Australian Voices in Film:
“The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”
Essay Question: Stereotyping of character representations
“The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” is a hilarious comedy, brought together brilliantly by writer and director Stephan Elliot. Tick/Mitzi and Adam/Felicia are two drag queens that travel across Australia on a lavender bus with there transsexual friend Ralph/Bernadette. All three challenge the dominant stereotype of the Australian male. Released in 1994, 14 years into the AIDS epidemic, the film had a phenomenal response around the world and in Australia.
Travelling from Sydney, the three main characters played by Hugo Weaving, Guy Peirce and Terrance Stamp travel to Alice Springs for a cabaret show hosted by Mitzi’s wife. The audience is positioned to sympathise with the main characters during their hardships, and good times. The movie confronts different types of masculinity in an extreme environment
The film presents the stereotypical behavior of gay men that is evident in our society. Many of the costumes are designed to highlight the characters and the way they live. For example, Bernadette wears long flowing clothes usually white or an off cream. ‘She’ is an older ‘women’ and dresses to look like one with flowing skirts and tops with her hair done up simply.
Felicia is more of a stereotypical gay; ‘she’ has a more feminine figure and wears tight clothes when in drag. Felicia looks more masculine out of costume; wearing, stereotypically, a singlet and baggy pants. Felicia also has different body language compared to ‘her’ two friends; walking more femininely as well as dancing and singing more often with Bernadette’s statement “That's right. A bloody good litt...
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...where they make it too that top shows that they have survived the hard times and have overcome the AIDS epidemic.
The last extreme long shot shows the rural desert which contrasts with their bright costumes, letting the audience feel their accomplishment of climbing King Canyon in full drag. The music in the background is a soft slow song that gets more dramatic the longer it plays finally getting at its climax when they reach the top. This music can mean that their journey was slow at the beginning but got a lot more interesting the longer they drove.
“The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” is important to Australian culture not only for a great laugh but because it teaches people that there are many different types of Australian men and to embrace our diversity. Elliot used the AIDS epidemic as inspiration for this movie and did a very good job.
The larrikiness of the Australians was shown by their lack of discipline and disregard for the people of Egypt. We saw this in the movie when Frank Dunn and his mates caused trouble by harassing owners of shops and playing pranks on others and paying for prostitutes.
The movie, And the Band Played On, discusses the origin of the AIDS virus and how it spontaneously spread across the world. It used the Ebola disease to foreshadow the forth coming of another serious disease. The world was not prepared to handle such a contagious plague. Doctors around the world assumed that the first cases of the HIV virus to be just an abnormality of a certain disease, their carelessness of this matter was the start to the spread of this disease. Throughout this movie, it illustrates different points, such as the beginning of HIV, the misconceptions it gave, and the panic it aroused amongst doctors and the common people.
Australia has the terrible condition of having an essentially pointless and prefabricated idea of “Aussiness” that really has no relation to our real culture or the way in which we really see ourselves. We, however subscribe to these stereotypes when trying to find some expression of our Australian identity. The feature film, The Castle, deals with issues about Australian identity in the 1990’s. The film uses techniques like camera shots, language and the use of narration to develop conflict between a decent, old fashioned suburban family, the Kerrigans and an unscrupulous corporation called Airlink. Feature films like The Castle are cultural products because they use attitudes, values and stereotypes about what it means to be Australian.
"The African Queen (film)." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_African_Queen, 07 June 2014. Web. 22 June 2014.
Within the film, All About Eve, the female characters are limited by their gender in their careers and everyday life. Eve Harrington, the main antagonist of the film, is controlled and attempts to control Addison DeWitt to try and gain success in the theatre and public eye. The protagonist, Margo Channing, struggles with a choice between being a successful actress and a housewife because she believes it isn’t possible to uphold both. And Karen Richards, wife to a successful playwright Lloyd Richards, struggles with the idea that her career never exceeds past loving her husband.
Undoubtedly, the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, that was filmed in 1994 in Australia and directed by Stephan Elliott. In the film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, it illustrates a story about two drag queens and a transgender woman, as they travel across the Australian Outback from Sydney to Alice Spring in a bus named “Priscilla”, along the way they encounter a wide-range of groups and individuals. During the journey, they face less accepting attitudes and subjected to homophobic abuse, violence, but overcome all of negative attitudes and learn to accept hate. When comparing this film to other international films during the 1990’s and the story it told it showed that Australia was not like other international
Victor/Victoria and Kiss Me, Kate are both fantastic films presented in a similar fashion. Both films carry heavy themes of sexuality and what society states about sexuality and gender roles. Together both films show the multiple sides of working in the theatre industry. From successful and powerful (Kiss Me, Kate) to broke and desperate for a job (Victor/Victoria). They span the lifestyles of those in the performing arts. The cinematography in both of the films was brilliantly done and well beyond its time, especially for Kiss Me, Kate. The costume design aided very much in the sexuality of the story, using outfits to show how modest a character was, or simply whether she was portraying a man at that time or not.
