“Fucking Queer”: Eastern Promises and the Traditions of Noir

“The filmmaker, having scrupulously established the world of film noir, queers it by shattering the categories — both narrative and cinematic — of the world itself.”

I. NIGHT-BLINDNESS (OR, THE PROBLEM WITH QUEERS . . . )

Queer. Fucking queer. The word and the phrase slice through Eastern Promises. Queerness, and the fear it engenders, casts its shadow everywhere. Kirill, the scion of the film’s Russian mafia family, is obsessed with it. No surprise: he is queer. Semyon, the patriarch of the family, is obsessed with it. Again, no surprise: he is aware — and ashamed — of his son’s desires. “London made him what he is,” he opines; it is “the city of whores and queers.” He does not object to the whores, obviously, since he traffics in victimized women, but he cannot abide the queers. The same might be said of the critics: they have turned blind eyes to the queers in the film and cast their sentimental sights instead on the victimized women. Are the brave Anna and the beleaguered Tatiana more worthy of critical attention than the paranoid Kirill? Apparently so. Does meaning (and the construction of meaning) reside in the relative comfort of heterosexual organization rather than in the disquieting anarchy of queerness? Apparently so.

Critical opinion has been, to say the least, divided, and critical vision has been decidedly night-blind. Reviewers have turned to A History of Violence — a film which in no way addresses non-heterosexual themes or characters — to interpret Eastern Promises. They have responded with awe (“a rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power . . . very much a companion piece to A History of Violence,” Village Voice), with indifference (“a B-movie companion piece to A History of Violence,” LA Times), and with disdain (“a strangely placid and impersonal affair — like A History of Violence with half the intensity and a quarter of the critical self-awareness,” Film Monthly). While many of its thematic resemblances to A History of Violence are undeniable — family structures, loyalty, troubled identity, the double life, violence, crime and its aftermath — Eastern Promises has, at its heart, a radical subversion. It is a cunning and mutinous response to the notions of family, loyalty and identity. It is, in fact, a slap in the face of the struggle for stability, for “normality,” which is the animus of A History of Violence. It is not A History of Violence’s twin, it is its foil. It is only by being blind to the dark side of the film — the queer side, the fucking queer side — that one can see it as lacking in intensity and critical self-awareness, “an old fashioned movie,” “standard potboiler fare,” or even “an unrepentant hack-job.”1 By examining the film’s queer agenda, one sees it as extremely intense and distinctly critically self-aware.

“Queers and queerness, in life as in art, are not always instantly recognizable,” according to Richard Dyer. Problematizing queer stereotyping in film noir, he explains:

Queer stereotypes are posited on the assumption that there is . . . an essential being which is queer . . . the problem with queers is that you can’t tell who is and who isn’t — except that maybe, if you know the tell-tale signs, you can. . . . it’s not surprising that these stereotypes generate uncertainty even as they attempt to produce certainty . . . It may also be why they are so relatively widespread in noir, since they suit so well its general sense of uncertainty (97).

This ambiguous visibility of queers and queerness and the tradition in noir to relegate the queer characters to the fringes of the action may account for the critics’ blind spot in the reading of this film.

This blind spot, obviously, is heteronormativity. Have the reviewers been deceived by the strategies of disavowal and assimilation employed by two of the central characters, Kirill and Nikolai? Since the mechanisms by which queer characters are rendered inconspicuous are often integral to their power within a homosocial narrative, is it a mark of the film’s sophistication that the reviewers have read it as “a streamlined genre diversion” (Andrew Dowd, Film Monthly) or “an old fashioned picture” (Anthony Lane, New Yorker)? Those who see it as subversive, as “a genre film that is actually something else” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice), neglect to trace the real contours of this subversiveness, falling back instead on a generalized sense of the film’s charged subtext and the obvious homoerotics, the “animal intensity” (Siddarth Pillai, Passion For Cinema) of the Kirill/Nikolai relationship. Peter Travers, though he says “Brilliant film. Brilliant director . . . Cronenberg subverts formula at every turn” (Rolling Stone), does not follow these turns. Even the few critics who diagnose its subversiveness as queerness (Ed Gonzalez in Slant, for example, says that “Eastern Promises is a straighter version of Inland Empire, which is not to say that it isn’t totally queer”) fail to apply this queerness to an investigation of the film’s subversive tactics.2 What the reviewers seem to be avoiding is this: the filmmaker, having scrupulously established the world of film noir, queers it by shattering the categories — both narrative and cinematic — of the world itself. The narrative is queered; the characters are queered; the camera itself is queered. Dare I say that we ourselves are queered — if only for the duration of the narrative — in the reading of this film?

