Mainstream: The Future of Queer Cinema?

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I love Rowan's nuanced takes on topics. Personally I struggle to watch Drag Race because of the competitive nature of the show, and the drama-seeking production. If the UK managed to make it more of a community-based showcase of drag that would be awesome, but I don't know if they can sell that idea :')

👍︎︎ 14 👤︎︎ u/Maegaranthelas 📅︎︎ Jun 02 2019 🗫︎ replies
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- Earlier this year it was announced that "RuPaul's Drag Race" was coming to the UK. With the global success of the franchise, it was hopping across the pond. - Hey, this is RuPaul, and guess what, UK? We are casting for "Drag Race." That's right, we are looking for queens, we are looking for showgirls for the UK! God save the Queen! - So we're going there. Yeah, five years ago I did a television show over there called "Celebrity Big Brother," and the reason I did that show, nobody really knew much about "RuPaul's Drag Race," it wasn't on really the radar over there, and I did it to get attention for our TV show. - The announcement has highlighted a schism between the drag world of reality TV and the drag world of, well, reality. In the days following the announcement, on social media and in publications, including LGBT and mainstream ones, there were people voicing their reservations. In a Guardian article entitled, "The UK drag scene is too diverse "for RuPaul to turn into a race for ratings," British-Iraqi drag performer Amrou Al-Kahdi was worried about the discrepancy between the very competitive winner-takes-all world of "Drag Race" and the more community-focused world of UK drag. It also discussed the difficulty of balancing the capitalist mentality of "Drag Race" and the mentality of the British scene, which often seeks to directly avoid that. And these aren't criticisms that came just when the British show was announced. This is something that people have been criticising about "RuPaul's Drag Race" for some years now. Writer Brian Moylan talks about the idea that when you have something which is so phenomenally successful as "Drag Race" has been and in such increasing degrees, you have a lot of people who aren't within the community who's being portrayed who want to watch. That in itself obviously isn't a problem. But then when they're invited onto the show and into that space and feel entitled to the space, without really necessarily appreciating it fully, just what they've seen portrayed on this TV show, it kind of gets a little bit sticky. He gives as an example in the article the honestly so cringe-worthy it's going to pain me to say this sentence that Vanessa Hudgens, one of the guest judges utters, "I'm so into voguing right now, so that gave me life." (upbeat dance music) - [Vanessa On Recording] I'm so into voguing right now, so that gave me life! And that jump, it was just insane! It was so good! Oh my god, the speed at which you hit that shablam, I was like (squeals)! You really brought it! - The Hudgens voguing seems to be a trend which is just so hot right now. In the article, Moylan talks about the differences between the show originally when it was something a lot smaller with an avid gay fanbase, and the way it's transitioned into mainstream media, arguing that increasing reliance on things like petty feuds meant that the show had changed in some way. The UK is a country with drag in the foundations of our performance bases, from Shakespeare to panto. We're likely to have seen a drag performer before the age of 10. a lot of them pride themselves in being the home not just of cis male performers, but also drag kings, female drag queens, non-binary performers, and acts that are a range of styles from biting humour to political commentary to weird performance art. There's also been some concern that the particular kinds of challenges that are the staple of "RuPaul's Drag Race" won't necessarily match onto the reality of the UK community. Especially after RuPaul's previous comments on the scope of drag, that "drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony "once it's not men doing it," even if he later apologised for the remarks. Dragpunk, a drag artist collective from Birmingham, said of the UK scene that it's "at odds with the fame-driven commoditization "that 'Drag Race' promotes." And it's no doubt that "Drag Race" is now unavoidably tied to fame. Not necessarily because money is flooding in and raising all ships, as it were, but because the money is being diverted specifically to "Drag Race" girls rather than the community in general. Joe Jeffreys, a historian of drag at the New York University, has said this about the show. "It's only made opportunities for those contestants. "If it was the true golden age of drag, "I would see mass audiences flocking to the drag shows "at my local bars, but they're flocking to events "featuring contestants from the show, "but when you get back down to that localised "gay bar drag show, the doors aren't breaking down yet." Now some people are hopeful that the UK version of the show can shine some light onto the UK drag scene, but even some of them have reservations. Margo Marshal, a UK drag performer, has said, "I do worry that it could change people's expectations "of drag and people might dismiss artists who don't conform "to the narrow 'Drag Race' beauty standards, "and so the diversity of the scene might decrease." Now this decrease might be because people are only willing to pay for certain acts, so the ones that aren't are sort of priced out of performing in terms of professional shows. But it might also be that they decide to change the way in which they do drag in order to conform to continue to have a career. Charlene, a New York drag queen, has talked about the effect this is already having in America. "There's this dance you do on Instagram "and way you network yourself. "We're like, in Toy Story, the aliens in that machine "waiting for the claw to pick them up. "We have this stagnancy of queens doing the dance "rather than focusing on their art." For a lot of people, "Drag Race" is their first introduction to drag