Macaque friends (taken from an article about how a study on macaques led to the conclusion that human friendship evolved to help in fending off predators)
Our friendships are more disjoint, complicated and confusing than we all think. I have finished reading the excellent autofiction novels by Elena Ferrante, set in Naples and dealing with the odd friendship between the narrator, Elena Greco, and her best friend, Raffeala (Lila) Cerrullo.
What it does so well is to describe the papered over unfriendliness, or just disquiet, that exists in so many friendships, and to suggest its inseparability from friendship itself. The Ying and the Yang? Maybe. The intensity of Greco’s dependence on Lila, for creativity, more properly for creative energy, the sense of attraction and repulsion between them… it is unlike the simple Power of Positivity posts I sometimes get on Facebook, the kind which show two women holding hands under sunsets, with a big caption about true friends. That is static, unbelievable, and corresponds not a great deal to real life. There is certainly great trust and happiness and intellectual connection from friendship, and it my experience, that is actually more true the more people mature. But there is always stuff going on under the surface.
Ferrante’s skill is to lead the reader to understand that the relationship between Elena and Lila contains a lot that is not only true with respect to these characters, but true generally. The tugging, the intimacy, the complicatedness of friendship is what she captures. Half is flattering to pretensions made of friendship in the general culture, half isn’t as much.
I’m thinking of whether there is any comparison to Knausgaard to be made. But his friends are rocks of masculinity, men who lead him back into male spontaneity and energy when he feels in danger of being seen as a ‘jessie’ (sic) or being swallowed up by the demands of his wife Linda, of becoming a thoroughly domesticated man. This is referring chiefly to his friend Geir (others too, but I can’t remember their names now). That preoccupation means that there isn’t really too much about friendship itself in Knausgard (not necessarily a flaw, of course, it just isn’t his thing). Ferrante, despite writing women’s lives to the point where one might naively (or worse) assume that there is something particularly female about the themes she draws out, writes friendship universally. There is little in it that could not be applied to male friendship, with a lot of the surface detail changed (male friends may talk less on average, so that might be tweaked).
There are other things about Ferrante I want to talk about. Maybe in another blog post.
Reconstruction: the historian Eric Foner pointedly describes it as America’s unfinished revolution, as it may well be. The period after Lincoln’s death and Union victory over the South saw an effort to remodel Southern society following an egalitarian principle. This effort was bound up at first in the practical necessity of finding land and subsistence occupation for freed black people, but under the guidance of radical abolitionists, there was a real movement to create societies of citizens, black and white, equal, at least before the law.
Northern Republican and abolitionist dislike of Southern slavery was partly rooted in the North’s different aesthetics and ethical sensibilities, and Reconstruction must be viewed partially in that light: as an attempt to paint the South with Northern colours. Northern abolitionists had in the antebellum period withdrew (in perhaps too-studied pantomime disgust) from visions of decadent plantation living, of unneeded Southern luxuries; this was contrasted with the rightness – the thrift and self-reliance – of pioneer life. A popular contemporary theory (now of course discredited) held that the North-South division was rooted in an atavistic English faultline: Southerners were held to be the descendants of aristocratic, lazy Normans, while Northerners descended from hardy Anglo-Saxons. Many objections to slavery – including that of Lincoln’s own father – were, so far from any concern with black suffering, in fact mostly based on frustration at the inability of smallholders in the border states to compete with slavers, the entrenched commercial power of the latter stemming from a free and naturally self-sustaining labour force. Reconstruction might be viewed as the Northern attempt to replace the Southern sense of human virtue with their own. Could black people be imagined, be figured, as the humble, moral, little people in whom Northern Republicans saw so much virtue? Radical abolitionists coupled the North’s more diffuse support for the little people of the world with their – much less popular and harder to sell – belief in equality. And with this combination the more radical among them spun thoughts of a society of black judges, black senators and black governors. For a decade this vision became real, imposed through the force of Northern arms.
A cartoon satirising the compromise of 1877, in which Democrats agreed to support a Republican president, if an end were brought to Reconstruction and federal troops withdrawn.