II. FIGURES IN A CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE, WITH CRONENBERG

Film noir has, in its panicked and unstable organization, two constant characteristics, to which Cronenberg — with his screen writer, Steve Knight — turns his experimental eye.

The first is the abiding presence of queerness. These films are “gut-and-gore crime stories, all fashioned on a theme with a combination of plausibly motivated murder and studded with high-powered Freudian implication” (Spicer 1). In film noir this “Freudian implication” plays out in recognizable gangster-film narratives and themes: patriarchal authority, filial obedience and lines of succession are fraught with Oedipal drama, honor among thieves is called into question, and the ties of family and culture that bind criminal organizations tighten and unravel. But in noir, unlike in standard-issue gangster films, these narratives and themes focus on a sometimes debilitating anxiety over the definition (and perhaps even the very existence) of “masculinity” and “normality.” The culture of paranoia endemic to the styles and stories of film noir (in contrast with the relatively uncomplicated moral — or amoral — climate of the gangster film) finds men in the throes of crises of ethics and identity, adrift in a chaotic world. In the service of this anxiety, paranoia, and anarchy, queer and queer-coded characters have always dotted the noir landscape. The literal and psychic darkness has frequently provided both a hiding place and a breeding ground for an assortment of misfits, “but it was especially welcoming, if often in subtext, to ‘perverts'” (Film Noir Studies): lurking in the shadows, they have enlivened the picture of a society in which social and moral norms are compulsively disregarded. Richard Dyer notes that “noir was one of the first places in Hollywood cinema to produce images of homosexuals on a scale that makes their presence one of its defining characteristics” (108). Eastern Promises torques film noir, whose anxieties have arguably themselves now become commonplace, predictable or complacent, into a new structural and thematic configuration. “Perverts” are brought out of the subtext, and out of the (figurative) shadows. In the spirit of radical experimentation and critical self awareness, Cronenberg — “a subversive maggot in the multiplex apple” (electric sheep) — disrupts noir, itself a narrative and stylistic queering of the Hollywood “invisible” style. In disrupting the once-disruptive, he invites us to disrupt our own interpretive strategies.3

The second is Existentialism. This philosophy is founded on a sense of the disorientation (at best, bewilderment; at worst, devastation) of the subject adrift in a world without values or moral absolutes, and devoid of meaning. Life is meaningless unless one gives it “meaning” through action. Life is valueless unless one gives it “value.” For “an alienated and confused ‘non-heroic hero'” (Spicer 2), life becomes a nightmare of randomness: meaning and logic are reduced to contingency and chance; morals and values are reduced to impulse and appetite; ethics are reduced to expediency; meaning is imposed — often in retrospect, and as mere justification — on a primitively cause-and-effect sequence of events. Nothing is clear or absolute. In this morass, demarcations between villain and hero, good and evil, and, sometimes, queer and straight, become smudged.4

“Uncertainty and chance are built into noir’s central narrative organization . . . At the most general level, homosexuality is simply one more trope in the performance of uncertainty. However, homosexuality is also central to the structure of narrative confusion in many of the films; nor is it any old trope of uncertainty” (Dyer 90, 109). Uncertainty and confusion — the uncertainty and confusion about how something is going to turn out — are certainly staples of noir narratives. But a kind of ontological uncertainty — the lack of stable or acceptable foundations on which to build one’s hopes and desires — is the uncertainty on which part of Eastern Promises‘ narrative is built. This foundation is renegade sexual desire: homosexuality — or, more precisely, queerness — is the trope of uncertainty upon which much of Eastern Promises is constructed. It is central not only to “the structure of narrative confusion” in Eastern Promises, it is central to the structural logic of the film. It is, in fact, the agent of thematic clarity, whose agenda, far from being the ultimate reinstatement of heteronormativity or heteropatriarchal stability, is a subversive but unequivocal unseating of heterosexual certainty and its replacement with what can only be called queer uncertainty. If classic film noir, though it presented audiences with images of a disturbingly queer world, finally failed to (or chose not to) dislodge heterosexual masculinity from the center of its consciousness, Eastern Promises, though it presents audiences with images of a reassuringly heterosexual world, chooses to dislodge heterosexual masculinity from the center of its consciousness and, consequently, from its narrative “resolution.” Epistemological disturbance — queer uncertainty — rather than being contained, resolved or curtailed by the narrative, is nurtured and sustained within it. It resonates far beyond the final frame of the film.

