Da Vinci's Demonisation
The Original Hudson Hawk
So, a few weeks back a link to the trailer for Da Vinci's Demons did the rounds on Twitter. Oh dear, I thought, even before clicking on it. This is coming from Starz, who gave us the updated swords and sandals schlockfest of Spartacus--replete with 1960s style beefcake models turned "actors." This is coming from the channel that took the blood from Caligula and the sand from Sunset Beach, put it through a Hollywood blender, and poured out a mediocre pabulum too trashy to take seriously and not trashy enough to enjoy as kitsch. Yeah, yeah, I heard some people raving about it; all I saw there was Hercules or Xena without a fraction of the wit, Gladiator banalised from epic to soap opera. Spartacus: Rome and Away. So now Starz are doing a historical fantasy series riffing on Da Vinci. O-kay.
Even before clicking, anyone could guess what would be getting shovelled into the trash TV pulp machine. Da Vinci? That's gonna mean Dan Brown, right? Secret history of the most lurid type, pseudo-religious mystery with secret societies, Illuminati. Da Vinci? That's gonna mean Rambaldi from Alias, right? All Leonardo's mad invention skillz, those are so going to be exploited to give us The Original Hudson Hawk (TM)! This is going to be Leonardo as a young and dashing adventurer, probably with a mile-wide rogueish streak, sucked into conspiratorial intrigue and set-piece derring-do, a Renaissance MacGuyver crossed with Casanova. Are they going to throw in some Shakespeare In Love? Of course they are! The whole idea writes itself.
None of this is a problem for me, mind. I love me some good hokum, I do. You could do something like this with Kit Marlowe, International Superspy, and I'd lap it the fuck up if it was done well as pulp. But of course, that sorta pulp can also be done supremely badly, witness Spartacus with its Eurotrash Chippendale gladiators. And of course, with Leonardo or Marlowe--or Caravaggio, he'd be great material too--with any American corporate TV historical fantasy based on one of history's greatest homos, one thing is even more predictable than all of the above. Even before I clicked on the trailer, I knew what we were going to see...
He's going to be straightironed, of course, I thought, eyes already rolling as I clicked on the link.
And yes, of course, the trailer is pretty clear from the get go. The very first shot after Tom Riley as Da Vinci ("Perhaps you've heard of me.") is Laura Haddock as Lucrezia Donati, the female love interest. From there we dive into your standard trailer montage of action and intrigue, images of Haddock looking all sexy vixen sprinkled in now and then, a little shot of a scantily-clad woman dancing with a snake, a flashcut of Leonardo and Lucrezia doing the whole bodice-ripping thing (Imma throw you on teh bed, sexy lady!) and oh, look, now they're kissing nekkid, and she's making an impassioned speech so we know for sure she's plot-critical, and now they're nekkid again, her straddling him, in front of the fireplace. (Passion! Romance!) And yeah, what would be the closing shot, the crunch shot of the trailer? Leo and Lucy sitting close together, her hand on his thigh as they whisper breathily to each other. (Leo: "We play a dangerous game." Lucy: "I thought danger was the appeal for you.")
It's not exactly rocket science to read from that just how far the show is going to straightiron Da Vinci. Or as I likes to call him...
THE.... Sodomite Leonardo Da Vinci!!
But wait, I hear you say. We can't know definitively that Da Vinci was a sodomite. It's all speculative, unproven.
Well, sure, I say. So I shall consider my lovely Leo innocent of heterosexuality until proven guilty. It's rampant speculation that he was straight, so if you're going to make a wild hypothesis like that, the burden of proof is on you, amigo. The point being, that card is just as valid played from my hand as it from yours, straight boy. You have, frankly, fuck all evidence to make your slanderous case that he was a cuntfucker.
What? Too harsh? Chillax, baby. Look, some of my best friends are cuntfuckers. I have nothing against cuntfuckers. Clearly there's a slippery slope: if we can't trust you to stick to the same gender, we can't trust you to stick to the same species; and we're not the ones actively breeding in order to have kiddies to fiddle; and fuck knows, if male/female couplings are accepted, you can be sure live/dead couplings are the next step. I mean, I'm not a heterophobe, but... well, I just think if you're going to go around with your Heterosexual Agenda, trying to appropriate historical figures to your cause, claiming that they're part of that minority at one extreme end of the Kinsey Scale, you need to bring some facts to the table. Without good reason... I don't see why we should libel Leo's good name with such a claim.
(Yes, for the benefit of the irony deficient, I'm being facetious. Duh. But the basic point stands.)
Bear in mind that we're talking about the guy who wrote that quote above, dripping with revulsion at the thought of putting the peepee in the vageegee. And let's factor in another quote to look at where precisely that disgust is directed... or not directed rather: “A man who is ashamed to show or name the penis is wrong. Instead of being anxious to hide it, man ought to display it… with honour!” Dude, that goes beyond proclaiming the glory of one's own morning glory, beyond extolling the aesthetic awesomeness of the male member, the Lord Cock Almighty, and into outright encouragement for others to get their tadgers out as and when they feel like it. Go on! You know you want to! Let's see that proud pintle, baby! Get it out there on display, for us all to admire! Here, let me help you with your breeches.
Never mind the sodomy accusations in his youth--the straightironers will surely say those were politically-motivated slander. Let's look at Salai, "the Little Unclean One," the apprentice he kept around for forty years despite him being, in Leo's own words, "a liar, a thief, stubborn and a glutton." Why? Might it have something to do with him being, in Vasari's words, "a graceful and beautiful youth with curly hair, in which Leonardo greatly delighted"? Might it have something to do with the crude sketches in Leo's notebooks, clearly made by another's hand, in which cocks on legs march toward a butthole labeled "Salai"? I'm not saying it's case proven. I'm saying yours is the case to prove if you're positing a sexuality setting of straight.
So, yeah. Leonardo, Son of Sodom. Deal with it. Or deny it if you want; just don't expect me to take your resistance to the realities as anything but prejudice.
Still, for all that rendering Da Vinci as a painterly Casanova is and can only be an act of arrant straightironing, I held out zero hope that Da Vinci's Demons would be anything but eye-rolling in that respect. It's sad, because the time is fucking ripe for a US TV show to show some balls (to display them! with honour!) and have a rogueish charmer action hero of exactly this type who's also... yanno... a swaggering sodomite with an eye for the lads rather than the lassies. The breakout character of Kurt in Glee, the plethora of preferences on display in True Blood, the entire culture of shipping and slash performed on every fricking male character in every fricking fantasy TV show or movie series... all of this should by now be sledgehammering into executive producers' thick skulls the reality that the market is there, the audience ready for it. But still, those spineless segregationist cuntfuckers in the board rooms are such a known factor, I went in resigned to this show being as reactionary as the norm. I expected the same old same old of Alexander and Troy and--oh fuck this, I can't even be bothered to fucking list them. Yeah, as bitter a taste as it leaves in my mouth, that fatalistic surrender to the inevitable, I expected my sodomite sibling, Leonardo Da Vinci, the Florentine Flamer, to be straightironed as the hair of a black woman the same TV cuntfuckers don't want to look "too black."
