Beginners, the latest cinematic effort from director Mike Mills, warrants a stellar spot in the long line of recent Hollywood films that deal with societal stereotypes of LGBTQ individuals. In Beginners, veteran actor Christopher Plummer plays Hal, a terminally ill old man who becomes open about his long-repressed homosexuality only after the death of his wife. Although the film focuses primarily on the endeavors and exploits of Oliver (Ewan McGregor), Hal's indecisive and insipid son, Plummer manages to steal every scene in which he takes part - his performance radiates with warmth and profound softness, and Beginners becomes a poignant portrait of self-acceptance.
Plummer's stellar turn is made all the more powerful when one considers that his character, because of his sexuality, could never have inhabited the screen in earlier eras of Hollywood history.\nFor decades, Hollywood refused to offer up even minor hints or subtle suggestions of homosexual tendencies. The production codes of the first half of the 20th century called for the systematic removal and repression of all such content from studio productions. While the popular novels and plays of the day often provided slivers and implications of homosexuality, the studios strived to erase all such pieces of allegedly "aberrant" and "perverse" lifestyles as they translated the written works in question to the screen.
For example, through this systematic censorship, the fairly blatant lesbian tendencies of Maxim de Winter's housekeeper in Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca transformed instead into a deep sense of servitude in Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film adaptation of the novel. Similar snips and substitutions in the 1950s plagued the adaptations of Tennessee Williams' famed plays, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In each case, bits of dialogue that hinted at the homosexual inclinations of any character disappeared from the script altogether. In this manner, Hollywood stripped all gay commentary from Williams' work and muddled his artistic intent.
While this censorship began to disappear at the end of the 1950s, Hollywood's portrayal of gays in the late 1960s and '70s reflected a stereotypical vision of the culture, portraying promiscuous, self-loathing or outrageously flamboyant men, reflecting a new kind of homophobia. The gay characters in Mel Brooks' The Producers, for example, seem intended to mock the supposed 'silliness' of the gay lifestyle. Additionally, William Friedkin's 1970 picture The Boys in the Band demonstrates similarly static characters that do nothing to challenge preconceived notions of homosexuality. As the century progressed, films like Bird on a Wire, Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct systematically cast LGBTQ characters as either criminals or as flamboyant stereotypes.
Fortunately, the role of LGBTQ themes in film has expanded exponentially since the end of the 1990s. In 1999's Boys Don't Cry, Hilary Swank delivered a heart-wrenching, Oscar-winning performance as Brandon Teena, a transgendered teenager who had to contend with cruel societal standards and norms. Her portrayal provoked mass sympathy from American audiences, and it proved that the hour had come for a franker illustration of LGBTQ characters and lifestyles on screen. Widening this window into the so-called 'queer conscious' even further, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain managed to elicit both box office success and critical acclaim in 2005; its stark imagining of the repressed romance of two gay cowboys forced audiences to reflect upon their own views of sexuality and the American Dream. Amd that same year, in Duncan Tucker's Transamerica, Felicity Huffman posed a similar challenge to traditional sensibilities with her sympathetic, relatable turn as a transsexual woman who seeks some kind of normalcy in her life.
These films paved a path towards true openness for LGBTQ characters in films. Liberated from the world of stereotypical supporting players and static incarnations of the "gay best friend," the lesbian mothers portrayed in 2010's The Kids Are All Right, for instance, behave in a way that virtually any audience member would describe as 'normal.' Through these films and many others of the past few years, Hollywood has finally begun to traverse new frontiers of LGBTQ culture and to weave equality and understanding into the American fabric.
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