at all. And for a lot of people, that can't be overlooked, the idea that it's bringing to the mainstream something which otherwise wouldn't be seen, that it's increasing visibility, maybe increasing acceptance. And that's something to be celebrated. But I think while praising "Drag Race" for the good it does just by existing, we can also acknowledge some of the issues that people have with it or the worries that people have about it. So, the idea that it only presents a certain subsection of the drag community, and therefore the idea that it doesn't reflect the reality of drag, and therefore the potential damage that it does to real-world drag performers. The good and the bad can exist alongside each other when we talk about a show like this. "Drag Race" is there for the perfect example of an LGBT TV show which is made with the best intentions in mind, and which may even be heralded as a bastion of representation by some people, but which in terms of its impact isn't necessarily having an entirely positive effect, or portraying a particularly representative queer reality, even when a lot of straight and cis people view the show as doing exactly that. This conversation about the future of "Drag Race" is a sort of microcosmic view of the wide issues around LGBT movies or TV shows as queer representation moves further into the mainstream. And it's this future that I wanna talk about in today's video, in the first of a three-part series about the mainstream future of queer cinema. So, what exactly mainstream cinema is is a little bit difficult to pin down at the moment with the changing media landscape that we are currently living in. But for the purposes of this video and for me, I'm gonna talk about it as the idea that's it got to do one of three things. It has to be one, produced by a major film studio, two, get a general release in cinemas, or three, be produced and prioritised by a streaming service and have a significant marketing budget pushing it towards audiences. In this way, it's probably useful to note at this point that we can see mainstream as sort of synonymous with capitalism, with vast sums of money being pushed onto it. And so as a little background thing to be thinking about during this video, it's probably useful to just have in mind the impact that that kind of large investment of money might have on the content that is produced, as well as how and who it is distributed towards. So when you first heard my introduction about "Drag Race," you probably had some kind of instinctive thoughts about what I was saying and the criticisms that I was talking about. So you might be thinking, actually, you know what, overall it's doing a really good job of increasing representation, and that is gonna cause a trickle down effect, we don't have to have perfect representation right now, and what's important is that it is potentially increasing acceptance in the wider community. Or you might think, do we really care about appeasing straight and cis people with these kind of shows? They should be by and for gay people, and if they enjoy the show, great, but it shouldn't be for them. Or you might have thought, who cares, it's a show with gay people and it's not that deep. And all those thoughts are informed by your personal internal answer to the question, what is LGBT+ media for? So there are four main angles that people tend to be coming towards when answering this question. And it's important to note that these aren't necessarily conscious answers that are clear and precise and that they've had to actually work through and think about. Sometimes they're just kind of instinctive. So the first angle is that people who see it as a way of increasing acceptance in straight and cis audiences. So these people might favour entirely palatable or respectable LGBT portrayals. It's quite difficult to try and increase acceptance in a homophobe if your gay character is acting just like the homophobe fears they will. So these portrayals might skew into the kind of sticky world of respectability politics. Now I've talked at length about respectability politics in another video that I'll link in the description, but essentially it's the idea that marginalised people need to act in a certain way to be seen as respectable to not be marginalised. Kind of putting the onus on marginalised people to act in a certain way so they aren't like "those" gay people, or like "those" black people. Whatever it is. And the view that if only that minority acted in the proper way, they wouldn't be marginalised. It kind of puts the onus on those marginalised people rather than society at large to accept them as they are. So if we're trying to increase acceptance, do we say we only want these people who conform to this kind of acceptable idea? You know, do we say that we don't want any HIV-positive gay men unless they got it while in a committed relationship? Do we say that we don't want any overtly political LGBT characters because it might be too controversial? People who want to use representation to increase acceptance might also be in favour of using LGBT characters to explain LGBT concepts or identities within the narrative of the film or show itself. There's also a kind of risk here of it becoming didactic, that this character is there only to teach and not necessarily is a well rounded character in their own right. We can also see media of this type will sometimes employ what can be quite damaging tropes that they think might increase acceptance. So a really obvious example of this is the Bury Your Gays trope, the idea of killing off characters often to really further a straight character's storyline. So sometimes it teaches them an important lesson about the true pure nature of love, or makes them appreciate what they have. And that can be seen as something that's really positive, 'cause it's like, well, if we're saying that gay love is beautiful, then surely that's positive representation. But when it's all about trying to get straight people to be accepting, it kind of prioritises them over the gay characters and audiences themselves. This idea, the idea that LGBT-focused media is kind of used to increase acceptance