WFS committee member Russ Kale looks back on his first encounter with Edward II, and tries to uncover what Jarman was saying about queer identity.
In 2006, I moved to Te Whanganui-a-Tara for university. This was my first time living in a city that had a recognisable queer community, and of course my first strategy to explore this was to borrow everything of interest that the public library had. One of these books was the annotated script of Edward II, with a beautiful maroon-and-gold cover. It immediately suggested decadence to me, and a little bit of naughtiness. I’d never heard of Derek Jarman before, but between the photographs and the diary entries describing Jarman’s ongoing treatment for AIDS, one thing was clear: I needed to see this film.
Fortunately, the university library held a copy, and I remember watching it on a small screen in the public reading room. I was not prepared for the copious nudity (and nor were the other library patrons), but more than that, I was struck by the roughness of the film. Didn’t Jarman know how to put a film together? It seemed like it had been edited together more out of rage than out of craft.
Edward II was the ninth of Jarman’s eleven feature films, and along with Caravaggio (1986), one of his best-known. It combines three of the enduring motifs of Jarman’s films: an interest in historical queer figures, an all-consuming anger at the intolerance of British society in the 1980s and 1990s, and the presence of Tilda Swinton, who appeared in all of Jarman’s films from Caravaggio onward. Jarman started work as a designer of theatre sets while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, and it was likely here that he drew the attention of Ken Russell, who hired him to work on several of his films, most significantly The Devils (1971). In addition to his work as a visual artist, film director, gardener and poet, Jarman directed music videos for artists including Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths and Wang Chung.
Between his involvement with British counterculture and his determination to portray gay identity on film, Jarman struggled to find reliable sources of funding, often drawing on the support of public institutions such as the BFI. Steve Clark-Hall, one of the producers on Edward II, recalls having to deliver the news to Jarman that one of the film’s backers had withdrawn, effectively halving the available budget. “That’s great,” Jarman replied, “it means we can do it a different way.”
The budget difficulties explain some of the artistic choices. Rather than filming on location, the set designers prepared several movable stucco walls – only the bare minimum required. Although the film secured the appearance of the Elektra string quartet, the tango they played would have cost £5,000 a minute to include, so it was replaced in post-production with a janky organ soundtrack. The filming itself was deeply impacted: in several cases, what we see on the screen was in fact the only take recorded, to save on the costs of film. Tilda Swinton’s trademark long pauses caused frustration at times. “We are making a movie… you know, moving pictures,” Jarman reminded her.
Of course, in the decades since the film’s release, the terrain of queer politics and queer theory have moved significantly. Even at the time of production, Edward II was caught in a dramatic shift regarding what gay cinema was ‘meant’ to do. In his book The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman, Niall Richardson describes the three main waves of gay liberation that were taking place. The priority of First Wave Gay Lib was to reduce the stigma of gay identity, ‘proving’ that gay people were capable of living and loving tenderly and successfully. One key tactic was to identify prominent gay figures from history. Second Wave Gay Lib, in contrast, argued that the thing uniting all queer experiences was oppression by society. The appropriate response to this oppression was rebellion. Sexuality was flaunted and weaponised against the comfortable heterosexual society. In Britain, the passage of Section 28, which prohibited “promoting homosexuality”, showed how homophobic Thatcher’s government was, and provided a target for rebellion (Richardson, 40).
Proponents of Queer Theory, the third wave Richardson discusses, observed that even rebelling against the majority still kept the structures of oppression intact. Rather than advocating for the equality or supremacy of queerness, it would be better to show that the boundaries by which ‘queer’ was even conceptualised were arbitrary and malleable. Gender and sexuality were things that could be portrayed and co-opted, rather than inherent and permanent elements of one’s identity.
Many directors seem all too happy, when someone suggests an unexpected interpretation of their films, to fold it in and claim it was intentional all along. I suspect, though, that Jarman was aware of these shifts in queer identity, and actively chose to respond to them all, in the layers of meaning we see in Edward II. Perhaps he didn’t consider them as separate elements of gay representation; perhaps he just saw them as compatible aspects of his own identity. In any case, the film gains in meaning when viewed through this lens.
Firstly, Edward II makes no apologies for ‘claiming’ Edward and Gaveston as gay men. On the one hand, the text of Marlowe’s play makes this reading seem non-controversial. However, the reading of historical figures in this way is full of complexity and wishful thinking. Robert Mills, in A Gay History of Britain, points out that we obviously have no conclusive evidence of this. Although the failures of Edward’s reign were commonly attributed “to the nature of his connection with Gaveston” (Mills et al,. 7), the evidence that does survive is easily confused with the descriptions of other emotional but non-sexual relationships between men. The film conveniently elides this, showing a seemingly loveless and sexless marriage between Edward and Isabella, with no explanation or seeming care how their son came about.
But even if Edward was gay, what does it matter? What stands out in his story is the persecution he and Gaveston faced. In true Second Wave fashion, Jarman makes this persecution the centre of the action. The anachronistic presence of the Outrage! protesters and their battle against the riot police makes this clear. Validity is only won by overcoming the homophobia of society, and Gaveston, Spencer and Edward are martyrs to the success of the overall cause.
And yet, if Edward II shows only one thing clearly, it is that this rebellion is a failure. The gay king plays his role as a martyr too well, and is saved only by the sudden change of heart of his captor, Lightborn. In real life, Edward was not so lucky, and what the film shows as a dream sequence did in fact happen. Even after his fictional rescue, though, Edward II disappears. It is Edward III who finally reigns, figuratively and literally.
All along, Derek Jarman has been embracing the power of queer theory in his depiction of Edward III. The young prince merges elements of masculine and feminine throughout the film, playing with war toys and wearing military uniforms at times, and dressing in his mother’s shoes and jewelry at others. In contrast to his mother’s icy, calculating control and his father’s hysterical outbursts, the young Edward manages to present his identity in a more nuanced way, embracing both the traditionally masculine and the traditionally feminine.
Neither Edward II nor Isabella are able to inhabit their gender or sexuality naturally. Steven Waddington screams himself hoarse as Edward, ranging from hysteria to petulance. Swinton is famed for her androgynous appearance, and it’s clear Isabella isn’t comfortable as a woman: rather, her attention-grabbing dresses and clinky jewellery suggest Swinton is in drag as a woman. Her performance is captivating, at times literally radiant. Beyond the cliched misogynistic depiction of women in gay films of the period, Swinton and Jarman both delight in Isabella’s campy excess. In contrast to Isabella’s supposed villainy, Gaveston is meant to be one of our gay ‘heroes’. Yet, as Richardson observes, Gaveston is “a particularly nasty character” (2), at times becoming the main villain of a story about a woman betrayed. He bewitches Edward like a chattering demon, and Edward’s real weakness is how easily he allows Gaveston to manipulate him. Referring back to the way in which Edward’s reign was perceived at the time, the problem isn’t so much that Edward’s fascination with Gaveston was too gay: the problem is that his fascination made him unable to perform the image of a king. His son seems to have no such trouble, and his ease with his own identity allows him to easily outlast his parents, caught up in their anxiety over the quality of their performance.
It wasn’t until 2000, seven years after Jarman’s death, that Section 28 was finally repealed. Had he lived that long, Derek Jarman would have seen the paths of queer identity shift and diverge in fascinating ways. However, in his lifetime he refused to let his identity be a straitjacket, refused to let his death be a martyrdom or a failure, refused to be a stereotypical ‘weak and effeminate’ gay man. He was merely himself, in all his contradictions, far more interesting than British polite society wanted him to be. And he made films to match.