"Pansies don't float" – gay representability, film noir, and The Man Who Wasn’t There: Analysis by Vincent Brook and Allan Campbell. Quote: >Roderick Jaynes is the pseudonym employed by the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen to disguise the editing of the films they otherwise produce, direct, and write together under one or both of their given names. The use of this fictive persona (a source that dares not speak its name) in regard to the neo-noir ultimately released as The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) is doubly ironic. Here it foregrounds a similar subterfuge of identification in the film itself, a subterfuge that has gone largely unnoticed or at least not remarked on in the discourse surrounding the film. As for the working title, "not to float" suggests submersion, something kept beneath the surface, and what in a Hollywood film is more likely treated as submerged ("subtextual," if you will) than the representation of a homosexual? Yet "Pansies Don’t Float," like "Roderick Jaynes," both shrouds and reveals, for, as we will show, more than one "pansy" (beyond the secondary character openly disclosed as homosexual) lurks beneath the surface of The Man Who Wasn’t There. Besides "outing" none other than the film’s protagonist, and assessing the significance of his "closeted" gayness, this essay will analyze the relation of homosexual submersion to film noir as a genre specifically, and to the issue of "gay representability" in American commercial cinema as a whole.<
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posted by johannes,
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
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