Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.
Last week we talked about race in HBO’s LGBT properties while briefly discussing Dee Rees’s Bessie. If there’s one thing media in general (but gay media in particular) needs to work on is intersectionality: any attempt, for example, at framing the gay rights movement as “the new civil rights” movement not only suggests the plight of black people in America has been “won” but it refuses to understand how they intersect in sometimes very troubling ways. This week we're jumping on HBO's most recent release, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, which aired just this past Monday and which I got to see last week in the big screen. Not only is the doc wonderful, featuring candid interviews with those who knew (and posed for!) him, but it dovetails nicely with these issues of sex and race that we keep discussing.
The film borrows its subtitle from the famous words Jesse Helms used during a congressional hearing about Mapplethorpe's "pornographic" pictures: "Look at the pictures!" he implored, arguing that one couldn't deny the fact that they were not art. Cannily, this HBO documentary lets us admire plenty of Mapplethorpe's pictures—I didn’t count but the doc is exhaustive, showing us hundreds of photographs, scanned and offered up to us for close inspection.
We get to see both his celebrated portraits (of Patti Smith and Debbie Harry, of Carolina Herrera and Andy Warhol) as well as those “filthy” pictures from his X book that so incensed Helms. As the film chronicles Mapplethorpe’s life (from suburbia to New York, from cunning waif to renowned photographer), it also follows the collective effort of The Getty and LACMA as they mount a joint retrospective of the artist.
It’s easily the most phallic-centric film I’ve covered in this column, outnumbering quite easily the number of full frontal shots of every other HBO movie combined. Even as I’ve hailed the sex scenes in Looking and on True Blood (to name just two), contemporary depictions of gay sex (and really, of sex in general) in mainstream media remain wedded to the idea that a tumescent penis immediately signals a shift into pornography—Mapplethorpe’s main lesson to us, it seems, remains a wholly intellectual one. Time and time again, he tried to remind us of the beauty of the penis and of the ways it need not be such a cause for alarm. Mainstream media, on the other hand, continues to operate under the implicit acknowledgement that male full frontal nudity (and in particular an erect penis) is somehow where one draws the line.
This, of course, becomes an even trickier proposition when, as was the case in his later years (before he died of AIDS complication at the age of 42) he photographed mostly black men. The word most often used to describe this fixation is “exploitative” given the way Mapplethorpe (a white guy) had profited from, quite literally, using black bodies. The documentary, more interested in the way Mapplethorpe pushed past artistic limits of impropriety (his most famous self-portrait features him with a whip up his ass), dances around the issue of race by deferring to one of the photographer’s female black friends from art school who says she disagrees with that critique given how much Robert loved the men he photographed (“And that’s not exploitation to me”). It’s a provocative rebuttal though one which leaves plenty to be discussed.
Look at the Pictures does give many of Mapplethorpe’s former models a chance to talk about their relationship with the photographer and give insights into these now iconic photographs: inadvertently, the doc offers us what may be the most sustained look at gay black male sexuality in HBO’s history. That it’s filtered through a white artist’s story is perhaps as perfect a distillation of these issues of representation as we’ll ever get.
Fun Awards Fact: None yet (I have high hopes for an Emmy nod but then its unabashed embrace of Mapplethorpe’s art may make enough people squirm) but we should take the time to bemoan the fact that directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have yet to earn any Emmy love for producing what is inarguably one of the best reality tv series competitions EVER: RuPaul's Drag Race. Yes, Bailey & Barbato are the guys behind World of Wonder.
Next week: Larry Kramer in Love & Anger.