Queer Thought: The Kids Are All Right, All White, and Just Like You
On Saturday, I took another look at “The Kids Are All Right,” the acclaimed 2010 comedy directed by Lisa Cholodenko. It was released to fairly universally positive reviews and was showered with awards and nominations, including Oscar nods for Best Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, and Best Picture.
It’s an enjoyable film, to be sure, anchored by a nimble, more than competent cast. Annette Bening is raw and wary-eyed as ever as Nic, a middle age doctor in a long term, committed relationship with Jules, played with an awkward intensity by Julianne Moore. Together, via an unknown sperm donor, they have to two children: the overachieving Joni and the athletically inclined Laser, played by Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson respectively. Joni is on her way to college. Laser plays on a number of sports teams at school. Nic is a doctor who is maybe too fond of red wine, and Jules is trying to get her landscaping business off the ground, after years of playing the stay-at-home-mom to Nic’s breadwinner. In the opening scenes we see the family unit at home, having dinner, and it’s clear we are supposed to look past the gender business at something more obvious: they are, of course, a family like any other. Nic bothers Joni about sending out thank-you cards for her recent graduation party. Jules expresses concern about the quality of Laser’s best friend. They argue harmlessly. It’s clear they all love each other.
Newly eighteen, it is now possible for Joni to access the information on her biological father — the sperm donor — and she does so. She shares this information with Laser and, without their mothers’ knowledge, they arrange a meeting. Their bio dad is Paul, a furry, playfully coifed man-child who rides a motorcycle, wears leather cuff bracelets and owns a trendy farm-to-table type restaurant. He’s handsome and scruffy, a middle-aged hipster version of an easy rider, and we’re meant to view him as a non-conformist: he’s not married, he’s done several different jobs, he has a casually sexual relationship with the hostess at his restaurant. Paul is the film’s antagonist, an interloper, as Nic calls him late in the film, a sharp threat to Nic’s carefully constructed, lovingly maintained nuclear unit. First he comes after her kids and then, in a disappointingly cliche plot maneuver (more on this later), he begins an affair with Jules.
The film, like too many Hollywood offerings, has a race problem — or, more accurately, a lack of race problem. The fact that Paul’s hostess, Tanya (played by Yaya DaCosta, who will star as Whitney Houston in the Angela Bassett-helmed Lifetime movie of the late singer’s life), is the film’s sole black character should not go unconsidered, as this fact, coupled with Paul’s sexual relationship with her, is clearly meant to show us two things: 1) that Paul does not reflect the status-quo, and 2) that Paul is the antagonist here. If a driving factor in the film’s message is that same-sex couples are perfectly capable of engaging in institutions and traditions typically reserved for heterosexual people (and surely it is: the film was released just as discriminatory marriage laws began crumbling all over the country; the film, by virtue of its gayness, is inextricably tied to its politics, too perfectly aligned with the “movement” as a quiet, non-subversive “protest film”), then Nic and Jules and their family are the representation of gays doing that, and Paul is the challenge to that ideal. Nic and Jules and Joni and Laser are so white they practically glow. Joni has the hair of an angel. They are so white. Paul is white, too, but he’s olive-complected from so much time in the sun. Paul plays with the darkness, quite literally; it is smeared all over him. Of course there’s nothing wrong with a white film character being sexually involved with a black film character; however, when the interracial aspect of the relationship is exploited to highlight the white character’s “evilness,” there’s definitely an issue. That these implications likely never occurred to the filmmakers is another issue. The only other non-white character is the Hispanic gardener under Jules’s employ, and he’s presented as a bumbling idiot with broken English and silly allergies that run contrary to his profession.
The film has other problems as well. Namely, it’s blatant push for gay conservatism. Despite it’s technical and artistic merits — of which there are many — the film succeeds most as an advertisement for gay heteronormativity. The film tries so hard to present Nic and Jules as “a couple like any other” that it practically straight-washes all their gayness away. They argue, but they also cuddle together on the couch in front of the television. They have sex, but it’s tepid and waning in the stereotypical way of longstanding couples. They worry about their children and fumble attempts at talking to them about sex. Pay attention, Straight America: We’re Just Like You. The film goes to excruciating links to show us this.
This is not a bad thing, necessarily — certainly there are gay people in the world living lives that subscribe to hetero-sexist ideals, in this way and in a plethora of others— except that the the attempt to normalize gayness here is so blatant and overt it’s gross, and detrimental because such tactics are never directed at gay people themselves but rather at straight people who might be resistant to the idea of equal rights for gays, or uncomfortable dealing with gay subject matter, or even innocently ignorant of gay lives. There are already so few pieces of quality entertainment directed at gay people. It’s not necessary that what representations do exist are too constantly pandering toward heterosexual interests and viewpoints. Consider that the only friends of Jules and Nic’s we meet are a straight couple. Consider that the film plays into sick stereotypes — straight fantasies, really — of lesbian women who really just want a big dick in their pussies, re: Jules’s affair with Paul. It’s not very likely that a lesbian of Julianne Moore’s level of attractiveness, if she wanted to have an affair, would have a difficult time finding another lesbian with whom to do it. Also consider her almost euphoric joy when she is first confronted with Paul’s (ostensibly large) penis, and, in the ridiculous montages of their coitus, her ecstatic glee at having him inside of her. Furthermore: consider how the most graphic of the film’s sex scene are of a heterosexual nature.
Indeed, Paul’s positioning as the film’s villain could have been an interesting examination of the encroachment of heteronormativity on gay lives and gay families and the threat contained therein, but the film is too concerned with sterilizing gayness for the benefit of straight moviegoers for this to happen.
And yet. The film was heralded by gay critics and organizations as “important,” and won a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film. It is not outstanding. It is well-made, well written, directed with tenderness and compassion. The performances are universally sound. Bening especially is a marvel as Nic, with all of her nervous edges, her paranoia and grief, and Moore does shine in a few scenes. But it’s depiction of gay lives is antiseptic at best and almost vehemently exclusive. Obviously a movie about an upper class white lesbian couple is going to purport a certain and very specific version of gay life, and certainly positive representation, however exclusive, should not be taken for granted. However, The Kids Are All Right too clearly articulates the ways in which the visibility of gay people in the United States is too often reserved for gays who fit the mold espoused by the movie’s apparent ethos and the overarching preference of the current gay rights movement: white people with nice homes and professional jobs striving to be “just like you.”
