'Sandy thinks I'm gay, Julie thinks I'm a lesbian': 5 sexually confused films
The A.V. Club experiments in honor of Humpday
Humpday
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The movie Humpday concerns two straight male friends who get drunk, dare each other to have sex on camera, sober up, and still decide to go through with it. It's a hilarious, surprisingly nuanced examination of what happens when putatively straight guys start questioning their sexuality—especially when it feels like sexual fluidity is just part being young, hip, free-living, and calling yourself artistic. In honor of Humpday, which opened in late July, The A.V. Club presents five films that get their kicks out of sexual confusion.
The Servant (1963)
Harold Pinter's screenplay (adapted with a corrective eye from a novel) has an upper-class man hiring a slightly menacing Dirk Bogarde to be his servant while he plots a career in Brazil with his fiancée. Bogarde and the fiancée don't like each other from the start, especially when he walks in on her and her man getting it on by the fireside. Bogarde then brings in his sister, who promptly starts hooking up with the husband-to-be. Except maybe she isn't really his sister, and maybe Bogarde isn't so much interested in managing the man's house as in the man himself. It'd be unfair to reveal too much about The Servant, but its pointed use of shifting sexual boundaries brings up the obvious as much as the finale of Chasing Amy—and then goes way past it.
Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
Is he her brother? Husband? It's nearly impossible to tell what the relationship is between the cohabitating male-and-female Lakes. He's concerned, solicitous, and speaks on her behalf at all times, and then they come to move into the same house together after a mental breakdown lays her up. A lot of messed-up things happen in Bunny Lake Is Missing—including the disappearance of a child that could put you off parenting for life—but the biggest comes when it's finally revealed how Steve and Ann Lake are related.
Luna (1979)
If Bunny Lake flirts with incestuous territory, Bernardo Bertolucci's notorious Luna gleefully dives into the deep end. A mother is concerned about her son's heroin habit, so she does everything she can to help. First she scores to get him through withdrawal, then she jerks him off, then... Truly, there's nothing bashful or dull about Luna, which treats incest as just as good a mothering technique as, say, cutting off your kid's dealer. Sometimes, however, her tactic is distance: She flirts with another man to get him jealous and interested in her again. Or is that really what's going on? With Bertolucci at his most perverse, it's hard to tell.
Tootsie (1982)
Dustin Hoffman goes into drag to get a better job, because his character is such a well-known jerk of an actor that no one will work with him. Tootsie played in the '80s as a running score-card of casual workplace/big-city sexism, but it wasn't another 9 To 5. The way the movie has aged so well can be attributed to its emphasis on dudes getting in touch with their "feminine side," or at least finding it mandatory to think from a woman's perspective before they can get any action. Hoffman loses interest in girlfriend Sandy (Teri Garr) when he becomes attracted to his female co-star Julie (Jessica Lange), with whom he becomes friends—only to lose her after coming clean. But he wins her back later by proving he's learned his lesson: "I was a better man with you, as a woman, than I ever was with a woman, as a man."
Naked Lunch (1991)
Pretty much all of David Cronenberg's films are exercises in showcasing as many ambiguous orifices as possible and wondering what's the right thing to stick in them. So Peter Weller, as a William Burroughs stand-in, has a sort of vaginal typewriter. Then Cronenberg brings on the phalluses left and right, some spurting fluids at the slightest provocation. Though the movie Naked Lunch is much less sexually explicit than the novel (it would almost have to be), it nails the sense of perverse pansexuality, with everything somehow offering up the temptation of intercourse.