And then it failed, but failed in a curious kind of way. It failed in that black people were subject to violent and sustained suppression, and lost voting rights for nearly a hundred years; and it failed inasmuch as radical abolitionists did not succeed in passing down any of the impetus for reconstruction to future generations, neither to their own children nor seemingly anyone else. It finally can be said to have failed such that the historiography of the period, beginning with the Dunning school of the early twentieth century, was allowed to so successfully construct a negative portrayal of Reconstruction such that its end became seen as a great moment of American reconciliation, the ‘birth of a nation’ – the new reunified white American nation. This portrayal seems to have significantly shaped (or distorted) collective memory. The Dunning school, which saw Reconstruction as alternately fanatical and self-interested, and as both chaotic and immoral, was hegemonic in academic history far into the twentieth century, and its views can be seen reflected in any number of films and tv shows. A fairer, potentially more positive, view of the motives of Reconstruction (as distinct from those of the abolitionist movement during the Civil War itself, which is better known) has never really been unearthed in popular history.
The energy and outrage over slavery displayed by white abolitionists became a movement for equality, but within a generation it had become much diminished, then forgotten. Why? How is it that by the 1900s ex-secessionist states were sending statues of confederate generals to the Capitol – with only muted protest from the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War? Why did the zeal for equal rights of the abolitionist movement, at one time so clear, disappear? From what I know, I’m not sure historians have come up with convincing answers to these questions.
George and Orry, from ‘North and South’
The first statue – of Robert E. Lee – was sent by the state of Virginia in 1909. It was controversial. The Washington Post quotes a Kansas congressman of the day as saying, “I think it is a disgrace. He was a traitor to his country, and I will not sanction an official honor for a traitor.” Apparently one Idaho senator fulminated against what he called the “desecration” of the Capitol. Well, this is the kind of reaction you would expect (sadly one that would quickly fade faced with the strength of the ‘lost cause’ narrative. Would many Kansas congressmen, even today, call such a statue a disgrace? Or would most call it ‘history’ that should be left alone?). Despite such initial disquiet, as the Washington Post puts it, ‘a dam had broken in the Lost Cause’: the next twenty years saw Southern states send battalions of Confederate icons to the Capitol. The protest became muted fairly quickly. Hero-worship of Confederate generals became normalised in the South and happily tolerated by the rest of America.
Virgilia Hazard
It’s surprising that by the early twentieth century, the egalitarian ambitions of the abolitionists were seen as an embarrassment. White reconciliation, represented iconically by Woodrow Wilson’s appreciation for ‘Birth of a Nation’ (“It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true“) took over. Municipal statues and monuments in the Southern United States still overwhelmingly venerate slavers, confederates and segregationists, with almost nothing given over to abolitionists or civil rights activists (black or white). That is well-known. Perhaps less well-known is that the north still does not honour its abolitionists. Thaddeus Stevens, someone you might know from the movie ‘Lincoln’, has few monuments to his name, despite being one of the architects of the constitutional amendment which ended slavery. Can we chart the cultural articulation from the abolitionist generation to their gilded age children of the 1880s and 90s, uninterested as they were in securing even the most basic aims of Reconstruction? Something like ‘The Betrayal of the Negro’, written in 1954, is said to do something like this. I should pick it up.
Radical abolitionists have been forgotten; they have also been slandered. Take Virgilia Hazard, 1980s TV’s version of the mad bad abolitionist; played by Kirstie Alley, Virgilia featured heavily in the classic tv miniseries ‘North and South’, based on the wildly popular novels of the same name. Some background: the show is about two friends, George (Virgilia’s brother) and Orry. George’s family is a pioneer of the new industrialism, from Pennsylvania; Orry is a scion of a well-to-do South Carolinan plantation. The film shows us the Civil War (including the build up and aftermath) through their friendship. We see them bond when they first meet as cadets at West Point; we see them become closer through the decades; and finally we see their friendship tested when they fight on opposite sides of the Civil War. While the film looks admiringly upon George’s anti-slavery views, it also approves of his lack of energy to do anything about it, and his mannered disdain for what we would now call ‘direct action’.
The show wants to document the divisions – cultural and material – in American society that led to the civil war; but at the same time it wants to valorise friendship and solidarity between all (white) Americans, and at the end of the war, wants the audience to applaud as George and Orry reconcile. Much time is spent showing them fighting together, on the same side in the Mexican-American war of the early 1850s.
