Could "Milk" have changed the Prop 8 vote?
Harvey Milk was gunned down on Nov. 27, 1978, three weeks after his biggest political victory. The San Francisco city supervisor, the first openly gay man elected to a major public position in this country, had been in office less than a year when he spearheaded a statewide campaign to defeat Proposition 6, a ballot initiative that called for the mandatory firing of gay teachers in California. Milk, Gus Van Sant's film about this unlikely politician's brief but brilliant career, marks the 30th anniversary of its subject's death. But it also arrives three weeks after the biggest political setback the American gay rights movement has suffered in years: the passage of Proposition 8, which reversed the California Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage.
In ways its makers could not have expected, Milk is very much a movie of its moment—it now seems like more than just a movie. It has sparked copious pre-release commentary—not many films occasion three New York Times articles and a Maureen Dowd column before they open. Amid all the ruminations about Milk's eerie relevance and the talk of life mirroring art mirroring life, two questions have come up repeatedly: How does Proposition 8 change the meaning—the symbolic significance as well as the real-world function—of Milk? And if the film had found an audience early enough, could it have made a difference?
The first question is easier to answer. The passage of Prop 8 transformed Van Sant's film from a delicate, serious-minded period biopic into something altogether more urgent and emotional: a threnody, a catharsis, a call to action. Its hero, played by an unusually warm and giddy Sean Penn, is not simply a trailblazer who threw open closet doors; he's a prophet whose words still matter and, what's more, have gone sadly unheeded. There are moments in the film that now seem to traverse time and space, as if telepathically addressing the struggles of the present day. As the Prop 6 results start to roll in, Harvey tells his followers: "If this thing passes, fight the hell back.
Read entire article at Slate
In ways its makers could not have expected, Milk is very much a movie of its moment—it now seems like more than just a movie. It has sparked copious pre-release commentary—not many films occasion three New York Times articles and a Maureen Dowd column before they open. Amid all the ruminations about Milk's eerie relevance and the talk of life mirroring art mirroring life, two questions have come up repeatedly: How does Proposition 8 change the meaning—the symbolic significance as well as the real-world function—of Milk? And if the film had found an audience early enough, could it have made a difference?
The first question is easier to answer. The passage of Prop 8 transformed Van Sant's film from a delicate, serious-minded period biopic into something altogether more urgent and emotional: a threnody, a catharsis, a call to action. Its hero, played by an unusually warm and giddy Sean Penn, is not simply a trailblazer who threw open closet doors; he's a prophet whose words still matter and, what's more, have gone sadly unheeded. There are moments in the film that now seem to traverse time and space, as if telepathically addressing the struggles of the present day. As the Prop 6 results start to roll in, Harvey tells his followers: "If this thing passes, fight the hell back.