Emma Houxbois – Bitch Flicks

How ‘Spring Breakers’ Ungenders the Erotic and Transformative Power of Violence

This guest post by Emma Houxbois appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Ever since his screenwriting debut at age 19, penning the controversial script for director Larry Clark’s Kids, Harmony Korine has been best remembered in the public consciousness for navigating the razor’s edge between gritty realism and outright exploitation, with critics sharply divided on either side. In order for Clark to put himself in a position to meet the teenage Korine and solicit what would become the script for Kids, he taught himself how to skateboard at age 50 and hung around Washington Park Square as a means of earning the respect of his would be collaborators and in doing so, emerge with a film that captured the fidelity of their perspective rather than his alien construction of it.

Clark’s methodology of getting close to his subject, shooting using the techniques and visual language of documentary filmmaking, and relying on mostly untrained actors made an impression on Korine that has lasted, in one form or another, across his career to the present. When Korine began filming Spring Breakers in 2012, approaching the age of 40, his engagement with the youth culture he sought to evoke in the film had shifted almost completely into a position where he was stepping into the shoes that Clark wore when they collaborated on Kids.

The semiotics and technology of camera work had evolved remarkably in the 20 years since Kids was filmed, to the point where shooting handheld no longer immediately communicated that the film was either a documentary or aping one the way that Kids or his own follow-up Gummo had been received. Instead, it had evolved into a low cost alternative that fueled the explosive rise of independent filmmakers as diverse as Steven Soderbergh and Robert Rodriguez and stayed on as a stylistic flourish as many of those directors and DPs earned their way into studio budgets. The final nail in the coffin of handheld photography being immediately associated with documentary filmmaking or low budget productions was perhaps Steven Spielberg’s extensive use of it in the Omaha Beach invasion sequence in Saving Private Ryan.

Thus Korine was forced to rely on other means to convey the sense of spontaneity and unvarnished realism that defined his entry into filmmaking. This necessary shift came in the form of moving to a surrealistic approach that saw him hire famous well-known actors and rely on them to improvise and mingle with the same kind of untrained participants that he and Clark had both relied on in the past.

When the news emerged that Korine had cast former child stars Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, and Ashley Benson alongside his wife Rachel and James Franco through paparazzi photos of the young women handcuffed and leaning against police cars dressed in neon bikinis and sneakers, the immediate assumption was that Korine was mounting a kind of personal bacchanalia that would prey on the impressionable young actresses and exploit them for his own sexual appetites, a line of criticism similar to that which marred Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny and severely compromised the reception of Abdellatiff Kechiche’s work on Blue is the Warmest Color.

The film itself opens very conscious of these expectations and addresses them in the most confrontational way possible. It begins with Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” the dubstep anthem that bore the brunt of intergenerational musical warfare that painted it as being the clear sign that contemporary youth culture had no sense of taste or appreciation for art. The song is set and to a clearly constructed montage of the seeming worst excesses of Spring Break: young women dancing provocatively in bikinis, stripping, and simulating all kinds of sex acts for the lurid enjoyment of their male peers and the camera that frequently slid into slow motion to capture every jiggle and bounce, zooming in leeringly as they sucked on popsicles or laid back with their mouths open for the boys to pour beer and energy drinks held over their crotches into their mouths. The loudest, ugliest, most lurid speculation about Korine’s motives and the popular construction of Spring Break as a playground for the worst excesses of young male sexuality exploded across the screen.

It cuts abruptly to the norm of its protagonists’ lives, a generic and sedated tableau of aimless midwest life that pans through passively watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic while taking bong hits to Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson’s Brit and Candy bored in class among a sea of laptops flickering from one PowerPoint slide to the next in their professor’s lecture. Instead of laying the intended facts bare as he did in prior efforts, Korine takes on the role of trickster in Spring Breakers, first by baiting his critics by presenting the most lascivious and staged panorama of youthful excess imaginable, then by immediately following it by burying the true central thesis of the film in the droning voice of the professor:

The professor is speaking about what he refers to as the first and second reconstructions of the South, which he tells the class establishes a continuum, that the men of the South went to war, an experience which radicalized them upon their return home to revitalize their communities and effectively value their own lives and social cohesion more than in the antebellum and interwar years.

