(no subject)

[between_time_and_42]

Like I mentioned before, I rewatched This is Spinal Tap recently, and like I said the first time I saw the movie... the only way that the tension between Nigel/David/Jeanine even makes sense is if Nigel is in love with David. It's extremely fucking obvious even though it's never said outright. I was even watching the deleted scenes on the DVD, and in one of them Nigel talks about how David used to experiment and bring home men to sleep with when they were both living together, and David just acknowledges it as true and moves on. This is super significant to me because the dialogue of the movie was entirely improvised and all the actors had to go on were outlines of their character's backstories, so the fact that the character doesn't dispute this and the fact that it's kept as an actual deleted scene and wasn't just immediately discarded means that David is canonically bi and it was written into the character's backstory. And yet... in the final cut, it's never actually stated that they had feelings for each other (or maybe it was one-sided, I read it being more one-sided on Nigel's part), even though that would have made a LOT of sense. I'd say "well, it was the 80's, plus them being in love wasn't the point of the story and you can easily read it as merely close friendship," but... well, I dunno. The movies that Christopher Guest wrote after Spinal Tap, at least the documentary-style ones, all have at least 1 LGBT character, and even though it's treated as an unpleasant punchline in A Mighty Wind, the characters in Best in Show and Waiting For Guffman all have sort-of happy endings and are treated fairly by both the narrative and the characters in-universe, so... what I'm saying is, it shouldn't have been too much to ask for canonical representation in Spinal Tap, especially when it would have clarified that part of the story a lot, but at the same time, it really does still work if they're just really close friends, so I'm conflicted.

The same goes for another film about fictional musicians- Inside Llewyn Davis. I mean, it's easy to infer that Llewyn's grief for his dead partner drives/colors the whole thing. I've talked about this plenty of times before- Llewyn was part of a duo, and when one half of the duo is gone, it turns out the whole was stronger than the sum of its parts. No one wants Llewyn, the solo singer. They want Davis of Timlin & Davis. Mike was Llewyn's partner in business and in life. So why not extend that to his romantic life? Such little is said about Mike that it's easy to draw any conclusion you want, but I still think the romantic undertones of their relationship should have been made explicit. And it's not like this would have gotten in the way of the story, or like the time it was made had anything to do with it- this was made in 2013!! Sure, it takes place in the 1960's, but the Coen brothers made a movie that take place in the 40's that features THREE explicitly gay characters. Then when it comes to Llewyn Davis, it's all hush-hush. Why?? Maybe I'm getting too worked up thinking about this, it's just... that narrative could have worked so much better with explicit representation.