III. DOUBLE VISION?

Consider Rubin’s figure/ground illusion. Multistability (or multistable perception), the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to vibrate between two or more alternative interpretations, is the interpretive logic upon which the full legibility of Eastern Promises, with its two interlocking narratives, depends: one narrative makes the other one possible; the two narratives — like the two images — press in on each other in a competition for perceptual primacy. They are equally important and, importantly, equally visible. The precise contours of the one define the precise contours of the other. In Eastern Promises, queerness and its expression are restricted and outlined by the existence of homophobia and heteronormativity; homophobia and heteronormativity are delineated in specific relation to queerness. When it is a vase (as the heteronormative gaze, with its focus on the “reassuring” world, would have it), Anna, the protagonist, embarks on a dangerous journey to save a baby, in search of a happy ending. When it is two faces (as the queered gaze, with its vision into the “disturbing” world, implies), Nikolai and Kirill face off in an undeclared competition for control of the narrative, with no clear end in sight. Here their gaze at each other is erotic, and their faces are decidedly queer. Critics have neglected the two faces because of their infatuation with the vase.

Who is the “alienated and confused non-heroic hero”? The critical trend has been to cast Anna as the de facto heroine (though she is neither alienated nor particularly confused) since she is the innocent character, presumably the one with whom the audience identifies, who is drawn into a world of crime and bloodshed because of her noble quest to save a child. Ed Gonzalez calls Eastern Promises “the story of a woman in trouble” (Slant). Were this the whole story, any queers and queerness would be relegated to the fringes of the film’s meaning, as they have been in classic noir. So Kirill’s journey becomes the subplot, and the homoerotics of his relationship with Nikolai are backgrounded, as many reviewers maintain — in Steve Warren’s case, with an alarming blend of insight and fatuousness: “a homoerotic subplot, though non-reciprocal, suggests ‘Brokeback Mafia’ . . . Physicality between European men is often misread by American audiences, but in this case Nikolai knows how Kirill feels about him and uses it to his advantage, without having to go beyond friendly hugs” (CinemATL).

In “the story of a woman in trouble,” Kirill is merely a closet homosexual who desires his driver; Nikolai is merely an enigmatic heterosexual henchman who puts up with this attention.5 While there is no question that Anna drives an essential part of the film’s narrative, it is Kirill who, with the engineering of the killing of his cousin in the first scene of the film, claims the position as the character who sets into motion the course of events that structure the interlocking plots, taking his place among noir’s “paranoid protagonists adrift in cities that are monstrous, hallucinatory and actively malevolent” (Spicer 65).

Eastern Promises is, as Roger Ebert has noted, “not a movie of what or how, but of why” (rogerebert.com). Both the what and the why of the Anna-as-hero plot reading present no challenge: she, a midwife, embarks on a dangerous journey because her compassion and her maternal longings are aroused by the death in childbirth of the young Russian prostitute, Tatiana. In an effort to get Tatiana’s diary translated, she is drawn into a world of crime and violence, but through her association with — and attraction to — the inscrutable mob henchman, Nikolai, she saves the baby from the murderous Kirill, who (with his father, Semyon) is implicated by the diary in Tatiana’s death. Kirill’s queerness, and the narrative complications that ensue from his disavowal of it, are sidelined in what Anthony Lane calls the narrative’s “urge to pluck innocence from the embrace of evil, and to dispense punishment to those who deserve it most” (The New Yorker). In the Kirill-as-antihero reading of the film, both the what and the why are more complicated: Kirill has his cousin killed because he called him a queer and his paranoia is awakened, his rise to power (real or imagined) in the vore v zakone is threatened, and his fear of being outed (especially to his dictatorial and homophobic father, whose approval he is constantly seeking) is activated.6 He turns to his henchman and the object of his desire, Nikolai, to collude with him in keeping the double secret of his queerness and his murderousness. After Nikolai later discloses the reason for the murder (“He called him a drunk . . . and a queer”) to Semyon, Semyon asserts his heteropatriarchal authority by hatching two plans to save and control his son: Nikolai will get Tatiana’s incriminating diary from Anna, and then he will take the fall at the avenging hands — and knives — of Kirill’s enemies. The failure of the second plan leads to Semyon’s arrest and the ascendancy of Kirill in the vore v zakone with Nikolai at his side. The homoerotics of Kirill’s relationship with Nikolai are foregrounded, and the radical queering of the noir world becomes the central intelligence of the film. Citing Rabid and Videodrome, Steve Erickson writes in Gay City News that “for a heterosexual man, Cronenberg’s sensibility has always been pretty queer, attracted to ambiguous sexuality and areas where gender boundaries break down”: in the course of this narrative, queer Kirill queers — and even genderqueers — Nikolai because he desires him and can control him. And Nikolai queers, and even genderqueers,  himself in order to retain access to, and control over, queer Kirill, who desires him.7

