Tom Kalin Swoon: The NON-Player

"Hey, don't worry," I offer, genuinely floored by this filmmaker's cash-flow dilemma. "I'll put it on my expense account." Hell, if he plays his cards right, I'll buy him a broom.

We visit the hip and bustling gourmet café Dean & Deluca, but the noise level is deafening, so we go back out on the street. New Yorkers like to walk, I figure, because the sidewalks are wider than their apartments. They're always saying, "It's just 20 blocks away," and it's always 25, which is well over a mile, for God's sake. These are people who don't valet park. These are people who don't own cars. Kalin's got long legs and a good strong Manhattanite's stride. As we race down a side street lined with furniture galleries, he suddenly halts. "Believe it or not, this is probably one of the quietest places we'll find in Soho." Where? We are standing by a stoop of chilly looking metal steps next to a storefront. Here? My back aches just to look, and if this is quiet-well, there's a car alarm whining in front of us and a cab driver expostulating behind us. But Kalin looks like a man in tune with the essence of New York. We sit. We crouch.

Kalin pulls a cigarette-the first of many-from a metal case and surveys the intricate white latticework furniture in a show window across the street. "Where are the people who have money to buy these thousand-dollar chairs?" he muses. (I keep to myself the information that at least one of them, my friend Liza, is up on 72nd Street with a complete set on her patio.) I tell him it's my understanding that there are a lot of wealthy people in New York, and he grins. "There are probably more in L.A. The film industry here is doing okay, but no one's paid anything." A connection is made in the back of my brain: low-budget gay independents--Poison--Todd Haynes--the poster in Kalin's office.

Could it be that these two filmmakers work out of the same small office? Kalin nods. His producer, Christine Vachon, is Haynes's producer too. "I met Christine through Todd," Kalin says. "And I met Todd in '87-he'd just done Superstar [the underground classic in which Karen Carpenter's story is told with Barbie dolls instead of actors], and I saw it when I first moved to New York. I wrote him and said, 'This film's amazing and I want to talk to you because I don't know anyone in New York and this is exactly the kind of work I want to make.' ... It's been great to be able to find a way to work with him that's separate and yet related." Kalin pauses, then answers my next question before I ask it. "When people say Swoon looks like Poison, I want to fall over. I'm like, it's got a different director of photography! What are you saying? It doesn't at all! Oh well," he smiles, "it's a gay film. They're all the same."

I ask Kalin what drew him to the subject of Leopold and Loeb to make his feature film debut. "I grew up in Chicago," he says, "where Leopold and Loeb are very much a part of the local lore. My grandmother kept a scrapbook of the case. My mother is 72, and her generation grew up with this. I think she's still disturbed that I chose to make this my subject matter but, I mean, I grew up with Manson: my capacity for horror is very different from hers."

From Leopold and Loeb to Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez-Americans remain obsessed with the theme of killers-as-heroes. We don't keep scrapbooks so much anymore because we don't have to-true-crime books dominate the best-seller lists, and then they're turned into TV movies of the week. But in these TV movies the soul of the story is usually the hard-working cops and the noble attorneys-like Clarence Darrow, whose life was recently the subject of a hit "American Playhouse" TV movie.

So why does Darrow barely appear at all in Swoon? "I do a number on him," answers Kalin, "because, although I admire him-he was a visionary in terms of the legal system-my bone to pick with him is that he defended Leopold and Loeb by saying that the homosexual relationship between the two constituted in and of itself a kind of pathology. I cast a character actor who's quite buffoonish and I gave him five lines. The people at the Darrow Institute are like, 'You cut out the most beautiful summation speech!' That was the point."

The same rethinking of the story seems to be behind Kalin's omitting any mention of Nietzsche: "At the time of the case, Leopold and Loeb were too easily turned into Nietzschean Supermen, embodying those superhuman aspects, and part of that was society's inability to see them as ordinary people-because of their sexual identity, because of their Jewishness and because of their wealth. I wanted to normalize them-I wanted to ask the audience to, at least for a minute, think about themselves as being romantically obsessed with someone and imagine what it would be like to have society tell them they could never have a romantic future ..... Part of what I'm trying to do with the film is shift some of the responsibility-not the blame, but the responsibility-onto the culture that makes a gay identity an untenable one..."

Kalin has a measured, sometimes academic way of speaking. "Not the blame, but the responsibility ..." An interesting distinction. It's the kind of distinction that has everyone in an uproar in the wake of the Los Angeles riots. As an imperfect but enthusiastic liberal, I can say that in theory I really, really get the logic behind that way of thinking. And in reality, I'm looking for a place to hide.

