It was a parable of queer life, by definition an entire existence outside of the ordinary run of things, and this was perhaps why the story has a long history of appealing to queer artists, from Benjamin Brittan, who turned it to his final opera, to Visconti who applied himself to the same material around the same time. To live outside the realm of ordinary life itself, was to suffer. It was an allegory that suggested to make art was to suffer. Where else can everything else end but here, in a perfectly manicured palace of decadence, everyone ominously dropping dead of some unspeakable disease? The story, originally penned by Thomas Mann in 1912, is frank enough: a man enters a city and silently chases an object of some interminable beauty while the beach town around him is hit by one of those pre-vaccination era plagues, until he dies. Newly restored, Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice is a dark and haunting artifact of the last century, the ultimate hazy fever dream tragedy of the rough-riding, arthouse 70s.
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