian-American attack last Sunday. See my fusillade against Gloria Steinem and Patricia Ireland, "The feminist fault line on Clinton," in the March 29 Boston Globe. On the same day appeared my front-page review of "Who Killed Homer?" by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, in the Washington Post Book World. I describe this important book as "a blistering indictment" of the academic establishment for its destruction of undergraduate humanities education.
Feeling like a beautiful boy in a macho man's world? Ask Camille. - - - - - - - - - - |
