Camping Out at Downton Abbey
I've been watching Downton Abbey with the bf (I've been cheating on him with The Way We Live Now, though, an adaptation of Anthony Trollope from a few years back which I like better). From the beginning I found the PBS sensation to be a little, well, camp. It's basically Knots Landing in fancy knickers, and about as true to life.
Which must be why it's popular with the gays*, right? It can't be for the positive, complex and incisive depiction of gays in Downton Abbey that the gays are drawn to, since, well, there isn't any positive, complex and incisive depiction of gays in Downton Abbey.
Oh, there is a gay character in the series — one we would recognize as gay who seems also to self-identify as gay — Thomas the footman. Whom the website describes as "scheming", "vicious", "cunning" and "nasty". He is a liar, a thief, and a coward. His only remotely sympathetic emotion is self-pity.
The only "gay scene" so far pairs Thomas up with a Duke he's carried on with whom he's now trying to blackmail. The Duke proves more than his equal in villainy. That's all we'll say about that.
The show's creator, Julian Fellowe has said of Thomas,
It’s hard to be gay in 1912. It’s illegal. If anyone finds out, you go to prison. So for me, him being gay means you slightly stay your hand. He’s not just horrible. To get any kind of emotional life going, he’s got to take his life in his hands every time. That seems to me to be a sympathetic thing.It's really rather, um, not. Actually. But if I'm reading Fellowes right, The evil gay footman is a product of his society, and can therefore be forgiven. Carry on.
It may be that the gay community is all grown up in a big wide post-gay world and doesn't mind blatant negative stereotyping of the sort Thomas represents. The character of Thomas takes it so far, in fact, is so utterly lacking in redeeming qualities and so jam-packed with despicable qualities historically attributed to homosexuals by the 'phobes, that as serious as the show seems to take itself we may detect some archness in the audacity of presenting such a sadly retrograde character in this day and age, and on PBS to boot.
Of course, gender and sexuality have always been coded in theater and cinema, and remain so even today in our ostensibly “liberal-permissive” culture (as Zizek would call it), which is much more expulsive than repressive. Theater and cinema thrive on layers of meaning, and it's not unusual for characters — I'm thinking of the girls in Sex In the City — to be read as essentially gay men in drag.
There's obviously a long history of cross-dressing in theater which took on fascinating new dimensions with the advent of cinema, where male writers can "have their way" with women, and gay male writers don't have to don drag themselves to "play" women.
When you look at it like this, the gayest character, by far, in Downton Abbey is not Thomas the footman, it's the saucy Dowager Countess of Grantham, whose Wildean quips — "what is a weekend?" "Don't be defeatist, dear, it's very middle class." "I do hope I'm interrupting something." — provide the "oh snap!" moment (such as it is) of many a scene.
But it would be a tad too postmodern to suggest that there is really the subtlety of subtext in this series, which is, in so many of its details and the gravity with which it so obviously grapples, something rather short of a masterpiece, I'm afraid, that would qualify its characterizations as duly ironic.
But it may still qualify as camp.
Camp has many faces, of course, and has been notoriously hard to nail down as a concept, but when I think of what constitutes camp at its most wickedly glorious, it is its identification with cultural kitsch. "Pure Camp," as Susan Sontag famously put it, "is always naïve". What makes something poorly constructed that aspires to high seriousness camp is our reaction to it, our reading of it.
Again, to echo Sontag:
The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.Which is why the Dowager Countess is the gayest character of the lot. Her elitism and attitude of umbrage are in every way more representative of High Gay sensibility than the cliche of the conniving, evil, blackmailing gay (a cliche that conniving, evil, blackmailing pols like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich would certainly approve of) that Thomas the footman represents.
Can we still enjoy the grotesque and outdated depiction of gays Thomas the Footman represents? Of course we can. But I don't think we should try to understand the character as a serious statement about the evil effects of criminalizing homosexuality, or any such nonsense, as his creator half-heartedly suggests. No. That's taking it all entirely too seriously.
The only way to understand it properly is as camp. Pure camp.
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*No, I don't mean my high school New Wave band The Gays. I mean the "gay community" in general.
My favorite from Lady Grantham is her retort, when her daughter declared that she must speak her mind, "I don't see why, no one else does."
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Mrs Crawley (brightly): What shall we call each other?
Violet, Duchess of Grantham (caustically): I suggest Lady Grantham and Mrs Crawley!
Actually there was a second "gay scene" for Thomas, when he had gotten himself assigned to be valet for visiting Turkish playboy Kemal Pamook. While helping Pamook dress, he put his hand on the Turk's cheek, provoking an outraged response which led to Pamook's blackmailing Thomas to facilitate the disastrous sexual encounter with Lady Mary.
Let me say something as a man who has a couple of decades on you, and it isn't meant to contradict any of your revulsion at the depiction of Thomas but perhaps to explain it.
