Overcoming the Stigma: The Queer Denial of Indiewood

sex sells, except when it comes to Indiewood films with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) content. This is significantly evident when looking at the two trailers that were released for Tom Ford’s A Single Man, a film detailing a day in the life of a depressed gay British professor. Although neither trailer presents the film’s basic narrative or emphasizes that the film is an adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name, both present a few key shots accompanied by the film’s score. Tom Ford’s initial trailer for the Toronto International Film Festival illustrates the film’s gay content alongside other elements of the film’s narrative. We have the shot of Colin Firth and Matthew Goode kissing, a shot of Firth looking into Nicholas Hoult’s eyes, and ultimately an equal pairing of Firth interacting with male characters as he does with female, particularly Julianne Moore. The film was then sold to the Weinstein Company, whose subsequent trailer tells a markedly different story: Goode’s and Hoult’s names are removed from the final moments of the trailer; the gay kiss is removed; and there is a conspicuously un-subtle attempt at pushing both Firth and Moore for Academy Awards—we even get a quote from Playboy describing the film as “a movie of beauty, mystery, visual dazzle, and emotional resistance.” If one had not heard anything else about this film, one could easily assume from the Weinstein trailer that this is a semi-independent film detailing the relationship between Firth and Moore. This stark difference led Indiewire film critic Peter Knegt to claim that this was the heterosexualization of a gay film: “In with the Oscar buzz, out with the gayness. It seems the Weinstein Company doesn’t want to take any chances with all those homophobic Academy members” (“A Tale of Two Trailers”). This approach is indicative of many LGBT films in that there is a distinct downplay of queer content to favor the “quality” characteristics of the films, which in this case is perhaps most notable in the conscious decision to replace a scene of Firth and Goode kissing with claims of the Oscar buzz surrounding Firth and Moore.

The intention of this article is to identify how this differentiation between “queer” and “quality” content occurs within the LGBT films of Indiewood. Indiewood films are marketed as an art-house alternative to Hollywood but in fact are distributed by specialty divisions of major distribution companies. Brokeback Mountain and The Kids Are All Right, for instance, were distributed by Focus Features, which is a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, which is a subsidiary of NBC Universal, which in turn is a division of the Comcast Corporation. A political-economic critique of this corporate formation questions how explicitly queer narratives are marketed to a mass public with the sole purpose of making financial profit. Existing scholarship shows that “quality” features traditionally associated with cultural capital are highlighted in the promotion of these Indiewood films, perhaps most notably in the literary-adapted films distributed by Miramax (Collins 142). Highly celebrated literary figures dull the stigma associated with the commodification of films within Hollywood. This article argues that promotion of LGBT Indiewood films follows this same strategic approach. These films are surrounded by paratexts that distinctly emphasize “quality” cultural capital while downplaying any queer content. As Indiewire critic Peter Knegt has identified with the trailers for A Single Man, these are films that these subsidiary companies, alongside the private Weinstein Company, want to promote to a mass public beyond queer niche audiences. Within this process, queerness becomes the very liability for these films to overcome.

Indiewood

Above all else, Indiewood is an economic trend. The Indiewood, or semi-independent, film signals a shift in the production, distribution, and exhibition of many independent films, where specialty divisions owned by major media conglomerates distribute independently produced films (King 1; McDonald 354). Instead of these films continuing to exist on the margins, mini-major distributors, such as Miramax and New Line Cinema, pick these films up at major international film festivals for distribution...