Wild things I learned in the garden of Queer Cinema

This final collage I have made brings together the visual feelings and textures of “God’s Own Country” and “Saltburn” to show how queer desire, landscape and wildness all overlap in strange ways that are not tidy. I wanted the images to be overlapping and strange to represent how the films sit in my mind. I wanted to express the mud and cold of Yorkshire against the gold decay of the Catton estate.

Using Bell’s idea of “naturecultures” again, this collage becomes a visual representation of how culture and nature are always entangled. I added the quotes to highlight the moments when these films show “nature trouble”. It shows when nature stops being a backdrop and starts becoming part of the erotic acts.

Hi Wildlings!

Okay, I just have to bring this next film into the mix. I think I have watched this film over ten times and I just can’t get enough of it. Every time I rewatch ‘Saltburn’ I notice something new: something weird, something sexy or something wild. This film is a feral animal wearing pearls.

Firstly, the only way to describe this film is ‘cultivated wildness’. There are hedges trimmed into submission, marble surfaces that have been polished to death. I wouldn’t call Saltburn the countryside, it is a taxidermy version of it. Saltburn’s wildness is somewhat eerie and creepy, that is why I had to include it in this blog, the vast contrast between the wildness shown here and in ‘God’s Own Country’ is mind boggling. This film takes desire to a whole new level.

Halberstam says that wildness can be colonial, violent and radicalised but also that it names “a form of disorder that will not submit to rule.” So, what do you do when a place pretends to be wild but in reality, it is actually a machine of order, regiment and control? You infect it.

Enter Oliver. This boy weaselled his way into this family and made it rot from the inside out. He became the disorder that it couldn’t control. I know there have been people that have argued whether Oliver is coded queer, but actually it is everything about this film that is queer. Oliver’s desire leaks everywhere, from secrecy and fixation into class aspiration and consumption. He is so hungry for so many things, and he performs politeness so well, but beneath it his desire is a form of hunger wearing manners. His well-rehearsed civility masks his feral appetite.

Bell’s idea of “nature trouble” comes back here. Like previously mentioned it is anything that refuses to fit into an assigned category or box. Oliver is quite literally nature trouble in human form. He slowly unsettles things through class misalignment, emotional misalignment and sexual misalignment. The invasive species that is Oliver Quick seems pretty and charming at first, until it starts choking the very living thing it feeds off. He colonises Saltburn and creeps up its walls slowly, like a vine. As I mentioned previously, the Saltburn institution and estate is obsessed with order and the ideas of lineage and inheritance. The don’t want anyone else disrupting the family or changing it. Most of all they would not be able to stand if the family had a bad reputation. Oliver queers the estate by queering reproduction, his desire doesn’t lead to a future or a continuation of the family line; it leads to decay and collapse. He wants to ruin it.

When I think about my favourite scenes in this film there are three that come to mind. Two out of these three compete for being the wildest scene in this film. I know that many of your minds have gone straight to the grave scene however I think the bathtub scene gives it a run for its money. For taking the crown as the wildest, it might a surprise to you that this scene doesn’t take place outside. This scene feels like a ritual, it feels like a feral immersion into someone else’s essence. Through Halberstam’s eyes, he would describe it as an “epistemology of unknowing” because Oliver is truly diving into something beyond comprehension.

Afternoon wildlings! 

I’m jumping on here to tell my thoughts and ideas on ‘God’s Own Country’. 

The first time I watched this film I felt like I needed to wash my hands because the film really holds the power to make you believe that you’re also there in the mud. It makes you feel as if you are getting down and dirty in a field. This film is full of tiny intricate details; it is so intimate and beautiful. In this film the soil really does become a second skin, which enables the sex to feel so raw and real to the viewers, and that is exactly what makes this film queering.

If I am speaking and thinking about this academically, what really fascinates me is how this film queers rurality by revealing that the landscape was never actually rural in the first place. This links back to Bell’s naturecultures argument about how “nature” and “cultures” can never be separated. Meaning that nature has actually already been shaped and manipulated by humans and human practices.

This links to Bell talking about people “fucking in nature”. The casual and blunt way in which he talks about this destabilises the category of nature itself. He says that this causes “nature trouble” which is a phrase I adore. ‘God’s Own Country’ is packed full of nature trouble; it’s full of bodies doing things in places that seem unnatural and almost uncomfortable.

Another thing I love about this film is that the land and the earth almost acts like a witness to Johnny and Gheorghe falling in love, almost like a passive bystander that is watching. However, it does get involved at times (when they are making love) and in those times it feels as if it all comes together and fits. Josh O’Connor’s character, Johnny became very interesting to me when I realised that he embodied a sense of queer rural negativity. His character is completely emotionally unavailable and shut down. He shows no tenderness and the ideas of ‘the masculine working class man’ are so deep rooted within him. Johnny is practically welded to the land but his relationship with the land is one that is more of an obligation instead of a one of belonging. Johnny and the land don’t really blend well together, he never touches it with a sense of curiosity and attentiveness that Gheorghe does. 

Gheorghe touches the earth like he is reading it. His presence that he brings, disrupts all the feelings of masculine ecology that are so deep rooted in Johnny. He is intimate and carful with the land and in the lambing scene which could easily be seen as something unpleasant, we see these almost maternal instincts shine through in Gheorghe. This in itself is quite queering as he is acting against typical gender roles and what we see is this beautiful and tender side of this man come out to play. An apt way to describe the lambing scene is that it is a queer rearrangement of what birth, reproduction and care are supposed to look like. Bell talks about this when he says that naturism is trying to de-sexualise nature. But in this scene nature is far too alive to be embodied and too wild to be innocent.

Good Morning my Wonderful Wild Things! 

This is the newest blog in my series. In this blog I am attempting to understand my fascination with queer wildness. Not only the cinematic and theoretical kind but also the visual kind and how you can take what you have watched and read and turn it into a physical artform that brings every element together to create something that you can experience, visualise and understand. So, if this is up your alley, please follow along for daily posts.

I have been thinking a lot about what Halberstam calls “the absence of order”, a kind of feral ontology that ‘refuses to submit to rule”. I read that line as I was dozing off and it caused something within me to twitch. I suppose that is where this blog really begins, with that internal shift. This shift wasn’t caused by nature or theory; it was caused by my own internal evaluation, the moment I realised that wildness wasn’t just “out there”, but it was also happening within me. Now I can’t stop thinking about queer wildness. It keeps reminding me of my own feelings that don’t behave the way that they ‘should’ in a normative world. It is like I am being asked the same question continuously: Who are you without order holding you in place?’

Bell states that you can never uncouple the term “nature” from “culture”, they are always tied together to create the term “naturecultures”. I love that term, it feels like something that I could whisper to the rustling trees or to the damp edge of my pillow after I have soaked it with tears. Honestly, I am not sure that my identity, my desires and my instincts are purely “natural” or purely “cultural”. A place where the boundaries between self and world, animal and human, order and disorder start to blur. It sometimes feels as if I am a feral animal that is pacing and restless, waiting to tear through boundaries that had been set long before I arrived.

I am noticing that the more I read, the more I’m drawn to the way that these theorists frame wildness. Halberstam writes an “ontology of the untamed”, and I can’t help but keep rereading that phrase. What does it mean to exist as something untamed? What does it mean for your desire to go beyond comprehension? Why does that feel somewhat familiar?