Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Conclusion

My original project was much wider in scope, but I eventually narrowed it down to romantic comedies, teen movies, with a few historically significant dramas. I regret that I didn’t actually review any movies with transgender characters.


The movies I reviewed can be generally divided into two basic groups: queer protagonists, and gay best friends. There are certainly movies with gay villains out there, but due to the conventions of the genres I generally stayed within, gay male friends were most plentiful.


One interesting thing I learned from doing this project was that straight people don’t seem to have lesbian friends. The closest we come to a main character having a lesbian best friend is Janis in Mean Girls, and that’s just a big rumor. In fact, I have trouble thinking of any straight character in any movie that has a lesbian as a best friend. Part of this is that there’s hardly any lesbians in movies in general, but I’d bet part of it has to do with the fact that lesbians and gay men occupy very different realms of cultural stereotypes. Gay men, according to the movies, are like straight men that will never break a straight girl’s heart. They are glamorous. They are cultured. They exist to make straight girls happy, be it by providing makeovers, a sympathetic ear, lessons about art, advice about boys, or just no-strings-attached male attention. They never ask for anything in return, and never have enough of a plotline to make anyone uncomfortable. This spreads over to real life—I’ve heard straight women describe themselves as looking for a gay boyfriend. They don’t want a friend who is gay; they want someone to buy shoes and go see Rent with. These are the same women who love going to gay bars because “no one hits on [them] there.”


Lesbians, on the other hand, can’t be the designated sexless friend for straight girls in movies because there’s always the possibility of a lesbian hitting on the straight girl. And lesbians don’t have any particular culturally-ascribed superpowers outside of understanding environmentalism, playing acoustic guitars, and getting male attention. Nothing that’s really helpful to the Cher Horowitzes of the world.


My theory is that the reason the gay friends in movies never get to date is that writers and directors have a very specific set of boundaries for what makes a straight (universal) movie into a gay (niche) one. If a gay guy squeals over a girl, it’s funny. If he squeals over a boy, and the boy responds positively, it’s threatening to the hypothetically conservative viewer. The one notable exception in the films I watched was Four Weddings and a Funeral.


In films with queer protagonists (But I’m a Cheerleader, Kissing Jessica Stein, Saving Face, Imagine Me & You, D.E.B.S.) , I was struck by how homogenous the protagonists were, which is likely a reflection of the homogeneity of Hollywood in general. Everyone was middle to upper class. Everyone, except for the women of Saving Face, was white, with a few friends of color. I also thought it was interesting how similar the characters were in appearance. They’re all thin, with long, shiny hair, and conventionally feminine ways of dressing. Since all of these are coming out stories, it might be that the filmmakers wanted to show that lesbians can look like anyone, or they might have wanted to get people in the theatres by delivering conventionally beautiful women. I thought it was interesting how some of the protagonists’ love interests appeared—not more masculine, precisely, but less “Barbie heterosexual,” to borrow a phrase from Imagine Me & You. They’re all feminine, conventionally beautiful women, but they tend to have shorter, darker hair (again, Saving Face being the exception), and in the case of the adult women, have artistic rather than conventional careers (I’m counting jewel theft as an artistic career for D.E.B.S.). While they wear feminine clothing, they generally wear more pants and darker colors. They represent a more free-spirited, less “conventional” femininity, while still being conventionally feminine enough that, were they not standing next to their love interests, no one would ever identify their appearance as transgressive in any way.


One thing I thought was interesting was that in all five movies, the main, viewpoint, characters are always originally in the passive role, being pursued by other women. They’re also generally the ones who are still discovering or defining their sexualities. Except for Wil in Saving Face, the protagonists of all the movies start the film identifying as heterosexual, and change along the way. Part of this is the popularity of the coming out story as a genre, and I’d bet that part of it has to do with getting audiences—again, the hypothetically conservative audiences—to go to a movie about women who start the movie as out and proud lesbians. I’d suspect that producers believe that audiences can more easily identify with the seemingly straight characters, and they may be right. It’s also possible that lesbian romantic comedies are drawing from straight archetypes, where the more passive character is more “feminine.”


In the future, I’d really like to see more diversity in movies about queer people, be it about racial, economic, geographic, religious, or gender identity. (This applies to movies about straight people as well.) I’d also like to see more genre movies as opposed to the conventional coming out, first-love kind of story. One movie I didn’t review, but really enjoy, is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a parody of noir films, where Val Kilmer plays a tough as nails, somewhat effeminate detective whose gayness is notable in that the perspective it gives him helps him fight bad guys, like when he shoots a hit man with a revolver hidden in his balls—“Homophobes never check there.” I think someday we’ll have a whole slew of gay action movies, gay detective movies, gay musicals, etc. Maybe even a gay teen movie where straight girls help gay boys find love, or a movie where straight and gay girls are friends.

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