I just didn't expect the rest of the homophobic bullshit, the gobsmackingly concerted cuntfuckery of the highest order.
What do I mean? Let's see...
The Imperial Chickenhawk
So, after a little flashforward prologue teaser, we open episode one in 1476 with the assassination of the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Mario Sforza, in Wikipedia's words, "a notorious womanizer who often passed his women on to his courtiers once he was tired of them." So, a cuntfucker. He was a cuntfucker both literally and figuratively, Wikipedia tells us. He was as into putting the peepee in the vageegee as Leo was against it. And he was as cruel as you could want a cuntfucker to be for narrative purposes. He had a poacher force-fed a full-furred hare. Another man he nailed alive to his coffin. He combined his cuntfuckeries into the perfect storm of cuntfuckery, indeed, raping the noble wives and daughters of Milan. Not a nice man, in short.
And how do we meet this monster? How is his depravity demonstrated. We see him naked at the window of his palatial bedchambers, pissing in a chamberpot, turning back to his canopied bed to pull aside the curtains.
Beat.
"Out you go, boy." he says disdainfully, and tosses clothes to the young naked man revealed in his bed. He slaps the pretty youth's ass as the boywhore toddles to the door--"Go on! Go!"--tosses a coin or two, and turns away in utter disregard. Because yeah, he's a bit of a scumbag, right? He's a debauched powermonger of debased appetites. He's power corrupted, an amoral user of people at the very least. He's decadent as any entitled cuntfucker born into power and privilege, taking what he wants, throwing scraps of coin in contempt--less in payment than as sign of his ownership of your ass. He's a cuntfucker, as I say, and what better way to show this than to signal it with sodomy as subjugation?
Because, yeah, see, the peepee in the poop-chute... that's all about the power. The buttseks is to make that bottom boi your bitch. The assfuck is assertion, dominance, emasculation of the innocent young brave whose buttocks we are clearly to imagine being penetrated, violated, pwned in the pounding. This is the semiotics of sodomy--in the mind of the cuntfucker at least. And such semiotics is useful. TV is a medium in which concision is of the essence, in which a character must be established in seconds, in a single signifying action that sets them with utter certainty. And so here the Duke of Milan must be established as a man of vice. And so here that base nature is signified by his shameless strutting sneering sodomy. Duke Galeazzo or Baron Harkonen, in this monstrum of degeneracy we see every fucking bullshit predatory pervert in the history of homophobic fiction.
Smashing.
Let's remind ourselves of the reality, shall we? Or the historical record, at least. "[A] notorious womanizer who often passed his women on to his courtiers once he was tired of them."
So, yeah. We're not just talking about straightironing the hero here. We're talking about the reverse too. We're talking about taking a non-heroic character who was, in reality, to the best of our knowledge, not just straight but aggressively so--a misogynist user and abuser of women, a cuntfucking rapist--and wiping that crime from the picture in order to render him instead as a vicious stereotype of a vicious sodomite. In order to exploit the prejudice encoded in the trope, to invoke the homophobic phantasm of the Imperial Chickenhawk. In order to set this--this sin of sodomy as subjugation--as the key signifier of his moral turpitude.
I can only guess that force-feeding a man a hare just wouldn't do to establish Sforza's credentials as a man of vice. I can only surmise that nailing a man to a coffin was inadequate to purpose. But why? Given that an act of brutal torturing cuntfuckery is a pretty good way to establish brutal torturing cuntfuckery, the only inadequacy I can see in presenting Sforza as the cuntfucker he was lies in the failure of such an historically accurate Sforza to serve in the reification and reinforcement of the homophobe's semiotics of sodomy.
Which is to say, the only fucking reason not to mine the real Sforza's eminently exploitable real viciousness is that substituting sodomy in as symbol for vice achieves the same result and more; invoking that animus of bigotry in place of ethical aversion to cuntfuckery, the trope elicits that animus in the audience, and as an ersatz example of the abject being despicable, it validates that animus, cements the bigotry such that subsequent exploitation is all the more likely and all the more effective. Such use of sodomy, I mean, serves to bolster such use of sodomy--as a surrogate, a scapegoat, a symbol. Yay.
This particular symbol gets offed immediately after that, by the way. I mean, after all this, I should be clear, it's not like Sforza's the actual villain of the piece. He's not being set up as an all-out monster, simply painted with perversity as an offhand narrative shortcut--just so we know, in the short timespan in which he's necessary to kickstart the plot with his assassination, exactly what kind of man he is. The phrasing used later: "a pig of epic appetites."
Super.
The Slash Nazi
Cut to Leonardo, also introduced with a naked young pretty thing in his employ. No buttboy hustlers here though, Cock forbid! No, it's a topless young female model he's painting (plein air, amusingly, for those who know their art history,) a friend, we can tell, from their friendly chat... and an admirer, we can tell, from the flirty undercurrents of a (nice healthy heterosexual) desire that ultimately surfaces in, of course, a kiss. Oh, he's a bit of a rogue, perhaps, keeping his emotional distance, playing it cool even as she drapes herself over him. But it's all just the carefree passions of those boho artist types unshackled by convention, the horndog propensities of a Picasso or Pollock. No judgement here, if anything we're to admire his dash. Turns out she's Vanessa, "newly liberated from the convent of St Anthony." Oh, you, Leonardo! Freeing the sexy nuns from the silly moral strictures! You handsome heterosexual devil, you, with your rakish heterosexual charms!
And what of his young apprentice, Nico, who comes running up now, curly blond hair not unlike the portraits of Salai? That he's actually no Salai at all is fair enough in historical terms; Salai didn't join Leonardo till 1490, and this is 1476. But he's no surrogate for such either. No, if we thought there might perhaps, just maybe, be even a little safe psuedo-subversion of the straightironing with a secondary character, if we thought there might be some hints of homosexual dalliance on the side, or at least a little homoerotic tension to be shipped or slashed with a flighty sprite, a Renaissance Robin to his Batman, that avenue is closed off pretty quickly. NO! shouts the Slash Nazi. NO SLASH FOR YOU! NO SLASH FOR YOU!
