So I flung myself headfirst into the new wonderful year of 2018. A new era where the inevitable cycle of human cruelty and personal failure were yet to eradicate my soul and feed the ashes to the monster of capitalism because, well, it hadn’t yet had the daylight to do the job. And you know what I thought I wanted to write about in review, this glimmering golden age? A movie I saw more than a fucking year ago. SEO, eat your heart out. SPOILERS KIDDIES.
The Guessing Game
Within the first “chapter” of Nakamura Shoko’s 2016 animated vignette-style film Doukyuusei (Classmates), nay, within the first few minutes before the title card even makes its appearance, a dilemma is presented as thus: is this person who I assume he is or is he someone else entirely? Here the “I” is slacker student Kusakabe Hikaru with his bleached blond hair, eyes drawn into a slope of a perpetual boredom, the shape of his body echoing his nature with the fullest slouch he can manage. He realizes, while in music class, that the boy sitting beside him isn’t actually singing along but just mouthing in pretense. This boy is Sajou Rihito, perfect posture and natural black hair. The stern and sullen honors student.
Doukyuusei is their teenage love story.
I love a gay love story and I love this film. And yes, I have to say “gay love story” because the “gay” part is extremely important. It is the most important thing. Growing up as a queer man in a conservative catholic setting, I was starved for the kind of validation in witnessing myself depicted in media that a film like Doukyuusei is capable of granting to me now a little too late in life. But you know, I had Latter Days, which isn’t such a bad film, if you can overlook how terrible it is.
Doukyuusei is a film that’s had a very strange reaction as far as I can tell, because most people praise it. Most people say that it’s a good film, beautifully animated, uniquely edited with its panelized transitions, well-written and lovable characters, no nonsense plot without any of the usual pitfalls of anime romance, and especially of Boys Love anime romance. Yet it always comes with this caveat. That Doukyuusei is a film that is not really about anything, an enjoyable but unremarkable romance. Everywhere from MAL reviews to blog posts to the infamous anime YTer Digibro’s top 10 of 2016 list has at least a brief mention of how the film doesn’t really extend into a greater metaphor about anything. I’m not sure if I can say that’s a wrong opinion, but I definitely feel it’s a wrong sentiment. A wrong way of looking at the film.
Because just in those first few minutes, before the plain title card fades into view, the movie is already doing something which is immensely fascinating and unique to me. It is setting seed for the depiction of the particularly queer feeling of not knowing. Not knowing, that is, whether romance with a person is even possible.
After returning to his classroom after the initial scene, Kusakabe chances upon Sajou practicing the song for their chorale. Surprised that his initial assumption proved wrong, Kusakabe offers Sajou, with that tinge of first interest, to be his singing coach. While teaching the honors student in a cute reversal of roles, he then begins to look for signs and ultimately forms the assumption that yes, Sajou is probably interested in men, but more importantly he’s working particularly hard at this song to impress their music teacher, the charismatic Hara-Sen (short for Hara Sensei). Of course, Kusakabe is wrong.
At the climax of the first vignette, entitled “Summer,” the seed planted grows tall, and Kusakabe has seen it turn all ways at this point, still not knowing what fruit it might be. But we know how this story goes.
The Guessing Game: Is he gay or straight? Is he with me because he really likes me or because I’m convenient? Because I’m pitiful? The first three vignettes of the film are all about this, and both of the main characters take turns being the “I” asking the questions, playing the game. Certainly there’s something universal about the feeling of waiting on love’s reciprocation, but Doukyuusei emphasizes how specifically and how strongly a young queer person feels this kind of doubt.
The doubt, not only of someone’s love, but of the possibility of love.
This is the thing I believe makes Doukyuusei really special. Yes, of course, I’ll sing praises to the director, the animators, the soundtrack, and so on. But what it has that a lot of other BL anime, a lot of other romance anime, a lot of other romance, queer or otherwise, worldwide doesn’t have, is this sensitivity to the specifics. What it has is realism.
Realism is Representation, Representation is Realism
It’s strange sometimes, how a little detail or even a particular focus on one thing over another can mark something as specifically existing or belonging to a certain subculture or domain. And how a break from detail, even just one, can cause a viewer to disassociate from something or someone that claims to represent an idea in which the viewer is deeply entrenched.
Take a Chicago hotdog.
