Spectacular Passions

“Spectacular Passions offers interesting ways of (re-)reading films, film stars and their audiences. . . . [Farmer’s] argument throughout is lucid. . . .” - David Buchbinder , Media International Australia

“[A] flexible and broadly useful model of a psychically motivated social spectatorship. . . . Farmer’s book revives an important gay figure that is too infrequently examined by contemporary queer studies.” - Brian Crane , Canadian Journal of Communication

“[Farmer] has gotten some wonderfully fugitive ideas down in black and white. . . . [F]un . . . . He subjects Hollywood musicals, Mae West, Sunset Boulevard and [Montgomery] Clift to such semiotic second-guessing, provides many an illumination along the way and never does serious violence to credibility.” - David McConnell , Lambda Book Report

“Farmer elaborates on his theoretical model by examining an array of film elements that seem particularly relevant for the gay spectator: the musical, camp, maternal desire, and figures of masculinity. The model that Farmer develops seems plausible and points toward significant possibilities for further research. . . . [R]ecommended. . . .” - J. J. Marchesani , Choice

“Farmer touches on Mae West, Judy Garland, Sunset Boulevard, and the rest of the greats to reveal the role gay fantasy plays in understanding ourselves. Toss in his easy-to-read primer on postmodernist debates around gay identity, and you can sit back, soda and popcorn in hand, and enjoy the show.” - Emily Drabinski , OUT

“Spectacular Passions makes a compelling case for deploying psychoanalytic theory to explain gay culture's complex relationship with popular film.  But, fear not, author Brett Farmer mixes Freud with fandom to produce an engaging book that is filled with insights and surprises.” - Alexander Doty, Lehigh University

“Spectacular Passions offers a series of original, always intelligent, often provocative analyses of the fantasmatic potentiality of gay male spectatorship. The result is the most sustained and complex examination of fantasy and cinematic spectatorship that I have yet read. It is compelling, informed, wide-ranging, and affecting.” - Steve Cohan, author of Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties

“Brett Farmer's eloquent study of gay male spectatorship in relationship to classical Hollywood cinema is challenging and far-reaching.  Spectacular Passions encourages readers to imagine and re-imagine the dream machine of cinema as very different than standard heterocentric accounts of Hollywood would suggest.  Taking psychoanalytic approaches to fantasy as his point of departure, Farmer demonstrates the complex and fascinating connections between gay male desire and Hollywood cinema.” - Judith Mayne, author of Cinema and Spectatorship