cheerleading
by Douglas Messerli
Brian
Wayne Peterson (screenplay, based on a story by Jamie Babbit), Jamie Babbit
(director) But I’m a Cheerleader / 1999, USA 2000
One can just imagine the wealth of good intentions that Jamie Babbit and her screenplay writer Brian Wayne Peterson planned for their tale of a cheerleader unaware of her lesbian inclinations who, sent away for conversion therapy, discovers not only her sexuality but finds her true love.
Babbit has noted it was her desire to not
only to feature the icon of an American femininity, a cheerleader, as her hero,
but to represent the lesbian experience from the femme perspective as opposed
to the butch lesbian heroes of Rose Troche’s Go Fish of 1994 and Cheryl
Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman of 1996.
Peterson, who had worked with reparative
therapy in a prison clinic for sex offenders, wanted, moreover, to make a film
that would not only entertain with its satiric presentation of such conversion
therapy clinics, but that might make people angry enough to actually discuss
the issues the film raised.
Buoyed by the popular films of John
Waters and others who, setting their LGBTQ tales in a vague sense of the past
which mixed perspectives from the 1950s and early 1960s, Babbit and Peterson
determined to also set their illustrative fiction within the context of highly
theatrically-lit and colored-saturated sets that nodded to James Bigood’s Pink
Narcissus (created from 1963-1970) and embraced films such as Jacques
Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and his earlier heterosexual romance, The
Umbrellas of Cherbourg from 1964. In an odd sense, you might almost compare
production designer Rachel Kamerman’s, art director Macie Vener’s, and costume
designer Alix Friedberg’s transformation from a world of beige, tans, and
browns into a rainbow spectrum from baby blue to hot pink as a kind of 1990s
version of The Wizard of Oz’s radical shift from black-and-white to
Technicolor.
As Mollie Pyne wrote in her review on the blog AnotherMag:
“Sartorially, beige can be elegant and classic: camel or nude or mushroom. But to be beige is different, it is burdened with a singular meaning: boring. In the film, Megan’s parents wear various shades of beige and her friend Kimberly (Michelle Williams) is seen in an all-brown look. Jared (Brandt White), Megan’s boyfriend, wears a tan jacket over his football jersey with matching trousers; his car is tan with an equally subdued interior. The school’s lockers are brown, as well as everything inside Megan’s family home: furniture, decor, lighting. Within the first five minutes, beige is established as symbolically repressive. It covers or replaces the passionate and fiery red of cheerleading outfits or jock uniforms. Beige reflects the rigidity and sexual oppression being enforced by Megan’s family, friends, True Directions founder Mary J. Brown and society.”
Finally, the creators of this “fairy tale”
must have delighted in being able to cast drag queen RuPaul in a supposedly
“straight” role as a New Directions graduate—meaning he has been successfully
converted from gay to normative heterosexual sex—who is now that organization’s
scout and team leader; John Waters’ friend and regular actor, Mink Stole as
Nancy, the major character’s mother; Bud Cort, who played the iconic suicidal character
Harold in Hal Ashby’s 1971 film Harold and Maude, acting in this film as Megan’s
father; and the hunky, good-looking actor Eddie Cibrian as the unknowingly gay
Rock, son of New Directions leader Mary Brown.
Moreover, the creators’ “good intentions”
seemed to pay off. The film earned a substantial profit, despite its R-related
rating, and was ranked in 2011 as the 73rd highest all time
box-office selling LGBT-related films. Despite several negative reviews at the
time of its release, it has remained popular with LGBTQ audiences, even gaining
over the years since its release in popularity among gay, lesbian, bi-sexual,
and transsexual audiences.
All of which suggests to me that despite
the remarkable increase of LGBTQ films since 2000 that many of these do not
present the same complexity of thinking as did so many such films of the 20th
century, even if sometimes their expression of queerness was often muted and
even hidden. In a world of filmmakers such as Akerman, Almodóvar, Cocteau,
Denis, Fassbinder,
Haynes, Hitchcock,
Jarman, Pasolini, Téchiné, Visconti, and even lesser known figures I’ve written
about in these pages such as Christensen, Da Campo and Savel, a work such as
Jaimy Babbit’s is not only lightweight but laughable as an exemplar of substantial
filmmaking.
We can even grant that the work’s true
villain, Brown, has a notion of reality that ignores the logic of transitions
that occurred in the culture over the last several decades, but why the writer
and director focus on normative sexual values that were already eroding by the
late 1950s is a bit harder to explain. Even within the sort of “out of time”
logic in which these all-American figures exist, to have a young tofu-eating lover of Melissa
Etheridge, a trendy neighborhood gay and lesbian bar, alternative groups
offering homes to young rejected queer teens, a goth-like young lesbian figure,
and PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) meetings all inhabiting
the same space in which women are defined only by their abilities to cook, produce
and care for babies, clean the house, and wait hand and foot on their hubbies’
every whim appears more than a little anachronistic.