I'm wondering how the Reverend Donald Wildmon and his American Family Association of Tupelo, Mississippi will react of Swoon. After all, Kalin's colleague Todd Haynes raised the Reverend's blood pressure something fierce last year with Poison, which was, like Swoon, funded in part with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Wildmon slammed the film and the NEA because, he said, the film featured "explicit porno scenes of homosexuals involved in anal sex." In truth, Poison is not pornography. A little more sex, and it might have actually made some money. Wildmon hadn't seen the film, it turns out. I ask Kalin if Swoon would be able to get NEA funding today, in light of what happened with Poison, but it turns out that his grant came through after the controversy happened. "The NEA funded Swoon to the full amount-25 grand. They got a full script and 35 minutes of the film. They know what they funded. I've not heard a word from Reverend Wildmon and company."

That may change upon Swoon's official release-or it may not. The film strikes me as being as big a target for the far right as Poison, but who can say with those clowns? Don't you folks down there in Tupelo go faxing Wildmon this article, either. He can buy it at the newsstand like everyone else. Kalin, meanwhile, turns out to have a slightly left-of-center perspective on grants in any case:

"The NEA and other institutions have systematically excluded certain people from getting money. People of color who aren't tied in to a film community may not be able to get a grant-not because they're not talented but because the grant form may seem daunting or unfamiliar. As a white middle-class man, I'm not shocked that I've gotten funded." So the bottom line, which I think I can see if I reflect soberly and gaze through all these troubled waters, is that pissing off the media watchdogs may be soul satisfying on one level, but it isn't always a smooth move. "There's the idea that controversy with the NEA is good marketing," says Kalin, "that it somehow brings the film greater attention and success-that may be true; that is the way the media works-but let's not forget that it also makes Reverend Wildmon a very rich man. I don't want to elicit a controversy because it's only gonna serve the interest of the far right even more."

As if one extreme isn't enough, Kalin's also facing the wrath of the far left. Leopold and Loeb are hardly the movie role models that gay activist groups are lobbying for. Swoon's already been called politically incorrect by some, and been lumped, absurdly enough, together with films like Basic Instinct, the Michael Douglas nudie which has angered so many gay activists. "For me, it's difficult," says Kalin, "because I've been involved with AIDS activism, but I feel like my politics have grown more complicated-I don't see myself as less political now, but my politics now include wanting to talk about a difficult situation in history instead of being some kind of pro-active spokesperson for an alleged gay community and making positive middle-class representations of people with station wagons and collies-that's not my life.

One politically correct idea that I take exception to is that images have the ability to teach an audience behavior. That a film could be directly responsible for someone going out and becoming a serial killer or a gay basher. I just don't think it's true. You find certain feminists having an alliance with the far right around pornography and I find that troubling because it shuts down the arena of speech. I'm a little hesitant to bash political correctness whole-heartedly, because we do live in a racist society that's totally screwed up-there is a reason to be angry. But you've gotta have a sense of humor. Politics can no longer remain outside of pop culture. You know, Madonna's political-sorry! Painful as that may be." So, for that matter, is Bart Simpson. These are who we have in the '90s instead of Dylan. You really do need a sense of humor.

At this point, Kalin himself brings up the subject of sexual identity in relation to his work. I wonder if he thinks I've been avoiding it. I wonder if I've been avoiding it. Breaking the ice somewhat icily, he tells me, "I've ended up with interviewers asking me how people feel about my being gay, and I'm like, get a grip-how do you feel about me being gay? Take a sedative. It's not my job to make you comfortable with my being gay. How do I feel about you being straight? Instead of being able to talk about editing and casting-the things other filmmakers get to talk about."

Yeah, he's a director, all right. He wants to talk about editing. I press on: "Do you find that the press tries to lump you in a group, as strictly a gay filmmaker?" This question is about as insightful as asking Spike Lee if anyone's noticed he's black. But Kalin Cannily runs with it: "I've been complicit with that to a degree insofar as sure, you need your hook to hang your story on-I'll be a queer filmmaker for you, that's fine. But what is queer film-is it one made by a gay or lesbian director, or one with a gay theme? I think that I will not be making films my entire life that deal with gay and lesbian subject matter. The problem is, when you talk about gay film, you only make it white middle-class gay men and you don't mention the fact that there are many women and makers of color at work. The labeling device is convenient-it's something I'm deeply suspicious of when it doesn't include everyone it's supposed to include. So you take what you can get from it and hope that you'll have the chance to say what I'm saying now."

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