Dean to Ledger: The Homoerotic Movie and Early Death

In David Luke's translation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Gustave von Aschenbach thinks of the young boy Tadzio, "...he'll probably not live to grow old". Little did Mann know that when his novella would be made into a film, the boy playing the role of Tadzio would meet with a motorcycle accident and die before the release of the film.

James Dean's homosexuality has been widely written about and the homoerotic subtext of his relationship with Sal Mineo (also gay in real life) in Rebel Without a Cause has also been much discussed. Dean died in a race car accident.

River Phoenix's character in Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho struggles with his homoerotic feelings toward's Keanu Reeve's character. River Phoenix died on the pavement outside Johnny Depp's night club The Viper Room after a night of drink and drugs.

Leslie Cheung, himself gay in real life and openly so, played the role of a homosexual man twice. Once in Farewell, My Concubine and then again in Happy Together. He threw himself from his Hong Kong high rise apartment. He was 46.

Heath Ledger played the role of Ennis del Mar - a man who can never fully own up to his love for Jack Twist - in Brokeback Mountain. He was found dead at around 3:30 p.m. on the floor of his SoHo apartment in New York on 22nd January 2008.

So, here's the question. Is it a coincidence that as many as six films with homoerotic content or subtext have been followed by the unnatural early death of one of the lead actors?

The thing is, death of the homoerotically-perceived young male has been an important part of gay mythology since the homoerotisation of the figure of St. Sebastian, most notably in Derek Jarman's film Sebastiane and Yukio Mishima's autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask. It is fascinating that the shocking and universally mourned death of Heath Ledger seems to have added yet another sad chapter to this extraordinary history where cinematic representation of the homoerotic has been swiftly followed by the mortality of one of the male bodies recorded by the camera. A mythology inaugurated so long ago seems to be playing out with unerring regularity even today.

Edward and Alexandra in British Iconography

As this picture will show, by way of contrast, the Punjabi portrait of the royal couple may have managed a competent likeness of the King but was wide off the mark as far as the Queen was concerned. Danish princess Alexandra was regarded as a great beauty and set fashion trends such as high-necked dresses and a limp (because she used to walk with a slight limp!)

Edward and Alexandra through Punjabi Eyes!

Some years ago when I was at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi I was intrigued by a peculiar example of royal portraiture. Hanging in the gallery's first floor I found a portrait of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. During the British Raj portraits of the current British monarch must have been mass produced. But most of them must have depicted the monarch dressed in British royal regalia. What made this particular portrait remarkable is the fact that the king and queen were shown to be dressed in Punjabi royal regalia! Indeed the NGMA attributes this portrait to the "Punjab School". The portrait set me thinking not only about the way in which it tries to effect a mixture of British and Indian royal regalia on the bodies of these two royal personages, but also about how Queen Victoria - the mother of Edward VII - would have been deeply amused to see her son and daughter-in-law depicted in this particulat fashion. This blog entry is an attempt at contexualizing this unique portrait and assessing its iconographic significance. Seen above is the portrait that I've been talking about. In the course of this blog entry I shall point several elements in this portrait, so I thought it a good idea to post a detail of the portrait too.

This painting seems to be telling us a rather ordinary story about the way in which British royals were Indianised iconographically, evidently as a sycophantic colonial exercise. What seems to be more interesting is the way in which the Indianisation is effected on the bodies of the two royal personages. The painter of this particular portrait took great care to incorporate into his work as many markers of British royalty as possible. If we look at the figure of King Edward VII, we find him wearing the blue sash, on his left chest is the Star of the Garter. He wears the Maltese Cross as a pendant at his throat. Just before the quilted green cushion on which he and his Consort are seated we can see the Orb, which is given to a monarch during their Coronation. It is meant to symbolize the dominance of Christianity over the whole world. As a part of his head dress is the prominently displayed arrangement of three ostrich feathers or "The Prince of Wales feathers". This is interesting because King Edward had visited India during his mother's reign. He was then the Prince of Wales. The feathers therefore can be seen as a souvenir painted in to remind the viewer of the monarch's visit to India as the Prince of Wales.

If we turn to Queen Alexandra, the portrait is accurate in one crucial detail: she is wearing pearl chokers. It is believed that the Queen Consort always wore chokers or high-necked dresses in order to hide a small scar on her neck! She is also given a tiny crown, much like the one preferred by her mother-in-law. She is wearing a red sash and her left chest is crowded with several decorations. Much of the jewellery on her chest may have been copied from reproductions of royal portraits widely available at that time.

