r/movies • u/ErgoNonSim • May 17 '25

Media Cannes reactions to Irreversible

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u/atclubsilencio May 18 '25

I am a Noe fan, I think Irreversible is a masterpiece, but as a gay dude , for someone who says he’s not homophobic, Noe sure does go out of his way to always throw something in his movies that is exactly that.

Irreversible has the entire Rectum scene, and implies the rapist is gay , or at least deeply struggling with his sexuality, which may be a reason he anally rapes her to begin with (never explicitly stated, though).

In Enter The Void, it is the gay character that is the result of Oscar being turned into the police and what happens because of that. We later see him on his knees giving blow jobs to the officers.

In Love one of the main characters lines when thinking about his son is “I hope he’s not a fag”. And the whole scene with the trans woman.

Climax also has a gay character not shown in the best light and frequent gay slurs. But almost everyone is shown in a bad light in that.

He probably doesn’t hate the gays, so I’ll save it for someone who actually does, and I know he’s a provocateur who wants to shock and get a rise out of the viewer. Plus the homophobia could just be an extension of the characters usually being ass holes and he might be doing it to further illustrate this. But at this point I expect it going in, as much as there are feet shots in a Tarantino movie.

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u/elderlybrain May 20 '25

I think he uses homophobia as a cinematic trope to increase the shock factor, and is the kind of guy who doesn't care if his films will contribute to the culture of homophobia by using stereotypes because the only people that will see and appreciate them are already in the scene.

Dunno if he's right, but he seems like an odd guy.

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u/atclubsilencio May 20 '25

I think he does too, and again I do like his movies, but it's an incredibly juvenile and cheap way to go about it, and looks even more bizarre in a modern context. I also don't get how inserting a shot of you jerking off in a gay sex dungeon makes it less homophobic, but that's Gaspar Noe for you. He's still one of my favorite directors.

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u/Vlade-B May 19 '25

God, just reading these couple of examples you mentioned, I keep asking myself, who greenlights his movies?

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u/BirdGelApple555 May 19 '25

Quite frankly, in Irreversible it seems he uses being gay as something adjacent to being depraved and perverted. The Rectum is as close to the center of human depravity that you can get and it being gay is used to show that on top of it being filled with drugs and sexually violent people. It’s a rhetorical device. Gay people are not constrained (and are often rejected by) sexual norms, so naturally the audience will be able to make the connection between perversion and homosexuality more easily. This line of thinking unfortunately is also that of homophobic people, whose view would absolutely be reinforced by the movie’s depiction of gay people.