F/F Friday: But I'm a Cheerleader
Jun. 8th, 2018 08:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerAfter we finished packing up all our stock for Pride (some friends and I are running a booth) we decided that we need to watch a movie to allow ourselves times to recover. Naturally we felt it ought to be thematically appropriate for Pride, and that is how I finally saw But I’m a Cheerleader.
It is exactly as delightful as I have always been led to believe. It’s sweet and funny and it’s also a lot of fun to see a movie with so many gay kids all in one place, although obviously they would have been better off meeting… basically anywhere that isn’t a gay conversion camp, really.
The movie has a jolly good time skewering the concept of a gay conversion camp: the wardens are trying to train the inmates into straightness by inculcating them with 1950s gender roles. The girls wear pink dresses and learn how to clean floors, while the boys wear blue suits (“Those are supposed to make them less gay?” one of my friends commented) and practice the manly art of football-throwing.
Some of the kids, including our heroine Megan at the beginning, would really like the program to work. But Megan’s very existence shows that it probably won’t. She’s about as feminine as a girl could get without dressing in a hot pink suit like Elle Woods, and yet here she is, filled with lesbian lust, which bubbles to the fore when she meets the goth tomboy Graham, who is mad as hell about being here and not afraid to show it.
A great film. I may watch The Itty Bitty Titty Committee just because it’s the same director. In fact, because it’s Pride month, it’s a good time to watch a bunch of f/f movies I’ve had on my list for ages: Jenny’s Wedding, Water Lilies, maybe even Madchen in Uniform if I can get my hands on it - although on the other hand it might be nice to wait to see that one on the big screen; they might show it in Bloomington some time…
It’s a project that accords well with my women film directors challenge, too. If the same percentage of male directors made LGBT+ films as female directors do, our representation problems would be more than halfway to a solution (at least on that particular front).
It is exactly as delightful as I have always been led to believe. It’s sweet and funny and it’s also a lot of fun to see a movie with so many gay kids all in one place, although obviously they would have been better off meeting… basically anywhere that isn’t a gay conversion camp, really.
The movie has a jolly good time skewering the concept of a gay conversion camp: the wardens are trying to train the inmates into straightness by inculcating them with 1950s gender roles. The girls wear pink dresses and learn how to clean floors, while the boys wear blue suits (“Those are supposed to make them less gay?” one of my friends commented) and practice the manly art of football-throwing.
Some of the kids, including our heroine Megan at the beginning, would really like the program to work. But Megan’s very existence shows that it probably won’t. She’s about as feminine as a girl could get without dressing in a hot pink suit like Elle Woods, and yet here she is, filled with lesbian lust, which bubbles to the fore when she meets the goth tomboy Graham, who is mad as hell about being here and not afraid to show it.
A great film. I may watch The Itty Bitty Titty Committee just because it’s the same director. In fact, because it’s Pride month, it’s a good time to watch a bunch of f/f movies I’ve had on my list for ages: Jenny’s Wedding, Water Lilies, maybe even Madchen in Uniform if I can get my hands on it - although on the other hand it might be nice to wait to see that one on the big screen; they might show it in Bloomington some time…
It’s a project that accords well with my women film directors challenge, too. If the same percentage of male directors made LGBT+ films as female directors do, our representation problems would be more than halfway to a solution (at least on that particular front).
no subject
Date: 2018-06-23 06:30 pm (UTC)I wasn't quite able to get over the cognitive dissonance between subject matter and the humorous treatment--the humor did work for me, but still I had an undercurrent of disquiet while I was watching. Maybe that's inevitable though. I'm glad they were showing up the whole concept of conversion camps as completely wrongheaded back in the 1990s, though.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-23 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-23 08:24 pm (UTC)