Did this film have any similarity with any of your own cultural experiences (food, family, values, experiences, religion, symbols)? Please Describe, Compare and/or Contrast with details/examples. Minimum 100 original words. 5 points possible
Queer Theory is the idea that our identity is generated from fluid components and heteronormative society suppresses the fluidity of these components forcing those who identify as queer to rebel against heteronormative society. This suppression of fluidity and rebellion of heteronormative identity is prevalent throughout Camelot 3000. Isolde is the figure piece for everything queer and goes against any form of heteronormative identity. She is a woman who loves a man trapped in a woman’s body. Isolde’s love for Tristan transcends his physical sex as she sees him as he sees himself. Tristan is a woman who sees himself as a man and Isolde’s love goes against the heteronormative view that she must continue to
Rafe is constantly alienated by the fact he is openly gay in a predominant straight society, and because of this the community of Boulder often responds by justifying the actions and assumptions towards Rafe only because he is gay. Again this is illustrated when Rafe states, “I’m so tired of being a type… I just want to be a human being” (), Rafe exclaims the society treats him in a way of which he is not a human rather a type. He is not equal to the straight people of Boulder, instead just a part of a category. This reveals the community's morals towards gay people, since the people of Boulder do not uphold equal rights of those in the gay community. Not in the sense of legal rights, but rather the rights pertaining to a lack of equality and shunning. In essence, Rafe’s community stereotypically frames him, missing the real Rafe. The community’s alienation, as shown, reveals the the prejudice and categorization of a group and takes shunning gays to a new level. Rather than getting equal treatment and judgment, they’re held accountable to certain stereotypes due to the fact of whether or not someone is gay. Rafe continues to reveal the society’s views towards gays as he proclaims,“Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where no one thought being gay was even something to
All About Eve is based on a story written by Mary Orr. Mary Orr wrote “The Wisdom of Eve” in the International Cosmopolitan Magazine based on real life events. After Joseph L. Mankiewicz read the story, he immediately fell in love with it because it was his way of “settling a lot scores [with the theatre]” (Crowther). He bought the rights to the movie and began casting. According to Mankiewicz, casting for Margo Channing was the hardest; after a lot of thinking, Mankiewicz chose Claudette Colbert as Margo, but two weeks before shooting began Colbert was on bed rest due to an accident during the filming of another movie. Because she was the only available actress that could play the part well, Mankiewicz selected Bette Davis as the new Margo.
This movie has eight characters, six old women and their bus drive and a middle-aged women named Michelle. The fact that the cast are not actors makes it even more amazing. I love each of these women in the movie. Each one has their own personality which comes out beautifully in the film. They story began with when all the actress are traveling together in come country side of Quebec, Canada. All the sudden their bus breaks down and leaves six old women, Michelle and their bus driver in the woods of an isolated countryside. They find an abandoned cottage in the woods and to survive, they feast on wild raspberries, frog legs, and fish. In addition to that, they share their past experiences to kill time and survive in the woods.
All About Eve tells the story of an aging starlet and the mysterious young girl who takes advantage of her in order to rise to the top of the theatre world. Beneath the surface of the plot and of Eve’s obsession with Margo Channing lies serious queer undertones. For Eve, there is a thin line between wanting to be Margo and wanting to be in a relationship with Margo. Eve takes care of every aspect of Margo’s life, eventually escalating her behavior to trying to seduce Bill, Margo’s lover, and taking Margo’s role in her upcoming Broadway play. The meaning subtly underlying Eve’s meticulous takeover Margo's life is that if Eve cannot have Margo, she will become her. Eve’s behavior is queer in this way, and in the very same breath is wholly unjustifiable,
6.Performers would use costumes for male roles emphasizing their feminine sexuality by contrasting it with markers of masculinity.
But things were slowly evolving in the movies. Independent films had been featuring gays and lesbians as main characters, depicting real life and real relationships. Armistead Maupin’s Tales of The City revolved around a homo-hetero pairing.