The cost of this is Virgilia, George’s sister. Unlike him, she is portrayed as blunt and lacking decorum. Early in life, she becomes obsessed with the wrongness of slavery, delivering a barnstorming speech against what she calls its true product, the harvest of human beings (Matrix vibes?) and going so far as to help the famous (non-fictional) abolitionist John Brown commit acts of terrorism. So far, so good. But the show constantly punishes Virgilia, and strongly suggests that she goes too far. At every turn, she falls further down in society from what the show implies to be her overzealous sense of justice: as a nurse, she is rude to Confederate wounded, and is duly punished; through a series of obstinate actions, she becomes practically homeless and dependent on prostituting herself to a powerful congressman to get by. And the show is not above intimating that her ‘pro-black’ feelings are driven by powerful and unseeming lusts: the man she later marries, the slave Grady, she meets in Orry’s barn and promptly seduces and has sex with in the hay. Lust and political zeal mixed up; each driving the other.
After the end of the war, Orry has seen to it that the ‘bad’ overseers are driven off, and that his ex-slaves, now workers, are ‘happy’ – but then, suddenly, their plantation gets attacked by a mob of angry freedmen desperate for revenge.
The show’s perspective is clear: these ‘savages’ are going to destroy the civilized life that Orry and his family have, and the cosy cohabitation that Orry, the ‘good slavemaster’ has created with his new workers. The obvious and offensive fantasy of black people choosing to till the fields, loyal to Orry and to his mother and sister, is one that ‘North and South’ is content to retread for the viewers of the 1980s. It represents the Dunning School’s perspective quite well, though with some concession to post civil rights era attitudes. So slavery is bad, yes, but the bloodshed to get rid of it is seen as a regrettable division between the brotherhood of white America, one to be resolved as soon as possible. Slavery is bad, yeah, but any attempt from former slaves to overwrite the plantation system, that Grand Guignol, is to be deprecated. ‘North and South’ (at least parts 1 and 2) doesn’t go far into the reconstruction period. But the attack on the plantation and Virgilia’s descent into poverty, confusion and grief at the death of her black husband indicates what we are supposed to think.
In the Dunning view, the black people of the 1870s South, the ones who ran for state senate and gubernatorial positions and won: they are wild and untutored; their northern allies who migrated to the South, the so-called carpetbaggers, are self-interested crooks posing as high-minded radicals; and the Southerners who worked with the northern Republican victors and accommodated themselves to the new order were yellow-bellied collaborators (‘scalawags’, as they became known).
One of the few statues of Thaddeus Stevens
While some or all carpetbaggers may have been partly motivated by personal gain of some kind, given that this is true of all political action in any context, it seems prima facie to be an unfair ding against them; and I don’t really like what I’ve seen of the rebuttals to this point, either. I am struck by the defensive shadow in which the new neo-abolitionist movement – those historians and writers who in the last few decades have taken a more positive view of Reconstruction – lives. Why even take the time to extensively refute this drummed up charge sheet?
There are several works which are dedicated to defending carpetbaggers from the charges of corruption to which they have been subject. These go into some detail. But doesn’t the act of refuting every charge concede too much of the framing to the Dunning school? The Southern ‘redeemer’ perspective should have been dismissed out of hand as that of revanchists sympathetic to slavery and secessionism, who balked at criticism of pre-war Southern society and celebrated a return to it. Why take the ‘Birth of a Nation’ depiction of generally shifty and degenerate northern opportunists so seriously, when it was in part or in whole a smokescreen set up to oppose the remaking of Southern society?
And I could say the same about the attitude to the Scalawags. Some scholarship has found contempt for Scalawags in the class divisions of the white South (for example, placing them as lower class whites cut out of the benefits of plantation society). But again, why take this contempt so seriously? Why spend time and energy on the refutation?
Virgilia and her husband Grady
Those of us outside of the academic study of this subject don’t have any understanding of what the abolitionists felt about the failure of their project in the mid-1870s. The famous speeches of abolition happened a decade before, and little of the reconstructor’s view of their faltering project has filtered into popular culture or even the background knowledge of the educated public. Sometimes summations will talk about the abolitionists ‘losing interest’ in black people, without explaining that loss of interest. Was it mission accomplished? Since Stevens et al. had a clear vision for Reconstruction, beyond emancipation itself, I’m not sure that explains it. Of course, the fact of emancipation itself – something that even at the height of the civil war was still controversial amongst the Northern public – would have doubtless drained political capital for further energy spent on black welfare and rights. The 1880s were the gilded age, the age of the Vanderbilts and the railroad: the civil war was a fading memory. A few decades later, it was the something like that sweetness of forgetting that would be celebrated: relief at the reconciliation between white Americans.
