What are the politics of visual pleasure for a movie about nascent queer love filmed in the time of AIDS but set in the late imperial cocoon of clipped lawns and subfusc?įorster began writing Maurice in 1913, when the British Empire governed nearly a quarter of the earth’s population and the question of nostalgia was beside the point. As much an uncritically aestheticized portrayal of elite English Edwardianism as it was a melancholy glamorization of closeted gay life, the transatlantic confection cost £1.58 million, a sum that would have bought 262 AIDS patients a year’s worth of Retrovir (AZT), licensed for use that year at a price that made it the world’s most expensive drug to date.
The production was chummily Anglo-American, making for a curiously polite protest (if protest it was) against the colonial nostalgia and reactionary homophobia of the Reagan-Thatcher years. Forster’s cross-class gay romance Maurice premiered at the Venice Film Festival. On September 5, 1987, under the spell of the sinking and watery city where Aschenbach first saw Tadzio emerge from the sea like some frail and golden god in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of E.M.
Lapham’s Quarterly is exploring the history and allure of pop culture’s period pieces, artifacts that captivated audiences with their conceptions of the past-and the political and cultural contexts that made these historical fictions so compelling. History does not reach us only in classrooms and via textbooks movies, novels, songs, and even video games have shaped how we understand what came before the present for generations.
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