GLR Review March-April 2019

T WO MOVIES about popular music and its stars were released late last year, Bohemian Rhapsody and A Star is Born , both of which portray the tinsel and terror of superstardom. Bohemian Rhapsody is essentially a biopic about Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury, who died of AIDS-related pneu- monia in 1991. In the starring role, Rami Malek (the Emmy-winning star of Mr. Robot ) struts about onstage in ballet tights and presents himself, in more ways than one, as the whole package. An additional prosthetic—buck- teeth—gives Malek the singer’s famously equine overbite. Early in the film, he approaches guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) in a parking lot after a gig where they’ve just lost their lead singer. “I was born with four more incisors,” he tells them. “More space in my mouth, and more range.” Now there’s a sales pitch. Bohemian Rhapsody is framed by Queen’s performance at the Live Aid concert on July 13, 1985, before 70,000 concert- goers (including Prince Charles and Diana) at Wembley Sta- dium, 100,000 more in the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, and more than a billion viewers worldwide. After three days of re- hearsal, Queen’s set began just before 7 PM with Mercury seated at his Steinway. From there, the film flashes back to 1970 and the singer’s early days of obscurity. After Queen’s debut in a grungy local pub, one audience member snarls, “Who’s the Paki?” There are additional queries: when asked by his girl- friend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), about the meaning of his band’s name, Freddie replies: “Queen, as in Her Royal High- ness, and it’s outrageous, and there’s no one more outrageous than me.” Once he finally drops his poker face and comes out to Mary as “bisexual,” she balks: “Freddie, you’re gay [and] your life is going to be very difficult.” Below the film’s surface, there is something unsettling about how the legend of Mercury has been straight-washed for mass appeal. The original trailer for Bohemian Rhap- sody drew the ire of the gay press for omitting any refer- enc to AIDS. Meanwhile, screenwriter Anthony McCarten compressed the timeframe in order to make the Live Aid event a kind of swan song, which it wasn’t. Mercury was diagnosed two years later, in 1987, and such a switcheroo is not just emotionally manipulative but dishonest. Even worse, the logic at work is straight: Mary’s love, like that of her Christian namesake, is a saving grace that he rejects at his peril. The love of his bandmates is likened to that of a “family,” which means that Freddie’s lover and personal manager Paul (played by Allen Leech), whom his “fam- ily” distrusts, must be jettisoned for his “villainy.” The fact that Mercury’s fame continues to rise posthumously is ironic. Brian May told NPR’s Terry Gross that the band never enjoyed real success in the U.S. until the 1992 release of Wayne’s World , in which Wayne and Garth rock out to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Mercury always refused to ex- plain the lyrics to the six-minute song, but some interpret its four parts as the painful process of coming out, whereby the singer kills off the illusion of his heterosexuality (“Mama, just killed a man. ... Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth”). May related the sad but clairvoyant fact that prior to his death, Mer- cury told May (also the film’s producer): “I suppose I’ll have to fucking die before we ever get big in America again.” No less ironic is the fact that foot-stomping anthems like That Double Edge of Stardom C OLIN C ARMAN Bohemian Rhapsody Directed by Bryan Singer 20th Century Fox A Star Is Born Directed by Bradley Cooper Warner Brothers Pictures Colin Carman, PhD, is the author of the newly published The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment (Rout- ledge) and a contributing writer to this magazine. FILM    Lady Gaga as Ally and Anthony Ramos as Ramon in A Star Is Born Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody