Boys on film

Last night I was in a classic American dive bar on First Avenue and they were playing really great music, including Heart's Magic Man and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams and Carly Simon's You're So Vain. I would have ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon but this bar wasn't quite divey enough. Whenever I hear this song, I think of Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides and this clever montage of Trip Fontaine. I haven't seen Josh Hartnett in a film for a while but I know he's hanging around downtown Manhattan because about four people have mentioned him to me in the last month. Regardless of wherever his career has taken him subsequently, I think he was wonderful in this film, and I think Coppola did a great job of fetishising a male actor for the delight of female viewers, something not seen too often in Hollywood films. I was discussing this recently with a group of clever creative gals and we couldn't think of another example where a male character is depicted on screen quite clearly through a female gaze, apart from Brad Pitt in Thelma & Louise and most recently, Robert Pattinson in Twilight. I attribute the enormous popularity of the Twilight films in no small part to this overt female gaze and the way Pattinson (and the werewolf) are offered up as fetish objects for viewers in a way Kristen Stewart is not.