IV. GENDER IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

The most powerful genre subversion is not the intensification of — the queering of — noir queerness inherent in the positioning of the queer Kirill as the antihero, nor is it the queer-coded relationship between the two leading men: it is the positioning of the emblematically macho Nikolai as the film’s femme fatale. “Film noir’s construction of gender is one of its most distinctive features” (Spicer 85): in a bravura stroke, Eastern Promises queers its most notorious archetype. Cronenberg, the godfather of bodymorphing as a metaphor for the pliability of identity and the malleability of physical boundaries (a man can turn into a fly; a phallus can sprout from a woman’s armpit) travels beyond his exploration of gross pathology into more obscure territory. Here, gender is problematized through a subtle mutational process. Structurally, film noir needs a femme fatale; in this narrative, Kirill is infatuated with Nikolai. As the object of desire, in a queered relationship, under Kirill’s queer scrutiny, and with a deep agenda for his own advancement, he knowingly enacts the role of Kirill’s siren. He can neither disrupt Kirill’s straight identification by returning his advances, nor threaten his own position by rejecting them. Instead, like the femme fatale, he must drive his agenda by maintaining the erotic tension of the existing structure. To gain actual control of the narrative he must encourage Kirill’s illusion of control of the moment. His own sexual identity is not the issue. Gender, as Judith Butler famously argues in Gender Trouble, is not an expression of what one is but something that one does. One “does” masculinity; one “does” femininity. Similarly, one “does straightness” or “does queerness,” depending upon the demands of the situation.8 Nikolai, a master of performance, simultaneously (and quite spectacularly) “does” both masculinity and queerness. Seen in this light, his prison tattoos are the femme fatale’s negligee; his muscles are her curves.

The classic femme fatale is characterized by her desirability, her duplicity, and her cunning use of her own allure to manipulate. Ava Gardner’s Kitty Collins (The Killers, 1946) is described by Andrew Spicer as “the apotheosis of a mythical femininity” (91). He lists her “sloe shaped eyes, curvaceous, high cheekbones, cleft chin, full, upturned mouth, all an open sexual invitation.” Might the same not be said, queerly speaking, of Viggo Mortensen’s Nikolai’s “total gorgeousness” (Amy Nicholson, Inland Empire Weekly)? What of his “scary chiseled cheekbones and deep-set, easily wounded eyes” (Anthony Lane, New Yorker)? Certainly he extends an open sexual invitation to an unresponsive Anna at their first meeting — “go for a drink, maybe?”9 But it is Kirill with whom he goes for drinks; it is Kirill who playfully smacks him on the ass and tenderly caresses his cleft chin, it is Kirill who drunkenly supplicates himself at his feet in a tableau perilously close to a queer bootlicking scenario; it is Kirill who insinuates himself between Nikolai and a prostitute (by sliding into his lap and pushing her away) and demanding that he “fuck one of these bitches and I’m going to watch . . . I’m recommending you to my dad. I want to make sure that you’re not a fucking queer.”

