A Quote by Todd Haynes
People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film... Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?
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I'm interested in the structure of art and how it works. And the content is also interesting, but I don't want to keep the same structure and just plug in new content every week.
Any story dealing, however seriously, with homosexual love is taken to be a story about homosexuality while stories dealing with heterosexual love are seen as stories about the individual people they portray. This is as much a problem today for American filmmakers who cannot conceive of the presence of gay characters in a film unless the specific subject of the film is homosexuality. Lesbians and gay men are thereby classified as purely sexual creatures, people defined solely by their sexual urges.
Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.
I would never be essentialist about sexuality and structure, but I do think there's a way in which this male-arc has been talked about as the only structure, and kind of a stand-in for even the word structure, instead of looking at other forms.
Most theorists suspect that space has an intricate structure - that it is 'grainy' - but that this structure is on a much finer scale than any known subatomic particle. The structure could be of an exotic kind: extra dimensions, over and above the three that we are used to (up and down, backward and forward, left and right).
The danger is not so much in the economic structure of a society but in its intellectual structure.
People from pre-sexual revolution and even from the 60s and the birth of the gay movement still define gay as two men or two women having sex. Our generation defines it from a more emotional standpoint. To be gay means you are drawn to the same sex. But it's a part of who you are, an identity, not an act.
If I did the structure and had this thing about a straight character, I would never have a sex scene to prove that he's heterosexual. If I have a gay character in a movie, I need to have a sex scene in it - just to prove that he's gay?
What I find in a creative company is while there is a desire to build a management foundation that can feel clear and consistent, the unique product we're in Illumination Entertainment making doesn't always allow for that. So rather than following management strategy that talks about building your structure and then staffing that structure, I tend to build the structure around the strengths of the individual people we have.
I think, almost, the film industry thinks that by making gay characters super masculine, it's an attempt at saying being gay is OK if you act like straight people. I don't think we should just have gay characters who are 100 percent femme, either. I just think it's about that mix and creating more diverse gay characters.
As a comedian I don't think they look at me as a sexual person but I can see where with actors it would be a little difficult for them because its part of their mystique, it gives them an easier time to change characters and people aren't going oh we have a gay actor, their gay so I don't know if I'm gunna buy this guy with this girl, its weird, I don't think it's fair; it's only done with us, it seems, like they just accept everyone as straight and go along with it and then its oh their gay and make a big deal out of it.
Structure is important in film, but there's often structure to be found in the most unlikely of places! It's quite possible to build a structured story and retain idiosyncrasy.
Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.
When we have gay characters on TV, they're just, kind of, gay for the sake of being gay. That's their personality. That's their whole backstory, that's their future story, that's their present story - it's just gay. Nobody's just gay.
I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.
If we end up creating a gameplay structure where it makes sense for, whether it's a female to go rescue a male or a gay man to rescue a lesbian woman or a lesbian woman to rescue a gay man, we might take that approach.
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