I mean, not to be uncharitable to the actor, but his round face and rather weak chin are not the stuff of a cherubic imp. He's written, cast and acted as a gormless galoot, a naifish squire to the hero. And straight, of course. As he gazes slack-jawed at the nekkid lady, it's clear he's no puckish power-bottom prone to scribbling pricks aimed at his arse in Leonardo's notebooks, just another awkward adolescent with a hardon pointed squarely at the boobies. It's not just text that's going to be straightironed but subtext too. No Holmes and Watson heteroflexible banter. No Teen Wolf tensions to make a Sterek of Stiles and Derek. No Leonico here.
NO!
NO SLASH FOR YOU!
A little fun and games with a flying machine to sketch in the last ingredient--Leonardo as charmer, painter, and now inventor--and it's back to Florence for the actual plot to kick in. Enter Lucrezia Donati to catch our hetero hero's eye in the marketplace, to transfix him as Nico warns of the danger of even looking at Lorenzo De Medici's mistress, to turn her head coquettishly and signal the certainty of a narrative trajectory: oh, yes, we can be sure that she's going to be the love interest. There be cuntfucker shagging on the horizon, mark my words. (In the first episode, it transpires.) And now, with a horseman riding by, bringing news of the assassination to Lorenzo, (cue the quote above deriding Sforza for his debauchery--just in case we didn't get it, yanno, in case we didn't understand that Sforza being in bed with a lad was a signal of his moral bankruptcy and sexual vice,) now we can cut to the proper villain of the piece.
Shall we explore how Pope Sixtus IV is introduced? Because this one's a fucking doozy.
The Return of the Imperial Chickenhawk
Scene: a large circular indoor pool, a bath in the Roman or Turkish style. In the centre, submerged with only their heads and shoulders exposed, are Sixtus and--what's this?--another pretty young naked man, Sixtus embracing him from behind and--wait, what? What the fuck? Is he...? Yes, he is. Sixtus is holding a knife to the lad's throat, other hand fondling the lad's cheek as he asks if the young man is frightened. No, the lad lies. Which allows evil Sixtus to play power games with a lecture about the sin of lying, as the camera smoothly dollies in from above, so we get a clear shot of the naked youth's genitals, shaved to boyish hairlessness if I'm not mistaken, flaccid in his boyish vulnerability, those genitals grabbed now by evil rape-faggot Sixtus at the boy's admission of fear. But oh, now with the evil rape-faggot kiddy-fiddler buttsekser Sixtus fluffing him, we're to imagine the boy's cock responding, evidence to (evil, etc.) Sixtus that his admission is also a lie--partially at least. A not-so-veiled threat of murder underlines (evil, etc.) Sixtus's demand for a decision--is it fear or desire? is this a lie or that?--puts the lad in a double bind, damned either way.
Another Imperial Chickenhawk then, and now we get the full-fledged monster--murderous, manipulative, the psychotic sexual sadist who's gone so deep into the heart of Sodom he's found himself in Salo. The Freudian knife poised to penetrate tender flesh of the poor confused young man. It's prurient and lurid and absurd, and Alan Ball could probably do it deliciously on True Blood, revelling in the perversity and slickly twisting with a subtle shift to explore the dominance and submission games of S&M libertines with wit and wits about him. Here though, it's just the proof in the pudding of the point made above: sodomy set as symbol via Sforza, the animus of bigotry is invoked again, all the more contemptuous, all the more contemptible.
A near kiss is interrupted by the arrival of the frontline anatagonist, the young black-garbed blade, Count Girolamo Riario, with news of the assassination's success. A little plotting to conquer Florence now that its protection from Milan is taken care of, a little hint of greater mysteries with a mention of "the Turk" and the "Book of Leaves" he's after, and as the Pope strides off to take care of business, now we get Riario gazing admiringly upon the pretty young lad left naked and hapless in the pool, no small sincerity in the villain's voice as he draws his sword--"I am truly sorry"--and wades into the pool to slaughter the boywhore. Figures that he'd be a sodomite too, favourite of his papal uncle--buttfucked by him, I'd be willing to bet, into his black-hearted wickedness. The narrative so far has been nothing if not consistent.
By this point, less than fifteen minutes in, one might be forgiven, I should think, for wanting to spit in David Goyer's cuntfucking face, call him out as the cuntfucking cuntfucker he is, and kick his preciously inviolate ass until he cries like the craven chickenshit prejudice-pandering cuntfucker that he is, his aesthetic and ethical cowardice writ large in everything on the screen to date. Or one might be forgiven, I should think, for simply venting one's ire at this ugly-ass agitprop with a loud, "FUCK YOU, YOU CUNTFUCKER!" and a coffee mug hurled into the screen. Or for just, yanno, turning off this shitfest of unbridled bigotry and watching something that doesn't cram its homophobia down your gullet in the first ten minutes like it's actively and defiantly out to let you know, in no uncertain terms, that it reviles everything you represent to it. Out to spread the word even!
Out of fairness, I'll note that, unlike Sforza, Sixtus was subject to allegations of sodomy, a reputed "lover of boys and sodomites" who awarded benefices and bishoprics in exchange for the asses of hot young men, his nephew Riario included. One might point out that the same provisos of politically-motivated slander surely apply to him if they apply to Leonardo, but I've no problem believing him a) innocent of cuntfuckery in the literal sense, and b) guilty of cuntfuckery in the figurative sense. His notorious nepotism and his hand in the Pazzi Conspiracy seem, on cursory reading, to be basically accepted. I see no mention of him force-feeding a hare to a poacher though, or nailing a man alive to his own coffin. He's also unlike Sforza in so far as he wasn't reputed to be a serial cuntfucking rapist. But which one do we see actively torturing a victim--psychologically, sexually?
We're through the fucking looking glass, amigo. It's not just that the sodomite becomes straight here when it comes to Leonardo. The rapist becomes sodomite here, if he's straight. If he's straight, the cuntfucking rapist becomes not a rapist, in fact. While the non-torturer becomes a torturer now, naturally, if he's gay.
For the love of fucking Cock.
