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A MOVIE Representations of Homosexuality a Case Study of Blue Is the Warmest Color

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A MOVIE Representations of Homosexuality a Case Study of Blue Is the Warmest Color A MOVIE Representations of Homosexuality A Case Study of Blue is the Warmest Color word count: 19038 Author: Sarah Famke Oortgijsen Thesis supervisor: dr. Maryn Wilkinson Student number: 5806011 Second reader: dr. Eef Masson [email protected] MA Film Studies 0612511289 November 27, 2015 Blue /blu:/ adj 1 a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day: ‘the clear blue sky’, ‘a blue silk shirt’, ‘deep blue eyes’ 2 melancholy, sad, or depressed: ‘he’s feeling blue’ 3 having sexual or pornographic content: ‘a blue movie’ - Oxford Dictionary A Blue Movie “movies that give you boners when you watch them, but you’re in the theatre so you can’t do anything about it unless you want to become a peewee hermon.” - Urban Dictionary CONTENTS 1: INTRODUCTION 7 1.1: A Much Discussed Film 7 1.2: Research Questions 10 1.3: Corpus 11 1.4: Review of the Literature 12 1.4.1: The Male Gaze and the (Straight) Spectator 12 1.4.2: Other Gazes 15 1.4.3: Queer Accounts on Cinema 17 1.4.4: Sex on Screen 18 1.4.5: Recapitulation 18 1.5: Methodology 19 1.6: Approach 20 2: GAZES AND (MALE) DESIRE 21 2.1: Mulvey’s Legacy 21 2.1.1: Visual Pleasure and the Gaze 21 2.1.2: Gaze of the Camera 22 2.1.3: Gaze of the Characters 24 2.1.4: Gaze of the Spectator 27 2.1.5: The (Impossible) Position of the Female Spectator 28 2.2: Heteronormativity 30 2.2.1: Heterosexuality as Desirable Standard 30 2.2.2: Heteronormativity as Construction 31 2.3: Class Differences and Stereotyping 32 2.4: Recapitulation 33 3: SUBVERSION AND QUEER IDENTITY 35 3.1: Hollywood versus European Arthouse Cinema 35 3.2: Subversion 36 3.3: Construction of Time 36 3.4: Performance of Gender 37 3.5: Queer Identity 38 3.6: Reading Against the Grain 39 3.7: A Queer Movie? 40 3.8: Recapitulation 41 4: SCREENING SEX 43 4.1: A Short History of (Real) Sex in Films 43 4.2: The Fine Line Between Romantic Agony and Pornography 46 4.3: Are the Sex Scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color Exploitative? 47 4.4: Graphic Novel Versus Feature Film 49 4.3: Recapitulation 51 5 5: CONCLUSION 53 5.2: Gazing at Love and Sex 53 5.3: Minoritizing and Universalizing Queer Love and Identity 54 5.4: A Blue Movie? 54 5.5: Afterthoughts 56 6: BIBLIOGRAPHY 59 6.1: Consulted and Referred Books, Journal/Newspaper Articles and Reviews 59 6.2: Consulted and Referred Films and Series 62 6 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1: A Much Discussed Film At the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, one film in particular caught public attention: Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle – chapitres 1 et 2; Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013). This film, about two girls who fall in love, discover each other and their selves and eventually fall apart, won the prestigious Palme d’Or, which the official jury unconventionally awarded to both the director and the lead actresses (with them, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, becoming the only female performers to have ever won the award). The multiple minutes-long graphic sex scenes that appear in the nearly three-hour story caused a wave of commotion, with lyrical reviews and a wide variety of prizes and nominations on one side1 to scathing critiques on the other2. The critics’ responses to the film can be roughly divided into two Image 1.1: The official movie poster for the camps: excessively said those who applaud it for French release of Blue is the Warmest Color. being ‘art’ (e.g. Rich, Gleiberman) and those who refute it for being ‘porn’ (e.g. Dargis, Moore). It is this on-going debate, which I will discuss later in much more detail, which makes Blue is the Warmest Color an interesting topic for this thesis. In-depth research will expose how female homosexuality is constructed in this film and, to a broader extent, demonstrate how cinematic representations (re)produce images of 1 Apart from winning the 2013 Palme d’Or, the film was also nominated in 2014 for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award. A full list of awards and nominations can be found on IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2278871/awards 2 It even received the doubtful honor of a Hall of Shame Award at the 2013 Women Film Critics Circle Awards. The jury declared: "I went in knowing almost nothing except general buzz but I hated the sex scenes which were way too long and midway through I couldn't wait to flee the theater. Coming out I read how many takes Kechiche required and I was thoroughly repulsed. Who was this for? Then I read the graphic novel and discovered that critical plot points were deleted. Like the fact that Adele's parents find her in bed with Emma which is why she has to move out – and I was enraged. A three-hour movie and Kechiche is so busy salivating over his actresses that he can't bother telling a coherent story! Hype for this film makes me nauseous." (https://wfcc.wordpress.com/women-film-critics-circle-awards-2013) 7 sexuality and gender identity. Blue is the Warmest Color says a lot about where we stand today; in popular culture and film studies, but inherently also in everyday life. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis formulated the first major critique on the film immediately after it premiered in Cannes. In her festival report (2013a, 3) she noted that “the movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else,” and in a later review (2013b, 4) she accused him (among other male directors) of creating a troubled depiction of female sexuality on screen: she states that “the way it frames, with scrutinizing closeness, the female body” is problematic. Julie Maroh, author of the graphic novel Le bleu est une couleur chaude (international title Blue Angel, but literally meaning ‘blue is a warm color’) on which the film is based, stated in a blog post on her website3 that as a writer, she found that “what [Kechiche] developed is coherent, justified and fluid. It’s a master stroke,” but also that “As a lesbian… It appears to me that this was what was missing on the set: lesbians. […] Because -except for a few passages- this is all that it brings to my mind: a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so- called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and made me feel very ill at ease” (2013, 1). On top of that, the Image 1.2: The cover of the graphic novel Le lead actresses openly excoriated Kechiche’s methods bleu est une couleur chaude by Julie Maroh, on which Blue is the Warmest Color is based and accused him of making them play the same and from which the international title of the film by Kechiche derives. physically and mentally exhausting scenes over and over again.4 These critiques touch broader issues of representations of homosexuality on screen, which are often problematic. Although a little out-dated today, the documentary The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1996), based on 3 The original post by Julie Maroh can be found here: http://sd-4.archive- host.com/membres/up/204771422545612119/Adele_blue.pdf 4 In an interview with The Daily Beast, both actresses declared they would never work with Kechiche again (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/01/the-stars-of-blue-is-the-warmest-color-on- the-riveting-lesbian-love-sory-and-graphic-sex-scenes.html). 8 the same named book (1981) by Vitto Russo, one of the founders of GLAAD5, illustrates how problematic the role of homosexuality has always been in movies. The documentary illustrates that Hollywood has never quite known what to do with homosexuals in its movies: the characters are unreliable, sadistic or pictured as a giggling sissy with a purse; subordinate and inferior positions. When films did depict homosexuals, they were often targeted at a gay audience (Russo 1981, 189). However, there are lots of examples of recent mainstream films and series with homosexual characters, like Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013), The Kids are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010), Faking It (MTV, 2014), and Orphan Black (BBC America, 2013). These are not necessarily targeted only at a gay audience anymore, as their big successes illustrate. In films and series that depict homosexuality, there seems to have been a shift from posing the gay element as main storyline, in which the characters have to overcome their struggle with themselves being gay (e.g. Fucking Åmål (Lukas Moodysson, 1998), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)), to a more unconcerned way of adapting homosexuality, by making it a side topic to the main story and not the primary focus of the film (Orphan Black, Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)). Films like Weekend, Stranger by the Lake (L’Inconnu du Lac; Alain Guiraudie, 2013) and Les Amours Imaginaires (Xavier Dolan, 2010) have won prestigious prizes at prominent, major film festivals, meanwhile blurring the line between arthouse and mainstream films. Blue is the Warmest Color fits this list perfectly: the main actors come across ‘normal’ problems that every couple potentially has to deal with, whether they are hetero- or homosexual. Their struggles can be viewed as paramount for all people and therefore do not necessarily only speak to a gay audience. Still, the controversial minutes-long sex scenes depicting the girls in all kinds of sex acts encouraged critics to speak out against it.
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