'Draw me like a statue': youth, nostalgia, and the queer past in Gods and Monsters (1998)

Abstract

Early in Gods and Monsters (Condon, 1998), the viewer shares the gaze of Ian McKellen’s James Whale as he surveys the arrival of his muscular new yardman, Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser), through a window frame. We cut to the interior of the director’s Hollywood home, the most prominent aspect of which is the copy of a marble relief from the Parthenon frieze depicting two semi-nude youths on horseback. This establishing moment indicates how the film constantly shifts between personal and historical perspectives and desires: the cross-generational desire of the aging gay director for the young man, the idealised nudes of antiquity and queer culture of the twentieth-century later seen in the film, as well as Whale’s flashbacks to the WWI battlefield, and the 1990s’ cinephile audience’s cultural memory of cinema history as channelled through Whale. At the moment Boone finally agrees to pose nude with the words ‘you said you wanted to draw me like a statue’, the trauma of Whale’s past breaks through the surface.

This chapter explores the framing of these personal, cultural and cinematic relationships within the queer history of art reception foregrounded by Whale’s painterly gaze and the copies of canonical artworks hanging in his studio and home. The film is underscored by nostalgia for cinema’s own past – reviews citing Sunset Boulevard and Death in Venice as reference points – and, from its 1950s’ setting, for a perceived utopian age in the gay imaginary. The presence of gay rights campaigner McKellen is crucial, but the film acknowledges how patriarchal power can exploit the young, whether in wars, ancient or modern, or beside an idyllic Californian pool. I argue that the film’s cross-generational relationships possess fascinating temporal, cultural and historical dimensions.

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ORCID for Michael Williams: orcid.org/0000-0001-5386-5567

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