Many have tried, of course, from Shakespeare to American Pie, from Schindler's List or The Wizard of Oz to Chloe in the Afternoon or Bound, yet really none of these has shed much light on it, in my opinion. That Bertolucci gem, Stealing Beauty, seemed to hit the target the first time round (Mazzy Star echoes as the nineteen-year-olds (p)lay beneath the olive tree), but in retrospect it's rather sentimental, and not all its gestures ring loud today (though I still believe that "the only portrait an artist can make is a self-portrait").
Boys Don't Cry is one of the few things I know that touches the psychic/social dimensions of sex. It contains both the most beautiful sex scenes of any film I've seen, and the most disgusting (if you can call that sex). This range makes the film valuable, because it arms the viewer not just with an idyll or a horror, but with an axis by which to understand the territory of sex: a well-measured, interconnected map of what sex is to us, in our minds, in our culture. It is mainly Swank's difficult, subtle acting, with its gentle smirks and painful winces that limn this portrait into perfection. You needn't be an urban sophisticate, nor Southern and poor, to appreciate the etches it makes on you: I propose that anyone alive today would know the range of human experience that it encompasses.
In thinking through this, I thought of two other inventions that have clarified my relationship to sex: the words, "male gaze" and "voyeur." The latter is a dirty word. "What's a voyeur?" "Someone who takes pleasure just from looking." This stops me dead cold in my tracks. How could one not take pleasure from looking? "The visible" is, of course, manifestly beautiful, is it not? Are there those among the sighted who are not voyeurs? If not, it explains why there are guys who go to porn theatres and jack off (or for that matter, why there are guys who go to art films and jack off).
The other, "male gaze," I came across while flipping through a book called Sexy Dressing, about the power relationships enforced by our choice of clothes. It describes those stolen peeks, those sly sidelong glances at a nearby woman—a gaze of which I secretly knew I was guilty, even then, at 17: the male gaze. The bold (?) declaration is made that women are ever aware of this constant peeping and snooping: an assertion that shocked me, since I thought that at least, if there was a risk to me in these glances, at least I was hurting no one but myself. I was mortified that my voyeuristic desires could be a perpetual psychic presence for the women around me—sometimes for better, but usually, I gather, for the worse. It can make women feel glad, proud, confident, to be so universally looked-at, but it can also make them feel unattractive, or objectified (denied their subjective experience).
If I am a voyeur and the everyman is not, then I already have an alternative sexuality. My precious, I need to stare at you for the vision itself. If my gaze is "male", an weapon of injury that shoots across rooms without speech, then my life, my desire, my need, is one of destruction.
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