If you haven’t been too busy reading juvenile movie blogs all week, you might have heard that Navy Capt. Owen Honors was recently fired as commander of the carrier USS Enterprise in the fallout from the release of some “raunchy”, “anti-gay” videos he made to entertain his “seamen” (sorry, one seamen joke, I couldn’t resist). Him being a budding filmmaker and all, I thought this story fell under our purview, so I’ve embedded a couple of the videos in question. They’re pretty boring, sort of what you might expect if Michael Scott from The Office was a ship commander. I’ve spent waaay more time than I would’ve liked watching these, only to see what was so offensive, and the worst thing I saw was a guy saying a “f*g clogged up the sh*tter!” My stars, men aboard ship making jokes about gay sex and masturbation??? Tread not on my monocle, for in my surprise it has fallen.
One of the videos also spliced in a clip of Glenn Close, prompting her to release an OFFICIAL STATEMENT to say that she’s “distraught.”
A clip of Close from her 2006 tour of the warship features at the end of the video in question, which contains coarse language, anti-gay slurs, and jokes with homophobic overtones (in one sketch, Honors is seen in a bathing cap, trying to find an unoccupied shower, and discovering many same-sex shipmates lathering each other up). [*a sun bonnet is heard falling to the floor, the back of a white-gloved hand hits a forehead, writer faints* -Ed]
In a statement, Close said: “I am distraught that my image has been used to perpetuate something that I abhor. The cynical, unauthorized use of my image in this video is deeply offensive and insulting, and was the result of a seemingly innocent request made during a visit to an aircraft carrier over four years ago.” [EW]
For her to be this upset, I figured they must’ve dubbed over her voice with Mel Gibson’s or showed her pissing on a Holocaust memorial or something, but all a saw was a two-second clip of her sitting in the captain’s chair with a stuffed parrot in her lap. (it’s about four-fifths of the way through this video, but I promise, it’s nothing). Are these people serious? Does no one remember the phrase “curse like a sailor?” I always took that to mean we accepted a certain level of coarse language from guys cooped up in a ship full of other salty dudes for months at a time, but apparently inside jokes aboard ship are now held to the same standards of political correctness as Billy Bush’s Zac Efron interview. I wonder if Glenn Close or her A-hole publicist actually watched the videos before they fired off an angry email, or if they just sort of skimmed it and took the content for granted, like they did with that Stepford Wives script.