the
trophy
by Douglas Messerli
Eugene Mullin (scenario), J. Stuart Blackton (director) Oliver Twist / 1909
Ever since reading Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist in my junior year of college, I have always felt that Oliver’s entrance into Fagin’s den is very close to an immersion into queer life. Of course, in this rowdy and violent world of “prigs” (thieves) life is very queer, “odd and peculiar,” in the more traditional meaning of that word. But it is also a homosexual world and, with Fagin playing the role of the titular “den daddy” to the boys within the darkened and decaying structure—not so very different from James Whale’s Old Dark House—it is most definitely a pedophilic paradise wherein Fagin’s epithets of “my dear” “my pet,” and “my lovely” mean something far more than ironic niceties bantered in an attempt to keep the boys close to home. If Fagin’s nearly salivating endearments are ironic (and they are), they also are contextualized within an inverted society that Dickens deeply sexualizes.
Consider for example a single paragraph
where Oliver is taken with the Dodger and Master Bates—the names alone are
sexually charged, “dodger” being a British street term for someone who doesn’t
swallow sperm during fellatio and, obviously, the other suggesting the sexual self-pleasure
of masturbating—introduce the “green” (ignorant of nearly all life experiences)
Oliver to Fagin.
The Jew grinned; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance. Upon this, the young gentleman with the pipes came round him, and shook both his hands very hard—especially the one in which he held his little bundle. One young gentleman was very anxious to hang up his cap for him; and another was so obliging as to put his hands in his pockets, in order that, as he was very tired, he might not have the trouble of emptying them, himself, when he went to bed. These civilities would probably be extended much farther, but for a liberal exercise of the Jew’s toasting-fork on the heads and shoulders of the affectionate youths who offered them.
On the surface, obviously, beyond their apparently friendly greetings, Oliver is being properly shaken down by the pick-pocketing youths who are checking out his pockets and traveling pack for anything of value, with Fagin attempting to keep them in order by knocking them over their noggins with his toasting fork.
Yet the passage is utterly filled with
sexual double entendres. From Fagin’s disingenuous curtesy which
suggests a different kind of “intimate acquaintance” than a mere friendship, to
Dodger’s “very hard” shaking of his hands (which is suggestive of masturbation)
with particular attention to the boy’s “little bundle” (his penis and testes). Another
boy hanging up his cap (a “cap” in British slang meaning a lie) hints that they
are anxious to reveal the “real truth of their attentions” to him, while yet
another literally feels him up by putting his hands in the Oliver’s pockets.
Only Fagin’s “forking” them (meaning anal sex) keeps these affectionate youths from
extending their further “civilities” to the innocent newcomer.
And that’s just one scene among many
throughout the novel.
This extended aside only serves the
purpose of arguing that the very first film containing cinematic
representations of Dickens’ novel, J. Stuart Blackton’s Oliver Twist of
1909, is not as innocent with regard to queer sexuality as it first might
appear.
In this cinematic rendering we see Oliver’s
mother give birth and die, and witness Oliver’s attempt to ask for “more” food
in the workhouse, for which he is severely beaten, much more harshly punished
than in subsequent versions in which he is more chased than physically
chastised.
We also briefly
meet Beadle Bumble, but the film then utterly drops that thread, immediately
leaping ahead in time to Oliver’s meeting up with the Artful Dodger on the road
to London and his introduction into Fagin’s den.
Here Fagin (William Humphrey) not only drools
over his newest sexual pigeon, but shoos off his other apprentices, and—as Oliver,
almost starved from his long voyage, falls into a faint—picks him up and
hurries him off to bed, there being little question here about his ultimate if
not immediate intentions.
Blackton and his scenarist Eugene Mullin
dodge the homo-pedophilic implications of this a bit by choosing Oliver to be
portrayed in their film by a woman, Edith Storey, just 17 years of age during
the shoot.
Indeed, Fagin is not the only one who
rapes (in the sense of picking the boy up and carrying him off) Oliver, but
almost everyone one meets the boy does so, including the well-intentioned Mr.
Brownlow. In Mullin’s and Blackton’s telling Oliver is represented less as a parish
boy whose life is in progress than a kind of trophy bandied back and forth
between Fagin and Brownlow. He is a thing with little will of his own—which I
would argue is very much as Dickens’ portrays him in the novel.
Fagin’s desperate attempts to regain
possession of this trophy seem, in this instance, are a result not only for his
fears of the boy telling the authorities of his actions and whereabouts, but
suggest a deeper desire for the boy’s body, as he outrightly accuses Nancy of
working against his attempts to keep the boy in his clutches. This Fagin, very
much as in etchings of the scene, personally spies on her secret meeting with
Brownlow in his attempt to regain control of the boy.
The scene in which Bill Sykes kills
Nancy as portrayed in this motion picture premier of a story that will be
revived numerous times, changed the way her character would be portrayed in
almost all of the following films and is said to have made Nancy’s role (realized
by stage actress Elita Proctor Otis) “famous throughout the world,’ later
coming back to life back like a ghost out of A Christmas Carol to terrorize Bill
Sykes.
Unlike most the later versions, this
1909 telling ends with a scene from the novel in which Oliver with Mr. Brownlow,
visits Fagin in prison, unintentionally confirming that Fagin was guilty of his
internment in the den of prigs.
Los Angeles, December 16, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).
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