Abstract
Gus Van Sant’s biographical movie Milk raises several questions that are typical of the biopic genre itself, the issue of truthfulness, respect, representation, legacy, and bias. But it also fueled controversy as to the treatment of the queer issue which was considered as far too mainstream by some critics. The mixed feelings come indeed from the tension between exploring a popular genre and representing the queer issue in a transgressive creation both in form and content. This article therefore focuses on Milk’s compliance with the generic frame of the biopic. It also explores the political and poetical Real of the movie Milk and the difficult process of sublimation of history and legacy in a creative process.
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Notes
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The Lacanian concepts of real, imaginary, and symbolic are the structures of the psyche that control our desires and constitute the three orders of the intersubjective world, as theorized by Lacan. The concept of the imaginary indicates both the capacity to form images and the alienating effect of identification with them, as in the mirror stage. The symbolic is primarily the order of culture and language; this is the order into which the subject is inserted or inscribed thanks to the Oedipus complex and submission to the name of the father. It is the social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law (also called the “Big Other”). The real is not synonymous with external or empirical reality, but refers to that which lies outside the symbolic and that which returns to haunt the subject in disorders like psychosis (Lacan 1986: 71).
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Van Peteghem-Tréard, I. (2018). Queering the Biopic? Milk (2008) and the Biographic Real. In: Letort, D., Lebdai, B. (eds) Women Activists and Civil Rights Leaders in Auto/Biographical Literature and Films. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77081-9_12
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