The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema

by Thomas Waugh

For more than twenty years, film critic, teacher, activist, and fan Thomas Waugh has been writing about queer movies. As a member of the Jump Cut collective and contributor to the Toronto-based gay newspaper the Body Politic , he emerged in the late 1970s as a pioneer in gay film theory and criticism, and over the next two decades solidified his reputation as one of the most important and influential gay film critics. The Fruit Machine —a collection of Waugh’s reviews and articles originally published in gay community tabloids, academic journals, and anthologies—charts the emergence and maturation of Waugh’s critical sensibilities while lending an important historical perspective to the growth of film theory and criticism as well as queer moviemaking.
In this wide-ranging anthology Waugh touches on some of the great films of the gay canon, from Taxi zum Klo to Kiss of the Spider Woman . He also discusses obscure guilty pleasures like Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman , unexpectedly rich movies like Porky’s and Caligula , filmmakers such as Fassbinder and Eisenstein, and film personalities from Montgomery Clift to Patty Duke. Emerging from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, Waugh traverses crises from censorship to AIDS, tackling mainstream potboilers along with art movies, documentaries, and avant-garde erotic videos. In these personal perspectives on the evolving cinematic landscape, his words oscillate from anger and passion to wry wit and irony. With fifty-nine rare film stills and personal photographs and an introduction by celebrated gay filmmaker John Greyson, this volume demonstrates that the movie camera has been the fruit machine par excellence.

Genres: Film, Queer, Nonfiction

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Thomas Waugh is Concordia University Research Chair in Sexual Representation and in Documentary in Montreal, Canada. In addition to writing, he loves teaching, programming, swimming, cycling, travelling in India and sweating at Montreal's ninety-year-old community steambath.

Reviews

[Hal Schrieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this essay collection. I acquired it--I think via my?? therapist?? when I was a teenager, and I didn't get a lot out of it initially beyond watching Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and the 1992 Swoon. There's far more in here than I remembered, and most of it is startling in how much it feels like it might be written today. I kept reaching the end of an essay and thinking-- wait, we're still in 1979??

I like Waugh's appraisal of Fassbinder circa 79, enjoy his critiques of queer film festivals not programming things in an appealing way, and like --very much-- his arguments against "positive" stereotyping in favor of nuanced portraits of queer people whose relation to class and nationality and gender color their lives and produce alienation or connection. it's fun reading, like browsing just the arts and culture sections of magazines from 50 years ago. The sections on AIDS self-representation in film are astute and interesting.

Published in 2000, the main shortcoming of this book is that it focuses pretty much on white gay guys--with a savvy comment here or there of "of course I can't speak to women's issues...". The lone film review of a movie about trans people lapses into weird 80s sex wars rhetoric about how trans women are objectifying themselves in service to heterosexuality (admittedly the movie in question, "Born A Man, Let Me Die A Woman" is essentially a strange sexploitation ad for a surgeon). He also doesn't really talk about international film except in essays about international film festivals, and he doesn't really seem to care much about reflecting on what he knows about the countries in question when he sees these movies (that said, I appreciate the handful of rare-as-fuck films he mentions, like Tikoy Aguiluz's Boatman from the Philippines).

[Jason]

my summer vacation book!