Your fave is indeed problematic. That’s probably how it got made and how you got to see it at all.
(This is a post originally posted on my tumblr, but I bet it gets better comments here!)
Here is an example from my life.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its associated audience callbacks is, arguably, homophobic, transphobic, slut-shaming (in that the audience yells “Slut!” whenever the female lead says or does anything), rape-apologistic, probably classist, has almost no representation of characters of color, and so forth. The end of the film very firmly reinstates the monogamous, patriarchal norm: the queer characters are dead and the leads are shown crawling through desolate ruins singing the take-away message that “all I know is/deep down inside I’m bleeding.”
I’m pretty sure that if it had not had all those elements to reassure the mainstream viewer, it would not have been popular enough to be shown to high-school kids in Wisconsin in 1995.
Because in addition to those things, Rocky was also the first time I had ever seen on-screen:
two women kissing
two men being sexually intimate
a “man” dressed in “women’s” clothes who was portrayed as sexy rather than as a joke
a same-sex wedding-type-thing
a female character talking about sex as something she enjoyed for her own fulfillment rather than to look attractive to a guy
And it was also the first environment I was ever in that encouraged me to play with sexuality and gender.
We’re doing better now than we were twenty years ago, and that’s awesome. The internet creates amazing spaces where we can connect to each other without needing to go through something that’s making a profit for someone who will be worried about being too controversial. I’m delighted about that. And I think it’s great that we’re being thoughtful about our fiction, taking it seriously enough to critique it.
I just also think it’s really important to notice the multiple, multi-layered personal meanings that we as individuals associate with works of fiction. Because when I was a little queer in Shorewood, Wisconsin in the 90s, if I hadn’t had Rocky and Dan Savage (then called “Hey, Faggot”) and Buffy and The Birdcage, I wouldn’t have had much of anything. The problematic stuff was what got through the gate-keepers, I think in no small part because its problematicness made it less threatening to them.
But it was still enough to get me thinking about the world outside those gates.
Here is an example from my life.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its associated audience callbacks is, arguably, homophobic, transphobic, slut-shaming (in that the audience yells “Slut!” whenever the female lead says or does anything), rape-apologistic, probably classist, has almost no representation of characters of color, and so forth. The end of the film very firmly reinstates the monogamous, patriarchal norm: the queer characters are dead and the leads are shown crawling through desolate ruins singing the take-away message that “all I know is/deep down inside I’m bleeding.”
I’m pretty sure that if it had not had all those elements to reassure the mainstream viewer, it would not have been popular enough to be shown to high-school kids in Wisconsin in 1995.
Because in addition to those things, Rocky was also the first time I had ever seen on-screen:
two women kissing
two men being sexually intimate
a “man” dressed in “women’s” clothes who was portrayed as sexy rather than as a joke
a same-sex wedding-type-thing
a female character talking about sex as something she enjoyed for her own fulfillment rather than to look attractive to a guy
And it was also the first environment I was ever in that encouraged me to play with sexuality and gender.
We’re doing better now than we were twenty years ago, and that’s awesome. The internet creates amazing spaces where we can connect to each other without needing to go through something that’s making a profit for someone who will be worried about being too controversial. I’m delighted about that. And I think it’s great that we’re being thoughtful about our fiction, taking it seriously enough to critique it.
I just also think it’s really important to notice the multiple, multi-layered personal meanings that we as individuals associate with works of fiction. Because when I was a little queer in Shorewood, Wisconsin in the 90s, if I hadn’t had Rocky and Dan Savage (then called “Hey, Faggot”) and Buffy and The Birdcage, I wouldn’t have had much of anything. The problematic stuff was what got through the gate-keepers, I think in no small part because its problematicness made it less threatening to them.
But it was still enough to get me thinking about the world outside those gates.