“When you go overseas to fight Hitler,” he tells the class as Brit and Candy doodle notes fantasizing about their upcoming Spring Break including miming oral sex on a cartoon penis, “you get shot at, you see your friends killed. You’re going to come home a different person. You’re going to come back a radicalized individual. You’re going to risk life and limb.” He further advances the theory that the Double V campaign, victory at home and abroad, meant to the generation who went to war that they were to defeat not only Hitler’s fascism and racism in Europe, but that they were to return and dismantle Jim Crow as well.

While the full text of the lecture isn’t available, this is likely speaking specifically about the Black soldiers who fought in those wars and not the generation as a whole, which again, has further connotations later in the film. The hard truth of it is that such a thesis completely ignores that these kinds of trauma frequently, and especially in current times, result in PTSD symptoms that would severely compromise or outright rob someone suffering from it from any desire for that kind of action, but the film is more concerned about society’s formal and informal liminal spaces and how they operate to encourage conforming rather than creating sustained radicalization that subverts norms.

This sequence then transitions into a middle-aged youth pastor who sloppily tries to construct his evangelical message with teen slang while wearing a tight Affliction style t-shirt emblazoned with Christian iconography and a crucifix tattoo down the length of his neck. His inauthenticity, the blatantness of the artifice he puts up in order to channel youthful energy and momentum toward his own end is a winking parody of Korine and Clark before him.

The girls, driven by desperation to escape their mundane lives to take part in Spring Break, scheme a robbery of the local chicken shack to raise the necessary funds to get there. To psyche themselves up for the crime, they exhort each other to pretend it’s a video game, to detach themselves and dehumanize their victims in a hurried pep talk to the same end as the grueling boot camp scenes sequences in Full Metal Jacket. However, instead of finding themselves repulsed or detached by their actions, they revel in the thrill, getting their first taste of a dark urge they chase through the film like an addiction.

Throughout this time, it becomes apparent that Korine’s camera has abandoned any sense of being an objective or passive viewpoint and instead takes on the same kind of probing, predatory nature it took on during the opening montage. As the girls engage in innocent play both at home and in their first forays into St. Petersburg, the camera constantly attempts to expose and eroticize their bodies but finds itself stymied by a change in pose or subtle movement juxtaposed against the tinny, childlike score. There’s a lurking menace, a predatory masculinity that haunts them through the lens and seems to foreshadow an undoing for them at the hands of the ravenous boys who await them in Florida. It’s all in service to the idea of building up the expectation of a didactic narrative that punishes women who transgress in the way of classic fairytales and Edward Gorey.

This construction reaches its zenith as Alien enters the film for the first time, arriving just as the girls find themselves out of money and stuck in county jail for being caught with cocaine. His initial appearance is full of leering and looming menace, with closeup shots of his grill lampshading the teeth of a fairytale wolf ready to devour the helpless girl as an agent of cosmic retribution. He interrogates them about their experience so far, probing it for fuel for his own fantasies, again hewing close to the initial framing that Spring Break is fundamentally a place where women exist for the pleasure of men, but as Alien reveals himself and his personal identity, he begins to emerge as a contemporary Jay Gatsby.

Like the F. Scott Fitzgerald character, Alien embodies a teenage boy’s conception of being rich and successful, but it’s informed by a culture that encouraged and abetted misappropriation of Blackness as the center of that construction who conceals his clear artifice by embedding himself in the legitimate Black community the way that James Franco, the trained actor playing Alien is shot in and among untrained actors from the local Black community. The Gatsby parallel reaches its apotheosis as he lists all of his proudest possessions, pointing to all the different colors of Calvin Klein briefs he owns in a nearly identical shot to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby throwing a stack of different colored silk shirts to Carey Mulligan’s Daisy in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby released the same year.

As Selena Gomez’s Faith breaks down and Alien hauls her off for a private chat, the construction of their experience as the radicalizing construction of warfare emerges in her dialogue as she says “This is isn’t what I signed up for,” mimicking common war movie vernacular as the expected breaking point where Alien erupts into violence draws nearer, intercut with a flash forward to Alien reaching up a bloody hand to grasp a gun. The tension dissipates as Faith returns home safely, however.

Without her it seems as if Alien has built a fantasy of his own with Brit, Candy, and Rachel Korine’s Cottie making up his own personal harem. He invites them into his fantasy, transferring his vicarious experience of Blackness by taking them to a strip club run by Alien’s former mentor, played by Gucci Mane, which instigates the biggest clash of authenticity and artifice in the film as trained actor James Franco playing the role of Alien putting up a false performance of Blackness comes into conflict with Gucci Mane, untrained actor and real life murderer (acquitted for self defense). It’s the first major crack in the character’s facade and the assumption that he represents a reckoning for the girls.

That reckoning seems to occur as Alien begins playing dangerously with guns in front of Brit and Candy in bed, but when the turn happens, it’s Brit and Candy who frighten Alien by picking up a pair of loaded pistols equipped with silencers and force him down on his knees in an eroticized reenactment of their robbery of the chicken shack. As the oral sex imagery in the film’s opening montage is reversed and takes on a dangerous shift from popsicles and streams of beer to a loaded weapon, it’s Alien and his performance of masculinity that is called into account as Brit and Candy experience the erotic thrill for themselves. Instead of resisting, Alien embraces the shift in power by aggressively sucking on the silencer, embracing his new role as the subject to their object.

What emerges from this sequence is the realization that there was never going to be a didactic element to this film, that it was presented as a ruse to facilitate the idea of Brit and Candy reveling in the erotic thrill of violence and domination that is usually reserved for men. Alien isn’t their reckoning, he’s theirs to exploit for their own gratification as they use him to recapture the thrill of the chicken shack robbery by committing a string of violent robberies wearing pink ski masks emblazoned with unicorns to thoroughly code their violence and the erotic thrill they derive from it as being inherently girlish rather than simply a pantomime of masculine violence.

The reckoning, when it does occur, is in the form of Archie, who again imposes the harsh light of authenticity on their delicate artifice by having them sprayed with gunfire, resulting in a bullet would for Cottie, which again, recalls the professor’s commentary that being shot at and witnessing a friend being shot is an inherently radicalizing experience. Cottie then retreats, leaving Brit and Candy thus transformed. As Cottie explains her rationale for leaving, that everyone is returning to their normal lives -intercut with shots of the montage of the normative Spring Break- it serves as a reminder that the socially acceptable and encouraged version of that liminal space is constructed with the purpose of letting participants break social norms around sex and drinking with the understanding that they will re-adopt those norms when it ends. Brit and Candy, by remaining, have crossed fully over from a legitimized liminal space into a simulation of warfare as they have sex with Alien one last time before they launch an attack on Archie.

In the final moments before they attack, Brit and Candy leave messages for their mothers, telling them that they’ve been changed by Spring Break, that it’s refocused their priorities in life, that they want to return to their lives, that they’re going to apply themselves to school and appreciate their mothers more when they return, completing their transformation along the lines of their professor’s lecture.

When the attack finally occurs, it’s Alien who dies in the opening hail of gunfire, giving way to voiceovers of their full voicemail memories to their mothers as they shoot their way through Archie’s compound with his people placed around the sprawling yard like enemies in a video game, killing everyone they encounter until they reach Archie himself and shoot him in his bathtub.

The film ends with the camera rotating over Alien’s dead body as they return, bending down to kiss him while the frame continues to pivot until it is completely upside down and they run away into the distance, visually completing the inversion.

What Spring Breakers ultimately accomplishes, despite never fully exploring the fraught and exploitative relationship Brit and Candy have with Blackness, is to produce a narrative where women discover and pursue an erotic thrill discovered in violence without being killed or consumed by madness and guilt the way most every other violent female protagonist in film is.

Thelma and Louise take their lives, understanding that they cannot be allowed to remain in the world after having tasted the thrill of their transgression. Beatrix Kiddo, the protagonist of the Kill Bill films must curl up on the floor and atone for the enjoyment she got from her revenge by sobbing while her daughter sits outside blithely watching television. The examples are endless. What Spring Breakers postulates, in its own dark way, is that the experience of surviving non-sexualized violent trauma and being transformed by it in a meaningful and potentially positive way is not a gendered experience, nor is the seductive allure of dominance and violence as a means of asserting it.

“Pleading for the Female Gaze Through its Absence in Blue is the Warmest Color”

“Conspicuous Consumption and The Great Gatsby: Missing the Point in Style”

Emma Houxbois is a fiercely queer trans woman whose natural habitat is the Pacific Northwest. She is currently the Comics Editor for The Rainbow Hub and co-host of Fantheon, a weekly comics podcast.