The Prick Tease of Pansexuality
But hey, again out of fairness, I should note that the writers have promised to "address" Leonardo's sexuality... at some point down the line... in some vague shape or form. Is a snap judgement made on the first ten minutes of someone screaming homophobic abuse in your face too uncharitable, premature? Should we be giving the benefit of the doubt to Goyer, watching and waiting passively for him to deliver on this promise? I mean if someone spits in your face in the first ten minutes of a party, spends most every second of that ten minutes, in fact, spewing hate at you... I mean, if they say they're going to throw a scrap of respect at your feet at some point in the next however many hours, you owe it to them to make allowances for... well, their little faux pas of shouting "Faggot!" at you over and over again at the top of their lungs, right? I mean, what kind of over-sensitive flower would I be to treat the cuntfucking cuntfuckers with the same contempt they mete out to me? When they've promised, honest injuns, that maybe somehow they'll kinda sorta possibly touch on the notion that Leonardo might have at some point in his life had a passing whim of a fancy that some male figure he admired aesthetically was maybe, in some strange way, actually sexually attractive... perhaps?
For sure, who knows? Maybe they'll bring in little hints that Leonardo fooled around with some boyhood chum back in the past, in the dim and distant past. Woot. Cause yeah, no straight guy ever compared cock size with his straight mate and jerked off together in the lusts of experiemental adolescence. But, OK, maybe they'll actually suggest indirectly and ambiguously that every so often he might let some pretty boy model suck him off... if he's feeling horny, and there's no women in sight to seduce, and the lad throws himself at him. Cause yeah, that's not the sort of thing actually straight guys do when they're shit-faced frat boys. But OK, maybe we'll get something like that which goes a bit further towards undermining the wholly heterosexual rendering of Leonardo.
Like in the tavern scene in episode one, say. The scene where Leo is sitting in a tavern with his apprentice and unscrupulous mate, when the high-voiced mincing boyslut in white floats up to them to drape himself over the maestro's shoulder, asking to model for him since "No one looks at my form as you do." That would be the scene where Leo doesn't even raise his eyes from his notebook to look at this third in a line of bottombitch boywhores--because, yanno, that's how sodomites are in this world, Imperial Chickenhawks or the submissive emasculated bitches who open their asses to them--where Leonardo doesn't give the faggot so much as a glance as he gives his derisory dismissal: "No, no one looks at any form as I do." Because, yeah, let's not think of that gaze as anything but the gaze of an artist and inventor. Let's have him pointedly dismiss any sexual significance, set any interest in that lad's form as purely aesthetic and intellectual--a vision he has that applies to any form, a vision shared by none.
"Go peddle your wares with Botticelli," says Leo. "He's an easy mark." This from the man who kept Salai, "a liar, a thief, stubborn and a glutton," around for forty years on the strength of his pretty face, it seems, regardless of notebooks vandalised with pictures illustrating his buttboy status. Methinks it's Leo was the soft touch in reality. But not here, Here the lad flounces off--and oh, does he flounce!--to a disdainful comment from our hero's mate that the lad is no model but a hustler, and an artless one--wait, though! "But pleasing to the eye." says Leonardo. Oh. My. God. Did we hear right? Did Leo just comment on the model's looks? How totally that counteracts everything that's going on! How suddenly it's all turned around as they "address" Leonardo's sexuality by having the artist comment that... um... a handsome young man is a handsome young man. Great Cock Almighty, that's... um, that's...
That's spineless cuntfucking wankery is what it is.
Dear Mr Goyer, dear dear Mr Goyer... grow some fucking balls. How fucking chickenshit can you be? You want me to believe that at some point down the line you're going to have the guts and common fucking decency to "address" Leonardo's sexuality, don't give us this pissant pantywaist pusillanimous wimpery. Jesus Fucking Cock, when you talk about "addressing" Leonardo's sexuality, does that mean you're going to wait till the last episode of the last season to reveal that he's--dan dan DAN!--actually as straight an arrow as ever was, repulsed by the very thought of buttseks? Cause frankly, a bait-and-switch where your ultimate revelation is just an excuse to spit in the faces of the faggots one last time... that doesn't seem an unlikely outcome right now.
If that's not your game, what else are we to expect on the basis of this pathetic gesture? Down the line, once the crowds of cuntfuckers are safely bought-in to the story, somewhere down the line, so as not to frighten the cuntfuckers off with faggotry upfront, what are we to expect as the payoff in this prick tease game? If you're going to string us along--stall our calling you out on your homophobic cuntfuckery--on the promise of tackling the character's sexuality, the best you can do now is already some sorry-ass shit. The best you can do is openly reveal his bisexuality and give him a male love interest. Yeah, like (even) that's gonna happen. My bet is you go for some cop-out pansexual desire, inchoate and unconsummated--scene after scene of straight sex and the odd hint now and then of alternative interests. And frankly, on the basis of this limp-dicked watery wankjuice. my money's on you not revealing a damn thing. My money's on you being a pansy-ass pussylick, too spineless to do more than hint that the hero is not wholly hetero. My money's on you bottling it in every single scene like this, writing in a get-out clause where we can absolutely, if we want to, read some scrap of an inkling of a sign of homosexual "attraction" on Leonardo's part as simply the eye of an artist and inventor awed by all of Nature.
Looking at that tavern scene, at that insipid excuse for an implication of potential sexual preferences not involving the peepee/vageegee combo--the conjunction that the actual Leonardo was self-professedly repelled by, remember--my money's on you actually thinking that this piss-poor gesture is addressing Leonardo's sexuality. I'd lay odds on you obliviously writing this sort of shit all through the show and actually pointing to it as some frisson of "ambiguity" by which you acknowledge the "uncertainty" of Leonardo's appetites.
Seriously, is this the best you can do, Goyer? Is that "But pleasing to the eye," really meant to lay the foundations for a libertine Leonardo who might be just a little bit bi? Are we really meant to swallow your reassurances that the straightironing isn't the whole story? When this risible sham of a subtext is 100 percent readable as simply an artist appreciating male beauty, when more than anything it actually serves as a pretext for just another pandering demonisation of the queer who's coming on to him, when it's in the context of a veritable frontal assault demonising same-sex desires, salvo after salvo smashing into the viewer's skull your use of sodomy as the very symbol of corruption--when you tell us you'll deal with it down the line and this is what we have to go on... man, I will believe it when I see it.
Prove me wrong, cuntfucker. There's nothing you can do now to undo that jawdroppingly obnoxious opening, but maybe you can salvage some shred of artistic integrity from this wreck of pandering supercharged with prejudice and driven at full throttle into common fucking decency and respect. Can't say I think you're capable of it or even interested in doing so, but if you're not the cuntfucking cuntfucker that this arrant knavery says you are, go ahead and show us all how your TV show isn't actually an agitprop shitrag smearing your stenchsome message on every queer from Leonardo back to Sodom itself and forward to the present and beyond. Go ahead.
Prove me wrong, cuntfucker.
"The act of procreation and anything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions."
