Priscilla's secret
So the big kid and I watched Priscilla tonight, for predictable reasons. Australia ended its excruciating six-week festival of fear, pride and prejudice with a comfortable, blessedly uniform, vote in favour of same sex marriage.
I read an article in Overland a couple of days later by a young man in a relationship with a man in his mid-forties. The article was discussing his paramour's reflections on growing up gay in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, describing his world as "pre-Priscilla" and "post-Priscilla". I remember seeing the movie once in the cinemas when it first came out. I must have been 18, and it was in the middle of a series of films that can only be described as Luhrmannesque - gaudy, camp, heartfelt and very sparkly. There was Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom, P.J. Hogan's Muriel's Wedding, and, of course, Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Priscilla, to me, was the weakest of the lot as a film, but there was no mistaking the symbolism of three queens in Blundstones and ostrich feather headresses perched atop King's Canyon, surveying the wide brown land. Nor could one be unaffected by Hugo Weaving's character wrestling with the terror he feels while trying to tell his little boy he is gay while the boy plays at a central Australian spring.
So for Friday night movie night with Ms thirteen, I did my due diligence online (which largely recommended 14+ because of sexual content) and chose Priscilla. I hadn't seen it since first year uni, and remembered it as a sort of shallow romp with symbolism that seemed to fit the week. So we put it on and largely enjoyed it for the first part.
Then half way through the movie we come across a character who I had completely forgotten - the "mail order bride", Bob's wife Cynthia. In the first scene, the bus pulls up at Bob's house for mechanical repairs. While the men and trans woman watch Bob work, Cynthia comes out with biscuits and drinks for everyone and it is clear that Bob is ashamed of her. He quickly hustles her inside and apologises for her presence. Later the three protagonists are having dinner with Bob and Cynthia and they mention that they dance to songs. Cynthia tries to share that she can sing as well; again Bob shuts her down. She peppers angry insults at Bob in a kind of pidgin generic asian language (I think). Finally, in Bob's local pub, after the drag act has finished - and gone down like a lead balloon - Cynthia arrives, dressed in hat and strips down to lingerie. A flashback shows us that she has been locked inside Bob's house so that she can't come to the pub with all the men, but she breaks out, and brings ping pong balls. The rest can probably be remembered without too much description, but later Cynthia leaves in a clapped-out car, saying Bob has "a little ding-a-ling".
My daughter and I sat there in horror. She asked me, "Mum, is this ok?" I wasn't sure what to say. I rifled through explanations in my mind - was it ironic? Was it from another time when such things were acceptable?
None of it carried any weight, and the only thing I could think was that I had friends from Asian families when Priscilla came out. I cannot imagine being an Asian woman, let alone an Asian Australian woman, watching those scenes. They are just appalling. It is jaw-rattlingly incongruous with the rest of the movie whose premise is the condemnation of prejudice (and attempts scenes that are inclusive of the Aboriginal community). Somehow, embracing ideas that were so radically challenging and profoundly compassionate at the time, like taking on homophobia in an outback pub and accepting a child into a gay community, somehow blinded us to the awfulness of the stereotype being presented in Cynthia.
After the movie I read Carrie Hou's facebook post (if you haven't read it, I recommend it) about why Western Sydney voted no and the risk of prejudice in the commentary on it. She made many important points, but finished with this:
Lgbtq activism tends to be incredibly white (middle class and urban based) . The people being platformed, the stories being told, the language being used and the people being reached out to are white. That is literally why Australia transformed from 1970s, where homosexuality was a crime, to 2017 where Australia voted yes for gay marriage. Views changed with activism and education. This activism and access to education is inequally distributed. We need to ask ourselves how we can reach out to these communities long term and take care of the queer (often people of colour) affected. We need to think, what intersectional ways can we make lgbtq activism more understandable to working class & migrants in these areas?
