Two Gay Movies
A straight cis dude looks at Bottoms alongside Red, White, & Royal Blue
August brought us two very different queer movies. One, Red, White, & Royal Blue is a standard Hallmark-style romance between the son of the president and the Prince of Wales. The other, Bottoms, is a balls-to-the-wall high school lesbian Fight Club that evokes the chaos of Airplane!
Individually, they’re both interesting and worthy of discussion, but taken together, they offer two different approaches to queer cinema. I have a strong preference for Bottoms (::giggle::), but it’s not like Red, White, & Royal Blue doesn’t have its place.
Let’s take a look.
Bottoms
Now seems as good a place as any to point out that I’m a white, heterosexual, cis-male in his late 30s. Neither of these movies is necessarily meant for me. That being said, Bottoms is the most fun I’ve had at the movies so far this year. And, as a reminder, this is the year of not only Barbie, but John Wick 4 and Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse.
The story involves two queer high school nerds, played by Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri and, from the very first scene, it’s clear we’re going to enjoy the time we’re spending with them. Through events too complicated to explain (and that don’t make a whole lot of sense anyway — it’s not the kind of movie where logic matters), they end up creating a fight club at their school in order to get in the pants of their respective crushes, both cheerleaders.
What ensues is a parody of high school movies like Heathers or American Pie or Superbad or Book Smart, though that doesn’t truly do justice to the kind of movie we’re dealing with here. It follows the standard structure of these movies to a tee and, somehow, I had no idea where it was going next.
This movie is a complete mess and I don’t even say that as a criticism. It’s just a fact. Does the plot make sense? Yeah, enough. In the same way that the plot to Blazing Saddles made sense, but the plot is just an excuse for a series of very funny scenes with a frantic energy that left me completely exhausted by the end, mostly from laughing so much, but also from trying to keep up with what was going on.
It helps to see this kind of movie with a big, excited audience that gets the humor, though I imagine if it’ll find its way to a cult status if word of mouth doesn’t manage to spread fast enough for people to see it in theaters.
That being said, as far as a message goes? I’m not sure this movie has one. Is it feminist? Kind of, but not explicitly. I’m sure someone could find meaning in some of this, and maybe some of it is even intentional, but nothing jumps out as particularly profound to me.
Is it about gay pride? Not at all. The queerness is almost incidental to the movie while also being an intrinsic part of it. From the word go, the characters are openly lesbian to everyone and they’re accepted as such. Even the slurs other students have written on their locker don’t come off as hate speech for them being gay, but for them being ugly losers (the movie’s words — both lead actresses are Hollywood ugly, which is to say not remotely ugly at all).
But… this movie is not about their queerness. It’s just a part of who they are.
This is similar to director Emma Seligman’s previous movie, the brilliant Shiva Baby, where Sennott plays a sex worker, but the role is written in such a way that she’s a person who happens to be a sugar baby.
Other than Sennott in the lead role and the fact that the movie is very, very funny, though, there’s not a lot in common between Bottoms and Shiva Baby. Seligman’s avoided the sophomore slump by going in a completely different direction, and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.
A final brief note: the male actors in this movie are given very little to work with. That’s fine. How many movies have we seen where women are little more than sexy lamps?
That being said, Marshawn Lynch, as the girl’s teacher and club advisor, steals nearly every scene he’s in. He’s a former football player, but has an effortless ease to his performance and a real knack for what feels like improvisation (he was also featured on Murderville, a Netflix show I wanted to like more than I did, where he managed to keep up alongside Will Arnett, no easy task).
I doubt it’ll happen (for any number of reasons), but he’s deserving of a best supporting actor nomination for his role.
Red, White, & Royal Blue
Now counter that with Red, White, & Royal Blue.
This is a movie about queerness. We have not one, but two characters who each need to come out to their family, and one of whom needs to do it twice. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The plot is very simple. The First Son (Taylor Zakhar Perez) has a chance encounter with the Prince of Wales (Nicholas Galitzine, who, incidentally, plays the very straight jock football player in Bottoms) that goes sour and, though enemies at first, they fall in love in standard romantic fashion.
