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.
1 comment:
Interesting piece, but I'm happy to tell you that Björn Andresen, the Swedish actor who played Tadzio in "Death in Venice", far from dying in a motorcycle accident before the film was released, was last heard of alive and well and living with his wife and daughter in Stockholm. I've heard before this story that he died young, but it's an urban myth. In fact, Andresen has just celebrated his fifty-third birthday!
Sal Mineo, however, did alas die young(ish), murdered by a hustler in 1976, a month after his thirty-seventh birthday.
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