What is interesting is the way in which these markers of British royal status are overwhelmed by Indian items of dress and adornment. The King may be wearing the Prince of Wales feathers but they are pinned to a turban and behind the feathers lurks a paisley-shaped turban adornment, identifiably Indian. His half-sleeved coat is also stridently Oriental as indeed is his style of sitting. The sword he holds in his left hand and the 'kirpan' tucked into his cummerbund function as items of Indian regalia.

No attempt has been made to produce any likeness of the face for the Queen. Indeed, as I shall show in my next post, Queen Alexandra looked nothing like the woman seated beside the King in this painting. She is a generic Indian 'rani'.

Let me go back to the Orb placed just in front of the cushion on which the royal couple are seated. The fact that it is placed on the floor tempts one to read the positioning of it as a semiotic undercutting of the power of Christianity in Edwardian India. E. M. Forster does something similar in his short story "The Life to Come". In that story he also critiques the project of evangelicalism in India.

So, why would all this have amused Edward VII's mother? Because she had dressed little Bertie (as he was called in the family) in Punjabi clothes and had taken photographs of him dressed like that. This was in the 1860s when Queen Victoria had all but adopted the young Maharaja Duleep Singh as her son!

It is all this (and doubtless much more) that makes this ordinary and yet extraordinary royal portrait such an interesting object of study!

Ever since I acquired a new camera-enriched mobile phone I've been possessed by a desperate desire to record the stunning beauty that I find around my campus. A walk about the campus of my rural university will yield views such as these. These photos were taken very recently. The first one was taken on the 11th of this month, the second one on the 2nd, the third one on the 11th as well and the last one yesterday, 13th Jan. Thank God for technology!

Lucky 14th, I hope!

Hmmmm...! So here I am! With my own blog! Always wondered what it would feel like to gab about my little life in cyberscape. Now, I'm actually doing it! It's funny that I should start blogging on a day on which I'm nursing an awful pharyngitis and have just taught a French play to Open University students for five hours and got paid less than a thou for my vocal-chord-breaking efforts and it happens to be the 13th. I have decided that I shan't publish this blog till the clock strikes twelve and it's fourteenth! Not that I'm very superstitious. I'm not. I'm extremely superstitious. So which play did I teach, as I'm sure you are dying to know (Not!)? It was Moliere's Le Misanthrope. I've been teaching the wretched thing for ages now and know it like the back of my main, but I still enjoy telling my students that the French playwright was walking a tightrope in this play. He had to amuse the ghastly aristos and also, discreetly criticise them! Slap and tickle, slap and tickle! Slap them hard, make them laugh and do it over and over again through the entire duration of the play!



This is what I'll do in this blog: I'll post here my readings of the stuff I teach at the university. The stuff that I can't talk about in my class, because it may be considered too radical, I'll talk about here. This blog will be mostly about literature through the four eyes of a 40-year-old University lecturer! But I'll try and stay true to my blog id. I promise lots of clutter because there is a lot of that in this brain of mine. Don't expect posts on cricket or the stock market. Expect everything else! Expect Diana, Princess of Wales, expect Diana Haddad, expect Diana Vreeland, expect Diana, Goddess of Hunting, expect Diana Dors, expect Christopher Isherwood, expect David Hockney, expect Durga Puja, expect Federico Mompou, expect Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, expect Rahul Gandhi, expect Kalighat paintings, expect Pedro Almodovar, expect Gael Garcia Bernal, expect Cavafy, expect Mark Doty, expect "Brothers and Sisters", expect "Desperate Housewives", expect Vanraj Bhatia, expect Talat Mahmood, expect Manna Dey, expect Vani Jairam, expect Madhubala, expect a desire to record all the fleeting beauty that life keeps surprising one with, expect a constant subtext of gratitude that I'm healthy, solvent and alive. Am I in love? At the moment, yes. With a person? Yes. But my desire to record life's joys, strictly joys, has always been there even during those dark days when my pillows used to soaked with my self-pity. I always found a reason to get excited and get happy. I guess, I now think that the time has come to communicate this to the world out there. It's almost midnight. I'll post this blog now! Welcome to my world! And visit often!