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Lost in Space
Stephen Hopkins, director; with William Hurt, Mimi Rogers, Gary Oldman, Heather Graham, Lacey Chabert, and Jack Johnson.
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One of the most tiresome avenues of queer film criticism has been the cataloguing and dismissing of "negative images" of gay people as either bad politics or bad art. Thus defined, the question of "is it good for gay people" is blinkered and unfruitful. Life-- and art-- is far more complicated than simply producing or enjoying images of gay people who act only in righteous, moral, and virtuous ways. Positive? Sure, but interesting? As Mae West once said, goodness had nothing to do with it.

In 1992, when GLADD and other media watch groups were complaining about Sharon Stone's murderous bisexual black widow character in Basic Instinct, a noted lesbian novelist came to La Stone's defense. "I mean, here is a lesbian or bisexual woman who goes around murdering creepy men and gets away with it. What's the problem?"

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But there are times when the flight from positive images does not necessarily lead to the immediate embrace of the good "bad guy." Lost in Space-- a completely vapid but not uninteresting film version of the 1960s television series-- offers us one of the more problematic images of the evil homosexual in recent film.

Plotwise, Lost in Space is like an episode on the original series, only 90 minutes longer and with a few sex jokes tossed in. The space family Robinson-- father John (William Hurt), mother Maureen (Mimi Rogers), and children Judy (Heather Graham), Penny (Lacey Chabert), and Will (Jack Johnson)-- are trapped on Jupiter II, a spacecraft, and are Lost in Space, looking for a way to get home. For plot reasons that are far too complicated, they are trapped in space with Dr. Smith (Gary Oldman), a completely untrustworthy and two-timing scientist who-- working for a different power bloc-- has already tried to kill the cute family Robinson. We are lead to believe that Mr. Smith is a homosexual (of the evil variety) because he continually proclaims that he hates the concept of family, hates children, quotes Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and has no allegiances to anyone but his own selfish self. As played by the great Gary Oldman, he also postures and struts like an ego-wounded King Lear and sounds like a complaining Hamlet. Mr. Smith is also more interesting than anyone in the tediously attractive family Robinson.

A major plot thread here is the tension between Robinson father and mother over the paternal resistance to spending more quality time with their son, the young Will Robinson. Too concerned with saving the world and battling the hostile universe, John Robinson is-- in Freudian terms-- the uncaring, distant father who fractures the cohesion of the family unit and plants homosexuality's worm in his son. As if to remind us, the film constantly presents the image of that homosexual: the child-hating, family-loathing Mr. Smith.

This tension is explored cleverly in a science-fiction twist on psychanalysis. In traditional analysis, the patient goes into the past to revisit some primal scene and, from the understanding thus gained, rectifies actions in the present. Here they go into the future to find that primal scene. For reasons too complicated to go into-- yet again-- the annoying family Robinson find themselves on a distant planet and are faced with the prospect of an alternative future. Here they are all dead, except for an older Will (now played by Jared Harris, the terrific character in I Shot Andy Warhol) who has perfected the time travel machine that his father never believed would really work in the present (little-Will) time.

In this alternative future, we see that the evil-homo Mr. Smith has-- in essence-- become Will's father and mentor (as well as a giant deadly spider-- don't ask) and has actually killed off the Robinson family. This has all happened because-- well, because father Robinson didn't have enough time for Will when he was a boy. The Distant father has literally been replaced by the Homosexual father, and look what happens: family killed, boy became a queer (or at least Andy Warhol), the earth is not saved, and the universe falls apart. The older, disenchanted Will only wants to use his time travel machine to go back to the past and prevent the entire space voyage (and, by extension, the film itself) from ever happening. The now arachnoid Mr. Smith wants to use the time travel machine to go back and conquer the universe-- the paranoid heterosexual fantasy of a worldwide queer conspiracy. Needless to say, things turn out well for the nearly-obliterated family Robinson, and in the crisis, father Robinson finally learns to trust and appreciate Will's talents and intentions, and in doing so saves the family, the earth, the universe, and the reputation of heterosexuality itself. Too bad. The one saving grace is that by changing the future, father Robinson also saves the present. As the family moves ahead in their quest home, they are accompanied-- as always-- by Mr. Smith. He may be evil, but he isn't going away.

The movie remake of Lost in Space seems an attempt to generate simple-minded nostalgia for the 1960s. The message of Lost in Space is not much different from Anita Bryant's "Save the Children" campaign or the spew of the 700 Club. It is a defense of family values against the onslaught of the encroaching homo-horror.

This is a betrayal of the radical potential of science fiction. Just think about it. You can conjure realities and worlds startlingly different from our own, but what do we end up with here? The stupid, heterosexual family is under attack by an evil, Judy Garland-quoting homosexual. A longer leap of the imagination would have been to envision a world in which homosexuals are under attack by conformist-demanding heterosexuals. Oh, I'm sorry. That isn't science fiction-- that's socialist realism.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com