and in the end it's love

[schmerica]

I don't know if you all know this already or what, but Hard Core Logo is really fucked up.

Hee.

This movie always makes me want fic, and then I remember that I actually find the vast majority of HCL fiction to be completely unsatisfying, even from writers I really like.

This movie also raises an interesting philosophical question, of course, with unreliable narrators and canon (namely, how should it be taken?), given the context of the central homoerotic moment in the film and how it's presented, and then how it's generally completely unquestioned by fandom. (Wow, that sentence sounds much more pretentious when I'm trying to present it in a spoilerfree way.) ETA: There may be spoilers in the comments, of course.

Comments

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Without going all spoileriffic, I can say that one thing I've always loved about the film is that it is *all about* unreliable narration -- starting with its very framing device (the "documentary"), and continuing through the dual mindfucks of Joe's whole pretext for the benefit concert and the tour, and Billy's "I'm in" while always keeping his exit ticket in his back pocket. Each significant character tells a story at some point, the story of how things went down, what really happened, but as we see the levels of duplicity and dysfunction each of them enacts on camera, we're left wondering if we can trust anything any of them says. Ultimately the only thing we *can* trust is what the camera shows us, and of course everything it's recording is *performance* -- not just on stage/in concert, but also (by virtue of the framing device) everything that's said offstage as well, and on two simultaneous levels; the "band members" using the "documentary" for their own various ends, and the actors performing a movie. It's like this complicated glamour-spell that keeps getting more and more befuddling, until the final scene, the one entirely authentic and entirely fictional bit that breaks the whole frame. It's just an amazing film.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is a very brilliant point, and one I haven't really thought about before -- I admire your brain so much, Kat! And of course, the other part of the framing device isn't just that it's performance, but that we don't know how much stuff there is beyond what we see -- Bruce is choosing what story he actually wants to tell, the actual movie behind all that footage, and wow, you can do anything with editing, so that's just another level of distance.