[Note: I have a ton of other art-things I sorely need to do, and in fact WANT to do, but which are difficult to say the least – so of course this is the moment I choose to finish and release this obsolete blog post that has been sitting in draft since last summer. Looking for a justification, I *could* argue that the following will serve as a good segue into another post that I’m thinking about doing soon.]
(Aug. 4, 2022) As expected, 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which I finally got around to renting for a couple bucks on YouTube, hit all the conventional biopic beats. Indeed the first few Wiki-esque bullet points were almost rushed through; I haven’t checked my math but I’m pretty certain Freddie had gone from baggage boy to full barocchetto within the first fifteen minutes.
I’ll make no bones about it: I avoided this movie for years due to my hunch that it was overhyped and tailor-made for the sentimental and undiscerning. I wasn’t wrong. The sole reason it stayed on my to-do list was for my personal anthropological interest in the relationship between Freddie and Mary.
I’ve given a lot of thought to how to talk about the subject I am about to broach. Many would question why I feel the need to talk about it publicly to begin with. I suppose my answer to that, aside from my healthy streak of artist’s narcissism, is that I simply love words and the organizational satisfaction of naming things – AND I like the idea that someone who feels frustrated and alone might stumble on this blog in the middle of the night and experience a sensation akin to relief. So.
I have a history of being erotically attracted to men who turn out to be more interested in men than women. It’s usually a set of not-classically-masculine attributes that draws me in – a warm, conspiratorial verbosity, a gesticulatory fluidity, a playful petulance or brittle comic cattiness, in addition to perhaps a fixation on youth and beauty – before the full extent of the complication reveals itself. But the frequency with which it has happened to me necessitates that I ask myself if I am not subconsciously drawn to the inaccessible. Though, why would that be? I can only guess it has something to do with creating plot tension in the interest of staying riveted. Which – I do realize how cringe that sounds when you’re not talking about fiction.
I knew what I was getting with this film, yet I signed on merely for that vicarious headrush moment I knew would be in there – the locked eyes in the hallway and “I like your coat” insta-familiarity that is always the first advance of the hothouse flytrap that devours me.
And of course it ends in tears always, with a stale yet still throbbing, even possessive platonic love, a mournful drift, and at last a respectful parting of ways. But maybe even that disintegration is more alluring to me than the traditional path – a fact I’m not proud of but that is deeply embedded in my personal ecosystem.
Two moments in my life stand out. In one of them, an eccentric and devastatingly blunt high school classmate who looks like Bill Watterson’s Calvin but in JNCO jeans asks me in the middle of computer science who I have a thing for at that moment, and, when I tell him, he says, “Oh, you poor thing.” In the other, preschool-aged me is presented with the concept of a main road and a divergent road and doesn’t miss a beat asking what I’ll find if I follow the latter.
The Sold Kingdom 
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