The scene with the prostitute (“A sex scene voyeured by the spectre of Vincent Cassel, whose greasy Russian mobster ushers the film’s latent homoeroticism into the open,” The Lumiere Reader) has received critical mention but scant and disturbingly reductive analysis: nowhere is the critical predilection to heteronormalize the film more apparent than here.10) Ironically, it is Steve Erickson, writing for Gay City News, whose vision seems particularly clouded: “Eastern Promises emphasizes Semyon and Kirill’s homophobia, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively minor point. While the film’s relatively chaste, apart from the scene with the prostitute, there’s a subtle homoeroticism at work here. More than Watts, Mortensen is portrayed as an object of desire.”

On the contrary, while Mortensen is certainly portrayed as an object of desire, the film is deeply unchaste: in the grand guignol scheme of things, homophobia is the major point and lies at the heart of this narrative. According to Deep Focus Review critic Brian Eggert, “Vincent Cassel’s character remains shyly in question, since we’re given delicate notes to imply, perhaps, as those rumors suggested, that he is a homosexual. There’s an unsettling scene where Kirill’s sick sense of camaraderie demands that Nikolai have sex with a prostitute while he watches. And throughout the film, Kirill and Nikolai’s relationship is heavily based in touching. While this may be akin to the affection of brothers, we can’t deny how hushed Kirill becomes when his father curses homosexuality.”

How is Kirill’s open challenge to Nikolai to prove his heteromasculinity “shy” or “delicate”? How is it the expression of camaraderie, however “sick”? If the relationship between Kirill and Nikolai is “akin to the affection of brothers,” this affection is inflected with troublingly incestuous undertones.

The sexual interaction between two women as titillation is a staple of male chauvinist fantasy and a mainstay of heterosexual pornography. “Cronenberg has shown interest in the structures and stylistic tropes of pornography over many years” (Browning 58), and this particular trope is intricately deployed in this scene. Kirill constructs a scenario of macho competition, securely centralizing Nikolai in it by declaring that it is his performance that Kirill will be evaluating and his heterosexual virility that he will be policing. He also constructs a pornographic scenario in which Nikolai performs sexually for his delectation. So Nikolai becomes the star performer — the pornstar — in Kirill’s fantasy, possibly of identification, in which Nikolai becomes his surrogate phallus, penetrating the woman (since it is implied in Tatiana’s diary that Kirill is impotent with women), or — which is infinitely more plausible — of desire, in which he is himself being penetrated by Nikolai.11)

Kirill’s scenario, controlling and objectifying Nikolai in a voyeuristic fantasy of being dominated by him, plays havoc with the gendered binary of looking, in which the male is always the desiring subject and the female is always the desired object. Nikolai becomes both the sex object and, as it were, the sex subject; he is simultaneously feminized and masculinized. Kirill, in taking control of the gaze in the scene, is masculinized, but in fantasizing about being penetrated, is feminizing himself. Queer fantasy and role-play masquerade as macho competition and bravado. Certainly Nikolai is queered in the act of proving his straightness. Queerness in this narrative is particularly transgressive not only because it undermines the heteropatriarchy of the mob world, but also because it destabilizes gender-identification and disrupts categories of sexuality in the precise moment that it accentuates gender-performance and heightens (by insisting upon) categories of sexuality. On its most superficial level, and as Kirill would have it seen, the henchman is having sex with the prostitute merely to reassure the male spectator; looking a little more deeply, the henchman is having sex with the prostitute to arouse the male spectator; looking deeper still, the femme fatale is having sex with the prostitute to both reassure and arouse the male spectator. The full legibility of this scene requires the viewer’s (multistable) gaze to navigate between its “straightness” and both layers of its queerness.12

“Sex is the only human activity in which the professional has lower status than the amateur” (Davis 136). This scene depends upon the presence of the prostitute, a sex slave, and rather than “a subtle eroticism” — this is hardly a lingering look or a handshake held a moment too long — what is made possible here is an explicit network of erotic power relations between Kirill and Nikolai, power relations from which she is notably excluded. Emilia Nielsen argues that “Kirill and Nikolai negotiate power and desire over and through the body of a ‘sex slave’ who is figured not so much as an actual woman, but as a conduit whereby queer desire can be enabled” (Re-public). This is only partly true. She is not merely a conduit; she is the scapegoat, the whipping boy, for Kirill’s desires. Kirill’s performance of queerness, to the extent that he can perform it, is a performance of heterosexuality specifically through the degradation of the woman. She must be there, and she must be abused.13 So what is established here for Kirill is not only an interplay of desire and identification, but also an interplay of desire and anxiety (especially his misogyny — women are always “bitches” — and his fear of his own inadequacy); what is established for Nikolai is an interplay of sexual subject/object positionality. This replicates precisely the femme fatale’s relation to the antihero in classic noir: in order to remain irresistible to him she must keep alive both his fantasy of the possibility of her submission to him and his anxiety about his own masculinity. The spell cast by the queer pornstar on the watcher — like the spell cast by the femme fatale on the antihero — lies in the admixture of his prowess with his submissiveness, his remoteness with his availability, and his heightened sexual subjectivity with his willingness to be objectified, to be “bought.” In the erotic (and in this case, pornographic) moment, who ultimately holds the power?