Unity Through Differentiation: The Radical Sex Positivity of ‘Sense8’

The net effect, woven throughout the series, is a sex positivity that both embraces differentiation and recognizes the universal experiences that can work to close gaps of gender, orientation, and race that routinely stymie the discourse.

This guest post by Emma Houxbois appears as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

Sex positivity, as a movement and concept in general, is open to a great deal of interpretation and criticism because of the multitude of forms that it’s taken over the years. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the heated debates that formed what are alternately described as “the feminist sex wars” and “lesbian sex wars” in establishing where the boundaries between legitimate self expression and exploitation lie in areas like commercial pornography and BDSM lie.

Discussions of power, privilege, and control typically remain central to the topic of sex positivity, and they’re vitally important when considering film in particular, a medium where female expressions of desire are more often than not conceived of and executed by men. While these discussions are vital, they can also stand to be expanded into what sex positivity can look like when it moves beyond the idea of liberating self-expression to recognizing and understanding other people’s desires.

Prior to the debut of Sense 8, Lana and Andy Wachowski were not typically considered to be filmmakers with a particularly sex positive agenda, but the roots of their broad and inclusive conceptions of sexuality in their Netflix series (co-created with J. Michael Straczynski) go all the way back to their debut Bound, a heist flick that starred Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly as lovers. At the time, the Wachowskis reached out to erotica writer and famed proponent of sex positive femininity Susie Bright to offer her a cameo in the film as thanks for her work’s influence in creating the film. Bright, who fell in love with the script, countered with a readily accepted offer to be their consultant on film and provide direction on how to film the sex scenes between Gershon and Tilly.

It’s an under-discussed part of the Wachowskis’ career that Bound, through arrangements made by Bright, had its debut at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival at the Castro theater, establishing a queer context to their work years before Lana came out as transgender. However it’s easy to see a recapturing of the spirit of their collaboration with Bright in Sense8, as they expand from the lesbian romance of Bound to expand into a multitude of simultaneous expressions of sexuality.

Key to much of the conversation around the series and its depiction of sex is how central, and explicit, the relationship between Nomi, a trans woman, (played by Jamie Clayton) and her girlfriend Amanita (played by Freema Agyeman) is. In and of itself it’s a tremendous victory for trans representation that scores the unheard of trifecta of a trans woman character being played by an actual trans actress, recognizes that trans women experience same gender desire, and doesn’t construct her sexuality around deception of any kind. The Wachowskis clearly communicate their triumph in this with the close up shot of a well-lubricated rainbow dildo dropping to the floor at the close of their first sex scene together, but Sense8 sets out to accomplish far more than just a sex toy mic drop.

In addition to Nomi and Amanita’s relationship, the series develops the romance between closeted Mexican actor Lito Rodriguez (played by Miguel Angel Silvestre) who is among the seven other characters Nomi shares an empathic bond with, and his boyfriend Hernando, as well as blossoming heterosexual romances between other members of the group. Nomi and Lito’s relationships are given the bulk of the development as the series progresses, but the Wachowskis use that focus as an opportunity to build a conception of sex that celebrates differentiation while also tapping into the universal aspects of sex and intimacy that everyone experiences regardless of gender or orientation.

This is primarily and most noticeably achieved in a sequence in the sixth episode where enough of the emotional energy of the sensates is focused on sex to trigger a full blown orgy between several of them, including Nomi, Lito, and two of the straight male characters. The focus and direction of the sequence, which was described by Silvestre as Lana Wachowski yelling directions from the sideline, which sounds much like what Bright believed her role in Bound’s production would be interpreted as. (“I think they imagined that meant I stood over Gina and Jennifer with a riding crop, snapping, “Deeper , Harder, A Little to the Left!”) But the scene does also communicate the same language and visuals that Bright intended for Bound:

“There were two main ideas on my mind. One, unlike most Hollywood lesbian scenarios, this movie shouldn’t insinuate oral sex– that’s not the kind of characters we were looking at. BOUND is about getting inside someone very fast, trusting them with everything-these women had to be fucking each other. Penetration was the act we wanted to imply. Yet obviously we weren’t going to get away with gynecological or hardcore shots in a movie that was headed for America’s shopping malls.”