is obviously very mainstream-aligned, right? It's super accessible, you don't have to have any queer community knowledge to understand it. It's extremely non-offensive to straight and cis audiences, it's very, very easy to align that with the mainstream. So the second angle is people who think that LGBT-focused media should be to portray queer lives and experiences. This can kind of fall into two camps. So the first are very sort of neutral about it. It's just because LGBT exist in society, and therefore portray them at the percentage that they are in the population. You know, there's no thoughts either way other than the idea that LGBT people exist in the world. If we're gonna be portraying the world, we should portray them. The other kind of people who fall into this camp have more of an idea of the inherent value of LGBT stories and telling them for LGBT people, and cis and straight people are a kind of secondary concern. So questions around this angle would be things like, what identities within the LGBTQ+ spectrum are you representing? How accurate are they to these queer experiences? Because you can absolutely have the best of intentions in terms of showing people's lives on screen, but they won't necessarily be reflective if you haven't done the work behind the scenes. And also this question of how marketable is it to the general public? Is it something that realistically is going to be made? Is it necessarily going to be able to be mainstream in terms of the amount of money that people are willing to put into it if they think that the audience is going to be a smaller subsection of the population? And is it necessarily going to be something that straight and cis audiences will get or be invested in? So here we can see that these first two angles aren't necessarily two completely separate things. Right? So, if you're someone who wants to prioritise LGBT audiences, but you are hampered by the practicalities of trying to make the film, it might be that you say, you know what? The history of the LGBT community is extremely important. We ought to make a film about Stonewall. Hmm, but if we want to make audiences kind of be able to get into the story, maybe we go down the route of creating a protagonist that falls into that more acceptable or palatable idea of, you know, for example, a white cis gay man. We know how well that went. So these kind of films can be mainstream-aligned or not. It really just depends on kind of behind the scenes stuff in terms of who's funding it, who's writing it, whether it engages with LGBT tropes and in what way. And these kind of external variables about money. So the third angle is people who believe that queer cinema should allow queer people to tell their own stories. And this is how a lot of quintessential classic queer cinema is viewed, but it does run into its own issues and problems. For one thing, who is telling the story, right? Is it the writer, is it the director, is it the actors? Do all of them have to be queer for it to kind of fit into this idealised version of what queer cinema is? So the interesting thing is, you know, within the last year, we have seen this unified kind of marginalised storytelling in a very mainstream way in the film "Black Panther." You know, that film had a black cast, black director, black writers, as well as black production designer, black costume designer. And the story itself that it was telling wasn't this kind of externalised story that we might be used to in terms of the portrayal of black people in mainstream film which is often quite this externalised idea of, okay, we're gonna tell a story about black people, so we have to tell a story about racism and slavery because it has to interact with white society in some way. "Black Panther" goes deliberately out of its way to avoid those kind of cliche conversations, instead looking at conversations within the black community, looking at the different viewpoints and experiences of people who are black Africans and black African-Americans, for example. What would that look like for a queer film? I don't think we've had a mainstream example of a queer film that has that level of queer people within the production and the cast before. I don't know what that would look like. With this third angle we also need to ask about the idea of, you know, if we're saying that queer people should be telling their own stories, what do we mean by their own stories? There are so many different identities within the LGBTQ+ spectrum. So should we have an all-trans team on a trans-focused film? What will someone just within the community do if we have at least some people present? Now to some people the idea of gathering together an all-trans production team would seem slightly over the top and ridiculous. But actually for some other people it seems like quite a good idea, especially when we look at the mistakes and missteps that have been made by the film industry full of cis people when trying to make trans films. So this third angle, the idea of queer people telling their own stories, has not traditionally been mainstream. It could be, but ultimately it's how we normally see sort of indie queer cinema. And finally, honourable mention to the fourth angle, the chaotic neutrals in the world, who are just kind of like, does it have to be for anything? I don't care either way. Make every film gay, make no films gay, it doesn't matter, who cares? And so when we look at what a film is being made for, we can see how that changes its relationship to the mainstream in terms of how accessible it is, how available it is, and also how legible it is to a general population. So why would people be interested in making LGBTQ+ cinema mainstream? Well, it has a lot of positives. Mainstream cinema is very accessible, and it can potentially increase LGBTQ+ acceptance through that accessibility. It can also help get recognition for LGBTQ+ figures and histories into the mainstream in a way that we don't necessarily have within our education system, for example. And there's obviously the question of the availability of more money and more funding within mainstream productions that means that the overall quality