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Originally Posted by h8kurdt

Surprised you didnt know more about that already. The silent film era was recognised as being pretty out there for boundary pushing until the Hayes code put a stop to a lot of it.

As for Some Like It Hot, you can't deny that whole thing is using them cross dressing as the butt of the joke. And I say this as a massive fan of that film. My point about Performance pushing boundaries is that the whole thing is his cross dressing is a way of finding his identity and trying to figure out who he is. It isn't the punchline to anything. Rocky Horror Picture show delved more into that a bit later.

yeah i knew about the production code which is why i mentioned it, but never read about it a lot with an eye to gender issues. a refresher is always good.

i was trying to figure out why performance seemed so revolutionary to you (this before your explanation as quoted here, i was just guessing) and i thought maybe it was about censorship making it invisible for the previous period to that film, whereas i thought i was taking a longer view. regardless, now i see we were talking about different things.

and yes male drag is often either comedy or “perversion”, not just in previous eras but also afterwards (think dressed to kill or silence of the lambs), but still, “message” aside, with film there is a thing about the image itself which often subverts the intended story.

e.g., comedy or not, chaplin is way too pretty in drag.

and jack lemmon, sure, funny guy, making his stupid faces, but tony curtis’s image was often very subversive in the gender department

 

 

 

i get what you’re saying about the male/female identity, the idea of which in the last century can be traced back to at least jung (animus/anima) and his followers (e.g. hesse’s steppenwolf) but really it’s something that has always been there one way or another, regardless of the gender politics of the moment, all the way into antiquity and beyond, myths, deities, etc.