These films scrap the coming- out story
To a queer woman going to the movies, it may seem as if there has been something in the ether for the past year. First, in August, there was “Bottoms.” Then “Drive-Away Dolls” arrived in February. “Love Lies Bleeding” joined the fray in March. This cluster of relatively mainstream films about queer women, deliciously frothy and fun to watch, feels unprecedented.
It isn’t, of course — film always has a precedent. But the latest titles are different. These movies lean into camp: heightened realities, suspended disbelief, largerthanlife plots. W hat’s more, queer women had a significant hand inc rafting each release, and none of the movies involve comingout stories. T heir protagonists are already out, living their l ives, committing crimes along the way.
“I don’t think that these three films, even taken individually, could have quite existed in the pretty mainstream public sphere even a few years ago,” said Clara Bradbury- Rance, a film scholar and author of “Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory.” “At w hat point,” she added, “do you reach a sense that lesbians are represented enough to represent them in their badness and toxicity and irritation?”
“Bottoms” follows two lesbian high school seniors, PJ ( Rachel Sennott) and Josie ( Ayo Edebiri), who start a fight club ( sorry, self- defense club) as a ruse to hook up with cheerleaders. “Drive- Away Dolls” is a crime ca per about unsuspecting friends, Jamie ( Margaret Qualley) a nd Marian ( Geraldine Viswanathan), who find a mysterious package in the trunk of their car during a road trip.
And in “Love Lies Bleeding ,” Jackie( Katy O’ brian ), an ambitious bodybuilder, comes to town and falls for Lou( Kristen Stewart ), a gym manager with a shadowy past.
With their off beat B movie feel, these stories are “managing to mess with this dichotomy between the good representation and the bad representation ,” Bradbury- Rance said, allowing us to think that “there are ways of finding pleasure in ambivalence and ambiguity and tension.”
These films are part of a recent larger wave of lesbian s tories that includes “Tár,” “Nyad,” “The Color Purple” and “Silver Haze,” a nd t hey stand in stark contrast to another recent cluster: the period dramas of the late 2 010s. Think “Carol ,”“The Favourite ,”“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Ammonite.” Andrea Torres, one of the programmers behind t he recent Sap ph-o-Rama series at Film Forum in New York City, referred to this as the “lesbian saints era.” It even had its own “Saturday Night Live” sketch: “Lesbian period drama ,” went the tagline. “You get one a year—make the most of it.”
Now, though, we have three films in one year. “Bottoms ,” in particular, with its depiction of PJ and Josie as not necessarily good people, shows that maybe “there’s something snappy or spiky about queer life,” as Bradbury-Rance put it. Instead of claiming that lesbian films are about a universal desire, these are specific stories about queer life, with its own grooves and complexities.
This spiky representation—which features sex and violence, as w ell as sometimes fraught, not-always-happy endings— recalls the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s, a wave of independent filmmaking t hat included “The Hours and Times,” “Swoon” and “The Living End .” But B. Ruby Rich, a critic who coined the movement’ s name, noted back t hen: “Surprise, all the new movies being snatched up by distributors, shown in mainstream festivals, booked into theaters, are by the boys.”
IN HER TIME as coordinator of gender and sexuality studies at Swarthmore College, Patricia White, author of “Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability,” has taught plenty of students. When she shows them older work, they often expect realism, but when she shows more modern fare, nobody is fazed by lesbian vampires, sci- fi or superheroes.
Commercial and genre film tropes such as these — combined with the creativity of t his generation of queer women filmmakers—make for movies “that are very imaginative and very pastiche-y and not realist,” she said. “And not necessarily feel- good either, not quote- unquote positive — and that’s part of the fun, too.”
She said these films can raise questions: “What’s the social mayhem that my desire could unleash? Or what kind of narrative possibilities and twists and turns are possible” if you don’t stick to heterosexual formulas? The possibilities, she said, include “emotional, creative affirmations that are not just those of ‘ I see myself.’”
“Bottoms,” “Drive- Away Dolls” and“Love Lies Bleeding” straddle an odd line: They are all “pastichey,” as White put it, drawing from John Hughes, John Waters, the campy 2000 comedy “But I’m a Cheerleader,”
the platonic love story “Go Fish” from 1994, and film noir. And they are, to varying degrees, satirical as well. But they take themselves seriously as channels for a whole host of emotions, including the messy ones.
Archivist and document ar ian Jen ni Olson has been in the lesbian film world for decades, and pointed out that “every few years, there are these little bursts. And there are these little moments of, like, ‘ It’s a thing!’ And like, ‘ Does this mean that finally there will be more?’ And I always have a combination of optimism — it is really exciting — and skepticism that Hollywood is Hollywood.”
For queer women in the industry, the idea that the tide is actually turning is often met with hesitation. “I think it’s clear that studios have recognized that there’ s an audience for this ,” said Torres .“It’s like an ouroboros or some soul- crushing cycle of: Is this for us? Or are they doing this because they see that there’s lucrative” potential?
Allegra Madsen, executive director of Frame line, the organization behind the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, watched as t he current wave of lesbian film bubbled up for a few years on the festival circuit. She noted that there are many more lesbian stories than she has ever seen, adding, “A lot of these are about control over y our body and seizing bodily autonomy. And in a moment when that is definitely under threat, it seems like this could be a cultural response.”
But, she said, “I love this moment of, yeah, this is serious, but we’re also going to have a good damn time.”