Post by klep on Jun 22, 2020 7:43:55 GMT -6
MOVIE OF THE WEEK for 6/22: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge & Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street
PRIDE WEEK!
Note: This week's essay is graciously provided by a guest contributor.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE
I remember back during my senior year of high school my family moved to a new house in a new neighborhood where I’d have to go to a new school. People like to talk about fresh starts as a good thing; you can be anything you want to be; you’re a blank slate and nobody has any long-set notions of who you are or who you’re supposed to be. I guess that feeling could be liberating for others. Jack Sholder’s landmark 1982 teen drama A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge understands, however, that sometimes the scariest thing to be is yourself. Especially when deep down you know that you’re … gay.
I mean, it’s okay to be a little bit gay when you’re in the confines of your own bedroom. I remember anytime I’d have to clean my room I’d play my Cathy Dennis cassette tapes. I loved putting on my sunglasses and dancing along and mouthing all the lyrics. (As a teen I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. What can an adult homosexual even do? Can one make a career dancing & lip syncing to female pop singers’ songs?) I’d go wild sometimes and close all my dresser drawers by backing up into them and twerking them shut with my well-defined butt. But as A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge wisely knows, my mom would have the worst timing. She’d just barge into my room without knocking - and with my friend Lisa too - right as I get to the bridge of the song and simulate ejaculation with a wooden toy gun. So embarrassing! Watching this movie was like seeing myself on the big screen.
Alas, one can’t always stay in one’s bedroom. School was the worst. I remember one day falling asleep in science class and the science teacher’s pet python got out of his terrarium and snuck up on me. The snake wrapped itself around my neck and woke me up with a jolt. I screamed at the top of my lungs, partly out of fear for my safety and partly out of fear for my reputation. Would everybody else see this snake at my throat as a phallic metaphor? Would they know my secret, that deep down I yearned for the one-eyed trouser snake? Or there was P.E. I was always so distracted during sports. I’d be staring at all the baseball players’ masculine butts and not even be paying attention when the baseball comes flying through the air and hits me on the head. A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge accurately depicts the way gayness can consume every waking moment of the day.
And that was just the waking moments. Sleep was even gayer. I suppose every closeted gay teen dreams about the anthropomorphized physical manifestation of his own gayness. I know I certainly did. I tried to separate myself from my gayness, as if there was me over here and the whole gay thing over there. My gayness called himself Freddy. He knew we weren’t meant to be separate. He wanted to be inside my body, or rather become my body, or rather become one and the same with my body. And whenever I’d resist the symbiosis Freddy would show me his leather glove and everything would just make more sense. Watching A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge now as a well-adjusted gay adult made me reminisce about my own adolescence when my inner nightmare demon gave me my first article of leather fetishwear.
It became more than just a glove. One night my dreams took me to a fully actualized leather dive bar populated by all the local kinksters. Before I had time to get used to my surroundings I actually ran into someone I knew. It was Coach! I thought back to school and how Coach would always get more intense when he was surrounded by athletic men getting sweaty. Now it all made sense. Coach took me back to school for some role play; he made me submit to his will, running laps and performing other pheromone-drenched athletics. But something didn’t feel quite right yet. I realized I wasn’t a sadomasochistic sub; I was actually a sadomasochistic Dom. My inner nightmare demon corrected this situation by subduing Coach and tying Coach up in the showers. My inner nightmare demon and I became one and the same as we homosexually slashed Coach with finger-knives, rich with homoerotic metaphor. The Oscar-snubbed arthouse drama A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge accurately depicts the complex emotions every gay teen feels about his first bondage experience, the way your world seems to quake when you’re drenched in your gym teacher’s sexblood.
After gay dreams like that I’d always wake up screaming and drenched in gay sweat. There wasn’t any way of hiding screams that loud from the rest of my family. They knew something was up, but they just didn’t have a clue what. Mom was the sensitive one. She thought I needed to maybe see a psychiatrist. Dad was the hard one, what the kids today call “toxic masculinity.” Like anytime the police would bring me home after finding me naked in the rain, Dad would always accuse me of being on heroin and threaten to take me to the methadone clinic. Dad couldn’t see that the explanation was so much simpler than that. How could he? After all, he voted for Goldwater. Even when murderous parrots attacked us or the toaster spontaneously burst into flames, Dad always had a heterosexual explanation for everything. The domestic vaudeville of A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge depicts my home life with an accuracy few other movies have ever achieved.
