Why We Deserve to Have "The Ritz"

Note: The newsletter is a day late this week because my laptop's solid state drive was dying and I had to have it replaced over the weekend. I spent all of Monday reinstalling everything, so much fun! The paid newsletter this week will be released on Friday as usual.

There are many more films than people think. It's kind of staggering, sometimes, to think about 130 years of filmmaking (happy anniversary to the Lumiere's!) where hundreds, or thousands, of films could be made every 12 months. Even without the Oscar cycle, invented to drum up publicity for the studios, telling us which films are the most important or topical, we all naturally trend toward our preferred types of stories, and miss a lot of the rest. When something breaks through that bubble, it can feel like the entirety of visual media is a huge ocean and your dedicated years of viewing have only been skimming the top.

That's how I felt when I first watched The Ritz. Not because it was a queer comedy, but because it was a queer comedy from the seventies. At the time to me it felt like no explicitly queer movie could've been made in that era without a tragedy attached. Everything from the 50s and 60s was about repression, everything from the 80s and 90s was about AIDS. But The Ritz is a movie that is doggedly mid, a slapstick borscht belt type of humor centering around a subculture of smut. Chubby chasers mix with leather daddies mix with cowboys and twinks and regular schlubs. Once you're inside the bathhouse, you're out. While it was certainly bold subject matter at the time of its original Broadway run and subsequent filming, it's not aspiring to be anything significant, which ironically is what makes it significant to me.

I've always been in the John Waters camp of trashy art (I blame watching Cry Baby a lot as a preteen). The people deciding what's "in good taste" are often also the ones deciding what qualifies you as a human being, or an adult, or a woman, or queer enough, or black enough, or mature enough, or deserving of rights. For a long time, for gay movie to be "good" it had to be sad, or say something deep and significant about the human condition, to explain and justify every reason for its existence to straight audiences. But The Ritz isn't interested in any of those things, it's only interested in watching Rita Moreno climb over a twink's shoulders onto a chair while singing off-key. It's only interested in saying "ha ha that person's voice is funny" and "hey wasn't that Cliff Clavin?" It's a relief that it's so dumb.

Something about it being from the mid-70s is also comforting. I had been aware that the 30s had pushed representation before the Hays Code was properly enforced, but I didn't know that the liberation of the 70s included stupid little films. It's upsetting that the combination of a pandemic and the crackdown conservatism of the 80s did away with the genre, but its existence itself is uplifting to me. There has always been queer joy. It's not always where you expect to find it, but it's there.

I'm showing The Ritz this Wednesday as part of my Queer Classics programming at As You Are in Capitol Hill.

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