Prick up Your Ears

I do want to make film posts part of my blog, because nothing quite goes with knitting the way DVDs do. Even TV. And I say that as a HUGE fan of TV. Seriously. I actually had a pang because I chose to watch a quality film rather than sit through the re-premiere of 7th Heaven. I shamefully confess here, in this semi-public forum, my enthrallment with that stupid, stupid show. When it finally went off the air I breathed a huge sigh of relief. My chance for liberty is at hand! And yet... they went and brought it back, and I could see YEARS of me shackled to this painfully bad show. So rather than give in at the start of this new, undeserved season, I chose to watch a movie that Spanky recommended a while ago as an aside, and I LOVED IT. What a good choice!

Film: Prick up Your Ears
Starring: Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Vanessa Redgrave, and everyone's favorite, Wallace Shawn.
Year: 1987

Synopsis: I went through a spell on Netflix where I wanted to watch every gay movie ever made. I've watched quite a few, although I still have a long way to go. I originally rented Withnail and I, which Spanky got confused with Prick up Your Ears, which is what led me to this one.

Anyway, This is a film about the playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman), who I didn't know anything about originally. Joe Orton was a gay, working class rube from the midlands, who won a scholarship to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, where he met another student, Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina), who was older than him and also gay. It is a film about swinging London in the 1960s, and Vanessa Redgrave is HOT in those backcombed big hairdos and minidresses as Orton's literary agent. OH man. Anyway, Orton and Halliwell are both trying to be famous as novelists or actors or playwrights or basically whatever they can succeed at. Orton eventually succeeds, and Halliwell spends the rest of his life living in the shadow of his formerly subservient lover. It has to gall one to help bring out a young buck, who then proceeds to take everything you've taught him and run with it, thus leaving you spinning in your rut.

The writing is SUPERB and really funny, even though the story is ultimately morbid. My favorite lines included (I started writing them down after a while but I missed a lot):

1. Joe and Kenneth are picking up a third guy for the first time and Joe wants them both to assume fake identities. He picks a name, and Kenneth picks Patrick, causing Joe to say, "What, are you Irish then?", but when they get inside, Joe says his fake name, and then the pickup says his name is Ken, and Kenneth goes "My name is Kenneth too (Groan from Joe) but my friends call me Patrick" which was hilarious, but doesn't translate well into text i guess.

2. Joe: I could have been an orphan. The only thing standing in the way were my parents.

3. When the chauffer shows up to ferry Joe to his meeting with the Beatles: "Can we break down this door?" The landlord says "NO! If there's damage to be done, call the police. That's their job."

Of course, they break down the door, and find the two men both dead, and the rest of the film basically recounts their obsessively co-dependent relationship.

Joe was originally the country boy with no book learning, who used Kenneth to bone up on the classics and literature and anything else that would make him more cultured, and Kenneth was attracted to Joe's outgoing, rough nature, but they also were competitors, and I do wonder if all relationships (or maybe just all gay relationships?) share a bit of this bitterness and claustrophobia. What do you do when your previously shared goals become realized, but only by one of you? Do you continue on as you were? Do you look elsewhere for success? OR do you keep hounding your lover because you can't STAND the fact that they got what you wanted most with what seems (to you) like very little effort and very little deservedness? Part of you is happy for them but most of the time you wish it had been you. Why don't they leave each other? Why CAN'T they leave each other? What is love so strong that it outlives its usefulness?

And that is really the horror of the lives of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. They could never escape each other. Scary.