Finding Nemo (review)

of identity gives the false sense of a unified, constant identity that is supposed to be uniquely our own). The elements of the home and family, politics, celebrity culture, and sexual transgression lend this film to a queer reading. Queer theory need not focus on homosexuality, but I read The House of Yes as purposefully referencing gay culture. Of course, the sexual behavior of Jackie and Marty clearly proves non-normative, but their characters also play with stereotypes of gay identity. Homosexuality is historically thought to be the result of self-obsession and narcissism, symbolically figured here by the fact that Jackie-O and Marty are twins (“It’s like fucking a mirror,” Anthony notes). Jackie-O and Marty easily fit a certain depiction of gay male identity modeled on the upper-class, educated, effete male who lives in the city and lacks traditional morality, and they have a sort of camp sensibility, playing off of each other with witty banter, speaking French, and even playing a sophisticated piano ensemble after Leslie stumbles through “Chopsticks.” Beyond these surface connections, we see that the house functions like the closet, a space where Marty can “be himself” with Jackie in a way that he cannot in the real world. And one must note that the reference to Jackie Kennedy Onasis is a loaded one, since almost immediately after JFK’s assassination, she became an icon to counter-cultures in America. Andy Warhol produced many paintings based on photos of her, and she was a popular character among female impersonators, notably impersonated by Divine (aka Glen Harris Milstead) in John Water’s 1967 film Eat Your Makeup. In music, JFK’s assassination was reenacted in the video “Coma White” by Marylin Manson, who starred as JFK with Rose McGowan playing Jackie, and she appears in “Jackie’s Strength” by Tori Amos—a song about a girl who purposefully “gets lost” on her wedding day. The movie reads as exemplary of the idea that identity is itself an imitation. Judith Butler famously theorized gender as a copy with no original—a copy of a copy that constitutes a performance of the self. The struggle for Marty is that he wants normalcy. The struggle for Jackie is that she wants to create an anti-norm, and she insists that the house that they live in becomes the place where the threat of nonconformity is death. The gun that initiates sex also threatens the participants by the mechanism of its violence—what queer theorists might call normative violence. The fetish of the gun and of the costumes, which began as such a transgressive act, become the markers of that transgressive identity—“Jackie O”—which then insists on “fixing” itself in the space of the house. Marty’s death, however, may not be seen as any different by Jackie as the sort of “killing off” of parts of himself in order to take on the normal identity of husband to Leslie. The movie closes with more 8mm home movie footage. Jackie sits at the top of the steps exhausted, and Marty, behind the camera, approaches her, asking, “do you want me to stop?” “Yes, stop it Marty,” Jackie responds, “stop it....” The camera closes in from above on Jackie’s face, and she speaks as though she is worn out, yet her voice and expression is unmistakably sexual. The camera lingers on the shot of her for several silent seconds before the film ends. Jackie begs Marty to stop the camera, to stop the play, to stop the performance. The artificiality of Jackie’s identity based on a popular and political icon of the twentieth century is more real to her than Marty’s struggle to play the part of a normal man. Death, therefore, is simply the end of the performance, just as we all are sometimes forced to kill off a part of ourselves in order to function within the narrative of a life that, frequently, was written long before we came around. Daniel Williford Independent Scholar dpwilliford@hotmail.com