I remember as senior year progressed things got serious with my platonic friend Lisa, or at least she thought they got serious. One night we were at a pool party together and she interrupted me while I was changing into my swimsuit. She told me she knew what I was going through and that she was here for me. Lisa kissed me on my lips. It was such a strange sensation. I tried to go with it and we did several closed-mouth heterosexual kisses together like I suppose other teens do. We started to explore each other’s bodies and use our tongues on each other. All of a sudden it wasn’t my tongue, it was Freddy’s! My inner nightmare demon was interrupting the proceedings to remind me that heterosexual intimacy just wasn’t what I was born for. Freddy compelled me to go to my friend Grady’s house instead. After all, it just makes so much more sense for guys to sleep in other guys’ bedrooms. The coming-of-age bildungsroman A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge is one of the rare movies to perfectly deal with that moment where a gay teen finds himself unrequiting heterosexual advances and fleeing to his jock best friend’s bedroom. It’s so specific, and yet so universal.
The climax of A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge goes some strange places. The Lisa character in the movie becomes the protagonist and projects her heterosexuality onto the male lead Jesse’s no-longer-inner nightmare demon. The overwhelming force of her straightness subdues Freddy in what could only be described as a metaphor for conversion therapy. It was totally unrelatable and it made no sense. However, the end of the movie had a rather redemptive quality to it. Lisa and Jesse are riding the school bus talking about how glad they are that Jesse’s gayness is over. (As if gayness could ever be over?) Then Freddy’s leather fetish glove and finger-knives burst out of Lisa’s friend Kerry’s torso! I remember the first time I saw my own nightmare demon erupt from a lady friend’s torso. It was the first time I knew that girls could be gay too.
I may have been born three years after it was released in theatres, but A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge is a poignant and insightful movie that knows exactly how I felt when I went to high school in 1985.
SCREAM, QUEEN! MY NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
1985’s A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge has gay subtext. The subtext isn’t even that sub to the text. It’s pretty front and center with male nudity, male-on-male seduction moments, phallic imagery, leather bar, and flat-out BDSM set piece. The gay subtext wasn’t lost on critics at the time, who wrote pieces about how gay it is. The gay subtext wasn’t lost on the queer community, with the movie being featured on the front page of The Advocate. The gay subtext wasn’t lost on young queer audiences who saw themselves for the first time in a mainstream movie, identifying with something they weren’t yet able to articulate. And the gay subtext most certainly wasn’t lost on Mark Patton, the 25-year-old lead actor in the film who was breaking into showbiz while trying to stay safely closeted.
The documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare On Elm Street looks at Patton’s life across a span of 50 years, his relationship to fame, and his identity as a gay man. He knew he was gay as early as age 4 when his understanding of fairy tales was that he (a boy) was meant to marry the king at the end of the story and live happily ever after. He grew up in a conservative religious family amid a conservative religious community. His family was loving and protective, but was not able to give him a place where he could thrive, and his geography almost certainly guaranteed a short life expectancy ending in violence. So at the age of 17 Mark Patton moved to New York City to seek his fame and fortune. And because of his idealized blonde hair & blue eyes good looks he found fame and fortune almost instantly. Within his first year he was doing Mountain Dew commercials on national television, and by his fifth year in New York he was acting alongside Cher and Karen Black in a Robert Altman play on Broadway. The next step was moving to Hollywood, California to try and break into movies and TV shows.
Hollywood in the 1980s was a good place to be a gay man hanging out with other gay men, and it was a good place to be a young, conventionally attractive white male actor - but it was not a good place to be gay and in the entertainment industry at the same time. Being seen as even the slightest bit gay meant being blacklisted from the industry and replaced by some other young, conventionally attractive white male actor who could convince the public of his unblemished heterosexuality. Because of this, Mark Patton was never an “out gay actor” in the 80s. He and his boyfriend, also a successful actor, dated while remaining outwardly closeted for the sake of their professional careers.
