Professor Sean Griffin
RICH LOPEZ | Staff writer
Rich@DallasVoice.com
Now in its third year, the It Came From Texas film festival highlights films made in (or about) the Lone Star State. The theme for this year’s festival, being held in downtown Garland, is True Texas Tales, and each film has historic ties to the state.
Through documentaries, big budget films and even a campy secret screening, ICFT fest presents some Texas history through film – and some of those tales have just a hint of mint.
Dr. Sean Griffin, film studies professor in the SMU Meadows Division of Film and Media Arts, is among the festival’s special guest speakers. But he also pinpointed the queer notes and nuggets that can be found among the festival’s schedule.
“Lurking in the background of some of the films getting shown is the presence of queer people,” Griffin first said in an email. He points to the films Bonnie and Clyde, Bernie and even John Wayne’s The Alamo.
The Alamo? Hey, why not?
“The festival is organized around considering who is telling the history and why they are telling it (and how that might alter the way the history is told) — and LGBTQ+ audiences have learned to read subtext and find clues of their existence in artefacts that often try to cover them up,” Griffin added in the email.
“As such, the festival also celebrates the pleasure of watching something from a camp viewpoint — the Mocky Horror Picture Show screening, for example, as well as the comedic satire of Viva Max! And I would argue John Wayne’s The Alamo has its camp aspects too.”
As the author of Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out, an examination of the connection between queer culture and Disney, and co-author of Queer Images: A History of Lesbian and Gay Film in America — among other titles — Griffin knows his stuff.
But first, what makes a movie remotely queer?
“There are a bunch of different ways, but I say there are three aspects to that,” he said. “A movie can be queer if it has queer characters. If filmmakers or people involved identify as such and are expressing a queer lens or identity, that can make a queer film. And finally, if queer audiences decide, ‘This movie belongs to us.’”
Festival flicks Brokeback Mountain, Pink Flamingos and Showgirls each fit one of his three points above. But one film in the festival exists in a gray area.
Richard Linklater’s Bernie tells the true crime story of Bernie Tiede. Set in Carthage, Texas, about 60 miles east of Tyler, and starring Jack Black, Shirley Mac-Laine and Matthew McConaughey, the film is based on Skip Hollandsworth’s article in Texas Monthly about Tiede, a mortician turned murderer.
Hollandsworth co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater for the 2011 film.
“I think the movie raises the idea about Bernie [being gay]. I think the people in that town figured he was but never said anything. The movie honors that.
“Whether he is or not, the film leaves that open,” Griffin said. “But he’s sweet and warm and, while queer audiences may have warmed up to it, the appreciation for Bernie does feel more localized.”
So based on his guidelines, Bernie is on the cusp.
Griffin added, “If queer audiences are looking for smalltown queer Texas, we go to Sordid Lives, not Bernie.”
He was clear that he doesn’t go into a film seeking out anything to set off his gaydar. But he also aligns with the notion that LGBTQ+ folks have been trained to pick up on notes that might go otherwise unnoticed.
“We had to learn those hints that someone might be gesturing toward a queer aspect, or sometimes we have to determine, ‘Is it just me or was that intentional?’” he said. “I like how Kelly Kitchens and the festival programmers defined this year’s theme by investigating Texas history and those who are telling those stories, but also, we as gay people can find our place in a history that tends to erase us.”
Heck, the 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway could have had a threesome. According to Griffin, now there are just hints of it.
“The initial draft of the screenplay had Clyde Barrow (Beatty) as bisexual and in a three-way with Bonnie and their crime partner C.W.,” Griffin wrote in an email. “While the final film eliminated that, it does deal with Clyde having difficulty getting sexually aroused by Bonnie, so the ghost of that original idea lurks.”
The threeway would have happened with C.W. Moss, the gang’s getaway driver played by Michael Pollard. Instead, Griffin mentioned, there’s vague allusion to a connection.
“The overt stuff was certainly taken out, but it feels very plain that there was something else happening there in the film today — that and Clyde’s impotence and Bonnie’s sexual frustration throughout the film.”
Put a bunch of hetero alphas into a film and the result can be mixed and even high camp, as Griffin finds in John Wayne’s directorial effort in the 1960 film The Alamo.
“The movie leans into the myth of the actual Alamo, and it tries to be this upstanding heroic epic. But through a queer lens, the camp value feels more pronounced. There is this failed seriousness about the film, and when you get a bunch of men together talking about how big Jim Bowie’s knife is? Come on,” Griffin said.
Griffin’s part in this year’s festival has nothing to do with any of the above films. He will speak on the panel at the screening of JFK: Breaking the News with local news footage covering the John F. Kennedy assassination. The footage is provided by the G. William Jones Film Archives at the SMU library as well as the archives from the Sixth Floor Museum.
But Griffin will certainly be in attendance the entire run.
“I hold the honor as the only person who has shown up for every screening for its existence. I should wear a crown,” he laughed.
But, he pointed out, “Movies are a shared culture for queer people. On a basic level, it’s where people cruised each other, a social space.
“We share our love for Judy and Bette and now Jennifer Coolidge. We share a special fascination with the movies even though they were telling these straight, hetero stories. We can just appreciate them in an alternate way.” ■
It Came From Texas film fest runs Sept. 12-14 at the Plaza Theatre in Garland. For more information, the full schedule and tickets, visit GarlandArts.com.