I arrived in Boston to study in 1962 having left a repressed and highly conservative family to experience real life for the first time. As a student in the arts and coming to Boston which has always had a large gay community, I encountered large numbers of gay men everywhere -- performances I attended, classes I took, shopping, supervisors I had on jobs, co-workers, everywhere. Their lives in that virulently homophobic, legally criminalized, post-McCarthy era were saturated with tension, fear, the inevitable self- loathing, alcohol, tobacco and drug addiction. Characters and personalities were destroyed. I saw unhealthy lifestyles and mental conditions everywhere. Many men went toxic -- it was inevitable.
I'm not defending Thomas, but I cannot condemn him or his inclusion as he is portrayed in Downton Abbey either. Remember also the vicious betrayal of Oscar Wilde by Bosie in the same era but from the perspective of the class in which the Granthams exist. The poison was everywhere if you were gay.
Blessedly, I saw it change and Fritz and I often speak of how happy we are that the generations of gay men beginning just after ours have seen life steadily improving and can live normal, healthy lives.
Thomas may not be admirable on several levels, but neither is he exaggerated or essentially untrue. Perhaps because I have always been fascinated by history (and particularly those eras of huge upheaval and the stories of those who are destroyed and those who manage to survive and even thrive) I see an element of social history in Downton. Sometimes in passing comments, sometimes in major elements of the plot line, the easing of class distinctions and liberalizing of society under the pressures of war and the coming early feminist movements is clearly shown. Sure it's luxury soap opera, but I think it's also a snapshot of an important time in the beginning of modern history.
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There's a third gayish scene in the first episode of series 2 (spoiler alert if you haven't started series 2 yet)...
Thomas, who, by intentionally getting wounded, has been transferred to a local hospital where he's serving as an attendant next to Lady Sybil, falls for a young Lieutenant blinded in the war who's just back from the front and convalescing. While it's unclear whether the officer understands the nature of Thomas's attachment he grows attached to Thomas as well. It's all very chaste. When they're informed the Lieutenant must move on to make room for more critically injured men from the front, both Thomas and the Lieutenant are distraught. The latter slits his wrists.
This is also familiar territory for gay characters up until only a decade or so ago. Any hint of a "happy ending" had to be snuffed out in suicide. This is why every mother, up to my generation, said to her gay son, "but won't you be unhappy?"
My issue with the depiction of the gay character(s) in Downton Abbey is that they are a complete rehash of all of the negative cliches and stereotypes, so far, without any little twists that would show insight into them, which subsequent history calls for in a contemporary work of fiction like this one. A signal to the audience that you are, at the very least, aware of the cliches and stereotypes piling up.
And if you can't muster any creative insight into the inner life of your gay characters, at least throw in a fruity aristocrat or a devil-may-care "career bachelor" for good measure. I mean when all the gay characters are conniving toxic cunts it makes you wonder if there's a message in it. Basically The Dowager Countess is Thomas's gay counterpoint, however unintentionally, and she obviously has no real sexuality at all.
It's theater-- popular culture -- and it reflects popular sensibilities. I think we have to see it as an imagining of the past from the perspective of the present (no matter how hard it might try to remain faithful to that past, it will be awash in our popular sensibilities -- I personally find it hard to believe that the Earl and his wife would share a bed every night like a middle class couple in the suburbs, but whatever).
Anyway Will, you've partly answered the question I was posing myself. On how to react to Thomas, you seem to echo the show's creator, Julian Fellowes. The idea is that social circumstances are to blame for Thomas's toxicity. Outlawing homosexuality turns homosexuals into bitter, corrupt, toxic people. And, certainly there's a lot of truth to that.
And yet.
We all know that's not the whole story, not by a long-shot. E.M. Forster's Maurice was written around the time this period-piece is set, and shows at least the possibility of an inner life among homosexuals that is far richer, and an interaction with society that is far more complex than anything we're likely to see in Downton Abbey.
I guess I was simply struck by the total absence of a counterpoint to Thomas's nearly utterly irredeemable, very pointedly gay character. I'm not saying that Downton Abbey's slew of stereotypes aren't entertaining, only that we -- or I, at least -- need to think about how and why they work on us, if they do at all.
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I'm so glad someone has commented on the character Thomas. Why can't writers find a way of showing a gay man of that era as being sensative,brave, kind, compassionate and of good character? I'm very disappointed by the writer. It's time a way was found to present gay men, historically, as functioning successfully even during that time. And what about women? Why isn't there a gay female at least alluded to?
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Ah, as to Grantham and Cora sharing a bed, as I recall there was a comment in one of the first series episodes that explained that. I think it was in the same in bed conversation where she pointed out that he had married her for her fortune, he said that it was before he had fallen in love for her. She said it was very recently and he (perhaps gallantly) said it was much earlier than that.
I certainly understand everything you say and it may be that we have different ideas on how to recreate the past on stage or screen. The Downton story continues -- we'll see how Thomas's story progresses.
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