No Chicagoan would ever accept a depiction of Chicago where the hotdogs had ketchup on them. Apparently. Does this sound ridiculous to me, a person who has never even been to Chicago? Yes, but I also understand the sense of identity that is created by little specific details like that. Doukyuusei is bursting with tiny details that straight people would probably ignore or explain an entirely different way. I’ve seen some people comment on how “chill” the characters are and how their sexuality is never a problem to the world at large.
Why then does Sajou feel uncomfortable at being referred to as “a different genre” by Kusakabe’s friends?
Why does Kusakabe avoid addressing his friends’ snarky comments regarding “his Sajou-kun?”
There are, of course, Hara-Sen’s comments about “guys like this.”
And most blatantly, a coming out scene where after months being snide about it, Kusakabe’s band mate asks him plainly whether or not Kusakabe and Sajou are dating. Kusakabe’s first comment after confirming is, revealingly, him gauging the outcome of a bold move.
Tiny details. The fact that Kusakabe’s close friends were afraid of asking him about his relationship for as long as it seemed to take. The way Sajou says no to an initial prompt to kiss in public. The taboo of their relationship while never being directly addressed, hovering casually over every breaking point in their teen drama. Whereas in so many other BL anime, you often instead see tropes, idealized romances of rough men forcing sexual encounters onto delicate innocents, an exaggerated almost parody of heteronormative traditional male and female roles hastily copied into a context where heterosexual women can consume them without hang-ups. In Doukyuusei, you see something more nuanced, often openly defiant of those stereotypical portrayals of gay men.
And perhaps if you’re not a person with lived experience of these, you’ll be blind to them completely. But I’m telling you here and now, the great thing about this movie for a person like me is that even the smallest lines and actions, even the silences, seem to have been thought through of what would be the truest for a person with this sexuality, in this situation, to say and do and be quiet about. Is it gonna be true to the experience of every gay man in the whole wide world? No. But it will be obvious to every gay man that the thought has been put in.
Which is why I think the other thing the film does is so important.
The Logistics of Love
This film is a model for a healthy relationship. It is a guide to queer romance. All love stories are models for relationships mind, at our youngest ages we are taught about princes saving princesses from dragons. We learn the sins of falling in love too quickly, the conflict of choosing between people to love, the ultimate desirability of that mythical thing we call true love. So many stories are guides to romance, so many books and movies and television shows, and they don’t take responsibility for the fact that that is what they are. Very few will acknowledge how burdened society is with the idea of romantic love. Think of how any two characters of opposite genders and the correct amount of narrative importance are presumed to eventually be romantically entwined. Think of how many follow this preordained pattern without question.
Subtly, imperceptibly, because many people grow up with models of romance that are largely either fictional or their parents, people are taught that love exists only in certain models and that any deviation from those is wrong or false.
Heterosexual people become angry at the very idea of their partners becoming friends with a person of the opposite gender. Because in so many stories, people of opposite genders interacting can only mean one thing.
Bisexual people are told that they’re just in the closet. Polyamorous people are often mistaken for nymphomaniacs. Because in so many stories, love can only exist between two people. There is no room for even the possibility of other attractions, except as a tragedy.
I still hear people saying incredibly stupid things like “The friendzone is real,” and “forever alone,” both of which stem from a deep sense of entitlement and artificial dissatisfaction. The stories have told people that romantic love is the most important thing in the world, the most satisfying thing, and they’ve said that if you’re a good person (and who doesn’t believe themselves to be a good person at heart?), then you absolutely deserve to have love, right now, delivered to your doorstep like an Amazon package.
There is a presumption that people know inherently, instinctively, what love is like. So many stories say that people know when they know, like divine inspiration. But the truth is many people don’t, or at least their actions indicate that that’s not the case. They try to fit themselves into molds of relationships that can only exist in the movies. Maybe their parents should have raised them better. Maybe schools should offer better sex ed courses. I’ll let someone else debate on that, I just want to word vomit over this dumb anime movie.
Doukyuusei doesn’t really subvert and deconstruct all of the bullshit. If you’re looking for an anime that does, try Revolutionary Girl Utena. But what Doukyuusei does do, as a story, is try to be responsible in the fact that since it is presenting the romance of the characters as ideal (not to mention as the thing which is supposed to be most viscerally appealing about the film), it has to show that such a love doesn’t happen because of destiny or the magic of true love, but because the two characters stumble and struggle trying to make their relationship work. In real ways, not unnatural obstacles like misunderstanding words and then not asking follow-up questions.