One of the best ways for up and coming young actors to get attention during the 80s was to star in slasher films. The genre was hugely popular, both at the box office and on home video, and had a need for fresh young hot people to be dismembered in each new movie and all its sequels. Mark Patton hit his biggest break yet when he landed the lead role in the first sequel to Wes Craven’s smash hit A Nightmare On Elm Street.
A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge has gay subtext.This subtext wasn’t lost on Mark Patton, nor on surprisingly intuitive star Robert Englund. This subtext was lost completely on director Jack Sholder and many of the cast and crew. Sholder was directing only his second movie and was reeling with the complexity of all the special effects that needed to be achieved. Sholder apparently didn’t even realize that he shot the film’s infamous leather bar scene in one of the most famous gay bars in Los Angeles. He scouted the location during off hours when the bar was closed in order to get a feel for the space and had no idea who actually frequented that bar.
On the other hand, heterosexual screenwriter David Chaskin claimed at the time that the subtext was lost on him. Years later, when it became more acceptable to say gay in public, Chaskin would start to admit that he wrote a deliberately homophobic movie in order to tap into hot button issues at the time. Before it was completely acceptable to say gay, though, Chaskin deflected. He claimed that he wrote the subtext, yes, but the subtext was meant to be subtle and the Nightmare sequel became too obviously gay with the casting of Patton. A straight screenwriter scared of being associated with anything queer pinned all of the creative blame on a closeted gay man for being unable to pass for straight. (Patton’s agents took this a step further and said they’d have to rebrand him as a “character actor” going forward because he proved he wasn’t straight-passable enough to ever be a leading man again.) One of the strongest arcs in the documentary is Patton dealing with the decades of pain that deflection wrought.
The documentary also looks at Nightmare 2’s reception and how its critical appraisal has changed over time. First it was a box office smash. Then it became too gay and was often cited as fans’ least-favorite entry in the long-running Nightmare series (7 movies, a crossover spinoff, a remake, a video game, a TV series, a line of comic books, and 3 documentaries - as of this writing), then a generation later it became embraced as a queer cult classic and even horror fans came back around to appreciating the film.
Queer interviewees talk about how Nightmare 2 was their first time recognizing queerness onscreen and being able to identify with a lead who reminded them of themselves. Before seeing Mark Patton several queer interviewees said they often identified with the Final Girl of slasher films because she was the one who had to toughen up and fight back against the murderous bully; so a male scream queen was revelatory to them. One really interesting comment addressed the differences between American moral panic about sex vs American moral panic about violence: parents who would never allow a kid to be exposed to overtly gay movies but who would be oblivious to a random Freddy Krueger movie slipping through the cracks.
The homophobic backlash against Patton’s performance in Nightmare 2 peaked during the height of the AIDS dark ages. Patton watched many of his friends, and particularly his boyfriend, waste away and die of the terrible disease. The personal and professional traumas drove him away from the entertainment industry entirely. He relocated to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico where nobody knew who he was and gave himself a fresh start owning an art studio there. His newfound anonymity would likely have lasted the rest of his life if it weren’t for Never Sleep Again, a 2010 documentary retrospective on the entire Nightmare franchise, whose producers hired a private detective to track him down for an interview.
The documentary follows Patton’s exploration of being thrust back into fame - at least the fame of attending horror conventions and hosting screenings of Nightmare 2. Patton is very out of the closet now, and is quite thoughtful of what his fame means to others. He makes a point of always being the Movie Star when he’s in public as such. For him it may be just a signature on a 30-years-earlier image of himself, but for a fan that moment could have so much more significance. He uses his platform to invite horror conventions to be openly queerer and queer horror fans to be less closeted in their fandoms. He uses his speaking engagements to give people an oral history on AIDS, homophobia, and connections to queer generations that came before.
OUR NEXT MOVIE OF THE WEEK for 6/29: Mars Attacks!
DISASTER WEEK!
Before Tim Burton became a punchline, he turned out the singular disaster comedy Mars Attacks!, about some laser age Martians coming to invade Earth. Come join us next week as we discuss Mars Attacks!, available for rent in the usual places.
NEXT PICTURE SHOW PODCAST for 6/23: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Next week the podcast starts a pairing about the way that gold can poison men's souls with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Spike Lee's superlative new Da 5 Bloods. Join us Wednesday for our discussion of the older film, available free on HBO Max and for rent in the usual places.
