I was in my mid-20's when the TV production first aired; I'd been "out" as a gay man for some time and had been living with my first real "partner" for at least a year. My degree was in English and one of my formative academic moments was in a class in which we read Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice"; I raised the question of the main character's sexual orientation (the aging Aschenbach is swept up in a sexual obsession with an adolescent boy; he flirts like crazy, though no sexual activity actually occurs) but I was dismissed by the patronizing teacher who said that the story wasn't really *about* that. While I understand that literature is rarely *about* one thing, certainly there's something going on concerning sexual identity; after all, Mann could have had Aschenbach fall for a girl.Before I go on a multi-paragraph rant, let me get back to Brideshead. In the early 80's, there were still not many "positive" representations of homosexuality in popular culture. Watching the first few episodes of the mini-series, I was convinced that Sebastian and Charles were meant for each other and were indulging in a mad, passionate physical affair, even though there was no clear-cut evidence for that. What was clear was that they did have a "passion" for each other, and in the midst of that, Charles meets Sebastian's sister Julia. My reading of what happens is that Charles transfers his feeling for Sebastian to Julia, she being a safer vessel for his yearnings. Sebastian is upset by this; in fact, this may be the event that determines the course of the rest of his life.
A "romantic friendship," according to Wikipedia, is "a very close but non-sexual relationship between friends, often involving a degree of physical closeness beyond that which is common in modern Western societies." I suspect this is what's involved in many "phases" that teenagers go through when they have crushes on people of the same sex. In England, this kind of thing seems to be taken much more in stride, particularly in schools where the sexes are segregated. Now that I've mellowed a bit, I can accept that Charles' relationship with Sebastian may have been "unconsummated"; in some ways, that even adds depth to the sad yearning feeling of the entire miniseries.Sebastian, however, is clearly a homosexual character, and it is somewhat problematic for us, as Roscoe points out in his comment on my earlier post, that his "condition" seems to be inextricably tied to his downfall. On the other hand, Sebastian does accept his "fate," not trying to hide behind a false heterosexual relationship. Yes, he seems to meet a sad end, but so do Charles and Julia, and it seems clear to me that the real cause for all the sadness and unfulfilled passion in the story is God (and Lady Marchmain). The movie seems to imply that, in the closing WWII scene, Charles is about to convert; I don't remember getting that sense at the end of the miniseries, but that could have been due to my own cultural blinders at the time. At any rate, I think I will take Roscoe's advice and read the book soon.
Below is a cobbled-together YouTube video which features the original TV theme song which I find so wonderfully sad, and which seems to be stuck in my head now for at least the next few days.
1 comment:
The irony, Mike, is that had you been in that English class just a few years later, the queer overtones probably would have dominated discussed of _Death in Venice_. You wonder what kind of classroom horror stories today's English majors will be telling 20 years hence (actually, I know I've been the cause of at least one I can think of).
Thanks for expanding on this--and thanks, too, to Roscoe for his insightful comment. Having seen neither and not read the book, I can't really say any more, except that I think "The real cause for all the sadness and unfulfilled passion in the story is God" should be engraved on a building somewhere.
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