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UID:event-801@hypnostheatre.com
DTSTAMP:20260913T015011Z
DTSTART:20261001T173000Z
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SUMMARY:BEHIND THE CANDELABRA
DESCRIPTION:NO TV EVENT sparked the summer heat quite like Behind the Candelabra\, the HBO biopic about Liberace’s love affair with Scott Thorson\, a man more than forty years his junior. (The film was reportedly rejected by the major studios for being “too gay.”) Much of the fanfare involved the casting of Michael Douglas (now 68) as Liberace and Matt Damon as his kept boy.\n\nThe movie opens in 1977. For anyone born after that date\, as I was\, the name Liberace conjures a bygone era of easy listening\, Las Vegas\, and a gaudy kind of gayness. The name is also something of a dirty word in gay culture because Liberace denied his sexuality right until the bitter end. The pianist died in February 1987\, three weeks after being hospitalized in Rancho Mirage\, California. His private physician listed his cause of death as congestive heart failure\, and his staff went on to claim that he died from “the effects of a watermelon diet.” But the coroner’s office in Riverside County\, in a rare move\, rejected the death certificate\, and—before Forest Lawn Cemetery could lay Liberace to rest—an autopsy determined that he died of cytomegalovirus pneumonia due to HIV. \n\nThe tabloids might not have pried open Liberace’s closet with such fervor had he not been so dishonest about his private life for decades. One year before his death\, he published The Wonderful\, Private World of Liberace (1986)\, which begins: “I wrote this book to show people who I really am.” Denial had long been Liberace’s default mode. “I have a general family audience appeal\,” he once said\, “and I don’t want to develop only a gay following.” In the film\, Thorson returns one last time to Liberace’s deathbed in Palm Springs where\, wigless and withering away\, he tells Scott: “I don’t want to be remembered as some old queen.”\n\nBehind the Candelabra is directed by the great Steven Soderbergh who\, at 26\, became the youngest director to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes with Sex\, Lies\, and Videotape (1989). The script by Richard LaGravenese hits all the right notes\, presenting the full paradox that was Liberace’s life. Here was a man who lived for the limelight but spent his entire life in the shadows\; who relished pornography and multiple sexual partners but who never dared to come out to the general public. Behind the Candelabra captures these dichotomies and suggests further that the closet wasn’t such a terrible place for those privileged few who were insulated by wealth and celebrity. Milestones in gay cinema such as Gods and Monsters and Brokeback Mountain portray how the closet\, prior to Stonewall\, was a lonely\, even fatal\, space of repression and loss. What’s truly devious about Behind the Candelabra is its suggestion that the closet once offered actual advantages for the rich and famous. It may have been lonely at the top\, but the luxuries were almost limitless—including the ability to maintain the lie behind the screen of a carefully managed public image.\n\n&nbsp\;\n\n(Colin Carman\, glreview.org)
LOCATION:Hypnos Theatre\, Malmö\, Sweden
URL:https://hypnostheatre.com/events/behind-the-candelabra-2/
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