Follow Up to a Response

First there was this –
So many of the films I’ve watched recently have incorporated into their plots some kind of inane romance, affair, or love story involving heterosexual couples. This was never as unfortunate as it was in the recent Land of the Dead, where, among the walking corpses, two plucky heteros—one a freedom fighter, the other a virtuous whore—come together.

And then LuvSet commented –
Plus I disagree that the cute male lead (worked for me!) hooks up with the gun-wielding prostitute. They never kiss. They never even embrace. They don’t even exchange charged looks. The most significant looks between her and another male character, I’d say, are between her and Riley’s buddy when she’s sussing out their relationship.

(Follow the links to read the full texts.)

And so I added –
I’d agree with my bro. It didn’t occur to me that Riley(?) and Slack had hooked up. Given the lack of subtlety in the rest of the movie I’m pretty sure that if they’d hooked up there would have been some face sucking.

Genre movies have always had a tendency to include pointless (hetero) romantic subplots. I doubt that there are any more of them now than there were in the past. I certainly remember being annoyed as a kid by pointless romantic subplots getting in the way of the death and destruction in the monster movies I was watching. If anything (in horror movies at least) if “they” were trying to reinforce the hetero ideal there’d be more queer characters getting killed and more final couples instead of final girls.

I don’t remember any significant queer characters in other Romero movies that I’ve seen. Queer subtext in Martin would have gone over my head at the time I watched it. And probably even today. I’m mostly too clueless.

Possibly there were queer characters in Knight Riders. It seems like there was both a lesbian couple and a gay couple but I can’t remember clearly. The listing in the IMDB seems to back up my fuzzy memory. And while I liked Knight Riders when I was twenty I thought it was mostly just silly when I saw it again a couple of years ago. But then, I seem to be becoming a cranky old man.

2 thoughts on “Follow Up to a Response

  1. I didn’t mean the protagonist in Martin was gay or even bisexual but that the movie was full of transgressive sexuality. Voyeurism, strangulation … with Martin himself strangely willowy, even innocent, tho a killer.

    I still haven’t seen Knight Riders.

  2. Apparently Knight Riders is Romero’s favorite of his own films. It is a sweet, mostly hopeful movie.

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