"'Go F**k Yourself!', or Narcissism as Queer Aesthetic"

Mr. Dave Franco

Over drinks with the homo-homies last Friday, my friend Jeff asked me if I had seen the video of Dave Franco fucking himself. “Um, who is Dave Franco?” I asked, cocking my eyes to the side to see if the table of ladies nearby had heard us use the “F-bomb” before 7pm.  What followed was a meta-explanation from four men, employing graphic hand gestures, and feigned-looks of quelle surprise in effort to explain that Dave Franco, younger brother of star James Franco, had done a one-up on his big bro’s video about kissing himself by making a short film that portrayed him romancing and then having sex with himself.

“It is the height of narcissism, but so good!” Jeff assured. The next day I found the video online and watched it. Jeff, of course, per usual, was right. But this led me to contemplate the following idea:

James Franco—enigmatic, dark, idiosyncratic—gets read as “gay” quite often in our culture. Yes, he has opted to portray a number of queer male characters over the course of his young career, but it seems the rumors (and let’s be honest, hopeful desires of many a man) rest on something more. His brother’s video only seems to heighten the anxiety over the Franco sexuality. But my reading is that these are just young talented men, thrust into the limelight, and navigating it vis-à-vis a certain type of exaggerated, narcissistic bravado. So why is narcissism in men read as “queer”? [Click Here for this extraordinary video]

Here’s another case study.

Like a fine Sonoma County pinot noir oak-barreled and then stored to perfection, George Clooney is flawless.  His career and bearing speak of a life of fine-tuned choices and adroit navigation of an entertainment market ravenous for the next big thing. Elegantly, but simply dressed, well-spoken, that always-present twinkle in his eye, Mr. Clooney is the consummate Bruce Wayne, simultaneously embodying the dualities of elder statesman and rogue with a carefree, though subtle edge. He is the Beau Brummel of our age. He is also famously guarded about his private life and is not married. The gay rumors have been swirling around him for a decade or more, and the question is: why? Are we so afraid of the power, the supposed-loose-canon-ness, the precarious possibility for creative good or destruction of an unattached, attractive man that we must write off his selfish desire to lead a life unencumbered by assigning him a sexual desire with no basis?

1881-Gyula Benzcur

The origins, plot-points, and lessons to be garnered from the Attic myth of Narcissus prove as sundry as the potential dimensions of the “closest” constructed for the Messieurs Franco and Signore Clooney. Possibly derived from the Greek word for sleep or numbness, Narkissos has been written as a hunter, a fool, a child, and a god. Whereas Ovid’s myth adds the character of Echo, a young nymph whose love for the boy whose affections were notoriously hard to win, ends in both wasting away, earlier versions have Narcissus committing suicide when his love is not returned by his own reflection. Still others frame the myth with the goddess Nemesis taking revenge on Narcissus for his abhorrence for all human affection, while others make him into a bit of a trollop who falls in love with his twin sister (this last is very Manfred a la Lord Byron).  In all these versions, however, the pool in which the youth espies his reflection, and by which he perishes, whether knowing it is himself he sees or not, remains a constant.  Like Galadriel’s mirror, in the cerulean depths, Narkissos glimpses his past, present and future, and, in choosing a beautiful, responsive, yet shadowy reflection as the beloved, the youth actively turns away from reality, forfeiting his life for an echo of the real.

N.B. Liepicie, 1771

From Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde to Langston Hughes, from Caravaggio to the pre-Raphaelites, such a theme, a renouncing of the real for the momentary divine, has proven a theme for the decidedly, and culturally ‘queered’.  In adding a female deity to the myth, Ovid heightens the boy’s hubris by making him prefer the image of a mortal boy he could not have (because he always-already owned) to the promise of eternal union with the divine.  For Langston Hughes, in his elegant poem, “Suicide Note,” the pool becomes the Hudson River, and it is not merely gazing at a reflection that satisfies Nemesis, but a kiss.

Caravaggio
(notice how the artist has rendered his own portrait
 in the reflection)

There seems to be a cultural crisis of semiotics attached to the un-attached, narcissistic man selfish of his time. The choice of self over another is an act which destabilizes the bounds set forth with Oedipus answers the riddle of the Sphinx and enters, for better or worse, into “culture” and the rules of societal taste. By selecting himself, Narkissos’ beauty cannot be shared, only endlessly admired in the myopic ripples of an endless pool. “What a waste!” one may proclaim, “what a selfish cow!” One may sigh, and shake their heads, complaining that a woman spends too much time before the mirror, or spends avid attention to her person, but no pitch forks are gathered, no tweets blessed with the letters “G-A-Y” draw followers. The self-imposed kingdom of the narcissist may be the one concept or value where the female doyenne is more tolerated, and look upon more favorably than her male counterpart. But while this explains how Narcissus and his male ilk are queered through subversion (conscious or no) of hetero-normative marriage-desire-children paradigms, it does not explain why they are queered as homosexual, especially when the object of desire is unknown or non-existent.

I do not have an answer ultimately, but I do have a corollary observation. Lately, I have been intrigued by “decadent” literature: those novels of the last 150 years that speak of desires a rebours (against nature).  Gide, Genet, Waugh, Julian Mitchell, Huysmans, Wilde, Highsmith, Poe, Forster, and Baldwin come to mind, amongst others, (including the novella, “A Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad) and what is so incredible is that in each of these works—whether consciously or no—evokes the trope of a physical double, remarkably similar, if not identical in appearance, whose constant presence leads to the revelation of a desire that heralds the destruction of both.  In Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, the two male lovers go so far as to call out their own names during sex, naming the other as a second-self, and investing the act of anal penetration as a masturbatory communion. Can the thread connecting narcissism and anal sex be a slippery slope muddy with K-Y jelly, meth pipes, and Gatorade? Is the link between self-love and so-called deviance so assured?

More than anything, perhaps, the narcissist, especially in the case of famous ones, hints at a knowledge the rest of us do not know. The preference of self is an unanswered question, whose answer could lie anywhere in the spectrum between existentialism, Freudian trust issues, or proof that aliens in Hollywood not only exist, but walk amongst us.  The gaze of the male narcissist echoes back to us through time a fear we had hoped to bury: that a truth beyond good and evil exists, and that both heaven and hell reside not in the clouds or in Sheol, but within ourselves.