is potentially going to be better. But these pros aren't a given. For example, it's very possible to have a mainstream film with LGBTQ+ characters that won't do anything to increase acceptance. And some of these pros also come with conditions, so although there might be an increase in money and funding, who is that money and funding going to and what for? There are also potential negatives to films being mainstream. Again, these aren't certainties, but they are possibilities. So first, we have sort of death by crowd-pleasing. So either this means that you have to have your portrayal be kind of acceptable or palatable enough, even if it compromises on real LGBT histories and figures in order to appeal to a mass audience. Or alternatively, and this is often the case in comedies, becoming an exaggerated sideshow for an audience which is well-versed in stereotypes. It may lack nuance in terms of being accessible to as many people as possible, in particular having to fit into the idea of the Hollywood mould of narrative or morality. It may also overlook the most marginalised or least sellable people within our community, especially if they're wanting a return on the kind of big budgets that are put into projects like that. So if we look at these kind of pros and cons of why people might want something to be mainstream, and then we also look at those four different angles in terms of what LGBT films are for, we can see how and why people might decide that it's sort of worth the risk or the investment. If you prioritise the idea that LGBTQ+ representation should be increasing acceptance in cis and straight audiences, then being mainstream is vital to get that message out there. If you think these films should be for queer people then it doesn't necessarily have to be mainstream. If you're going looking for it, there are tonnes of lists of, you know, amazing queer cinema, best queer cinema of this year that you can dig into. You can go into the LGBT tab on Netflix. You can look at kind of distribution companies that specialise in queer cinema, so Peccadillo Pictures, for example, in the UK. So on the surface, that seems pretty obvious. However it isn't necessarily as simple as that. What about closeted and questioning people? Especially young people or people living with potentially homophobic families? If they share a Netflix account with their entire family, you can view their viewing history. How do they know that their parents aren't going to see that they've watched one of those films? You might wonder how you're going to explain a DVD coming in the post to your parents who want to know what you've bought. Potentially, going to see a mainstream film in the cinema won't invite as many questions. And maybe the discussion around it may open up acceptance within your family. So potentially for those queer people, being able to go to the cinema for something which is readily mainstream available will invite less questions. And actually, the acceptance that that film might bring to their family could ultimately help in the long run. Or it might implicate them further if their family knows because it's more mainstream what kind of film it is. And what about people who maybe need to see these films to help discover their own identity, but wouldn't necessarily go looking for them independently? So being mainstream isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it can do a lot of good. But simply being available and acceptable to the masses doesn't make it inherently good either. There are a fair few examples of films that have been accepted, even praised by the non-marginalized majority, while the minority it's playing have criticised it. - [Reporter] Critics have wondered who exactly was this movie made for? (softly upbeat music) In the past few years, films like "Moonlight," "Blindspotting," and "The Hate U Give" were celebrated for their more modern raw depictions of black experiences in America. - What do we do about the bones? - We do this. - [Reporter] But "Green Book" is a more mainstream movie with a reassuring message and a rose-colored happy ending. - "Green Book" being probably the most prominent recent example that has been criticised for a number of reasons. One, in terms of narrative itself, it focuses more on the white racist's journey, rather than on the black man within the same narrative. Two, behind the scenes the lack of respect and consultation that was given to the family of the black man who was portrayed. And three, that the sort of white majority production team compounded all of these in-narrative and behind-the-scenes problems. So I don't think that mainstream or not mainstream is a particularly useful descriptive factor in terms of assessing the impact and importance of LGBTQ+ media. And yes, I am aware of the irony of me rejecting the very title of this video at the end of the first part of this series. But I have come up with an alternative. Instead I want to propose two axes on which we can plot these films to give us a more nuanced understanding of LGBT media beyond whether it's popular or mainstream. So join me in part two as I break down these two axes, and in part three, where I'll be using a case study of "Love, Simon" and looking at 20 upcoming films in 2019 and '20 to look at the future trends of queer cinema. If you aren't already, of course you can subscribe/turn on notifications if you want updates of when these videos are coming out. And if you'd like to help support me make these videos, I'm going to leave a link to my Patreon in the description, along with all my social media, so you can find me all over the internet. And until I see you next time, bye.
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Channel: Rowan Ellis
Views: 124,471
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: mainstream queer cinema, queer cinema, queer movies, queer cinema 2019, female youtuber, small youtuber, queer youtuber, lesbian youtuber, queer movies 2019, ru paul's drag race, video essay film, gay video essay
Id: 0RR4Q09tDoI
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)
Published: Sat Jun 01 2019
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