Those who have read Ta-Nehisi Coates will know of his fatalistic attitude. In his view, there are some victories, but the structure of racism in America means that these will always be subject to reversals. This is how he explains Trump. Compare with Zion in the Matrix (not sure why the Matrix keeps coming up…). Even Obama’s pithy line, that the ‘arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice’ is based on a reading of American, and not say British or French, history. The plot on the graph gyrates up and down, but there’s a trend line. In English Whig history there has never been a need to talk about trend lines overcoming such gyrations, because Whig historians are not aware of tragic reversals of rights, material well-being, or cultural flourishing. In their view, which has until recently marked the English attitude to the ‘island story’, constitutionalism, liberalism and prosperity march together.
There have been many Zions
In many Southern states, amazingly, the 2010s have seen the first black Senators and Governors elected since Reconstruction. More than 130 years had to pass for the achievements of Reconstruction to come again. In this context, you have to think of an [progressive] ‘arc of history’ to explain the tragedy of this loss (Obama). Or you don’t think there is such an arc at all and fall into despair (Coates).
I’m not sure that I can say as much as I want to about ‘Love, Simon’. It came out last year and I’ve just got around to watching it. It is a romantic drama featuring, for near on the first time in mainstream Hollywood cinema, a gay protagonist. Simon is a closeted 17 year old whose life changes when he begins an email correspondence with a boy from his school (known only as ‘Blue’) who has spoken anonymously about being gay and closeted on the school’s Tumblr page. As they start regularly chatting to each other over Gmail, and falling in love, Simon is blackmailed – a strangely classic trope of gay tragedies – by another student. Simon tries to discover Blue’s identity. The film runs us through several candidates, before the two boys find each other in a heartwarming final scene that takes place on a ferris wheel. The end! The plot is simple, but it’s a great movie. I was touched by the film and was struck by its deftness of approach, its daring straightforwardness and a radicalism which caught me off guard; I’m still reflecting on the experience.
I felt that a part of me was represented on film for the first time; like many gay men who have been moved by this film, it was the representation I did not know I needed. And to see a non-stereotypical – as problematic as that is, and I want to talk about this at another time – young gay man shown being attracted to other men was strangely reassuring for someone who struggled with his sexuality in the past, even though I’ve been out for seven years and have seen a fair number of movies with LGBT themes. This is not an unusual reaction; but the film is more than a feel-good piece, or more properly: *through* being a feel-good piece it does more work than one might expect.
At various points in what follows I will be favourably comparing Love, Simon to Call me by Your Name (CMBYN). I think it is overrated, but I wouldn’t want to bash it for no reason. I would argue that that film falls down in ways, important ways, in which ‘Love, Simon’ triumphs. I don’t think this is an idle comparison; I think it allows us to see queer cinema more clearly. But YMMV. I certainly don’t think CMBYN’s reputation should be inflated by its arthouse genre box, and I do think some of the response to it has done that. But that’s another topic for another time, perhaps.
So… through being a feel-good film ”Love, Simon”, I think, ends up being really good. Take the montage of the first scene, accompanied by Simon’s narration, set spiritedly to the ‘Ooogum Boogum Song’. Simon explains that his life is both normal and privileged (if these can be run together!): the house in the suburbs, the loving and successful parents, the ‘sister he actually likes’. The contrastive punchline which follows is obvious. This opening monologue/montage has been criticised for its assimilationist message, “I’m just like you…”. But set against the power of the “except for…” which follows, as we see Simon receiving a new car, his parents cupping his eyes, and as we see him checking out the gardener across the street, I’m not sure the criticism has much force. The montage is bracing in a way which feels incredibly subversive. The lack of poverty or confounding factors acts to drive home Simon’s sexuality to the audience all the more forcefully. And the scene is bracingly funny and warm. I’m not sure I have ever seen a movie present a teenage boy desiring someone of his own gender presented with such charm, lightness of spirit and sense of play. One gets the sense that the film itself accepts Simon from the start; it is on his side, and so are we. The few seconds that it takes to make the articulation from ‘normal happy energetic teenager’ to ‘gay teenager’ have a bluntness that startles, a bluntness that more sombre queer films just do not have. To me, in comparison, their reticence seems like coyness.
