I don't mean to complain about movies that I actually kind of like all the time, but
come on! This is 2019! It's been 50 years since Stonewall and 52 since the lifting of the Hays Code and
still we're generally stuck at lesbian coding at most on the big screen? It's not that every movie needs to have gay characters or anything, but the creators of these major motion pictures pass up opportunities that seem obvious to me with such consistency that it seems intentional and unnatural, and this is especially true when it comes to female characters, who rarely get billed as the lead anyway (case in point: Captain Marvel is the 21st entry is the "Marvel Cinematic Universe", but only the first to clearly center a woman).
What am I talking about, you ask? Well to highlight an obvious example, consider the Wonder Woman movie from a couple years back. In the comic books, Diana (a.k.a. Wonder Woman) is bisexual, which makes sense when you consider that the two women who inspired her original creation were bisexual themselves. It makes narrative sense in the film that she would have at least experimented with same-sex relationships as well. I mean, in the film, Diana was born and raised on an all-female island, secluded from the rest of the world, and has lived there, in that situation, for hundreds of years now, knowing no other experience. You see what I mean? And yet the filmmakers felt it necessary to include a scene (I'm referencing the boat scene, in case you're wondering) making it crystal clear that she remains a virgin despite these remarkable circumstances, whereupon she proceeds to fall in love with literally the very first man she sees. I mean
come on! What are the odds? It's not that the relationship between Diana and Steve Trevor is poorly developed or anything (on the contrary, I found it cute and endearing), but I can't help but feel like here was a clear and obvious opportunity to validate lesbian sentiment in a way that would actually be visible, in a film that large numbers of people would actually see (i.e. wouldn't just be a niche indie),
and yet...the filmmakers instead went out of their way make Diana strictly heterosexual for the movie franchise only because otherwise political conservatives would freak and the movie wouldn't do as well at the box office. Just as an example of my point.
Similarly, in Captain Marvel, our protagonist just so haaaaaappens to find herself raising a child with another woman, neither of whom seems to have a man in their lives, just by pure coincidence. And yet they are narratively stuck in the friend zone. I mean that's what I do with my friends: we go adopt children together!
My point being that the titular Captain Marvel is clearly lesbian-coded, but nonetheless cannot be shown, you know, dating or, heaven forbid, kissing another woman on the big screen because every theater in the state of Alabama would refuse to show the movie here in 2019. This is actually the most common trope that gets applied to lesbian representation in media in general: coding. Most often scenarios are presented that make it clear to lesbians that characters are
supposed to be in a same-sex relationship, only to be disingenuously rendered "just good friends"...or even perhaps biologically related (like in the case of the 2015 Studio Ghibli anime picture When Marnie Was There, wherein the girl our female protagonist falls in love with, though visibly her same age, nonetheless turns out to be her grandmother; she's a ghost, it is revealed at the end of film
). The sheer dogged determination of major filmmakers
not to validate same-sex relationships in any way even when narratively presented with crystal clear opportunities to do so kind of hurts after long enough.
Conservatives tell me that Hollywood possesses a liberal bias. Perhaps in some respects it does, but here is an area in which clearly the opposite is the case.
Whenever I point this out, conservative-minded people invariably respond with a cheap line like "Do movies/games/whatever
have to be political statements?" It is, however,
they in this pseudo-logic who are politicizing sexual orientation, not me. It is they who are insisting that only their sexual orientation be represented on the screen. Conservatives complain about "the gay agenda" all the time, yet don't at all mind politicizing their own sexual orientation in the way of insisting that it is the only valid one to have and to be depicted. Wouldn't simply including the occasional lesbian character in a major motion picture just reflect the way the world is rather than intrinsically constituting a political statement? "What about the children?!", a paranoid follow-up argument goes. Yes indeed, what about the children? What about the gay youth out there who hate themselves and perhaps even engage in self-harm because they feel like unnatural freaks; like they're not supposed to exist? What about
those kids?
Okay, I'm done. I just had to say that this morning.