There are literally pornographic cinematographic shots of mark pouring tea and cream together before he starts WRITING and TALKING ABOUT SHERLOCK AND DW and then tucking into a PORNOGRAPHIC NOVEL while talking about “planning it quite extensively”
AND THEN HE TALKS ABOUT DOING AN EPISODE OF SHERLOCK WHILE THE CAMERA PANS TO ANOTHER VIEW OF THIS PORNOGRAPHIC GAY NOVEL
“The fun part is thinking about which stories I want to base it on” WHILE TALKING ABOUT SHERLOCK AND AFTER FLIPPING THROUGH A PORNOGRAPHIC GAY NOVEL
And remember when I manipped a photo of him from this shoot and put The King’s Men in the frame – I DIDN’T EVEN NEED TO DO THAT BECAUSE HE WAS ALREADY READING GAY PORN
My brain is so confused by this, it’s styled like a high fashion ad, and then he’s sitting in a fancy tea parlor thumbing through a copy of the gay fucking flesh and I just don’t know what to do about this? And you know he was making fun of the entire process during filming, being like, “this is so ridiculously pontzy, you know what this needs?” *starts scribbling a penis* “please, do continue filming and overlay this with dramatic piano music!” *draws ejaculate* “let me share with you my philosophy of life! It’s very serious.” *cracks open a dog eared copy of The Gay Flesh* “You know what I always say, people shouldn’t wank too much”
Anyways, please everyone appreciate cupid’s tags on this because they are 1000% accurate:
Okay but look at the other books. It’s not just The Gay Flesh and the penis drawing.
Director probably said “hey, can we put a few more books here on the table for atmosphere and you can flip through them, we’ll get a few shots of that”. And Mark was all “sure, I’ll just pull a few books from the shelves at random. Totally random. No agenda at all”.
“Like, say, this well-thumbed edition of Jean Genet’s The Balcony. You know, Jean Genet, the gay novelist who in his novels works to “subvert the traditional set of moral values of his assumed readership (…) and enjoys the specificity of gay gesture and coding” (Source). And the play The Balcony in which mirrors that both reflect and conceal play an important role.
Oh, and just to pick another book at random, here’s the seminal BDSM novel The Story of O. What? It’s not gay, if that helps.”
“And let me just put this drawing of a dick in my Sherlock notebook next to The Gay Flesh. And how about we put this book by Jean Cocteau on the right? You know, the writer and artist Jean Cocteau, who was bisexual and liked to draw male nudes and gay erotica (NSFW link) and who, entirely incidentally, helped Jean Genet get his first novel published and helped him get out of prison.
What, that‘s too explicit? Oh, how about I just plonk a few more books on top of it. Like, say, this Hitchcock book, just to get a bit of crime in there?” (Note: I’ve not been able to identify that book but it looks like a Hitchcock cover to me. Still working on that. Also not sure what Jean Cocteau book it is. But do yourself a favour and do an image search for Jean Cocteau’s drawings – just not at work.)
“Oh and would you mind cutting the film so you show the shot of my penis
drawing when I say “bollocks”…
…and me reading The Gay Flesh when I say
“wank”?
Just for laughs. Don’t worry, nobody will notice, those are just
figures of speech after all.”
Just to add, I found the other two books from this picture:
The second one is indeed a Hitchcock book – the “film edition” of Arthur La Bern’s Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leister Square, which was adapted by Hitchcock into the film Frenzy. You can see the title on the dust jacket in this shot:
And here’s the cover of the edition, it seems to match the one on the table.
This is just an a propos though – Frenzy has no gay references or references to Sherlock that I could detect, but I have to admit I didn’t read the contents in great detail because the subject matter is something I cannot deal with (ask me for trigger warnings if needed).
However, I’d like to add this little tidbit. A bit far-fetched to think Mark Gatiss was thinking about this, probably, but a nice little detail: The author was less than happy about the adaptation and asked “what happened (…) to the authentic London characters I created”.
This was probably just the director going “you write crime, you should have a crime novel on this table next to all the gay stuff”.
Reblogging this for the weekend because LOOK AT ALL THESE GAY BOOKS. We have not talked enough about all these gay books!