PRIDE WEEK!
Note: This week's essay is graciously provided by a guest contributor.
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE
I remember back during my senior year of high school my family moved to a new house in a new neighborhood where I’d have to go to a new school. People like to talk about fresh starts as a good thing; you can be anything you want to be; you’re a blank slate and nobody has any long-set notions of who you are or who you’re supposed to be. I guess that feeling could be liberating for others. Jack Sholder’s landmark 1982 teen drama A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge understands, however, that sometimes the scariest thing to be is yourself. Especially when deep down you know that you’re … gay.
I mean, it’s okay to be a little bit gay when you’re in the confines of your own bedroom. I remember anytime I’d have to clean my room I’d play my Cathy Dennis cassette tapes. I loved putting on my sunglasses and dancing along and mouthing all the lyrics. (As a teen I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. What can an adult homosexual even do? Can one make a career dancing & lip syncing to female pop singers’ songs?) I’d go wild sometimes and close all my dresser drawers by backing up into them and twerking them shut with my well-defined butt. But as A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge wisely knows, my mom would have the worst timing. She’d just barge into my room without knocking - and with my friend Lisa too - right as I get to the bridge of the song and simulate ejaculation with a wooden toy gun. So embarrassing! Watching this movie was like seeing myself on the big screen.
Alas, one can’t always stay in one’s bedroom. School was the worst. I remember one day falling asleep in science class and the science teacher’s pet python got out of his terrarium and snuck up on me. The snake wrapped itself around my neck and woke me up with a jolt. I screamed at the top of my lungs, partly out of fear for my safety and partly out of fear for my reputation. Would everybody else see this snake at my throat as a phallic metaphor? Would they know my secret, that deep down I yearned for the one-eyed trouser snake? Or there was P.E. I was always so distracted during sports. I’d be staring at all the baseball players’ masculine butts and not even be paying attention when the baseball comes flying through the air and hits me on the head. A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge accurately depicts the way gayness can consume every waking moment of the day.
And that was just the waking moments. Sleep was even gayer. I suppose every closeted gay teen dreams about the anthropomorphized physical manifestation of his own gayness. I know I certainly did. I tried to separate myself from my gayness, as if there was me over here and the whole gay thing over there. My gayness called himself Freddy. He knew we weren’t meant to be separate. He wanted to be inside my body, or rather become my body, or rather become one and the same with my body. And whenever I’d resist the symbiosis Freddy would show me his leather glove and everything would just make more sense. Watching A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge now as a well-adjusted gay adult made me reminisce about my own adolescence when my inner nightmare demon gave me my first article of leather fetishwear.
It became more than just a glove. One night my dreams took me to a fully actualized leather dive bar populated by all the local kinksters. Before I had time to get used to my surroundings I actually ran into someone I knew. It was Coach! I thought back to school and how Coach would always get more intense when he was surrounded by athletic men getting sweaty. Now it all made sense. Coach took me back to school for some role play; he made me submit to his will, running laps and performing other pheromone-drenched athletics. But something didn’t feel quite right yet. I realized I wasn’t a sadomasochistic sub; I was actually a sadomasochistic Dom. My inner nightmare demon corrected this situation by subduing Coach and tying Coach up in the showers. My inner nightmare demon and I became one and the same as we homosexually slashed Coach with finger-knives, rich with homoerotic metaphor. The Oscar-snubbed arthouse drama A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge accurately depicts the complex emotions every gay teen feels about his first bondage experience, the way your world seems to quake when you’re drenched in your gym teacher’s sexblood.
After gay dreams like that I’d always wake up screaming and drenched in gay sweat. There wasn’t any way of hiding screams that loud from the rest of my family. They knew something was up, but they just didn’t have a clue what. Mom was the sensitive one. She thought I needed to maybe see a psychiatrist. Dad was the hard one, what the kids today call “toxic masculinity.” Like anytime the police would bring me home after finding me naked in the rain, Dad would always accuse me of being on heroin and threaten to take me to the methadone clinic. Dad couldn’t see that the explanation was so much simpler than that. How could he? After all, he voted for Goldwater. Even when murderous parrots attacked us or the toaster spontaneously burst into flames, Dad always had a heterosexual explanation for everything. The domestic vaudeville of A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge depicts my home life with an accuracy few other movies have ever achieved.
