The Gay Logic of The Red Shoes

Powell and Pressburger's classic ballet movie The Red Shoes is proof that midcentury homophobia didn't need a queer body to give it shape. The heroine Vicky Page is seduced, made briefly ecstatic, and then driven to suicide, just like straight women were in lesbian pulps – but the role of her partner is played by an empty spotlight. Instead, her lover is the concept of ballet. Ballet stands in for the instability, the stigmatized infertility, the seduction of the innocent, with which queer people of this era were imagined to act.

There are also actual gay characters in the film. They're all men, and they are neatly categorized, D&D-style, into good, evil, and neutral. It's not nuanced writing, but it's complicated by the actors' presence and their work. A miasma, a vibe, is impossible to complicate. It's this conflict between queer bodies and queer vibes that eventually breaks this nearly great film in two, leading to a nonsensical ending and an echo of laughter.

The Red Shoes makes way more sense if Vicky is a boy. Specifically, it makes more sense if she's Vaslav Nijinsky, the experimental early 20th-century dancer whose career was cut off in his twenties by his worsening schizophrenia. Nijinsky was the lover of Sergei Diaghilev, his impresario and the obvious basis for The Red Shoes' great gay villain, Lermontov. The story of Nijinsky's marriage – after which Diaghilev brutally fired him – closely parallels what happens to Vicki, which makes sense when you consider that The Red Shoes started out as a biopic of Nijinsky and was only later rewritten to be Vicky's story. Even Vicky's death, an abrupt and baffling twist which clumsily symbolizes what happens when a woman chooses art over heterosexual marriage, makes more sense if one takes the film's increasingly hallucinatory turn as a representation of literal hallucination. The thing is, though, that if you turn Vicki into a man, the film becomes even gayer than reality was; this way, she's leaving the Diaghilev figure for another man. No matter how you try to make The Red Shoes "logical" (by straight logic, if not as a straight story), you wind up hitting something queer.

Moira Shearer's performance as Vicky is well-observed and memorable. She grounds the film with her work, which is surprisingly naturalistic. Of course, nothing in The Red Shoes is naturalistic per se, but we do get the impression that Vicky is acting like a "normal person" would in a deranged, heightened world of camp. Shearer portrays her as a working artist, whose step is graceful and whose back hurts her. She's also committed to Vicky as an aristocrat, someone who wears heirloom diamonds easily and yet always seems a little separated from them. I'm saying this because my real interest in this film is in the men, the queens who orbit Vicky at fixed distances like planets in an orrery, but first I want to give Shearer her due – you understand why everyone around Vicky becomes obsessed with her.

A rundown of the queens:

Boris Lermontov. D&D alignment: neutral evil. Along with All About Eve's Addison DeWitt, Lermontov is one of the arch-examples of the queer-coded villain – but while George Sanders is great as DeWitt, he's still a straight man camping. Anton Walbrook is the real thing, a gay Jewish refugee from Germany, a former matinee idol for whom playing gay has higher stakes. His performance as an art-minded Svengali is high camp, and it's the kind of work that makes me remember my frustration with Susan Sontag's binary between "camp" (unintentional, good) and "camping" (intentional, cringe). Not only does Walbrook obviously know that Lermontov is camp, so does Lermontov. Arch, insinuating, wildly manipulative, Wildean but without charm, perpetually about to break into a villain song, Lermontov is also excruciatingly aware of his own vulnerability. In one scene, he learns from a letter that Vicky has married. He sits in the dark in an exquisite velvet lounging suit; he gets up and paces the room; he punches and breaks a mirror, drawing blood. Suddenly, a knock at the door – his lawyer, come to counsel him about the breaking of Vicky's contract. Before answering it, he hastily walks around the room turning on lamps, the pleasures of an operatic sulk instantly giving way to practicality.

Gay men in this film have something to hide, but that means they have privacy – something which, for the straight writer and director, is portrayed with a tinge of envy. Heterosexuality in The Red Shoes is a grim affair, in which the partners are always encroaching on each other. In the one scene we see of Vicky's married life, her husband quietly leaves the bedroom to work on the opera he's composing; a sad piano tune plays as Vicky wakes up, looks at her old ballet shoes, ponders her lot. She leaves the bedroom, and we learn that the music is diegetic – the man has actually woken her up with the piano. She tries to embrace him, but he just resumes playing it with an awkward arm around her. Stuff like this never happens to Lermontov!

Grisha Lyubov. D&D alignment: chaotic good. An experimental character dancer who specializes in malevolent roles, and can outqueen anyone in the film, but genuinely wants the best for everyone, hence his absurdly on-the-nose surname ("Love," also a common first name for Russian women). Lyubov is played by Léonide Massine, a snatched king above fifty who had succeeded Nijinsky in Diaghilev's bed (and was as close as either The Red Shoes or Diaghilev could get to actually getting Nijinsky), but mostly dated women, go figure. Even in a five-alarm charisma fire like this film – even in a film centered on Walbrook – Massine stands out as a fascinating presence, his face in a strange marriage with his body, his body moving impossibly both onstage and off. He never walks across a room when he can strut or slither. He looks like he'll dodge death forever. If the magnetic but fundamentally awkward Lermontov is always either onstage or off, Lyubov is always on. He has his privacy, too, but it is a public privacy – we never see what's in his head, only the extravagant motions of his body. His equivalent of Lermontov's mirror scene is a split-second shot in which Lyubov, at the end of a ballet class he's taught with a maximum of brutal sarcasm, turns to the camera and pulls on a hairnet. Everyone can still see him, but now he's in private mode. It's Lyubov time.

Ivan Boleslawsky. D&D alignment: neutral good. The company's male lead. Played by Australian ballet star Robert Helpmann – a truly haunted-looking man, in the sense that a house is haunted – Boleslawsky is the least important of the named male characters. We don't learn that much about him besides that he's femme, unreliable, and maybe not that bright. Every man around Vicky is either an ageless 50-year-old or a 36-year-old who looks fifty, and Boleslawsky is the latter. The casting feels pointed – here is a man who's professionally outlasted four or five female partners, but he's still dancing ingenue parts, because the law of opera and ballet is that your age doesn't matter as long as your body holds out. Helpmann brings a sweetness and gravitas to his performance that makes him feel more central to the story than he is. It's not his fault that he's still Romeo.

Julian Craster. Vicky's love interest, a composer. Julian isn't queer or played by a queer actor, so far as we know – he has no chemistry with Lermontov, who's obsessed with him and really ought to – but he speaks to this film's odd inversions of the gay tragedy plot. In The Red Shoes, queerness is reliably negatively coded. Even good queer characters, like Lyubov and Boleslawsky, are ultimately unhelpful people who prefer aesthetics to reality and whose commitment to their friends is limited. We can love these characters, because they are impressive and because we recognize ourselves in their performances, but the intent is not for us to love them. At the same time, Julian's straightness is portrayed as thwarted gayness. He loves opera, camp, flowing scarves, he's undeniably queenly – in short, he has a good deal in common with the film's other major male characters, but unlike them, he ends the film devastated and alone. If only he could realize his potential! If only he could have a happy ending to call his own! While Vicky is killed by gay vibes and Julian's life is ruined, Lermontov and Lyubov and Bolewlawsky are all going to be completely fine.