"The History Boys" Ctd.

A reader response worth passing along:

That was a very powerful post on the Bennett film. But I think you underestimate your own distance from it. The scene at the end of the film, in which the audience discovers what happened to each of the boys, lets us know that the gay/Jewish/Sheffield boy, Posner, is unable not to end up a tragic figure like Hector - a teacher who struggles with his own attraction to his students.  Happy happy joy joy!  Worse, Bennett doesn't seem to me to provide the audience with anything that would prevent them from coming to the conclusion that homosexuality is essentially tragic.

If I'd seen the film at the age of sixteen, I believe I may have contemplated suicide afterwards. I'm not sure if I would have been able to rationalize that ending in any way. After I saw the film, I thought it might be possible to conclude that Posner's future unhappiness lies in the conflicted eros of being a teacher, and not in the conflicted eros of being gay. That's a problematic conclusion in many ways, though.

The point is that the film easily leaves its audience with the impression that being gay is equivalent to being fucked. In this decade, that means that Bennett is closer to hackdom than you judge him to be.

Fair enough. Bennett, like many Englishmen of his generation, is almost addicted to his own misery. And generationally, I don't think he's able to grasp the liberation some of us have discovered, or perhaps he considers it too vulgar to celebrate it. But in England, the transformation in twenty years is even more pronounced than in the U.S. I think of Bennett as a brilliant old queen, unable to move on from his own tragedy. Gore Vidal is in the same category. There's nothing to be done, alas, except avoid their fate. And read the often-mesmerizing products of it.