-- Leonardo Da Vinci
So, a few weeks back a link to the trailer for Da Vinci's Demons did the rounds on Twitter. Oh dear, I thought, even before clicking on it. This is coming from Starz, who gave us the updated swords and sandals schlockfest of Spartacus--replete with 1960s style beefcake models turned "actors." This is coming from the channel that took the blood from Caligula and the sand from Sunset Beach, put it through a Hollywood blender, and poured out a mediocre pabulum too trashy to take seriously and not trashy enough to enjoy as kitsch. Yeah, yeah, I heard some people raving about it; all I saw there was Hercules or Xena without a fraction of the wit, Gladiator banalised from epic to soap opera. Spartacus: Rome and Away. So now Starz are doing a historical fantasy series riffing on Da Vinci. O-kay.
Even before clicking, anyone could guess what would be getting shovelled into the trash TV pulp machine. Da Vinci? That's gonna mean Dan Brown, right? Secret history of the most lurid type, pseudo-religious mystery with secret societies, Illuminati. Da Vinci? That's gonna mean Rambaldi from Alias, right? All Leonardo's mad invention skillz, those are so going to be exploited to give us The Original Hudson Hawk (TM)! This is going to be Leonardo as a young and dashing adventurer, probably with a mile-wide rogueish streak, sucked into conspiratorial intrigue and set-piece derring-do, a Renaissance MacGuyver crossed with Casanova. Are they going to throw in some Shakespeare In Love? Of course they are! The whole idea writes itself.
None of this is a problem for me, mind. I love me some good hokum, I do. You could do something like this with Kit Marlowe, International Superspy, and I'd lap it the fuck up if it was done well as pulp. But of course, that sorta pulp can also be done supremely badly, witness Spartacus with its Eurotrash Chippendale gladiators. And of course, with Leonardo or Marlowe--or Caravaggio, he'd be great material too--with any American corporate TV historical fantasy based on one of history's greatest homos, one thing is even more predictable than all of the above. Even before I clicked on the trailer, I knew what we were going to see...
He's going to be straightironed, of course, I thought, eyes already rolling as I clicked on the link.
And yes, of course, the trailer is pretty clear from the get go. The very first shot after Tom Riley as Da Vinci ("Perhaps you've heard of me.") is Laura Haddock as Lucrezia Donati, the female love interest. From there we dive into your standard trailer montage of action and intrigue, images of Haddock looking all sexy vixen sprinkled in now and then, a little shot of a scantily-clad woman dancing with a snake, a flashcut of Leonardo and Lucrezia doing the whole bodice-ripping thing (Imma throw you on teh bed, sexy lady!) and oh, look, now they're kissing nekkid, and she's making an impassioned speech so we know for sure she's plot-critical, and now they're nekkid again, her straddling him, in front of the fireplace. (Passion! Romance!) And yeah, what would be the closing shot, the crunch shot of the trailer? Leo and Lucy sitting close together, her hand on his thigh as they whisper breathily to each other. (Leo: "We play a dangerous game." Lucy: "I thought danger was the appeal for you.")
It's not exactly rocket science to read from that just how far the show is going to straightiron Da Vinci. Or as I likes to call him...
THE.... Sodomite Leonardo Da Vinci!!
But wait, I hear you say. We can't know definitively that Da Vinci was a sodomite. It's all speculative, unproven.
Well, sure, I say. So I shall consider my lovely Leo innocent of heterosexuality until proven guilty. It's rampant speculation that he was straight, so if you're going to make a wild hypothesis like that, the burden of proof is on you, amigo. The point being, that card is just as valid played from my hand as it from yours, straight boy. You have, frankly, fuck all evidence to make your slanderous case that he was a cuntfucker.
What? Too harsh? Chillax, baby. Look, some of my best friends are cuntfuckers. I have nothing against cuntfuckers. Clearly there's a slippery slope: if we can't trust you to stick to the same gender, we can't trust you to stick to the same species; and we're not the ones actively breeding in order to have kiddies to fiddle; and fuck knows, if male/female couplings are accepted, you can be sure live/dead couplings are the next step. I mean, I'm not a heterophobe, but... well, I just think if you're going to go around with your Heterosexual Agenda, trying to appropriate historical figures to your cause, claiming that they're part of that minority at one extreme end of the Kinsey Scale, you need to bring some facts to the table. Without good reason... I don't see why we should libel Leo's good name with such a claim.
(Yes, for the benefit of the irony deficient, I'm being facetious. Duh. But the basic point stands.)
Bear in mind that we're talking about the guy who wrote that quote above, dripping with revulsion at the thought of putting the peepee in the vageegee. And let's factor in another quote to look at where precisely that disgust is directed... or not directed rather: “A man who is ashamed to show or name the penis is wrong. Instead of being anxious to hide it, man ought to display it… with honour!” Dude, that goes beyond proclaiming the glory of one's own morning glory, beyond extolling the aesthetic awesomeness of the male member, the Lord Cock Almighty, and into outright encouragement for others to get their tadgers out as and when they feel like it. Go on! You know you want to! Let's see that proud pintle, baby! Get it out there on display, for us all to admire! Here, let me help you with your breeches.
Never mind the sodomy accusations in his youth--the straightironers will surely say those were politically-motivated slander. Let's look at Salai, "the Little Unclean One," the apprentice he kept around for forty years despite him being, in Leo's own words, "a liar, a thief, stubborn and a glutton." Why? Might it have something to do with him being, in Vasari's words, "a graceful and beautiful youth with curly hair, in which Leonardo greatly delighted"? Might it have something to do with the crude sketches in Leo's notebooks, clearly made by another's hand, in which cocks on legs march toward a butthole labeled "Salai"? I'm not saying it's case proven. I'm saying yours is the case to prove if you're positing a sexuality setting of straight.
So, yeah. Leonardo, Son of Sodom. Deal with it. Or deny it if you want; just don't expect me to take your resistance to the realities as anything but prejudice.
Still, for all that rendering Da Vinci as a painterly Casanova is and can only be an act of arrant straightironing, I held out zero hope that Da Vinci's Demons would be anything but eye-rolling in that respect. It's sad, because the time is fucking ripe for a US TV show to show some balls (to display them! with honour!) and have a rogueish charmer action hero of exactly this type who's also... yanno... a swaggering sodomite with an eye for the lads rather than the lassies. The breakout character of Kurt in Glee, the plethora of preferences on display in True Blood, the entire culture of shipping and slash performed on every fricking male character in every fricking fantasy TV show or movie series... all of this should by now be sledgehammering into executive producers' thick skulls the reality that the market is there, the audience ready for it. But still, those spineless segregationist cuntfuckers in the board rooms are such a known factor, I went in resigned to this show being as reactionary as the norm. I expected the same old same old of Alexander and Troy and--oh fuck this, I can't even be bothered to fucking list them. Yeah, as bitter a taste as it leaves in my mouth, that fatalistic surrender to the inevitable, I expected my sodomite sibling, Leonardo Da Vinci, the Florentine Flamer, to be straightironed as the hair of a black woman the same TV cuntfuckers don't want to look "too black."
