The ending

[deleted]

Hi there Tom,


Thanks so much for the kind comments that you made regarding my messages. I have just watched this movie again, with my father, who is as straight as an arrow -- and when I asked him who he thought fell in love with who, he, like me, observed that Eyal fell in love with Axel!

I think that you hit the nail on the head when you made the observation about movies intended for US audiences being utterly devoid of intellectual challenge (or -- even worse -- attempting to lend a veneer of deep thought to their plots, such as the move "Crash" (one of the most simplistic pieces of kitsch I have EVER seen, posing as a profound commentary about race relations in the US)).

One need only look to social developments in the US to understand why the movie was nearly ruined by the ending. At the time that the movie was released, the gay community was reeling from a string of defeats, in which state legislatures had amended numerous state constitutions, or passed numerous state statutes, prohibiting the recognition of gay marriages within their jurisdictions. Now, the social climate is improving. Despite the setback dealt to the gay community back in November 2008, when the voters of California passed a state constitutional amendment (Proposition 8) depriving gay Californians of the right to marry (articulated by the California Supreme Court on May 15, 2008 in the case of in re Marriage Cases, S147999 (2008)), the gay community is now making significant advances on this front. Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage (as the result of a state high court order) in late 2003; this development was followed by the handing down of in re Marriage Cases in 2008 in California (and its subsequent reversal by Proposition 8). Since then, the state supreme courts of Connecticut and Iowa have both ruled that their respective state constitutions mandate that gay couples be permitted to marry on the same terms as heterosexual couples. Even more significantly, the state legislatures, without any prompting by their state high courts, of the states of Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire have all legalized gay marriage (bringing to six the total number of states in which gay marriages may now be performed). In addition, the State of New York and the District of Columbia have both agreed to recognize the validity of gay marriages entered into in other jurisdictions where such marriages may be solemnized. In addition to this, the states of California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, and New Jersey all grant “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions” to those gay couples in their jurisdictions who wish to formalize their relationships (these are referred to as civil unions in New Jersey and as domestic partnerships in the other four states) – it is important to note that these unions grant to such gay couples ALL of the state rights, privileges, and benefits that flow from marriage at the state level, although they are not referred to as marriages. Even as I write this, New York and the District of Columbia are debating measures to legalize gay marriages in those two jurisdictions; activists predict that gay marriages will soon become legal in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New Mexico within the next few years. The states of Hawaii, Maryland, and Colorado also grant to their gay couples a subset of the rights conferred upon married people at the state level (these domestic partnerships are not as generous as those mentioned above).

So the social climate is most definitely changing. President Obama has pledged to throw his full weight behind the repeal of (or constitutional challenge to) the obscene “Defense of Marriage Act” (DOMA), to sign the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) into law as soon as it clears Congress, to repeal the monstrous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy that permits the military to discharge servicemembers who are open about being gay, and to sign the amended federal hate crimes act (which would punish acts of violence motivated by hatred of the victims’ sexual orientation) into law as soon as it clears Congress. Although he has been slower to act than I would like, he is moving on some of these issues – he just signed an Executive Order granting to the spouses of gay federal employees significant benefits, in line with those received by the spouses of heterosexual federal employees (causing the hard right to go berserk, claiming that this violates the spirit of DOMA).

All anti-gay sodomy statutes have been declared unconstitutional – the US Supreme Court finally held all such statutes to be unconstitutional as applied to gay sex acts performed by consenting adults acting in private settings, in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) (thereby explicitly and bluntly reversing an obscene earlier decision handed down just 17 years previously Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986)), in which the Court had upheld the constitutionality of such statutes, using gratuitous, homophobic, and coarse language, mocking the due process challenge to the Georgia sodomy statute (which provided for the mandatory imprisonment of any person found guilty of violating this statute for one year, and a maximum prison term of 20 years!) filed by a Georgia bartended who was arrested (but ultimately not prosecuted) when the police entered his bedroom and found him doing 69 with another man). The Lawrence decision was handed down only one year before Walk on Water was released – at the time that this decision was handed down, gay sex between consenting adults acting in private settings was still a crime in some 14 states! I know that this is difficult to believe, but in some of these 14 states, it was a felony for two gay men or women to have consensual sex in the privacy of the bedroom of one such man (most of these laws applied in the southern states).

My point is that, when this movie was handed down, gay Americans were widely condemned as being unworthy of recognition of their relationships in almost every state. George Bush – an outright homophone who insisted that he would veto the hate crimes act, veto the ENDA, uphold the DADT policy, and defend the DOMA – was President. The religious right had its hands on almost every single lever of political power in the country; that situation is now reversed, and groups such as the “Family Research Council” (FRC), the “American Family Association” (AFA), “Focus on the Family” (FOTF), etc. have been condemned to widespread irrelevancy. America is finally waking up to the fact that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment actually means something to gay people too (the federal judiciary treated Bowers as creating a general “gay exception” to the entire US Constitution, despite the fact that its holding was actually very narrow). Children can no longer be snatched from their mothers or fathers merely because these parents are gay (as happened to a young woman in Virginia named Sharon Bottoms several years ago, before Lawrence was handed down). Gay couples may adopt children in all but one or two states (and these restrictions are being challenged). Times are changing, to the benefit of the gay community.

Walk on Water was therefore released at a time when gay Americans were still widely mistreated, and when plenty of people thought it entirely proper to incarcerate or otherwise harm gay persons. I firmly believe that the ending was tacked on to prevent the yokels and hicks in the red states from boycotting this movie. Groups such as the FRC and FOTF would certainly have attempted to boycott this movie. The AFA actually boycotted Ford because this auto company granted health insurance and other benefits to the spouses of its gay employees on the same terms as it did for the spouses of its heterosexual employees (when this boycott failed miserably, the AFA simply announced victory and pulled out). Can you imagine the malice of any organization that tries to take health benefits away from people? Can you imagine the sheer, raw hatred endorsed by these swine, in the name of their religion?

Right-wing extremists such as Maggie Gallagher (chairman of the newly-formed “National Organization for Marriage” (NOM)) are desperate, and their cause was not helped by a commercial named “The Gathering Storm” on which the NOM lavished more than $1.5 million – only to produce what many people thought was a spoof (I was almost rolling around on the floor with laughter when I saw it, and when I heard the utterly ludicrous statements made by the “actors” paid to participate in this joke!). The NOM shot itself in the foot – this commercial became the target of countless spoofs, joking discussions, and mocking simulations.

The moviemakers had to consider all of these factors when they released “Walk on Water”. Sadly, they almost ruined the movie in the process by tacking on the ridiculous, out of nowhere ending. It is a credit to their sensitivity and intelligence that they still managed to release a wonderful movie…


PHILIP CHANDLER