whitetigerzone — 13 years ago(November 01, 2012 08:29 AM)

Wow, another bulletin board thread on this film begins with an innocent speculation about this film serving as a metaphor for undisclosed homosexuality and the entire rest of the thread
is an explosion of rancorous, missing-the-point refutations, ad-hominem attacks and counter refutations. You get "I-didn't-see-anything-like-that-and-I-even-read-the-book-after-seeing-the-movie-and-there-was-nothing-in-there-about-homosexuality" Eh, what? Please acquaint yourself with the definition of metaphor.Look, a film maker may himself discern a metaphor or sub-text for homosexuality (or any other potentially compelling human issue) in a novel or other source work that the original author didn't intend, or didn't consciously intend and may select that source work for filming for that reason. He might give special instructions to the actors (or specifically select certain actors) to subtly convey the metaphor via looks, gestures or verbal inflections, without ever explicitly introducing the issue into the subject matter of the film (thus keeping it a METAPHOR). Likewise, a viewer, or a subset of viewers may discern that a film serves as a very good metaphor for some of their lives' experience even if it was never intended by the makers of the film, and often such discernments are responsible for a film's commercial success.
It is very doubtful that anyone connected to The Wizard of Oz ever intended Dorothy's journey to be a reflection of a young gay man's coming out adventure, but every gay man who's seen the film makes the connection. That the three men she meets are all played by actors who are or very much act like stereotypical queens is where we get the phrase "friend of Dorothy." So as another thread flamer erupted "this is homosexual revisionism run amok" - you can see what an absurd charge that is: everyone is free to interpret a film (or any artwork) as saying more than the obvious (else all films would be, basically, Chuck Norris films). If you'd been blessed with the clarifying lens of having been born and having grown up gay in a culture where this fact alone stands you a not insignificant chance of getting murdered, you might very well see parallels to your own dilemma in screen stories about protecting dangerous secrets or of double lives or of carefully plotted escapes. And you'd know that some of these parallels were not accidental.
Rock Hudson himself was much more intelligent than his typically wooden acting would suggest and did himself see the allusions to homosexuality in his movies - see the film "Rock Hudson's Home Movies" for more on that.