I have never seen another film dedicate a whole 12 minutes, 1/5th of its 60 minute runtime, to one of the characters figuring out the concept of consent, figuring out that he has to ask before kissing the person he likes.
I also can’t say I’ve seen too much media that depicts taking a break from a relationship as being healthy and important to being able to re-evaluate yourself and see your relationship for what it is, rather than as some kind of sign of degradation, or worse, as a joke at the expense of one of the two romantic lead’s pathetic qualities.
The film works in these very subtle ways to explore how a relationship between these two people could really work. In my opinion, not really with a didactic intent, but it has a kind of “instruction through experience” feature to it anyway. Simply by being an excellent love story, it teaches people, gay or straight, how two young men can fall in love. For lonely queer people who cannot even imagine the possibility of being loved, this is a lifesaving lesson. That in itself is so amazing, but so much of the film is really just the two characters trying to figure out how to make things work given their situations in life.
The film’s final chapter is dedicated to the greater dilemma of one of the boys trying for college and the other having no plan at all. In a way that’s what makes the film’s romance so rewarding, that there is no sense of “true love” but instead just two dopes who like each other a lot trying to make their way through the complications of a real life.
When people ask for representation, they are asking to be seen. For their stories to be told in a way that treats them like human beings, not perfect, but real. Many of them are asking for the space to be able to tell their stories themselves, space that is often taken up by people who tell the stories everyone knows. Yet often I see “representation” misconstrued as inclusion for the sake of inclusion, the nagging of some invisible grandmother to bring your cousin you don’t really like along to play. I mean, that’s a polite way to say it. No-one sends their grandmother or their cousin death threats after all, but playing a woman in a remake of some trash eighties film can get a whole army of assholes sicked on you, these days.
There’s a very good tweet by Mary Robinette Kowal (yes I’m quoting a tweet) that succinctly described the expectations and the reality of representation as thus:
“It’s not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it’s about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.”
Representation is a kind of realism and realism is a kind of representation. An attention to detail, a focus on making characters who exist in a particular identity more than a flagship for a label, a serious act of empathizing with someone enough to put effort into the imagination of their dilemmas. Faithfulness, not to preconceived notions of the mundane world, but to the reality of someone’s personhood. These are what make someone feel represented. These are what remind people that they are people who exist in the world, not abnormal and not forgotten, alienated, made into side characters in someone else’s life.
I struggle to end on this particular note because I know there are a lot of objections.
There are many films that are nothing close to any kind of reality like say, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which still strike a chord with certain kinds of people. The shocking absurdity of Pink Flamingos, the theatrical drama of Torch Song Trilogy. Movies that capture something abstract, a feeling, rather than a specific reality. I love many of these films also.
There are many many people, shades of queer so different from mine, who will not feel represented by a film like Doukyuusei, will watch it and still struggle to imagine themselves into love of the kind the film depicts. That’s very fair, but as I said earlier, I think many of these will recognize that the effort has been put in, and hopefully empathize with a story that is not exactly theirs but bears a shape that is not as dissimilar as one could have believed.
I guess what it boils down to is that Doukyuusei is a simple, elegant love story, often tender and sometimes corny, almost always earnest, down to earth, and ultimately, just a good film about two boys who fall in love, who are capable of falling in love and being happy. Yet people say it’s unremarkable.
In a world where a film about a grown man manipulating the feelings of a queer teenager and then breaking his heart without a second thought, banishing him to a lifelong unhappiness (at least in the book, in the film he apparently gets rewritten into a straight man for a terrible future sequel) is somehow the LGBTQ film darling of the year, described in every major news outlet as something akin to “a summer romance” and on the slate to win some of that sweet Oscar immortality, how is Doukyuusei not remarkable? How is the ability to imagine happy endings for people who have been denied those endings in reality for centuries, unremarkable?
I grew up lonely and unhappy and queer in the late 90s and early 2000s, the golden age of romcoms, and if Adam Sandler had made a film where he fell in love with a man who had a memory disorder that caused him to relive the same day over and over, it would have meant everything to me. It was difficult to imagine a real happiness for myself, a real love. When all the models of love you’ve ever seen don’t have room for people like you, that’s just the way it is. I clung to whatever I could get.
Doukyuusei… arrived too late for me, as I said. I have had a much better imagination for a long time now. But for someone else out there, it could be different. A professor once told me that all gay stories were about loneliness. I agreed, but I also thought, after some time: they are, but they don’t have to be. Not forever.
