The Sentinel has some things going for it that I hold dear: Chris Sarandon, a bitching apartment, creepy swinging chandeliers, and Beverly D’Angelo masturbating on a couch. In all seriousness, it’s that last one that got me thinking: it’s the lesbianism of D’Angelo’s Sandra and Sylvia Miles’s Gerde that gets the most raised eyebrows in this film, despite that everyone in that apartment building is a key-holding resident of Hell. So what gives? Why single them out? I’m calling shenanigans on this one and citing the unnecessary demonization of the lesbians amidst far greater crimes.
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| After two viewings, this one gets bad. Probably always was. |
Let’s get one thing straight: everyone else that Alison (Cristina Raines) meets in her apartment building is later identified as a murderer, which is pretty hell-worthy, but there’s not much embellishment. We don’t get much backstory on the crimes that landed them there: the most detail we get concerns the character Mrs. Clark, the little old lady at Jezebel the cat’s birthday party. Mrs. Clark was convicted and executed by electric chair for murdering her lover and his wife. Why did she bludgeon them to death with an axe? Her lover wouldn’t leave his wife, which bears a strange parallel to the fact that Alison’s lover Michael (Sarandon) is suspected of murdering his late wife (which we later find out to be true). How do we know that Chazen, twins Emma and Lillian, and married couple Rebecca and Malcolm are murderers? Because one of the detectives proclaims that Alison “went to a party with 8 dead murderers.” We see mug shots and police files, but no details. For all we know, these people killed someone in self-defense. We’re expected to just go with it after one detailed example and some circumstantial evidence. The most we get from the apartment interactions is that they’re overzealous neighbors. Nothing to really make you suspicious there; no one does anything that merits a trip to hell, save a birthday party for a cat.
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| Dinner was killer. |
However, the most attention we get in terms of there being a symptom of trouble stems from the interactions with Sandra and Gerde, which are far more sexual in nature than criminal. Alison waltzes into their apartment uninvited and, instead of being scolded or arrested for breaking and entering, is offered coffee, then becomes visibly upset by the fact that Gerde is feeling up Sandra’s leg. The silent Sandra then masturbates in front of Alison, which makes her even more uncomfortable. Uncomfortable to do in front of your neighbors? Depends on who you ask (we at The Backseat Driver are kink-friendly and therefore don’t judge). However, there’s nothing there that would merit eternal damnation. They may not be invited to too many pot luck dinners around the neighborhood for that type of hospitality, but there’s nothing there that merits hell in my book. To drive the point home further, go back and re-watch the scene where Alison is dreaming that she’s at the cat’s party again: Gerde and Sandra are the focal points of who we see stark naked in that sequence. So if the huge crime that gets you into hell is murder, why is the main focus the misguided perception of sexual deviancy? Why the hell is being a horny lesbian such a bad thing? Why not focus on the fact that they had killed people while they were alive, rather than the fact that they felt each other (and themselves) up in front of the WASP-y neighbor?
I get that the book and subsequent film were written in an era where gay rights (as well as kink) had a long way to go; however, that makes it all the more cringe-worthy to see lesbianism singled out here when we take into consideration that gays are people too, and that their actions involving sexual preference are not bad. The dead Michael tells Alison toward the climax, “The people you saw here – the lesbians, all of them, are reincarnations.” Even Michael singles them out! A man that murdered his wife lists lesbianism as an instance of demonic manifestation. They don’t even get names at this point – they’re known simply as “the lesbians,” which is insulting because it strips away any other aspect that makes them human beings. Sandra and Gerde aren’t people anymore, with names and backstories and crimes that got them a hot ticket to Hell – nope, they’re lesbians, which defines them far more than any crime could have. Nevermind that the rest of the group has been condemned as murderers – the lesbianism is the true crime here if we follow the verbiage and reactions of the other characters, an act that’s even more outrageous than the taking of someone’s life. The only other people that are subjected to this type of judgment by both Alison and the audience are Alison’s father and his group sex partners, which, again… that’s in the eye of the beholder. Having a threesome with women that aren’t your wife is no less damnation-worthy than sexual perference, and certainly nowhere on par with killing another human being. To give sexual orientation and kink the same degraded status as a murderer means that any deviation from the social perception of normal was viewed as punishable by an eternity of pain and suffering.
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| If this is the gateway to hell, I’m in trouble. |
That’s why I’m calling shenanigans on The Sentinel. I can live with the implausibilities. I can live with a fully furnished Brownstone apartment costing $400 dollars a month. I can live with the hammy acting of pretty much the entire cast, who are phoning it in so hard that I can hear the train conductor paging overhead. I can get past the melodramatic music and the 70s fashion. I can even see past the fact that Ava Gardner doesn’t age while Cristina Raines goes from 25 to 70 in three minutes. But what I can’t take is the lumping of sexual orientation into hell. Fuck that shit right there.
