[This is a reply to Charles Francois on a movie discussion
chat board. I always meant to do more with this, but lost interest in the film
itself. Perhaps one day.]
As a defender of CHUCK & BUCK, I thought I would weigh
in on why I found the
film really moving,
and why I disagree with Charles's reading of the film's
ideology about gay
sexuality. (That reading, in fact, is exactly what I
expected when I went
to see the film, and I was immeasurably relieved to
find something
completely different.)
First, the realism
question. No, a guy wouldn't sleep with his stalker. No,
his fiancee wouldn't
keep inviting him around. No, nobody would produce such
an awful play, least
of all someone with Beverly's rapier wit. It is not a
realist film.
Personally, I think assailing the film on these points is
wrongheaded. But suit
yourself. Now, onto the ideology issue.
To me, the film
alludes to reactionary theories of homosexuality such as
"inversion"
or "arrested development" in order to discredit them. Neither
Buck nor Charlie are
presented in the film as being reliable interpreters of
their own sexual
subjectivities. Buck interprets his gayness within the
faulty framework of
arrested development. In his conversation with Carlyn,
he bemoans the fact
the Charlie "made [him] this way," as though being "that
way" were a
serious problem. When Buck propositions Charlie, he is brazen
about it, but still
must couch it in terms of a game. So Buck, with his toys
and lollipops, has
slotted his sexual desire within a narrative of arrested
development. He seems
to be holding onto the trappings of childhood not
*because* he's gay,
but because that's the only way he can emotionally
manage his own
gayness. I don't want to come off like I'm saying this
"isn't really a
film about homosexuality," because it certainly is in many
respects. But I think
Buck's juvenile way of dealing with sexuality is shown
by the film to be a
flawed interpretation, and in this way Buck can fixate
on his gay desire as
a part of an overall fixation on the past.
I think the scenes
immediately after Charlie has sex with Buck are quite
telling. Buck clearly
wanted to relive the past, but he actually ends up
doing something very
different. He ends up having adult sex with Charlie,
and the aftermath
shows that this busts up his prior interpretive framework.
He throws his toys
away, ditches the suckers, and cries. An act which was
supposed to help him
reassert that his gayness was and still is connected to
a boyhood past
actually sends him headlong into adulthood (where he clearly
already was, but he
wasn't prepared to admit it). But even more
interesting, I think,
is that having sex with Charlie as an adult
retroactively recodes
their childhood sexual relationship for both of them.
Buck's play, of
course, demonstrated how Buck saw childhood and lust for
Charlie as
inextricably linked. Once those two things are severed, Buck must
become an adult –
precisely in order to accommodate his homosexuality, which
is actually
(surprise!) a sign of maturity.
(Incidentally, the
shift in Buck's relationship to the past is reinforced by
a beautifully subtle
moment near the end. Buck's jacket for the wedding
becomes a token of
his new beginning, a thing of the past resignified.
Whereas before it
would've been another sign of his being sadly stranded in
the past, it can now
represent retro-coolness, because Buck's relationship
to the past has been
reconfigured based on his tryst with Charlie. Buck is
no longer stuck in
the past; he has a past and utilizes it in the present,
like most of us.)
Several reviews have
complained that the character of Charlie is a cipher,
and that there is no
convincing reason that he would sleep with Buck.
Putting aside the
realism issue for a moment (see above), I think this
reading misses the epiphany
that the tryst represents for Charlie (who,
let's recall, made
the "deal" in the first place). When Charlie says "I
remember
everything" and begins to passionately kiss Buck (as opposed to
simply upholding his
end of the bargain), I feel that the film offers a kind
of explanation about
the difficulty of getting a read on Charlie. Here is a
man who has made
certain decisions about his life and sexuality, and
ambivalence about
those decisions appears to be barely held at bay. But as I
say above, they both
discover that sex as adults requires a new explanatory
framework, one which
cannot be contained by childhood or innocence. Charlie
has now had adult gay
sex with Buck (and, based on what we see, is going to
have a good time),
but still returns to Carlyn.
There is no
"magic cookie" impelling Charlie in this direction. Charlie
shows Buck that he
has not abandoned the past or become heterosexual
lightly, but has
fully assumed his choice to be with Carlyn. What for
Charlie might've
started out as running away from being gay, becomes "good
faith,"
existentially speaking, and this Buck can accept. By bringing the
past into the
present, Buck and Charlie both have to face two facts about
Charlie's sexual
subjectivity. First, Charlie has had sex with Buck, and
still he wants to be
with Carlyn. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Buck
is a part of
Charlie's sexual past, and that past *is* a fundamental part of
Charlie's sexual
present. Unlike most "compulsory" heterosexuals, Charlie
has arrived at his
desire for Carlyn by way of a history of which Buck must
now be a fully
acknowledged, and adult, part. This is *not* to say that gay
sexuality was just a
layover point on the way to a "mature" het
relationship. This
was the lie both Buck and Charlie told themselves, and
that's the lie which
collapses.
The fact that having
sex was transformative for Charlie as well as Buck was
shown by inviting
Buck to the wedding. (I don't buy the supposition that
Carlyn invited Buck
without Charlie's permission. She's not an idiot. If
Buck was invited,
Charlie was responsible for it.) When Buck first confronts
Charlie about their
relationship, Charlie dismisses their sexual past as
"exploration,"
calling on the "childhood games" trope. It seems to me that
by inviting Buck to
the wedding, Charlie (and perhaps even Carlyn, but we
don't specifically
know) is fully assuming his past, not segregating it as a
childhood
indiscretion. By inviting Buck, I think Charlie is acknowledging
him (at least among
the three principals) as an "ex." For both men, the
patronizing framework
of arrested sexuality or "innocent sex play" is
discarded, and, at
least between Charlie and Buck, a fully conscious, gay
past is affirmed.
As far as the wedding
itself is concerned, I think reading Charlie's
relationship with
Carlyn as a bisexual copout, chosen simply to acquire all
the cash and prizes
of hetero marriage / monogamy, is rather reductive.
(Unless, like a
horror-movie villain, we expect Buck to return in a sequel
as the Gay Avenger or
something.) I think Buck really *does* accept
Charlie's decision,
because Charlie convinces Buck that his decision is more
than a copout. It's a
decision of the heart, which is part of what makes
Buck realize that
he's an "ex."
At the risk of making
my argument sound like Borges's "Pierre Menard," I
think the
straightforward reading of the film is that gayness is an immature
stopover on the way
to "proper" heterosexuality. (This is the reactionary,
100-plus year-old
claptrap at which Charles F. rightly bashes back.) In
fact, the film
rewrites heterosexuality as being an unusually,
uncharacteristically
genuine (even "mature") choice, because it wasn't
compulsory, it didn't
cordon gay sex off in some zone of pathology. Gay sex
is removed from the
zone of pathology. To get Lacanian (please! don't hit!),
this film depicts a
heterosexual man (Charlie) who fully assumes his past,
and in so doing,
arrives at heterosexuality as something other than a
defense against
homosexuality. It also depicts a man (Buck) who assumes his
existence in the
present, as a gay man, and overcomes the "arrested
development" of
cockeyed, homophobic theories about the aetiology of gay
desire. (I think Buck
is flirting with the guy with the wedding cake.) I
think the film is
actually pretty radical.
That's all.