I remember as senior year progressed things got serious with my platonic friend Lisa, or at least she thought they got serious. One night we were at a pool party together and she interrupted me while I was changing into my swimsuit. She told me she knew what I was going through and that she was here for me. Lisa kissed me on my lips. It was such a strange sensation. I tried to go with it and we did several closed-mouth heterosexual kisses together like I suppose other teens do. We started to explore each other’s bodies and use our tongues on each other. All of a sudden it wasn’t my tongue, it was Freddy’s! My inner nightmare demon was interrupting the proceedings to remind me that heterosexual intimacy just wasn’t what I was born for. Freddy compelled me to go to my friend Grady’s house instead. After all, it just makes so much more sense for guys to sleep in other guys’ bedrooms. The coming-of-age bildungsroman A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge is one of the rare movies to perfectly deal with that moment where a gay teen finds himself unrequiting heterosexual advances and fleeing to his jock best friend’s bedroom. It’s so specific, and yet so universal.
The climax of A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge goes some strange places. The Lisa character in the movie becomes the protagonist and projects her heterosexuality onto the male lead Jesse’s no-longer-inner nightmare demon. The overwhelming force of her straightness subdues Freddy in what could only be described as a metaphor for conversion therapy. It was totally unrelatable and it made no sense. However, the end of the movie had a rather redemptive quality to it. Lisa and Jesse are riding the school bus talking about how glad they are that Jesse’s gayness is over. (As if gayness could ever be over?) Then Freddy’s leather fetish glove and finger-knives burst out of Lisa’s friend Kerry’s torso! I remember the first time I saw my own nightmare demon erupt from a lady friend’s torso. It was the first time I knew that girls could be gay too.
I may have been born three years after it was released in theatres, but A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge is a poignant and insightful movie that knows exactly how I felt when I went to high school in 1985.
SCREAM, QUEEN! MY NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
1985’s A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge has gay subtext. The subtext isn’t even that sub to the text. It’s pretty front and center with male nudity, male-on-male seduction moments, phallic imagery, leather bar, and flat-out BDSM set piece. The gay subtext wasn’t lost on critics at the time, who wrote pieces about how gay it is. The gay subtext wasn’t lost on the queer community, with the movie being featured on the front page of The Advocate. The gay subtext wasn’t lost on young queer audiences who saw themselves for the first time in a mainstream movie, identifying with something they weren’t yet able to articulate. And the gay subtext most certainly wasn’t lost on Mark Patton, the 25-year-old lead actor in the film who was breaking into showbiz while trying to stay safely closeted.
The documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare On Elm Street looks at Patton’s life across a span of 50 years, his relationship to fame, and his identity as a gay man. He knew he was gay as early as age 4 when his understanding of fairy tales was that he (a boy) was meant to marry the king at the end of the story and live happily ever after. He grew up in a conservative religious family amid a conservative religious community. His family was loving and protective, but was not able to give him a place where he could thrive, and his geography almost certainly guaranteed a short life expectancy ending in violence. So at the age of 17 Mark Patton moved to New York City to seek his fame and fortune. And because of his idealized blonde hair & blue eyes good looks he found fame and fortune almost instantly. Within his first year he was doing Mountain Dew commercials on national television, and by his fifth year in New York he was acting alongside Cher and Karen Black in a Robert Altman play on Broadway. The next step was moving to Hollywood, California to try and break into movies and TV shows.
Hollywood in the 1980s was a good place to be a gay man hanging out with other gay men, and it was a good place to be a young, conventionally attractive white male actor - but it was not a good place to be gay and in the entertainment industry at the same time. Being seen as even the slightest bit gay meant being blacklisted from the industry and replaced by some other young, conventionally attractive white male actor who could convince the public of his unblemished heterosexuality. Because of this, Mark Patton was never an “out gay actor” in the 80s. He and his boyfriend, also a successful actor, dated while remaining outwardly closeted for the sake of their professional careers.
