Proximal Relations in the Cinema of Tom Kalin

Abstract

The case studies of Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) and Savage Grace (2007) are the basis of Chapter 2’s return to cinema’s biomedical history, as well as to psychoanalytic models of suturing, to excavate queer filmmakers’ disruption of normative models of spectatorship. By examining the modes of looking and investigating already established by the studio-era scientist biopics, this second chapter argues that queer filmmakers returned to this observational mode in the midst of a health crisis. Kalin’s films are concerned with the biopic’s premise of proximity, being close to a historically or socially significant individual, but in such a way that puts forth alternative modes of vision and inspection. The biopic’s promise of closeness to an individual follows the Hollywood cinema’s conventions of cinematic suturing; the spectators identify with the narration of the biopic’s subject and locate themselves in the depicted cinematic world.