2 - Performed Masculinities: Oliver Reed in Ken Russell’s Films of the ‘Long 1960s’

Summary

INTRODUCTION: PERFORMING AS A RUSSELLIAN MALE

Ken Russell’s cinema features polymorphous manifestations of sexuality and encompasses a diverse spectrum of sexual desires. Although this chapter will interrogate the film-maker’s collaborations with younger male actors who embody different forms of masculinity and sexuality through their individual performance styles, it focuses primarily on Russell’s collaboration with Oliver Reed and considers the actor’s ‘Byronic’ performances in Dante’s Inferno: The Private Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poet and Painter (BBC, 1967), Women in Love (United Artists, 1969) and The Devils (Warner Bros., 1971). These performances paradigmatically merge self-destructive Romantic/ Gothic elements with the contemporary cultural, sexual landscapes of the ‘long 1960s’. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Russell depicts a variety of complex male desires that repeatedly subvert an alleged cultural heteronormativity. He exposes the (male) human body in all its frailties in The Music Lovers (United Artists, 1970), Mahler (Goodtimes Enterprises, 1974) or Tommy (Columbia, 1975), for instance, as well as the intricacies of human behaviour.

Writing about the body on-screen, Stephen Heath argues that it consists of ‘moments, intensities, outside a simple constant unity of the body as a whole; films [contain] bits of bodies, gestures, desirable traces, fetish points’. Russell’s films reveal a set of complex, nuanced layers of fragmented masculinity and corporeality which deviate from the contemporary English realist tradition and refuse to shy away from explicit depictions of frontal male nudity à la Women in Love’s wrestling scene. The scene offers a stripping away of preheld notions of masculinity in the disrobing of Gerald Crich (Reed) and Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates): from buttoned-up, stoic manhood to raw, naked self. This act of ‘undressing’ and the revealing of a more primal, ‘natural’ self also thematically anticipates Eddie Jessup’s (William Hurt) tapping of the primitive self in Altered States (Warner Bros., 1980), becoming a Russellian trope.

Dante’s Inferno combines medieval and Romantic ideals of spiritual love with necrophiliac and obsessive-neurotic Gothic (Poe-esque) tendencies, while The Devils demonstrates a visceral kaleidoscope of sexual desires and (Catholic) fetishes.