By: Thomas Hinderick

It’s an interesting question. One that perhaps has been widely publicized this past week on the Internet and other media by numerous pundits wanting to get in on the spectacle. What I’m talking about is the set in the Lionel Logue’s office scenes in The King’s Speech being used to shoot gay porn in the past. This is a film that’s won a laundry list of awards spanning from BAFTAs to Golden Globes and, this upcoming Sunday, probably one or two Academy Awards—which is a conservative estimate. And now, after the fact, even after the film has achieved both commercial and critical acclaim and accolades, these people want to harp on that minute detail. Isn’t that a tad bit puerile and carping? This small detail has no affect on how well The King’s Speech worked, yet many reactionists and revisionists groups are up in arms at the scandal. What scandal?

The fact that the British papers that discovered the ‘secret that should have stayed in the closet’ have blown the issue up is not so much a comment on the film as it is a reflection on society. I honestly wonder if there would have been as much commentary as there has been if the set was used in heterosexual, missionary-style porn. Or are the Brits, through and through, all out prudes? Doubtful. What’s more likely at play within the growing intensity of the rhetoric surrounding the issue is merely homophobia, in both subtle and overt manners. The fact that The King’s Speech has won so many rewards, being recognized as an ingenious film, as it should be, makes the issue that much more moot. I doubt that now that this information has leaked that people are going to reflect upon one particular set and just completely forget the actors/actresses’ performances.

Truly movie commentators have either become extremely childish or there wasn’t anything else of substance to mention in either The King’s Speech or other films. In which case, if there wasn’t anything else to talk about in the film, then the movie shouldn’t have won all those awards, right? What other film has reached such critical acclaim when it’s most memorable detail is the gay-porn set? None…that I know of, at least. I can only imagine the snickering happening among these commentators and readers alike as they feed, like parasites, on such a nondescript fact.

It’s sex. Haven’t we moved on in society where we’ve accepted sex as a daily, banal act/occurrence? There’s truly nothing that makes this topic spectacular or even note worthy, and how it ended up on front covers and all through the internet is beyond me. Perhaps this cycle of media gossip and spectacle is a growing trend more indicative of the media’s lack of anything insightful nowadays to say.

With the Oscars coming up this Sunday, I believe it is best to remember the qualities of each film in context of what it did and not random bits of knowledge that does nothing in terms of affecting the film’s quality.