The words “I’m gay” feature throughout the film. That simple declaration is actually surprisingly rare in mainstream cinema, but even more strangely, not always there in queer cinema either, and goodness did I appreciate it here. I particularly valued the lack of any reliance on sexual fluidity or a ‘love is love’ message, as in CMBYN veers into. As one commenter on a gay website posted, ‘CMBYN is about sexually fluid bros, ‘Love, Simon’ is about gay boys’. I think that’s right, and I think it is an essential difference. ‘Love, Simon’ does not focus meditatively or intellectually on gay identity, but nor does it have any interest in ignoring the centrality of identity – what same-sex attraction means for the subject in the world, for his or her self-perception, for how he or she relates to family, friends, and the cultural hooks which surround him or her. For too long gay cinema has found it chic to present same-sex love divorced from identity; I think it has also found it convenient. Queer films have indulged too often in wordless liaisons which momentarily puncture a normally straight life.
In reality, self-reflection will be a consequence of any unexpected same-sex liaison; the unreflective ‘love is love’ pansexuality of many queer movies is both unrealistic and unhelpful. Too many arthouse queer films – including the excellent recent ‘Never Steady, Never Still’ – see the silent depiction of moody spontaneous connections as a virtue. But in ‘Love, Simon’, Simon and Blue openly bond over sharing when they realised they were gay; they discuss being closeted and what it means for them; Simon fantasises about what life will be like in university, in a tongue in cheek sequence the campiness of which expresses, wryly, some real longing. The film lays it out. Forget less is more: more is more. The bane of queer presence in the mainstream is the circumlocutive drive – the moody wordlessness – and the analogical drive. We’ve certainly had enough of the latter! From opera dirges to science-fiction third gendered people, LGBT people have had to make do with – and in many cases have taken to producing – material which may have some kind of queer sensibility, boiled down to ‘it’s okay to be different’ much of the time, or other anodyne bottom lines. ‘Love, Simon’ is one of the few films to *unflinchingly*, without analogy – or apology – address an audience’s attention and emotions to the growth, to the adolescence, of a gay young man and the psychology of the closet.
And the film is particularly good at the psychology of the closet. Nick Robinson’s performance has been justly praised: we are alive to his moments of pain, his flashes of anxiety and forced self-control. His father’s mild homophobic joke when the family discusses the most recent episode of ‘The Bachelor’ is met with a convincing grimace; Simon’s yearning for connection, his sense of guardedness, are all displayed so very well. His sense of loneliness as he seeks out people who are ‘like him’ and candidates for being Blue, and his fear of losing himself, are conveyed with elegance. We are given “a deep, potent sense of who Simon is, what he needs, what he fears, and who he loves”.
This open expression of queer experience can sometimes take you off guard.
Upon rewatching some scenes I have been struck by how taboo-busting they really are. The flashback where Simon is telling Blue when he knew he was gay is one case: the unsettling images of a young boy waking up in distress, ‘for every night in a month’, thinking of Daniel Radcliffe, only to tear his poster of the actor down. We have seen countless expressions of heterosexuality from young boys in movies; but to see an explicit thinking back to homosexual desire, to see it manifested on the screen in the eyes of a child, is quite strange. It actually feels a little wrong to think of a boy of that age having gay thoughts. Why does that feel wrong, when I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the straight equivalent? Why does it feel so refreshing to have that openly on screen? And yet here the film is revealing, again exposing experiences that countless queer people have lived through but which have never been represented in cinema. Simon tears the poster down. What is to most, a pleasure – the experience of attraction – is here pain and distress, a childhood nightmare. The film does not dwell on it – and it does not mourn it – but it deserves credit for its authentic and fresh representation of gay experience. And another taboo-buster: the scene at the ferris wheel where Simon discovers Blue’s identity for the first time, and they kiss. Seeing two kids of the same sex sit down next to each other, boys of the same build and age, obviously feeling attracted to each other, feels new and strange. It is a simple scene, and its pleasure is in the simplicity. Simon and Blue have an easy charisma. It is quite unlike the rapport between Elio and Oliver in CMBYN, upon whom that film tries to will sexual chemistry by force of languid cinematography, chemistry that materialises only weakly (the massive apparent age difference in that movie serves in my view to defang the queerness of their relationship; Elio’s attraction can be read as an intellectualised infatuation with an older mentor, something that might as well be straight – and indeed we never really know the sexual orientations of Elio and Oliver). By contrast: ‘Love, Simon’ is happy to put two teenage boys, two equals, on a ferris wheel car, let us feel the sizzle, and dares us to object.