Yes, we know that even working women
today still are largely responsible for childcare, cooking, cleaning, and the
sexual satisfaction of their husbands, but not in the pop-up picture of reality
Babbit has cooked up. Today balancing those many roles may be even more complex
and difficult than they were in our stereotypical vision of the 1950s whipped
up by TV shows such as Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and
Father Knows Best, but that is precisely my point. Gender roles may
never have been so simply defined in reality as they are in Babbit’s picture. And
frankly, a more subtle and complex vision of how those roles are defined might
be of far greater interest dramatically than are the silly tableaux of But
I’m a Cheerleader. One need only to be reminded of Jan Oxenberg’s 1973 film
Home Movies, in which she describes and shows an old home movie of
herself as a cheerleader, where a bit like Megan, she clearly enjoys being with
other women, even fantasizing about them.
Yet, Oxenberg’s short is so very much more
convoluted. She suggests that she perhaps became a cheerleader precisely because
she was a lesbian, arguing that at the time maybe if she could be what women
were presumed to be on the outside she could still be a lesbian on the inside.
She feared that if she might become a lesbian on the outside, actually kissing
another woman in her cheerleading outfit it would shock the entire community. “I
mean, we weren’t even allowed to chew gum!” In other words, cheerleading was
not so much a pleasurable activity by a way of survival.
For Oxenberg, being a cheerleader was
not a mindless thing the way it is for Megan, but a complexly layered way of
playing a role in order to maintain just enough balance to remain within the
normative society until she could later escape. Babbit’s cheerleader has
apparently no self- knowledge, even needing to convinced by those who would “reform”
her that there is something within her that needs to be reformed. It appears
that Babbit’s cheerleader is such a stick figure that it’s not until she can
abandon her ideas of being a cheerleader that she can become a lesbian who’s
capable of love and still enjoy the cheers.
At
least the lesbians of Babbit’s film represent various “kinds” of Sapphic love,
whereas the males of But I’m a Cheerleader are all sissy boys forced in
their gender role-playing to fix automobile carburetors, run obstacle courses, and
shoot off guns. When was the last time any urban husband who didn’t work as a
mechanic was asked to fix the family auto carburetor, let alone change the car’s
oil? I would argue that most of the heterosexual males I know have never shot a
gun—although given the number of guns owned by males throughout the USA, I admittedly
must be acquainted with a special breed of heterosexuals. Even soldiers
sometimes have difficulties running obstacle courses, even if in Beau
travail Claire Denis makes it all seem like ballet.
What’s even more disturbing about Babbit’s and
Peterson’s work is the idea that a conversion therapy organization is truly
something which might simply be satirized out of existence. Anyone who has seen
Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased (2018), in which students are brutalized,
physically tortured, with one later committing suicide, will find it difficult
to laugh about even the milder but equally absurd tactics of New Directions.
Finally,
we have to ask precisely which audience was Babbit attempting to reach in this
propagandistic-like film. As Stephanie Zacharek, writing in Salon argues:
“And then, of course, there are the central messages of But I'm a Cheerleader, wrapped up in all that candy-colored coating: Be the person you were meant to be; don't let anyone try to change you; beware the strictures of society, particularly suburbia, that threaten to squelch who you are; no one should be bound by conventional notions of masculinity or femininity; and, of course, we must accept those who are different from us. If you haven't yet learned these lessons, or if you've never seen an actual starburst clock, you might get something out of But I'm a Cheerleader, but you're not likely to go in the first place. Babbit is only preaching to the converted.”
Similarly, NitrateOnline’s Cynthia Fuchs writes: “....the film leans too hard on its bubble-gummy look and non-scary send-ups of homophobes, making everything so huge that no one who is phobic might recognize himself in the film. ....Its most appreciative audience will likely be the converted (the film has been selected to close the gay and lesbian film festivals in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and appeals to teen girls, according to pre-release tests). But the audience who might benefit most from watching it either won't see the film or won't see the point.”
Ultimately, after watching this film we
remain in a kind of no-man’s-land in which we can neither believe in the
characters and gestures of its queer figures nor the film’s ridiculous sexually
normative beings. Even as Megan swoops down to save her lover Graham and Dolph
coaxes his gay lover Clayton away from “graduating” into the denial of their sexual
identities, to where are these “truly” saved beings hoping to escape,
particularly in a world in which you may not even be allowed to chew gum.
Los Angeles, November 15, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).
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