A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

Dec 1, 2017 1:36:27 GMT Reynard said:

I've never been sure what Nightmare 2 is exactly trying to say. So was Jesse a homosexual struggling to come out of the closet, confused bisexual or a straight guy who's just afraid that he might be gay? Gay subtext is quite obvious but where it is supposed to go isn't. It's quite easy to read the steelworks final so that Jesse is actually straight/bi who turned his attention to men for a while out of fear of rejection by women. This would make sense given the school buss opening nightmare (girls laughing at Jesse) and his girlfriend's behavior during the steelworks finale. Anyway, it wasn't very well handled.

They didn't want to put it in concrete terms, that is why it wasn't well handled. My gaydar rang mega bells with Mark Patton playing Jesse, so the fact that the lead actor was gay, piqued my interest in his character and he was good looking. Like mentioned earlier, they did a great but simple job with how they made him look in the open nightmare sequence, compared to how he really looked. The film also didn't shy away from the gay thing with Schneider's character or the homoeroticism involving Grady and Jesse either.

Both Schneider and Grady were jerks, but their death scenes were still disturbing and Robert Rustler did a good job a portraying his fear of Freddy\Jesse during the transformation scene. I'd say Jesse was gay and confused, but like many young men struggling to come to terms with their sexuality in a "heterosexist" society, he was making an attempt to play the straight game, as that is the accepted norm. He struggled to get with Lisa, as in a sense, Freddy was also reminding him of who he was and plays on people's fear. Lisa was there to make Jesse look normal. She kept telling Jesse to fight it though, as though it was a metaphor to kill the homo and get with her.