Status Updates From Screening The Sexes

Once acclimated to his baroque, circuitous style, the extent that Tyler's arch, against-the-grain reading of film directly anticipates major developments in subsequent film scholarship becomes so clear.

"...camping is part of the critical game I play with certain films, which, deliberately or undeliberately, themselves go in for camping. My longtime position on Hollywood art has been that serious movies may be unwittingly, though not always unrewardingly, pretentious. Their unsophisticated pretensions tell us something, and the game is to guess just what it is."

This was my initial education on queer cinema; it's time for a revisit now that I have seen/am familiar with much of what the venerable Parker Tyler is holding forth on. And... what fun! "If we read aright the signs of sexual style in the movies--read them with intelligence and an open, enlightened spirit--we can descry the true, the actual, the varied features of the whole repertory of human sexuality."