I just didn't expect the rest of the homophobic bullshit, the gobsmackingly concerted cuntfuckery of the highest order.
What do I mean? Let's see...
The Imperial Chickenhawk
So, after a little flashforward prologue teaser, we open episode one in 1476 with the assassination of the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Mario Sforza, in Wikipedia's words, "a notorious womanizer who often passed his women on to his courtiers once he was tired of them." So, a cuntfucker. He was a cuntfucker both literally and figuratively, Wikipedia tells us. He was as into putting the peepee in the vageegee as Leo was against it. And he was as cruel as you could want a cuntfucker to be for narrative purposes. He had a poacher force-fed a full-furred hare. Another man he nailed alive to his coffin. He combined his cuntfuckeries into the perfect storm of cuntfuckery, indeed, raping the noble wives and daughters of Milan. Not a nice man, in short.
And how do we meet this monster? How is his depravity demonstrated. We see him naked at the window of his palatial bedchambers, pissing in a chamberpot, turning back to his canopied bed to pull aside the curtains.
Beat.
"Out you go, boy." he says disdainfully, and tosses clothes to the young naked man revealed in his bed. He slaps the pretty youth's ass as the boywhore toddles to the door--"Go on! Go!"--tosses a coin or two, and turns away in utter disregard. Because yeah, he's a bit of a scumbag, right? He's a debauched powermonger of debased appetites. He's power corrupted, an amoral user of people at the very least. He's decadent as any entitled cuntfucker born into power and privilege, taking what he wants, throwing scraps of coin in contempt--less in payment than as sign of his ownership of your ass. He's a cuntfucker, as I say, and what better way to show this than to signal it with sodomy as subjugation?
Because, yeah, see, the peepee in the poop-chute... that's all about the power. The buttseks is to make that bottom boi your bitch. The assfuck is assertion, dominance, emasculation of the innocent young brave whose buttocks we are clearly to imagine being penetrated, violated, pwned in the pounding. This is the semiotics of sodomy--in the mind of the cuntfucker at least. And such semiotics is useful. TV is a medium in which concision is of the essence, in which a character must be established in seconds, in a single signifying action that sets them with utter certainty. And so here the Duke of Milan must be established as a man of vice. And so here that base nature is signified by his shameless strutting sneering sodomy. Duke Galeazzo or Baron Harkonen, in this monstrum of degeneracy we see every fucking bullshit predatory pervert in the history of homophobic fiction.
Smashing.
Let's remind ourselves of the reality, shall we? Or the historical record, at least. "[A] notorious womanizer who often passed his women on to his courtiers once he was tired of them."
So, yeah. We're not just talking about straightironing the hero here. We're talking about the reverse too. We're talking about taking a non-heroic character who was, in reality, to the best of our knowledge, not just straight but aggressively so--a misogynist user and abuser of women, a cuntfucking rapist--and wiping that crime from the picture in order to render him instead as a vicious stereotype of a vicious sodomite. In order to exploit the prejudice encoded in the trope, to invoke the homophobic phantasm of the Imperial Chickenhawk. In order to set this--this sin of sodomy as subjugation--as the key signifier of his moral turpitude.
I can only guess that force-feeding a man a hare just wouldn't do to establish Sforza's credentials as a man of vice. I can only surmise that nailing a man to a coffin was inadequate to purpose. But why? Given that an act of brutal torturing cuntfuckery is a pretty good way to establish brutal torturing cuntfuckery, the only inadequacy I can see in presenting Sforza as the cuntfucker he was lies in the failure of such an historically accurate Sforza to serve in the reification and reinforcement of the homophobe's semiotics of sodomy.
Which is to say, the only fucking reason not to mine the real Sforza's eminently exploitable real viciousness is that substituting sodomy in as symbol for vice achieves the same result and more; invoking that animus of bigotry in place of ethical aversion to cuntfuckery, the trope elicits that animus in the audience, and as an ersatz example of the abject being despicable, it validates that animus, cements the bigotry such that subsequent exploitation is all the more likely and all the more effective. Such use of sodomy, I mean, serves to bolster such use of sodomy--as a surrogate, a scapegoat, a symbol. Yay.
This particular symbol gets offed immediately after that, by the way. I mean, after all this, I should be clear, it's not like Sforza's the actual villain of the piece. He's not being set up as an all-out monster, simply painted with perversity as an offhand narrative shortcut--just so we know, in the short timespan in which he's necessary to kickstart the plot with his assassination, exactly what kind of man he is. The phrasing used later: "a pig of epic appetites."
Super.
The Slash Nazi
Cut to Leonardo, also introduced with a naked young pretty thing in his employ. No buttboy hustlers here though, Cock forbid! No, it's a topless young female model he's painting (plein air, amusingly, for those who know their art history,) a friend, we can tell, from their friendly chat... and an admirer, we can tell, from the flirty undercurrents of a (nice healthy heterosexual) desire that ultimately surfaces in, of course, a kiss. Oh, he's a bit of a rogue, perhaps, keeping his emotional distance, playing it cool even as she drapes herself over him. But it's all just the carefree passions of those boho artist types unshackled by convention, the horndog propensities of a Picasso or Pollock. No judgement here, if anything we're to admire his dash. Turns out she's Vanessa, "newly liberated from the convent of St Anthony." Oh, you, Leonardo! Freeing the sexy nuns from the silly moral strictures! You handsome heterosexual devil, you, with your rakish heterosexual charms!
And what of his young apprentice, Nico, who comes running up now, curly blond hair not unlike the portraits of Salai? That he's actually no Salai at all is fair enough in historical terms; Salai didn't join Leonardo till 1490, and this is 1476. But he's no surrogate for such either. No, if we thought there might perhaps, just maybe, be even a little safe psuedo-subversion of the straightironing with a secondary character, if we thought there might be some hints of homosexual dalliance on the side, or at least a little homoerotic tension to be shipped or slashed with a flighty sprite, a Renaissance Robin to his Batman, that avenue is closed off pretty quickly. NO! shouts the Slash Nazi. NO SLASH FOR YOU! NO SLASH FOR YOU!
