Hello, readers! S & I have an important announcement: as of today, we will be putting up guest posts on AvidBards in addition to our own! Katherine H. writes today’s wonderful post, on the queer diversification of teen romantic comedies and what that means for mainstream media. Katherine is a graduate from the University of Edinburgh and American University. She currently lives in New Hampshire and cannot wait to start her PhD in History at Durham University. If you are interested in writing a guest post, contact us on IG or Facebook @avidbards!
(Warning: this post contains minimal potential spoilers for the films Love, Simon, Alex Strangelove, and Call Me By Your Name. Read at own risk.)
I’m not embarrassed to admit in polite company that my favorite movie genre is the romantic comedy. I love the classic rom-com such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the black and white extravagances with soft lighting. Or, more recently, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in technicolor playing out a variety of circumstances in which the end result is them kissing in a scenic location. I will watch and unabashedly enjoy the teen rom-coms of my youth, Jane Austen remade, or whatever millennial-geared love story that Netflix occasionally spits out as an original. I love them all. I have recently stumbled upon a sub-sub-sub-genre that I will call “mainstream queer teen rom-com,” which has henceforth become my favorite. Though my name for this category might be a bit jumbled, I believe it’s important add the distinction of “mainstream” in conjunction with queer and teen and rom-com. No longer are queer movies strictly consigned to art-house theaters and the liberal academic crowd. Instead, these movies are reflective of the society to which they are being mass marketed: diverse, queer, and ready for something that is a bit different, but with which also intimately familiar.
Perhaps the most prominent example of this genre of movie is Love, Simon. Released in 2018, Love, Simon can be seen as the “coming out” of queer movies into the mainstream. Targeted at the socially inclusive digital natives Gen Z (not to be confused with the older, world-destroying Millennials), Love, Simon is a love story, a family story, and a little bit of a mystery. At the beginning of the film Simon (Nick Robinson) knows he is gay, but does not know how to tell his close-knit groups of friends or weirdly perfect family. Though his high school is home to out and proud teenagers, it is still a high school, and some teenagers are still mean. Simon takes his first steps into his true life by emailing an anonymous fellow classmate “Blue”, who outed himself to a social media site. They begin a digital relationship. Blue, like Simon, is not ready to come out and have his whole world changed. However, Blue is also smarter than Simon and does not accidentally leave their secret emails open on a library computer and proceed to get blackmailed by a selfish theatre kid. Chaos, betrayal, and drama inevitably commence. There are some good twists, and I do not want to spoil too much, but it is a rom-com and all’s well that ends well, etc. Three aspects of the film struck me as I was viewing it: 1) the music, 2) the permeation of technology into these teenagers’ lives, and 3) the fact that Simon was okay with being gay, but was understandably scared of his life changing in response to coming out. Just as Clueless is a child of the 1990s, all three of these points securely plant Love, Simon within the second decade of the twenty-first century. Super producer Jack Antonoff (Bleachers, Fun) served as executive music producer, injecting the film with the same auditory pathos that characterized the eternal theme from The Breakfast Club. The eclectic mix of techno pop-rock nicely echoed the omnipresent technology that keeps the teenagers constantly connected, while still being appropriately inspirational for Simon’s journey. Simon’s story is one of self-acceptance and change rather than self-realization. Described as such, Love, Simon could be about any teenager gay, straight, pink, or purple in high school finding love for the first time. The only difference is that I was cheering for Simon to find the guy of his dreams at the end of the movie instead of a girl. And when it comes to finding love, does it really matter if that person is a man or woman?
A Netflix original production within the mainstream queer teen rom-com genre is Alex Strangelove, the title being an obvious homage to Love, Simon and meant to target the same viewer demographic. The title character Alex is different than Simon in that when the movie begins he is in a happy, loving, straight relationship with his high school best friend turned sweetheart Claire (played with brilliant empathy by Madeline Weinstein). However, the fact that the couple has still not had sex after eight months of dating is weighing on the couple. (My advice: chill. You have time.) Encouraged by their hormone-crazed friends, they book a hotel room and the countdown begins to V-Day. In the meantime, a foil is introduced to Alex’s sexuality in the form of Elliott, an openly gay boy a year older to whom Alex immediately takes. I’ll let you watch the film to discover how it all plays out, but their journey is what truly struck me. Alex and Claire experience issues that any modern teenager could: getting into universities, parents with cancer, weird parties, sexual pressures, social media, and the list goes on and on. The movie demonstrates with surprising authenticity the “end of the world” mentality that comes making any decision at seventeen. The only difference is one of those decisions is whether Alex wants to be with a woman or a man. Watching the film, it didn’t feel like a “coming out” story in a traditional queer sense; it felt like a teenager coming into his or her own, just like in any mainstream cis teen rom-com. At the end of the movie, I swelled with emotion at the “kiss scene,” an emotion that is not different from when I re-watch Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett come together at the end of Pride and Prejudice. In the end, I am in it for the love story.
I want to take a minute to defend my honor: I don’t usually cry at movies. I don’t usually cry at a lot of stuff. However, I bawled my eyes out at the last film I will mention: Call Me By Your Name. The love story of a young man, Oliver (Armie Hammer) and teenager Elio (Timothy Chalamet) is perhaps a stretch by some standard to fit into my mainstream queer teen rom-com genre, however, I think it works beautifully. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, it was an Oscar contender from its inception as an adaptation from the critically acclaimed novel by the same name by André Aciman. I understand the potential arguments to kick it out of my jumbled genre: it takes place in Italy, in the 1980s, there are professors involved, different languages are spoken and subtitled, the soundtrack, the Oscar nominations, the blatant sexuality, the emotional toll, and the novel itself is a classic within the queer canon. However, at the heart of the story is Elio, a seventeen-year-old musical prodigy who has not quite figured out who he is yet. He’s displaced as an American who lives in Italy yet not quite comfortable within either culture. He wants to be an adult and make adult decisions, but ultimately acts like what he is: a teenager. He has sex with a girl, Marzia (Esther Garrel), because he wants to lose his virginity, and leads her on while he falls in love with Oliver because he does not know any better. He is jealous, fearless, sarcastic, headstrong, funny, naïve, and, ultimately, terrified. In other words, he is just like any other teenager we might encounter in a film or real life.
For me, these three movies break the boundaries of “queer cinema” while solidly remaining romantic comedies. They are accessible across the spectrum of sexualities, ages, genres, and even political persuasions. For instance, my aunt, a 65-year-old republican in Florida, called me to say she had just seen Love, Simon, and that I “must see it now, because it was the cutest”. No longer are queer films necessarily tragic, over-sexualized, displaced from the mainstream, and only depict one way of being gay. As queer communities enter the mainstream, so do the movies that represent them. I am excited to see what movies I can cry my eyes out over next.
~ K ~
Photo by Renee Fisher on Unsplash