Nick Robinson’s performance as Simon eclipses the portrayal of Elio. There is little interiority to the latter character; his eyes are blank, his behaviour – strangely in such an intellectual milieu – is rooted in instinct and reflex. This may be no fault of the actor, but as portrayed, Elio’s (seemingly unintended) glassiness and flippancy sabotages any sympathetic relationship. Contrast to the all-too-familiar stuttering when Simon says to his blackmailer “You’re gonna tell them.. tell them… I’m g…g…”; his irrational but perfectly judged flash of anger at his sister when she tries to support him; his flashes of happiness when reading Blue’s emails; or the perfectly pitched mixture of strain, anxiety and determination with which he comes out to his parents on Christmas Day. CMBYN, even when its lead character fails it, leans on the sumptuous, sybaritic richness of the Italian summer to provide *something* to the viewer. By contrast ‘Love, Simon’ leans on its lead’s performance to sell it, and remarkably for a subject such as this, it works.
Many critics have – in my view entirely correctly – been celebrating the fact that this film is a “mainstream” picture, recouping the tropes of American high-school movies and gaying them up, without making any attempt at ‘serious’ filmmaking. But critics often present this as if the movie is to be commended by virtue of the *effect* it will have – unlike Weekend, or CMBYN, the argument goes, it is a mainstream picture so it will reach mass audiences, including LGBTQ youth who may be inspired by it. This functional view is correct – so many queer people have been moved to come out by this film, or even moved to seek the love story that the dominant culture implied they could never look forward to; and the film has even persuaded some parents to view the struggles of their queer children with greater empathy. But the implication is that this does not pertain to the real merits of the film itself, that it is somehow outside of its merits as film. And I think that this undersells what ‘Love, Simon’ is doing. To their credit, some critics have recognised what they call the “magical ordinariness” and “subversiveness” of the film, a “revolution wrapped in candyfloss”. This does get some way to understanding the radicalism of the film, but perhaps not quite far enough.
‘Love, Simon’ is not just a high school movie; or rather it is not a high school movie with the palette swap from grey straightness to rainbow queerness. How could it be? The stakes are much higher; the movie knows this; we know it; the movie knows that we know it. It’s not ‘get the girl or not’; it’s a far more serious conflict. It is a love story, and a heartfelt one. But the conflict is not really about whether Simon does or does not get Blue, whether he ‘gets the guy’ at the end of the film. We live in a world where coming out (to oneself and others) is still surrounded with unarticulated anxieties and terrors that go to the heart of the human condition. The stakes are high and of a different quality; the audience knows this. The story beats and relationships are different as a result, including the contours of the love story. Some have complained that Simon and Blue do not show the kind of romantic connection that they should. But the point is that they connect over the closet, over their shared experience of homosexual desire. As in the real world, this is a powerful glue for queer teenagers. Each is the first person the other opens up to, and this thrill is the driver of their romantic connection: it also makes the romance sweeter, more tender, more inherently fragile and conditional.
We have never seen an on-screen high school romance that we can unironically support in the way we can with Simon and Blue. This partly explains why this is less a romantic comedy (as sometimes billed) and more a romantic drama – the similarities to ‘Mean Girls’ are thinner than one might expect, and this film just isn’t that funny. Any attempt to maintain the normal ironic distance with which a heterosexual pairing would be viewed in the classic teen movie collapses as the movie goes on and one becomes more and more invested in the success of the romantic hero. This is not just a gay version of the high school movie – I think this film has a different motor under the hood.
As I have mentioned above, the film strips away or softens the disadvantages you could imagine for a young man in Simon’s situation so that we can focus on the fact that he is gay. The film gives him – plausibly, for many children growing up in liberal parts of Europe and America – ambiguously progressive parents. Coming out is hard and emotionally fraught even with the kind of parents Simon has, as the film makes clear. But there are other things it strips away or defocusses, the better to connect us to the story. The film is, as critics have pointed out, PG-13 chaste. There are no peaches here. There is no sense of promiscuous gay life on the penumbra (as in Weekend), with some justification given the age of the main character. But there is still some sexiness, just of the more classic Hollywood variety, the suggestiveness of glamour and beauty and poised interacting figures. Had there been more than this, I don’t think the movie would have worked the way it does. The exclusion of earthier sexual longing creates a sweetness in its imagination of same-sex love and intimacy which is artificial, not naturalistic, but by this achieves the greatness that Hollywood artifice sometimes does.