The femme fatale is not just irresistible to the hero; she is also irresistible to the camera. Just as the image of the femme fatale, “the apotheosis of femininity,” is generated by and cycled through pulp fiction via heterosexual fantasy into the camera’s straight male gaze, so the queered image of Nikolai as the femme fatale is cycled through pulp fiction via queer sexual fantasy (and pornography) into the camera’s queer male gaze. The camera vacillates, as we must, between straight and queer ways of looking. Read heteronormatively, Nikolai is “a singular physical specimen” (Brian Eggert, Deep Focus); read queerly he is an erotic fantasy, and not just Kirill’s.

V. THE QUEER CAMERA

Many reviewers have responded to the camera’s queer gaze at Nikolai. “In a stunningly erotic interrogation, Nikolai is shown stripped to his boxer-briefs and questioned by the vory v zakone, allowing these men’s gaze (as well as the film viewer’s gaze), to verify his oral testimony via the various tattoos on his body” (Emilia Nielsen, Re-public). According to The Exile, who also separates the queerness of the film itself from the obviously queer elements of the Nikolai/Kirill narrative, “the homoeroticism . . . is all Cronenberg’s, not so much subtext as actual text. In an initiation ceremony, Nikolai stands, near naked, before a seated row of elderly capos while they appraise his full-body tattoos and rippling muscles” (Eye for Film). The objectification, and queering, of Nikolai (under the sly, controlling gaze of the camera, and notwithstanding the diversionary tactics of the narrative) begun by Kirill is deepened into his objectification and queering by the vore v zakone and by the viewers of the film. Nikolai engineers this because his “authentic” masculinity, which is crucial to his agenda, depends upon it. “The progressive stripping, both literal and metaphorical, of Nikolai throughout the film reveals not the person beneath the artifice, but the meticulously constructed series of artifices which constitute the person himself” (Andrew Tracy, Reverse Shot). His queerness — or queeredness — sidesteps identity, relying in true Existentialist form instead on his actions, and on what Nielsen calls “a kind of spectacular performativity” (Re-public).

“Nikolai’s balls-out escape from the grip of two goons inside a Turkish bath ingeniously suggests a hot and sweaty fuck session” (Ed Gonzalez, Slant). Several reviewers have identified the bath house scene — a scene from which Kirill’s desiring gaze is necessarily absent — as the nexus of the film’s homoerotics.14)) The bath house needs no explication as an obvious site for the exploration of queerness, although seldom has it been used so self-reflexively. Eastern Promises‘ critical self-awareness is nowhere more apparent than in this scene and its fixing of the film’s desires and anxieties on the naked body of Nikolai. Andrew Tracy is admiring: “In the film’s most brilliant sequence — an attempted assassination of the stark naked Nikolai in a public bath — Cronenberg creates not simply an astonishing piece of cinematic choreography, but a fusion of theme, narrative, and performance which can genuinely be called masterly” (Reverse Shot). He is set up by Semyon, Kirill’s father and sometime surrogate phallus, as Kirill’s subaltern, to be killed because he is the queered substitute for the queer who started the film’s killing because he was accused of being queer. The scene and its setup are an extravagant thematic and narrative gesture aimed at eradicating (literally, cutting) queerness from the heart of the film. But Nikolai has an agenda that far exceeds this narrative and the power of this narrative to contain. His radical queerness — and the queerness of Eastern Promises — cannot be curtailed. Were this a classic film noir, this would be the scene of the femme fatale’s demise, a successful attempt to eradicate sexual instability and reinstate the co-ordinates of order. But Nikolai is no ordinary femme fatale, and this is no ordinary noir. Queerness cannot, in this narrative, be unseated. Rather, this attempt to banish it indirectly results in Semyon’s own demise.15