Now, before I get in too deep with the main characters, I want to draw attention to the role of the president, played by Uma Thurman with a ridiculous Texas drawl that was impossible not to love. Every moment she was on screen was fantastic and, indeed, my favorite moment in the movie involves her reaction in the scene where her son comes out as bisexual to her.
I want to highlight her because, honestly, there wasn’t much else that I liked about the movie.
It was predictable and standard, but also hokey and absurd. Logical questions like “Where is the secret service in all of this?” or “Does the president ever do any work?” remain unanswered, though the degree to which this will affect you probably depends largely on your affection for the genre.
I would argue this is a bad movie, but I saw Meg 2: The Trench this summer—a movie about a giant shark with a whopping 29% score on Rotten Tomatoes—and I enjoyed every second of it (in 3D no less!), so I’m in a sugar glass house here and not about to start throwing stones.
Especially because I can see who might enjoy this movie. I don’t know how similar this is to the book it’s based on, but the feel it evokes is very similar to what I’ve gotten from the romance novels I’ve read. This is a fantasy world where the stakes aren’t especially high and there’s never any real doubt in how things will turn out.
It’s the comfort food of movies and if it doesn’t accurately represent the presidency (which, to be clear, it doesn’t), I don’t think fans of the genre will be too bothered by that fact.
The two leads have reasonably good chemistry. I don’t personally think they’re especially good looking, but by the end I did like them and want them to be together (honestly, I think part of this is because the characters at the end do not resemble the way they act at the beginning, but I’m probably being too critical here).
With a PG rating, this could have been a nice movie for the whole family, but the sex scenes are probably a bit too graphic for young children, though not nearly as graphic as the steamy scenes that probably appeared in the book. If these two characters were straight and there were one or two fewer f-bombs, this probably could have gotten away with a hard PG-13, but as it stands it’s rated R. I feel like if I had a teenage child, or maybe even a pre-teen, I wouldn’t have any problem showing them this movie (Bottoms, however, is probably for teens already in high school).
Why We Need Both
I don’t think you need to read very closely between the lines to know which of the two movies I enjoyed more. And, yes, if I had to suggest you see only one of them, I would almost certainly (and strongly) recommend Bottoms.
But, of course, you don’t need to watch only one of them. Just as I did, you can see both. Again, I’m not really into that kind of Hallmark romantic comedy, but if you are, there’s a good chance you’ll eat Red, White, & Royal Blue up. And if your sense of humor isn’t aligned with mine, maybe you’ll hate Bottoms. It’s not for everybody.
That’s the point, though. Similar to how I felt about Barbie (which was a “girl’s movie” without being a “chick flick”), I think we need to give our demographics more range. Not every gay movie needs to be a coming out story. Not every lesbian movie needs to be a searing historical drama with a bummer of an ending.
Just take a “regular” movie and make it gay. I promise, it will be more interesting as a result.
Before Lana and Lilly Wachowski made The Matrix, they made a smaller movie called Bound, which is relatively unseen, but I cannot recommend enough (I think it’s my favorite thing they’ve done to date). It’s a shame it’s somewhat hard to find on streaming, but it’s well worth the rental price.
This movie is a slick and stylish mid-90s noir, with two leads who have crackling chemistry with each other. And they happen to be two women.
Before filming began, the studios insisted that one of the characters should be changed to a man, but the Wachowskis said they didn’t want to do that because they’d seen that movie a million times before.
So stop being cowardly, Hollywood! Give us a bisexual James Bond. Let Captain Marvel be a lesbian. Don’t just peter around queerness in animated movies like you did in Strange World: give us a gay, male Disney princess.
With all the politics around sports right now, can we have a version of the Rocky story with a trans man in the lead. What about a rom-com with aces? How cool would that be?
None of this needs to be over the top or cloying. Let these characters be flawed and imperfect, just as you would make a “standard” cis-male straight lead. And ensure their sexuality or gender identity is only a part of who they are instead of the entire characterization.
And, while you’re at it, maybe actually pay your writers and actors decent living wages.
