The Monogamous/Promiscuous Optics in Contemporary Gay Film

Cüneyt Çakırlar & Gary Needham (2020) The monogamous/promiscuous optics in contemporary gay film: registering the amorous couple in Weekend (2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016), New Review of Film and Television Studies, 18:4, 402-430

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2020.1800329

This article explores representations of same-sex intimacy in contemporary gay cinema by focusing on two films, Weekend (2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016). Both films spatialise intimacy, which is reflected in a formal appeal to monogamous and promiscuous optics. What interests us here is how the rela- tional politics of monogamy/promiscuity can be considered as stylistic and ideological registers in gay filmmaking. Informed by Leo Bersani’s work, we investigate how gay cinema tests the social viability/intelligibility of same-sex intimacy against a centring of the self. Furthermore, we explore how gay films use form and style to situate both their politics and their spectators through specta- cles of erotic relationality. Following Bersani, the article proposes a theory of cinematic optics that privilege the impersonal over the personal, and the onto- logical over the psychological. Weekend ‘ovalises’ intimacy and locates the couple formally and ideologically. The couple in Weekend’s space of sociality operates within a monogamous optic that presents intimacy through stabilising identities and psychologising subject positions. Théo & Hugo, however, reorients spectator- ship as impersonal and promiscuous in finding a way to express the experience of cruising and sociability in ways that are dispersed and extensible.