The survival of Nikolai has more significance than just, as some reviewers would have it, the triumph of good over evil (that — a part of the resolution of this film, certainly, but only a part — belongs sutured onto the heteronormative reading, in which Nikolai and Anna save the baby; it rests upon our interpretation of him as a “good guy,” which he is and, of course, is not). It is precisely his escape from the bath house that clarifies Kirill’s (erotic) allegiance (“I swear I didn’t know my father was setting you up” he says) and precipitates the unstable ending of the film. After the arrest of Semyon, and the dramatic saving of the baby, as Anna is being consigned to the world of happy endings, queerness triumphs: Nikolai effectively seduces Kirill into finally choosing him. He persuades Kirill to continue living in the limbo of desire and anxiety. Holding him close, stroking his hair, he whispers, in another powerfully ambiguous tableau of reassurance and arousal: “Your father’s going away. The family business will be yours. It’s our time. You are the boss now . . . You are the boss now . . . You are the boss now. Now we are partners . . . .Why don’t we go home now?”

VI. “IT’S OUR TIME”: QUEERING KIRILL’S PITCH

“It is Mortensen . . . who truly astonishes. His elegantly accented role is dark and tortured, powerfully coiled lethality interlaced with an unfathomable compassion that hints at a secret twist . . . The final shot of the film is imbued with a profound dignity and ambiguity” (Brandon Fibbs, Colorado Gazette). This secret twist is Cronenberg’s subversion of the elements of film noir; this ambiguity is Cronenberg’s point and Eastern Promises‘ guiding principle. It resides in the parallel and contesting importance of the two plots, the heteronormative and the queer, which must be read simultaneously, and the film’s final — and deeply unsettling, heteronormatively speaking — refusal to restore heterosexual logic to a world from which it has been persuasively dislodged.

The final shot of the film shows Nikolai, sitting in the unseated Semyon’s place, in a moment of unquiet solitude. He has new status in the vore, but it is a new status dictated entirely by his relation to Kirill, and his relation to Kirill remains, by his own making, unchanged. Anxiety and desire remain its main coordinates: he has not taken over the London vore; he simply sits in this seat (a seat which, by the way, is not yet — nor ever will be — rightfully his) in a queered relation to the man who has taken over the vore. So, though queerness might seem absent from the moment — Nikolai is, after all, alone — it is abundantly, insidiously, present. The film returns, slyly, to the notion that queers and queerness are not easily apparent. Kirill’s gaze is absent, but the camera’s is not, and the accumulated power of the queer narrative is not dissipated by the demise of Semyon and the installation of the new regime. Nikolai has seen to that. Cronenberg has seen to that: the camera has lavishly established Nikolai’s queer(ed)ness.

Anna has moved on, with her baby, her beautiful “Russian doll,” to a new story, probably penned in a very different style. Not so for Nikolai and Kirill. As the final shot of Eastern Promises indicates, the drama of their relationship, and the saga of the London vore, is a continuation of the story already being told. Speaking of the sequel, now in preproduction, Cronenberg said this to MTV News: “I thought we had unfinished business with these characters. I didn’t feel that we had finished with Nikolai.” Certainly Nikolai’s business with Kirill is unfinished. Will the femme fatale get his come-uppance in the sequel?

Work Cited

Ayscough, Suzan. “Cronenberg adds subversive touch to London crime thriller.” Playback. 3 Sept 2007. 6 May 2009.

Blaser, John. “Film Noir’s Progressive Portrayal of Women.” Film Noir Studies . 13 Nov 2008. 6 May 2009.

Browning, Mark. David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker? Chicago: Intellect Books, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.

caras_galadhon. “Stars.” Yuletide Treasure. 24 April 2009.

Chocano, Carina. “Eastern Promises.” Los Angeles Times. 14 Sept 2007. 26 April 2009.

Davis, Murray S. Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

De Villiers, Nicholas. “Queer Ways of Looking.” Bright Lights Film Journal. August 2007. 3 May 2009.

Ditzian, Eric. “EXCLUSIVE: David Cronenberg Making Plans For “Eastern Promises” Sequel.” MTV Movies Blog . 30 March 2009. 10 April 2009.

