This thread
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=2827873has me thinking about Michael Medved again. Michael and his brother were the co-author of a book called "The Golden Turkey Awards" that for many years was like a Bible to me. Written over 25 years ago, the book gave awards to some of the worst achievements in cinema. There were categories like "Worst Performance by a Politician, "Worst Idea For a Monster Movie", etc. I was, and still am, a lover of bad movies, and I read and re-read the book and its sequel over and over again.
It saddened me to watch Medved's slow descent into extreme right-wing punditry. In his commentaries, one described in the thread I've linked to above, he often criticizes Hollywood for its "liberal" agenda, with extra venom reserved for films with explicit or implied homosexual themes.
Reading Medved's attack started me thinking again about the "hoax" in "The Golden Turkey Awards". In the forward to the book, the authors issue
A Challenge To The Reader:
Over 425 actual films are described in this book, but one is a complete hoax. Can you find it?
For 25 years I could not figure out which movie was the fake one, until this morning, when I used the power of Google to narrow it down.
So what does that have to do with DU, and why am I posting this in GD?
One of the categories in Medved's book was for "Most Unerotic Concept in Pornography". One of the nominees was for a film called
Him. I'll let Medved describe it to you:
This innovative film, designed exclusively for gay audiences, goes into excruciating detail concerning the erotic career of Jesus Christ. The ads for the film show the face of The Savior (with a cross glistening in one eye) while the headline inquires "Are You Curious About HIS Sexual Life?" Filmmaker Ed D. Louie satisfies that curiosity by showing us that the Son of Man was a voracious homosexual. (After all, why did he spend all that time hanging around with the Apostles?) The central character of the film is actually a young gay male in contemporary America whose sexual obsession with Jesus helps him to understand the "hidden meaning" of the Gospels.
Him ends up winning the Golden Turkey, and Medved offers the following explanation:
For sheer tastelessness, this film has no equals. In one scene, our homosexual hero goes to his local priest to confess his erotic fixation on Jesus Christ. The priest sits in the confessional, listening to the young man breathlessly elaborating his perverted fantasies, while taking advantage of the situation to reach under his cassock and masturbate grotesquely on camera. This charming episode surely marks one of the absolute low points in the history of American cinema. Those pathetic few who might want to see Him ought to come to the theater dressed in plain, brown paper wrappers, that hopefully cover their eyes along with the rest of their faces.
As you've probably guessed, many think that
Him is the hoax (there are also votes for an animal film called
Dog of Norway). Regardless of whether it is or not, the inclusion of
Him in the book means only one of two things:
1. Medved made it up, or
2. Medved went to a movie theater and watched it.
Either choice adds to my theory that the more militantly homophobic someone is, the more likely they are to be hiding or denying their own homosexuality.
Him is either a product of Medved's imagination, which seems like an odd idea for a straight, anti-gay man to have, or he somehow was compelled to see a movie about a gay Jesus.
I'm not saying that Michael Medved is gay. I, of course, have no way of knowing that. Nor do I necessarily approve of "outing" people. However, I do think that more study needs to be conducted about homophobia. As with Foley, Hastert, Mehlmann, and Hastings, it often seems the that worst of the homophobes may be protesting too much.
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