ALL I DESIRE
THE BOOK WASN’T HIDDEN under my mattress, but it contained secrets nonetheless. It sat in plain sight, on the little shelf built into the wall of my childhood bedroom, alongside my John Bellairs mysteries, Choose Your Own Adventures, and copious film trivia trifles. It was a simple collection of movie quotes, one of those oblong rectangular paperbacks, the same size and shape as my ever-multiplying Garfield anthologies. Among the pages boasting images of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine or Jack Nicholson’s Joker and their too-well-known lines of dialogue, there was something that looked illicit: a black-and-white photo of Marlon Brando from A Streetcar Named Desire. There he was, his hair tousled with sweat, his beyond-bare torso revealing two filthily swelling biceps, his head cocked devilishly as his hands gripped a shirt that had either just come off or was about to go back on. Who was this “Stella!” he was talking to, and what was this movie anyway? The only detail that mattered to little prepubescent me was that this photograph made me feel a certain way, a way I knew was wrong. This book would have to go back on the shelf for months at a time, safely away with the others I only dared look at, usually containing images from horror movies that carried that potent mix of fascination-repulsion.
There’s nothing unique about a kid being thunderstruck by a photo of a topless movie star, especially the incipient queer child, who will likely require many years to process such feelings. Movies are desire, after all. But there is something singularly erotic about the feeling engendered by the movie still, which, trapped immobile under our watchful stare, ups the ante of the moving image’s ability to function as a vessel for erotic devotion. Cinema lovers have long been instructed that one of film’s great attractions is the voyeuristic thrill it elicits in us. The scopophilic power of movies—that our admiring gaze creates a kind of erotic obsession that transforms our preferred screen subjects into sexual objects—is something most of us in this post–Laura Mulvey world would agree on, whether we’re drawn to or repulsed by De Palma or Hitchcock or Lina Wertmüller or Jean Genet’s . Our ability to capture and own the objects of our affection is especially pronounced in the era of the easily purloined frame grab. In decades past, desirous film watchers would usually have to rely on movie fan magazines to own their erotic fixations,