The film is not without flaws. Towards the end, Simon is made to say a regrettably pat and disingenuous line about how, no matter who you are, revealing yourself to the world is ‘pretty scary’. There then follows a trite bit about how Simon’s coming out has inspired a new post on the school’s Tumblr feed, written by a girl ‘admitting’ that her parents don’t want her to become an actress and she feels unloved. You can almost hear the gears turning as the creators/studio heads try desperately to turn this very particular story into something with obviously universal relevance. The thing about stories of this kind is that they are universally affecting *by being particular*; the defensive turn the film makes here is unnecessary. The other point is that Simon is written as an ‘everyboy’, and that it sometimes feels that he lacks the individual quirks that would make the character feel more like a real person. When the film does give him interests, they are so studiedly masc – one response to the film criticised the too-deliberate nod to Radiohead – as to jolt you out of the world of the movie for a split-second. The film-makers seem to have been careful to ensure that no interest or attribute should accrue to Simon that the mainstream would object to. In my view, though, Robinson’s hugely affecting performance, driven by his own sense of who Simon is (the actor has said he played Simon as guarded and self-editing) does, mostly, overcome the script’s reluctance to pin him down.
This film is not complicated, though it is insightful, intelligent and touching. There are few layers of visual meaning to peel back and there is little ambiguity. And that should be okay! Some of the greatest films are simple. This is story about a romantic hero who slays a dragon and falls in love. While it is realistic when it has to be, like its genre stable-mates, it allows itself the indulgence of a dreamy world of good-looking people and curated bedrooms as a stage for its heroic arc. There is great power in films that harness such glamour, that use traditional film grammar *traditionally*, that forge a connection between the audience and the protagonist and take the audience on an emotional journey, seeing the hero overcome difficulty with bravery. And this particular journey has never been shown on screen before.
So this post will be about wrapping a Rust library in Java. I wanted to use ncollide, a Rust collision detection library, in a Clojure project. I found ncollide attractive due to its simple, modern API design and good documentation. I was less interested in what was already available for the JVM. So why not try to wrap Rust… it would be a nice challenge!
Furthermore, I had a kind of strange childish admiration for people who wrap unmanaged code for a managed environment. I used SlimDX, a .NET wrapper over DirectX9, way back when it came out in 2007. The C++/CLI used to construct it seemed to me then like alchemy (partly because straight C++ also seemed like alchemy!) and I wanted that power. It has since been demystified for me, just by learning C properly and actually doing stuff with unmanaged code.
So using JNI was an important step for me. Actually, wrangling native code into a GCed, JITted, Runtimed world is great fun. No doubt. It also makes you think about the essentials. You’re forced to distill a piece of code into its core elements that can be boxed up and transported. Evrything else is noise. Actually, it should be simpler than that because in theory, given a language divide between interface and implementation, one should be able just to grab the interface (the headers) and create native method stubs in Java plus native JNI methods that wrap the original API methods. But you still have a lot of choice – how much do you do in the Java wrapper classes, or indeed do you even have a one to one relationship with the target classes at all? Why not have a big Java class with static methods? It’s design decisions like this that make the difference between – say – LWJGL and JOGL.
With Rust, ‘classes’ are structs with impl behaviours mixed and matched to them. There is therefore no tight coupling of data and method as in traditional OOP (I’d be interested if someone would care to explain to me in the comments how the in memory data layout of Rust structs + impl differs from C++ classes, and what you ‘get’ with a pointer to struct vs. what you ‘get’ with a pointer to a C++ class – you can see I’m new to Rust). Unlike with C++ JNI, then, where the object hierarchy of the native classes can be preserved, the lack of similarity between Java and Rust means that we may have to bake in the impl functionality into the Java classes.
The library I’m wrapping, ncollide, uses generics extensively. Java also has (compile time) generics. I’m not really sure how to create a generic bridge between the two. JNI is really about low level interoperability. There is a brute force way, which is: manually examine the type and dispatch native methods hardcoded for each one. There is no runtime type information on the JVM though, so all you’ll get is Object.
BAD ACCESS EXCEPTION 