![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo a couple of nights back I watched Milk, the biopic with Sean Penn playing Harvey Milk of that ilk. And I've been trying to formulate - well, not a response exactly, but at least the way I reacted to it. And it's hard, because it does different things to different parts of me.
In the first part, it is just so incredibly nostalgic, because I was so there - or not there, rather, but here and wishing I was there. We tried so hard in the '70s to be like Harvey: that radical, that committed, that achieving. But, y'know? Oxford never was San Francisco, and the UK is not the USA. We were twenty years from having any kind of gay-equality legislation, while they were fighting to keep what they already had. We were still growing our hair when they were cutting theirs, and half of us were still illegal to begin with (you had to be 21: "consenting adults in private" was the rubric, which is entirely fair, but they set the bar higher for us than for anyone else. I was still only 19 when Milk died); but we wore pink triangles on the bibs of our dungarees and we marched and shouted and devised plays and read Gay News, which is how we all knew about Harvey Milk. Hell, I nearly lost my rented room because I left a copy of Gay News on my bed, and a housemate saw it through the window.
So there's that: the pang of nostalgia for a life not quite lived, what we aspired to.
And then there's the other thing, the storytelling thing. I've never been much of a Sean Penn fan, but I love that he got an Oscar for this; it's an extraordinary performance. Stubborn in his weaknesses, which is so rare in movies. But actually, I really wanted to make a case for its not being about Milk at all. I think it's really about Dan White. Not that he gets much screen time, but that's half the point: he never did. It's about the disintegration of a personality, shown only in silhouette and shadow, defined in the shapes that Harvey makes around him. And I think Penn knows that, and is generous enough to go with it, to make the shapes that make the shadow where the story really is.
In the first part, it is just so incredibly nostalgic, because I was so there - or not there, rather, but here and wishing I was there. We tried so hard in the '70s to be like Harvey: that radical, that committed, that achieving. But, y'know? Oxford never was San Francisco, and the UK is not the USA. We were twenty years from having any kind of gay-equality legislation, while they were fighting to keep what they already had. We were still growing our hair when they were cutting theirs, and half of us were still illegal to begin with (you had to be 21: "consenting adults in private" was the rubric, which is entirely fair, but they set the bar higher for us than for anyone else. I was still only 19 when Milk died); but we wore pink triangles on the bibs of our dungarees and we marched and shouted and devised plays and read Gay News, which is how we all knew about Harvey Milk. Hell, I nearly lost my rented room because I left a copy of Gay News on my bed, and a housemate saw it through the window.
So there's that: the pang of nostalgia for a life not quite lived, what we aspired to.
And then there's the other thing, the storytelling thing. I've never been much of a Sean Penn fan, but I love that he got an Oscar for this; it's an extraordinary performance. Stubborn in his weaknesses, which is so rare in movies. But actually, I really wanted to make a case for its not being about Milk at all. I think it's really about Dan White. Not that he gets much screen time, but that's half the point: he never did. It's about the disintegration of a personality, shown only in silhouette and shadow, defined in the shapes that Harvey makes around him. And I think Penn knows that, and is generous enough to go with it, to make the shapes that make the shadow where the story really is.