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.
At
the same time, their satiric take on such clinics as the New Directions
featured in the film could also demonstrate the absurdity of gender-defined
notions of behavior, which would help their cinematic audience to comprehend
that queerness in general, and lesbianism, in particular, came in a broad range
of behavior patterns, most of them incomprehensible to the narrow-minded
normative structured societies in which these individuals had been 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 s 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 Ackerman, 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 Saville, a
work such as Jaimy Babbit’s is not only lightweight but laughable as an
exemplar of substantial filmmaking.
There is no doubt that it’s great fun to see a story in which an
innocent cheerleader like Megan (Natasha Lyonne) fantasizes about her fellow
female cheerleader’s bodies while enduring the deep and clumsy tongue kisses of
her supposed jock boyfriend, and then, given that she has taken to eating tofu,
listening to the songs of Melissa
Etheridge, and has grown fond of Georgia O’Keefe’s gynecological flowers, is
sent away to a conversion therapy house, where she learns from the
authoritarian leader Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty) that she is not the normal
young enthusiast that she perceived herself to be, but a horrifying lesbian—all
on account of the fact that while her father temporarily was unemployed and her
mother became the household source of support. It’s even fun to become friends
with the gay boys trapped in New Directions for the very same reason. And it’s
so very pleasant to see the cheerleader finally in love with the seemingly
cynical, but actually quite vulnerable Graham Eaton (Clea DuVall) who is not as
fearful of being a lesbian as she is of losing her family inheritance if she
doesn’t reform. These, after all, are the standard tropes of LGBTQ coming of
age romances, despite the unlikely location in which these events transpire.
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 be
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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