Em Roalsvig, University of California, Santa Barbara
Orpheus has been a queer icon since even before Eurydice existed, and he lives on in modern queer love stories. There are only five references from antiquity that specifically reference Orpheus’ queer, namely pederastic, love: Phanocles, Ovid, Hyginus, Philargyrius and Virgil, the latter three which follow Ovid, who is believed to have followed Phanocles. Phanocles’ fragment, from his elegiac poem which survives in Stobaeus, is the first instance of the myth having an element of same-sex love and can be read as an example of a queer relationship. Phanocles concentrating exclusively on Orpheus’ love for Kalais while aboard the Argo, with no reference to Eurydice or Hades. This paper analyzes the reception of Orpheus as a successful queer hero in two recent French films; Oliver Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Theo et Hugo (2016) and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) both emphasize the trope of the fatal gaze in the Orphic mythos and reconfigure eye contact as a means for queer communication, consent, and desire.
Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo retells the Orpheus myth, following two men who meet at a gay sex club. After one of them is diagnosed with HIV, we follow the couple falling in love as dreamers coming face-to-face with the consequences of their reality. The film refuses to look backward on many of the traditional elements of the myth, grounding it in the harsh truth of queer-coded relationships. Whereas Orpheus’ male gaze is fatal to Eurydice, in this film, erotic queer eye contact indicates both desire and consent. Leading by hand-holding is crucial in repositioning the two figures as a gesture of possibility, not control. The film reopens the largely lost tradition of a male-loving Orpheus, but without a Greek paederastic hierarchy; the two male lovers are of equal ages, and are not constrained to a normative love story based on loss and grief, but are liberated through queer-coded love.
In Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the artist Marianne is told she must paint her subject and muse Héloïse without her ever knowing, as she walks behind her. Like Theo et Hugo, the queer two main characters come to know each other through the details of body language, the oft end result of a queer secret liaison. This film subverts the paradigmatic male gaze described by Laura Mulvey, playing with the thrill and terror of being seen, and the two women’s reciprocal relationships. Follow Lacan and De Laurentis theories of objection and visibility, Sciamma’s camerawork alternatively focuses on Heloise watching and Marianne sketching of her. By deconstructing the Orpheus myth and recontextualizing it in an all-feminine sphere, Sciamma redefines the eroticism of looking and the ‘female gaze’ as a conduit for desire, pleasure, and mutual understanding. Both of these films craft successful queer love stories out of the tragedy of the classical heterosexual love story, reframing failure as queer success for a happy ending more suitable for a modern queer audience, returning Orpheus to his queer ancient roots.