I mean, not to be uncharitable to the actor, but his round face and rather weak chin are not the stuff of a cherubic imp. He's written, cast and acted as a gormless galoot, a naifish squire to the hero. And straight, of course. As he gazes slack-jawed at the nekkid lady, it's clear he's no puckish power-bottom prone to scribbling pricks aimed at his arse in Leonardo's notebooks, just another awkward adolescent with a hardon pointed squarely at the boobies. It's not just text that's going to be straightironed but subtext too. No Holmes and Watson heteroflexible banter. No Teen Wolf tensions to make a Sterek of Stiles and Derek. No Leonico here.
NO!
NO SLASH FOR YOU!
A little fun and games with a flying machine to sketch in the last ingredient--Leonardo as charmer, painter, and now inventor--and it's back to Florence for the actual plot to kick in. Enter Lucrezia Donati to catch our hetero hero's eye in the marketplace, to transfix him as Nico warns of the danger of even looking at Lorenzo De Medici's mistress, to turn her head coquettishly and signal the certainty of a narrative trajectory: oh, yes, we can be sure that she's going to be the love interest. There be cuntfucker shagging on the horizon, mark my words. (In the first episode, it transpires.) And now, with a horseman riding by, bringing news of the assassination to Lorenzo, (cue the quote above deriding Sforza for his debauchery--just in case we didn't get it, yanno, in case we didn't understand that Sforza being in bed with a lad was a signal of his moral bankruptcy and sexual vice,) now we can cut to the proper villain of the piece.
Shall we explore how Pope Sixtus IV is introduced? Because this one's a fucking doozy.
The Return of the Imperial Chickenhawk
Scene: a large circular indoor pool, a bath in the Roman or Turkish style. In the centre, submerged with only their heads and shoulders exposed, are Sixtus and--what's this?--another pretty young naked man, Sixtus embracing him from behind and--wait, what? What the fuck? Is he...? Yes, he is. Sixtus is holding a knife to the lad's throat, other hand fondling the lad's cheek as he asks if the young man is frightened. No, the lad lies. Which allows evil Sixtus to play power games with a lecture about the sin of lying, as the camera smoothly dollies in from above, so we get a clear shot of the naked youth's genitals, shaved to boyish hairlessness if I'm not mistaken, flaccid in his boyish vulnerability, those genitals grabbed now by evil rape-faggot Sixtus at the boy's admission of fear. But oh, now with the evil rape-faggot kiddy-fiddler buttsekser Sixtus fluffing him, we're to imagine the boy's cock responding, evidence to (evil, etc.) Sixtus that his admission is also a lie--partially at least. A not-so-veiled threat of murder underlines (evil, etc.) Sixtus's demand for a decision--is it fear or desire? is this a lie or that?--puts the lad in a double bind, damned either way.
Another Imperial Chickenhawk then, and now we get the full-fledged monster--murderous, manipulative, the psychotic sexual sadist who's gone so deep into the heart of Sodom he's found himself in Salo. The Freudian knife poised to penetrate tender flesh of the poor confused young man. It's prurient and lurid and absurd, and Alan Ball could probably do it deliciously on True Blood, revelling in the perversity and slickly twisting with a subtle shift to explore the dominance and submission games of S&M libertines with wit and wits about him. Here though, it's just the proof in the pudding of the point made above: sodomy set as symbol via Sforza, the animus of bigotry is invoked again, all the more contemptuous, all the more contemptible.
A near kiss is interrupted by the arrival of the frontline anatagonist, the young black-garbed blade, Count Girolamo Riario, with news of the assassination's success. A little plotting to conquer Florence now that its protection from Milan is taken care of, a little hint of greater mysteries with a mention of "the Turk" and the "Book of Leaves" he's after, and as the Pope strides off to take care of business, now we get Riario gazing admiringly upon the pretty young lad left naked and hapless in the pool, no small sincerity in the villain's voice as he draws his sword--"I am truly sorry"--and wades into the pool to slaughter the boywhore. Figures that he'd be a sodomite too, favourite of his papal uncle--buttfucked by him, I'd be willing to bet, into his black-hearted wickedness. The narrative so far has been nothing if not consistent.
By this point, less than fifteen minutes in, one might be forgiven, I should think, for wanting to spit in David Goyer's cuntfucking face, call him out as the cuntfucking cuntfucker he is, and kick his preciously inviolate ass until he cries like the craven chickenshit prejudice-pandering cuntfucker that he is, his aesthetic and ethical cowardice writ large in everything on the screen to date. Or one might be forgiven, I should think, for simply venting one's ire at this ugly-ass agitprop with a loud, "FUCK YOU, YOU CUNTFUCKER!" and a coffee mug hurled into the screen. Or for just, yanno, turning off this shitfest of unbridled bigotry and watching something that doesn't cram its homophobia down your gullet in the first ten minutes like it's actively and defiantly out to let you know, in no uncertain terms, that it reviles everything you represent to it. Out to spread the word even!
Out of fairness, I'll note that, unlike Sforza, Sixtus was subject to allegations of sodomy, a reputed "lover of boys and sodomites" who awarded benefices and bishoprics in exchange for the asses of hot young men, his nephew Riario included. One might point out that the same provisos of politically-motivated slander surely apply to him if they apply to Leonardo, but I've no problem believing him a) innocent of cuntfuckery in the literal sense, and b) guilty of cuntfuckery in the figurative sense. His notorious nepotism and his hand in the Pazzi Conspiracy seem, on cursory reading, to be basically accepted. I see no mention of him force-feeding a hare to a poacher though, or nailing a man alive to his own coffin. He's also unlike Sforza in so far as he wasn't reputed to be a serial cuntfucking rapist. But which one do we see actively torturing a victim--psychologically, sexually?
We're through the fucking looking glass, amigo. It's not just that the sodomite becomes straight here when it comes to Leonardo. The rapist becomes sodomite here, if he's straight. If he's straight, the cuntfucking rapist becomes not a rapist, in fact. While the non-torturer becomes a torturer now, naturally, if he's gay.
For the love of fucking Cock.
