Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The De-Gaying of “A Single Man”

While the heterosexualized poster for Tom Ford’s not-so-heterosexual “A Single Man” caused a wee stir last week, it seems the recently released trailer has just re-enforced those complaints.

A comparative study of the trailer that Tom Ford’s production company released as the film premiered in Venice and Toronto and the trailer The Weinstein Company just put out tells quite the tale. The new trailer uses the same music and mostly the same shots, except it adds in a bunch of quotes that not-so-subtly emphasize the film’s Oscar buzz, leaving out a few choice shots - pretty much all of which are suggestive of the film’s gay content.

The new trailer essentially is altered to suggest the core of the film is the relationship between Colin Firth and Julianne Moore’s characters, even removing from the end of the trailer the names of both Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult (who play Firth’s love interests). Moreover, in the first trailer, we see Firth’s character kiss both Goode and Moore, in the second we just get Moore. There’s also a sequence of shots in the first trailer which crosscuts Firth, who plays a professor in the film, staring into the eyes of both a female student and a male student. In the second, as you might guess, we only get the female (in a telling twist, instead of cutting to the male eyes, the trailer cuts to a quote from Entertainment Weekly saying “[Firth’s] performance is bound to win attention in this year’s Oscar race”).

Gone completely in the new trailer are a few shots of Firth running into the smoking (literally and figuratively) male prostitute outside a liquor store (one of the film’s more homoerotic sequences), as well as a few shots of him and Hoult running romantically and shirtlessly into the ocean together.

In with the Oscar buzz, out with the gayness. It seems The Weinstein Company doesn’t want to take any chances with all those homophobic Academy members. Call it the “Brokeback Mountain” approach (and remember how well that worked out).

No comments:

Post a Comment