“My idea, stolen from the ‘Kathy’ footage, was that we show a woman’s legs, straining and squeezing, and that we see that her lover’s forearm between her thighs. We dwell on that arm for a moment, moving back and forth in a fucking rhythm, looking sure, steady and unrelenting. Then, instead of following her arm all the way up to her lover’s pussy, we would cut to her stomach, fluttering like a little butterfly in that spasm we all recognize as orgasm. I loved the idea of eroticizing a woman’s belly like that. A lot of men making sex movies try to show a woman’s sexual pleasure by focusing the lens on her cleavage. Maybe that’s what they’re looking at, but hey, there’s a lot more going on!

“The other key idea was to eroticize the women’s hands whenever they were flirting or making love with each other. ‘A lesbian’s hands are her cock, they’re the hard-on of the movie, that’s what you want to follow,’ I said, like some veteran pornographer. When I see Corky’s hands on screen, I want to imagine how they would feel inside me. They’re the metaphorical substitute for the genital shots that you won’t be showing.”

Eroticizing the hands is the technique most keenly felt that follows through from Bound, but toward a somewhat different purpose in Sense8. Bright was looking for a way to get the idea of the kind of sex she imagined being most relevant to the plot and character beats of Bound across without being able to use explicit detail. She wanted to communicate genuine queer female desire to an audience who had never seen it presented in a manner equal to the depiction of straight sex in mainstream film. In Sense8, the first thing that focusing on eroticizing hands and grasping does is communicate the universality of desire across characters who identify as gay, lesbian, and straight. It depicts a physical element of sex that everyone, no matter their gender or orientation, can easily grasp and identify with. What it also does, just as Bright sought to evoke penetration in the sex scenes as part of the overall themes of Bound, is communicate how the individual sensates have been grasping toward each other in the series, trying to reach an understanding of their circumstances and who each other are.

Differentiation cannot be overlooked as being a major component of how the series presents and celebrates sexuality, despite the centrality of the “orgy” sequence that communicates a universality to human desire. Immediately following that sequence is a conversation in which Nomi tries to make sense of why she shares an empathic bond with the others, stating that it would seem more logical to her if the others were closer and not further from her identity and experiences. The response from Amanita’s mother is that she teaches the importance of differentiation through her classes on evolution. The implicit idea is that if differentiation is a key catalyst in biological evolution, it cannot be overlooked when considering the evolution of attitudes around sex that include queer and trans experiences.

Elsewhere in the series we see the critical importance of differentiation outside of sex, most notably as Lito and Wolfgang trade places in each others’ lives at the climax of their individual storylines. Lito, having pushed the situation with his blackmailer as far as he can by acting, falls back on Wolfgang to literally finish the fight. Then Wolfgang, having reached the limits of his skills as a thief and fighter in dealing with his rival, allows Lito to step forward and ply his trade as an actor. Each facet of the characters’ lives and experiences are as vital to the others’ towards their shared survival whether it be Sun’s martial arts skills, Capheus’ driving abilities, Lito’s acting skills, or Nomi’s computer wizardry.

Pleading for the Female Gaze Through Its Absence in ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’

The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

This guest post by Emma Houxbois appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

“You guys know about vampires?” author Junot Diaz once asked an audience of college students. “You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, ‘Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?'”

This is the starting point of Blue is the Warmest Color, which contends, and grapples with, the fact that depictions of female pleasure by female artists do not exist in art. This condition, this lack of understanding and representation, is what dogs its protagonist, Adele, as she struggles and ultimately fails to achieve a sense of comfort with her queerness. Female pleasure abounds in the film from the explicit sex between Adele and Emma, whose romance the film charts the rise and fall of, to eating, and the particular pleasure of observing and being observed. Adele is sometimes the subject, as she pursues Emma or when they take in an art exhibit, her gaze on the nude female figures constructed by men the focus of the scene, and sometimes she is the object as she poses for Emma’s paintings, the first representational work of her lover’s career.

