Is the rise of lesbian cinema a win for representation or just more porn for straight men?-Brooke Ivey Johnson-Entertainment – Metro

Is more lesbian cinema a victory for representation or just fetishisation? (Picture: Getty Images)

With movies like Love Lies Bleeding and Drive Away Dolls breaking into the mainstream in recent months, it’s a good time to be a film-loving lesbian. 

While women-loving-women (WLW) have previously had to scrounge for scraps of representation in their media consumption – clinging to minor gay subplots, suffering through bad films just to see that one gloriously sapphic moment, and generally deeming any female character who wears a white tank top without a bra as ‘probably queer’ – things have been looking up lately. 

For those of us who have rewatched Carol (2015) so many times that we’re always one bad day away from buying a mink coat at a charity shop, it’s a relief to finally live in a time when stories centered around gay women are making bigger and bigger waves at the box office. 

But more representation doesn’t always mean better representation. As cinema struggles to cast off the sexism that has haunted it since its inception, is the increase of WLW characters actually positive representation, or just fetishisation?

Take the classic lesbian film Blue is the Warmest Color (2013), for example. A seven-minute-long sex scene between the two female leads is one of the movie’s claims to fame, but instead of being used as a narrative tool to further the story or reveal the inner lives of the characters, it’s decidedly gratuitous.

It’s shot with close-up angles reminiscent of a porn film. The characters are emotionally distant from each other and the audience throughout, creating a scene that is more a series of body parts than a plot point. 

Love Lies Bleeding is one of the latest lesbian films to make it mainstream (Picture: Everett/REX/Shutterstock)

Blue is the Warmest Colour is known for featuring a seven-minute long sex scene (Picture: IFC Films/Everett/REX/Shutterstock)

It exists simply because it’s hot and as a marketing tool to appeal to men, and the use of the word hot, instead of erotic or sensual, is intentional. Genuine eroticism can be an art form unto itself, but many sex scenes between two women are catered to a very specific gaze – the male gaze. 

As feminist filmmaker and scholar Nina Menkes observes in her film essay Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, the subtle implication of the objectification of the female body in film can be read in even small cinematic details.

For example, viewers are often introduced to female characters with camera shots that isolate parts of their bodies that are not their faces, and often in situations of inaction, a noticable aspect of Blue is the Warmest Color.

In contrast, Menkes observes, male characters are most often introduced with shots that not only show their faces but show them in action in some way. 

Essentially, classic cinema language presents a woman and her body as passive objects to be acted upon, while it presents men to the audience as active forces. 

So how does this apply to lesbian cinema?

The lesbian sex scene in Atomic Blonde is disappointingly gratuitous (Picture: Focus Features/Everett/REX/Shutterstock)

If two women having sex are presented as passive objects by the language of film, the result is a sexual interaction that offers power and autonomy to the viewer, not to the participants in the scene. This inevitably implies that even in intimate moments between two women, there is still the sense of a male viewer acting upon the women, real or imagined.

Atomic Blonde – an action thriller that came out in 2017 and features a steamy sex scene between Charlize Theron and Sofia Boutella’s characters – is a prime example of this phenomenon.

Mulholland Drive exemplifies a common problem with cinema’s portrayal of gay women (Picture: Studiocanal/REX/Shutterstock)

The love scene was heavily marketed before the film’s release, which, when juxtaposed alongside the violent action scenes that make up the rest of the movie, creates an image of a film that’s specifically intended to appeal to the fantasies of teenage boys, not accurately depict queer sex or love. 

Like many of the objectifying lesbian scenes in cinema, it features plenty of moaning, writhing, and a sense of hypersexuality. There’s very little intimacy, curiosity, or tenderness at play.

The sex scene between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman in Black Swan only differs in that it has a sense of implied and literal violence, as well as an obvious sense that the women are using sex as a means of grappling for power, which is startlingly common in WLW sex scenes.

It was also heavily used for marketing to make the movie seem appealing to a male audience.

The sex scene in Black Swan between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis’ character has undertones of violence (Picture: Fox Searchlight/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)

Rarely do two onscreen female lovers share an intimate sexual connection that isn’t in some way fraught with troubled power dynamics or shame. Even the stunning movie The Handmaiden (2016) can’t escape this trap, presenting its two female characters as part of a troublesome hierarchy deeply influenced by their own sense of powerlessness. 

When queer female characters do have sex without shame or implied violence, they tend to be presented as innocent children unaware of what exactly they’re doing. 

The Handmaiden, while being a beautiful film, suffers from similar issues of representation (Picture: Moho/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)

Mulholland Drive is a prime example of this category. When Naomi Watts and Laura Harring have sex in the 2001 Lynch classic, they’re presented as naive and childlike (Harring’s character has literally lost her memory).

Of course, there are exceptions to these troubling trends. Love Lies Bleeding manages to cater to the male gaze very minimally, so much so that there was plenty of backlash from displeased viewers who felt that the movie would have been ‘better’ had the two leads been ‘hotter’ in a traditional sense.

What they meant by this, of course, is that they wished Stewart and O’Brian had looked more feminine/straight so as to have male fantasies more easily projected onto them. 

Love Lies bleeding manages to avoid feeling too beholden to the male gaze (Picture: Everett/REX/Shutterstock)

Perhaps the biggest difference between movies like Love Lies Bleeding and Blue is the Warmest Color, however, is that actual queer women were involved in the making of the former, while the latter was essentially a straight man’s exploration of lesbian sex. 

For representation to matter and escape fetishisation, queer stories need to be told by queer artists and leave behind outdated methods of filmmaking.

Hopefully, this will be a big step towards normalising modes of cinema that leave the male gaze behind. 

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