One of the best ways for up and coming young actors to get attention during the 80s was to star in slasher films. The genre was hugely popular, both at the box office and on home video, and had a need for fresh young hot people to be dismembered in each new movie and all its sequels. Mark Patton hit his biggest break yet when he landed the lead role in the first sequel to Wes Craven’s smash hit A Nightmare On Elm Street.
A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge has gay subtext.This subtext wasn’t lost on Mark Patton, nor on surprisingly intuitive star Robert Englund. This subtext was lost completely on director Jack Sholder and many of the cast and crew. Sholder was directing only his second movie and was reeling with the complexity of all the special effects that needed to be achieved. Sholder apparently didn’t even realize that he shot the film’s infamous leather bar scene in one of the most famous gay bars in Los Angeles. He scouted the location during off hours when the bar was closed in order to get a feel for the space and had no idea who actually frequented that bar.
On the other hand, heterosexual screenwriter David Chaskin claimed at the time that the subtext was lost on him. Years later, when it became more acceptable to say gay in public, Chaskin would start to admit that he wrote a deliberately homophobic movie in order to tap into hot button issues at the time. Before it was completely acceptable to say gay, though, Chaskin deflected. He claimed that he wrote the subtext, yes, but the subtext was meant to be subtle and the Nightmare sequel became too obviously gay with the casting of Patton. A straight screenwriter scared of being associated with anything queer pinned all of the creative blame on a closeted gay man for being unable to pass for straight. (Patton’s agents took this a step further and said they’d have to rebrand him as a “character actor” going forward because he proved he wasn’t straight-passable enough to ever be a leading man again.) One of the strongest arcs in the documentary is Patton dealing with the decades of pain that deflection wrought.
The documentary also looks at Nightmare 2’s reception and how its critical appraisal has changed over time. First it was a box office smash. Then it became too gay and was often cited as fans’ least-favorite entry in the long-running Nightmare series (7 movies, a crossover spinoff, a remake, a video game, a TV series, a line of comic books, and 3 documentaries - as of this writing), then a generation later it became embraced as a queer cult classic and even horror fans came back around to appreciating the film.
Queer interviewees talk about how Nightmare 2 was their first time recognizing queerness onscreen and being able to identify with a lead who reminded them of themselves. Before seeing Mark Patton several queer interviewees said they often identified with the Final Girl of slasher films because she was the one who had to toughen up and fight back against the murderous bully; so a male scream queen was revelatory to them. One really interesting comment addressed the differences between American moral panic about sex vs American moral panic about violence: parents who would never allow a kid to be exposed to overtly gay movies but who would be oblivious to a random Freddy Krueger movie slipping through the cracks.
The homophobic backlash against Patton’s performance in Nightmare 2 peaked during the height of the AIDS dark ages. Patton watched many of his friends, and particularly his boyfriend, waste away and die of the terrible disease. The personal and professional traumas drove him away from the entertainment industry entirely. He relocated to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico where nobody knew who he was and gave himself a fresh start owning an art studio there. His newfound anonymity would likely have lasted the rest of his life if it weren’t for Never Sleep Again, a 2010 documentary retrospective on the entire Nightmare franchise, whose producers hired a private detective to track him down for an interview.
The documentary follows Patton’s exploration of being thrust back into fame - at least the fame of attending horror conventions and hosting screenings of Nightmare 2. Patton is very out of the closet now, and is quite thoughtful of what his fame means to others. He makes a point of always being the Movie Star when he’s in public as such. For him it may be just a signature on a 30-years-earlier image of himself, but for a fan that moment could have so much more significance. He uses his platform to invite horror conventions to be openly queerer and queer horror fans to be less closeted in their fandoms. He uses his speaking engagements to give people an oral history on AIDS, homophobia, and connections to queer generations that came before.
OUR NEXT MOVIE OF THE WEEK for 6/29: Mars Attacks!
DISASTER WEEK!
Before Tim Burton became a punchline, he turned out the singular disaster comedy Mars Attacks!, about some laser age Martians coming to invade Earth. Come join us next week as we discuss Mars Attacks!, available for rent in the usual places.
NEXT PICTURE SHOW PODCAST for 6/23: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Next week the podcast starts a pairing about the way that gold can poison men's souls with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Spike Lee's superlative new Da 5 Bloods. Join us Wednesday for our discussion of the older film, available free on HBO Max and for rent in the usual places.