Dowd, Andrew. “Eastern Promises” (2007).” FilmMonthly.com. 15 Sept 2007. 24 April 2009.

Dyer, Richard. “Queer Noir.” The Culture of Queers. London: Routledge, 2002.

Eastern Promises. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, and Armin Mueller-Stahl. Focus Features, 2007.

Ebert, Roger, Chicago Sun-Times. “Eastern Promises.” rogerebert.com. 14 Sept 2007. 26 April 2009.

Ebiri, Bilge. “Eastern Promises.” The Nerve Film Lounge. 2 May 2009.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. 3rd Printing. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Edelstein, David. “Eastern Promises.” New York Magazine. 21 Sep 2007. 2 May 2009.

Eggert, Brian “Eastern Promises” (2007).” Deep Focus Review. 21 Sept 2007. 24April 2009.

Erickson, Steve. “Silence Masking Anxiety: “Eastern Promises.” Gay City News. . 31 Sept 2007. 24 April 2009.

Exile, The. “Eastern Promises.” Eye for Film. 6 May 2009.

Fibbs, Brandon. “In the Spirit of ‘The Godfather.’ The Colorado Gazette. 28 Feb 2008. 24 April 2009.

Gonzalez, Ed. “Eastern Promises.” Slant Magazine. 5 Sept 2007. 24 April 2009.

Hays, Matthew. “David Cronenberg on his frosty mob thriller ‘Eastern Promises.'” Montreal Mirror. Archives: Sept 13-Sept 19 2007, Vol. 23 No. 13. Sept 2007. 5 May 2009.

Hoberman, J. “Still Cronenberg.” The Village Voice. 4 Sept 2007, 26 April 2009.

Huddleston, Tom. “Eastern Promises.” electric sheep magazine: deviant view of cinema. 26 Oct 2007. 6 May 2009.

Lane, Anthony. “Space Cases.” The New Yorker. 17 Sept 2007. 26 April 2009.

Lumenick, Lou. “The Full Morty.” The New York Post. 14 Sept 2007. 26 April 2009.

Malcolm, Derek, Evening Standard. “Eastern Promises.” This Is London. 25Oct 2007. 24 April 2009.

McAvoy, Dave. “Best Films of 2007 #3: “Eastern Promises.” Whimsical F-Bomb. Film is a Four-Letter Word: an Academic Blog about Film, Media and Popular Culture. 30 Dec 2007. 24 April 2009.

McCarthy, Todd. “Eastern Promises.” Variety . 8 Sept 2007. 5 May 2009.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “An Affair to Remember.” How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

Nicholson, Amy. “Eastern Promises.” Inland Empire Weekly. 22 Feb 2008. 24 April 2009.

Nielsen, Emilia. “Unfulfilled Promises: Troubling Trafficked Women in “Eastern Promises.” Re-public: Reimagining Democracy. 1 June 2009.

Pillai, Siddarth. “Eastern Promises”: The Way of the Flesh.” PassionForCinema. 21 April 2008. 24 April 2009.

Quinn, Anthony. “Eastern Promises.” The Independent. 26 Oct 2007. 24 April 2009.

savageseraph. “Should Have Been.” Yuletide Treasure.

Schlager, Nick. “Lessons of Darkness.” nickschlager.com. 17 Sept 2007. 26 April 2009.

Scott, A. O. “Eastern Promises” (2007): On London’s Underside, Where Slavery Survives.” The New York Times. 14 Sept 2007. 26 April 2009.

Spicer, Andrew. Film Noir. Harlow, England: Pearson Education. 2002.

Tracy, Andrew. “Eastern Promises”: Vile Bodies.” Reverse Shot. 1 June 2009.

Travers, Peter. “Eastern Promises.” Rolling Stone. 4 Sept 2007. 26 April 2009.

Warren Steve. “Blood and Vodka.” CinemATL Magazine. 21 Sept 2007. 24 April 2009.

Wilchins, Riki. “It’s Your Gender, Stupid!” GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary. Ed. Joan Nestle, Clare Howell & Riki Wilchins. New York: Alyson Books, 2002.

Wong, Tim. “‘Eastern Promises’: of Flesh and Blood.” The Lumiere Reader. 27 Oct 2007. 5 May 2009.

Yeager, Matthew. “Eastern Promises” (2007).” culturevulture.net. Sept 2007. 6 May 2007.