So viewers of Hindi cinemas, mostly queer starved like myself, have "perfected the art of reading desires that lurk in the cracks of filmic narratives." To see, for example, in Anand (1971), in Sholay (1975), more than what meets the eye. But as professor Madhavi Menon writes in her book Infinite Variety: A History Of Desire In India, “The mode of communicating desire in Hindi cinema … has historically taken recourse to indirection rather than direction.” To give credence to this theory, in a cameo in the 1994 film Sleep With Me, director Quentin Tarrantino waxed eloquent on how Top Gun is actually about a "man’s struggle with his own homosexuality." That queer reading is now part of the film’s legacy.Įxclusively masculine spaces express desire in a way we are not used to seeing as sexual or with a subtext (intended or otherwise) we might not be used to reading as sexual. When The New Yorker Magazine critic Pauline Kael wrote about the Tom Cruise testosterone trapeze Top Gun (1986), she called it "a shiny homoerotic commercial," with sweat stained locker rooms, and men with towels perched precariously on sculpted hips. Macho manifestations are always queer suspects. It is an ironic marriage of queer theatrics and masculine posturing. Devgn grips the hurt man’s shoulders in reassurance. The first thing that crotch bangs against is a nerdy man, Ajay Devgn falling into his lap, his legs now around the man’s hips.
Literally the first shot we have of him is his black denim clad crotch. Part of me thought, watching it in retrospect, that’s so gay. It lends Devgn’s entry into the world of cinema with Phool Aur Kaante (1991) - standing on two bikes, one leg on each, till the bikes move away from each other and he performs a split - a kind of unintended subversion. So much is said and felt in that pause, a playful chide at one's dick size, and the recasting of the heroic entry as either a compensation for or symbolic of their respective measurements. Chalo!" (Whose is the biggest … entry … makes no difference. Simmba tells them to cut the banter, " Haan! Kiska zyada bada hai … entry… koi farak nahin padta. Simmba interrupts an argument between Singham and Sooryavanshi - with a sarcasm that allows him to be truthful without being scathing - about whose entrance is bigger, better, stronger. The last 30 minutes of the film - where the three cops, Singham (Ajay Devgn), Simmba (Ranveer Singh), and Sooryavanshi ( Akshay Kumar) joust and explode into orgiastic violence - has a curious comical moment. That the entry of a Rohit Shetty hero - boisterous, loud, plotted with an immense eye for staging, foreplay, and single-screen celebration - was actually a severe manifestation of Big Dick Energy. Sooryavanshiclarified a lingering theory on the male obsession with large, long, big things. Queer Gaze is a monthly column where Prathyush Parasuraman examines traces of queerness in cinema and streaming - intended or unintended, studied or unstudied, reckless or exciting.
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