I read an article in Overland a couple of days later by a young man in a relationship with a man in his mid-forties. The article was discussing his paramour's reflections on growing up gay in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, describing his world as "pre-Priscilla" and "post-Priscilla". I remember seeing the movie once in the cinemas when it first came out. I must have been 18, and it was in the middle of a series of films that can only be described as Luhrmannesque - gaudy, camp, heartfelt and very sparkly. There was Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom, P.J. Hogan's Muriel's Wedding, and, of course, Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Priscilla, to me, was the weakest of the lot as a film, but there was no mistaking the symbolism of three queens in Blundstones and ostrich feather headresses perched atop King's Canyon, surveying the wide brown land. Nor could one be unaffected by Hugo Weaving's character wrestling with the terror he feels while trying to tell his little boy he is gay while the boy plays at a central Australian spring.
So for Friday night movie night with Ms thirteen, I did my due diligence online (which largely recommended 14+ because of sexual content) and chose Priscilla. I hadn't seen it since first year uni, and remembered it as a sort of shallow romp with symbolism that seemed to fit the week. So we put it on and largely enjoyed it for the first part.
Then half way through the movie we come across a character who I had completely forgotten - the "mail order bride", Bob's wife Cynthia. In the first scene, the bus pulls up at Bob's house for mechanical repairs. While the men and trans woman watch Bob work, Cynthia comes out with biscuits and drinks for everyone and it is clear that Bob is ashamed of her. He quickly hustles her inside and apologises for her presence. Later the three protagonists are having dinner with Bob and Cynthia and they mention that they dance to songs. Cynthia tries to share that she can sing as well; again Bob shuts her down. She peppers angry insults at Bob in a kind of pidgin generic asian language (I think). Finally, in Bob's local pub, after the drag act has finished - and gone down like a lead balloon - Cynthia arrives, dressed in hat and strips down to lingerie. A flashback shows us that she has been locked inside Bob's house so that she can't come to the pub with all the men, but she breaks out, and brings ping pong balls. The rest can probably be remembered without too much description, but later Cynthia leaves in a clapped-out car, saying Bob has "a little ding-a-ling".
My daughter and I sat there in horror. She asked me, "Mum, is this ok?" I wasn't sure what to say. I rifled through explanations in my mind - was it ironic? Was it from another time when such things were acceptable?
None of it carried any weight, and the only thing I could think was that I had friends from Asian families when Priscilla came out. I cannot imagine being an Asian woman, let alone an Asian Australian woman, watching those scenes. They are just appalling. It is jaw-rattlingly incongruous with the rest of the movie whose premise is the condemnation of prejudice (and attempts scenes that are inclusive of the Aboriginal community). Somehow, embracing ideas that were so radically challenging and profoundly compassionate at the time, like taking on homophobia in an outback pub and accepting a child into a gay community, somehow blinded us to the awfulness of the stereotype being presented in Cynthia.
After the movie I read Carrie Hou's facebook post (if you haven't read it, I recommend it) about why Western Sydney voted no and the risk of prejudice in the commentary on it. She made many important points, but finished with this:
Lgbtq activism tends to be incredibly white (middle class and urban based) . The people being platformed, the stories being told, the language being used and the people being reached out to are white. That is literally why Australia transformed from 1970s, where homosexuality was a crime, to 2017 where Australia voted yes for gay marriage. Views changed with activism and education. This activism and access to education is inequally distributed. We need to ask ourselves how we can reach out to these communities long term and take care of the queer (often people of colour) affected. We need to think, what intersectional ways can we make lgbtq activism more understandable to working class & migrants in these areas?
At heart her point was an old and important one: that achieving liberation for one group by stepping on another is risky, nasty, hypocritical business. And that's what Priscilla did. It took Asian women sex workers - through a profoundly financially and geographically vulnerable character - and made them into a contemptible joke so that Anglo trans and gay men would be more acceptable to mainstream Australia.
Why on earth would we wonder, then, why seats with large Chinese and Vietnamese populations might vote no? I'm not saying it's Priscilla, but it's not a good start.
But of course what horrified me the most was that I didn't see it the first time round.
I was later talking about this issue with a wise friend, who gave me this magnificent quote from environmentalist Hunter Lovins: "Hypocrisy is the first step to real change".
But perhaps it's time to take the next step. The kids and I have watched Malcolm, and The Big Steal, and other Australian classics. Most have some dated gender roles but none of them have had this level of cruelty. Priscilla - for this reason - I just cannot quite be proud that you're Australian. And it makes me so sad.
Comments
Post a Comment