Hollywood’s closet

“Films”, according to Ryan and Kellner (1988, p. 12), “transcode the discourses … of social life into cinematic narratives”. They play, argues Pearce (2006, p. 33), “a notable role in the placement of particular ideologies and values” into social thinking and debate. Films, as a popular cultural form, can, as Kuhn (1990, p. 15) suggests, “be regarded as a gauge of social attitudes and change”. If we accept that Hollywood cinema is, through its prolific production and overwhelming synergetic marketing, the dominant force, in Western societies at least, in the development of filmic texts, how accurate a gauge can films be? Particularly, as Ryan and Kellner (1988, p. 1) claim, “Hollywood film operates to legitimate dominant institutions and traditional values”. Indeed, Kellner (Pearce 2006, p. 38) “argues that most Hollywood films … tend to promote versions of the American Dream and dominant American myths and ideologies”. Pearce (2006, p. 38) suggests, for examples of those myths and ideologies, “that money and success are important values, [and] that heterosexual romance is the proper social form”.

How then has Hollywood reacted to changes in attitude regarding sexuality since the ‘enlightenment’ decades of the sixties and seventies, which saw, as Benshoff and Griffin (2004, p. 4) state, people who did not identify with heteronormativity “coming out of the closet”, particularly after the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York? If popular film does reflect the attitudes and concerns of society, as Ryan and Kellner (1988, p. 12) suggest, what evidence does contemporary film provide that more fluid attitudes to questions of gender and sexuality are becoming more widely examined and accepted? A brief look at the history of Hollywood cinema from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century, and a consideration of two films, both released in 1999, Boys Don’t Cry and Summer of Sam, suggests that although contemporary cinema may appear to be more open towards, even supportive of, non-heteronormative notions of gender and sexuality, it still insists on presenting the ‘normal’ heterosexual relationship of man/male and woman/female as the proper - and safest - sexual practice and expression of gender and sexuality.