The Prick Tease of Pansexuality
But hey, again out of fairness, I should note that the writers have promised to "address" Leonardo's sexuality... at some point down the line... in some vague shape or form. Is a snap judgement made on the first ten minutes of someone screaming homophobic abuse in your face too uncharitable, premature? Should we be giving the benefit of the doubt to Goyer, watching and waiting passively for him to deliver on this promise? I mean if someone spits in your face in the first ten minutes of a party, spends most every second of that ten minutes, in fact, spewing hate at you... I mean, if they say they're going to throw a scrap of respect at your feet at some point in the next however many hours, you owe it to them to make allowances for... well, their little faux pas of shouting "Faggot!" at you over and over again at the top of their lungs, right? I mean, what kind of over-sensitive flower would I be to treat the cuntfucking cuntfuckers with the same contempt they mete out to me? When they've promised, honest injuns, that maybe somehow they'll kinda sorta possibly touch on the notion that Leonardo might have at some point in his life had a passing whim of a fancy that some male figure he admired aesthetically was maybe, in some strange way, actually sexually attractive... perhaps?
For sure, who knows? Maybe they'll bring in little hints that Leonardo fooled around with some boyhood chum back in the past, in the dim and distant past. Woot. Cause yeah, no straight guy ever compared cock size with his straight mate and jerked off together in the lusts of experiemental adolescence. But, OK, maybe they'll actually suggest indirectly and ambiguously that every so often he might let some pretty boy model suck him off... if he's feeling horny, and there's no women in sight to seduce, and the lad throws himself at him. Cause yeah, that's not the sort of thing actually straight guys do when they're shit-faced frat boys. But OK, maybe we'll get something like that which goes a bit further towards undermining the wholly heterosexual rendering of Leonardo.
Like in the tavern scene in episode one, say. The scene where Leo is sitting in a tavern with his apprentice and unscrupulous mate, when the high-voiced mincing boyslut in white floats up to them to drape himself over the maestro's shoulder, asking to model for him since "No one looks at my form as you do." That would be the scene where Leo doesn't even raise his eyes from his notebook to look at this third in a line of bottombitch boywhores--because, yanno, that's how sodomites are in this world, Imperial Chickenhawks or the submissive emasculated bitches who open their asses to them--where Leonardo doesn't give the faggot so much as a glance as he gives his derisory dismissal: "No, no one looks at any form as I do." Because, yeah, let's not think of that gaze as anything but the gaze of an artist and inventor. Let's have him pointedly dismiss any sexual significance, set any interest in that lad's form as purely aesthetic and intellectual--a vision he has that applies to any form, a vision shared by none.
"Go peddle your wares with Botticelli," says Leo. "He's an easy mark." This from the man who kept Salai, "a liar, a thief, stubborn and a glutton," around for forty years on the strength of his pretty face, it seems, regardless of notebooks vandalised with pictures illustrating his buttboy status. Methinks it's Leo was the soft touch in reality. But not here, Here the lad flounces off--and oh, does he flounce!--to a disdainful comment from our hero's mate that the lad is no model but a hustler, and an artless one--wait, though! "But pleasing to the eye." says Leonardo. Oh. My. God. Did we hear right? Did Leo just comment on the model's looks? How totally that counteracts everything that's going on! How suddenly it's all turned around as they "address" Leonardo's sexuality by having the artist comment that... um... a handsome young man is a handsome young man. Great Cock Almighty, that's... um, that's...
That's spineless cuntfucking wankery is what it is.
Dear Mr Goyer, dear dear Mr Goyer... grow some fucking balls. How fucking chickenshit can you be? You want me to believe that at some point down the line you're going to have the guts and common fucking decency to "address" Leonardo's sexuality, don't give us this pissant pantywaist pusillanimous wimpery. Jesus Fucking Cock, when you talk about "addressing" Leonardo's sexuality, does that mean you're going to wait till the last episode of the last season to reveal that he's--dan dan DAN!--actually as straight an arrow as ever was, repulsed by the very thought of buttseks? Cause frankly, a bait-and-switch where your ultimate revelation is just an excuse to spit in the faces of the faggots one last time... that doesn't seem an unlikely outcome right now.
If that's not your game, what else are we to expect on the basis of this pathetic gesture? Down the line, once the crowds of cuntfuckers are safely bought-in to the story, somewhere down the line, so as not to frighten the cuntfuckers off with faggotry upfront, what are we to expect as the payoff in this prick tease game? If you're going to string us along--stall our calling you out on your homophobic cuntfuckery--on the promise of tackling the character's sexuality, the best you can do now is already some sorry-ass shit. The best you can do is openly reveal his bisexuality and give him a male love interest. Yeah, like (even) that's gonna happen. My bet is you go for some cop-out pansexual desire, inchoate and unconsummated--scene after scene of straight sex and the odd hint now and then of alternative interests. And frankly, on the basis of this limp-dicked watery wankjuice. my money's on you not revealing a damn thing. My money's on you being a pansy-ass pussylick, too spineless to do more than hint that the hero is not wholly hetero. My money's on you bottling it in every single scene like this, writing in a get-out clause where we can absolutely, if we want to, read some scrap of an inkling of a sign of homosexual "attraction" on Leonardo's part as simply the eye of an artist and inventor awed by all of Nature.
Looking at that tavern scene, at that insipid excuse for an implication of potential sexual preferences not involving the peepee/vageegee combo--the conjunction that the actual Leonardo was self-professedly repelled by, remember--my money's on you actually thinking that this piss-poor gesture is addressing Leonardo's sexuality. I'd lay odds on you obliviously writing this sort of shit all through the show and actually pointing to it as some frisson of "ambiguity" by which you acknowledge the "uncertainty" of Leonardo's appetites.
Seriously, is this the best you can do, Goyer? Is that "But pleasing to the eye," really meant to lay the foundations for a libertine Leonardo who might be just a little bit bi? Are we really meant to swallow your reassurances that the straightironing isn't the whole story? When this risible sham of a subtext is 100 percent readable as simply an artist appreciating male beauty, when more than anything it actually serves as a pretext for just another pandering demonisation of the queer who's coming on to him, when it's in the context of a veritable frontal assault demonising same-sex desires, salvo after salvo smashing into the viewer's skull your use of sodomy as the very symbol of corruption--when you tell us you'll deal with it down the line and this is what we have to go on... man, I will believe it when I see it.
Prove me wrong, cuntfucker. There's nothing you can do now to undo that jawdroppingly obnoxious opening, but maybe you can salvage some shred of artistic integrity from this wreck of pandering supercharged with prejudice and driven at full throttle into common fucking decency and respect. Can't say I think you're capable of it or even interested in doing so, but if you're not the cuntfucking cuntfucker that this arrant knavery says you are, go ahead and show us all how your TV show isn't actually an agitprop shitrag smearing your stenchsome message on every queer from Leonardo back to Sodom itself and forward to the present and beyond. Go ahead.
Prove me wrong, cuntfucker.
Labels: Fuck This Shit
posted by Hal Duncan | 5:32 am
2 Comments:
Well said.
This. Absolutely.
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