The English title of the film, the same as the graphic novel it was adapted from, implies an inversion of the normal way of seeing. We’re used to seeing blue as cool, cold, and distant, but the film challenges us to see it as a vibrant and passionate colour the way that it challenges us to reconceptualize the power and passion of queer love. The French title, La Vie D’Adele: Chapitres I & II are heavy with film and literary allusions. To The Story of Adele H, the loose account of how Victor Hugo’s daughter pursued an unrequited love across continents and La Vie de Marianne, a novel left unfinished, suggesting both tragedy and an unfinished quality, which both come into fruition. Adele remains restless and unfulfilled throughout the film as Truffaut’s depiction of Adele Hugo is, but the irony of the reference is that Blue’s Adele is an inversion. Instead of warping the world around her to believe that an unrequited love is genuine, Adele is dogged by the invisible weight of heteronormativity that propels her to hide her relationship and live in a private shame. The female gaze, such as it exists in a world that denies its existence, is an insular one that exists between Adele and Emma as opposed to how the film itself is shot. The film presents the case for the female gaze by examining what happens when it’s withheld.

The problem with the male gaze and trying to uplift or separate a female equivalent from it is that male gaze as a term and concept has shrunk in its application to a narrow didactic interpretation that borders on being universally pejorative. To wit, the simple unexamined usage of the term was thought to be all that was needed to condemn Blue is the Warmest Color by its skeptics, but the use of “male gaze” as a cudgel that immediately translates into prurience and exploitation does more harm than good to the conception of a female gaze not least because it immediately valorizes the alternative, as elaborated on by Edward Snow in his essay “Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems”:

“Nothing could better serve the paternal superego than to reduce masculine vision completely to the terms of power, violence, and control, to make disappear whatever in the male gaze remains outside the patriarchal, and pronounce outlawed, guilty, damaging, and illicitly possessive every male view of women. It is precisely on such grounds that the father’s law institutes and maintains itself in vision. A feminism not attuned to internal difference risks becoming the instrument rather than the abrogator of the law.

[…]

Under the aegis of demystifying and excoriating male vision, the critic systematically deprives images of women of their subjective or undecidable aspects- to say nothing of their power -and at the same time eliminates from the onlooking “male” ego whatever elements of identification with, sympathy for, or vulnerability to the feminine such images bespeak.”

Simply put, the male gaze is not a monolith, and despite the way that the term is used in criticism and conversation, no one actually views film from the position that the male gaze is monolithic or purely informed by patriarchal values. To actually adopt that stance would require the conflation of Kenneth Anger with Quentin Tarantino, among other laughable absurdities. Male-directed film has always found ways to appeal to women on terms other than internalized misogyny, and of course the male vision in film has been frequently mitigated, influenced, or redirected by the work of women in other roles. Tarantino, for instance, is famous for his collaboration with the late editor Sally Menke, whom he sought out specifically for a feminine influence, which is hardly a rare event. Much recent buzz was generated by another female editor, Margaret Sixel, who worked on Mad Max: Fury Road with longtime collaborator George Miller (she edited Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City for him). Her contribution has been argued as being integral to the strong female reception to the movie, which, again, runs the risk of valorizing women’s work as being inherently superior.

The problem with strictly gendering the gaze is that it can improperly frame collaborations and essentialize the vision of female filmmakers. Mad Max: Fury Road, as a film, is more than the sum of a male director and a female editor, especially for a narrative so committed to dissecting toxic masculinity from within. So too ought Sally Menke’s work with Tarantino be seen more than just a mitigation, but a cornerstone of Tarantino’s desire to achieve more that what the limitations of his masculinity allow for, especially as the roles of women in his films evolved from non existent in Reservoir Dogs to the complete focus in Deathproof. Perhaps the most intriguing recent example of how a female collaborator transformed the work of a male director was in Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of her own novel Gone Girl for David Fincher, inverting the uncomfortable and frequently malicious male gaze that engenders his work, transferring the web of fear that his female protagonists like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander or Alien 3’s Ripley live in to the male protagonist and through him, the male audience. It’s a synthesis that cannot be easily essentialized into a single gendered gaze.

This is compounded by the fact that male nor female are fixed categories, nor are their desires. How are we, for instance, intended to properly frame the work of Lana Wachowski as a trans woman? How trans women engage with gender in our own lives and through our art cannot and should not be subsumed into a lens defined by the cisgender female experience. Which is only the beginning of how ruinous categorizations of gender in the gaze are on queer film and filmmakers. In comic book criticism especially, lenses of queer male masculinity are frequently co-opted and assimilated into constructions of the female gaze, which has the twin repercussions of narrowing queer male desire to a pinprick of feminized male figures and completely alienating queer female desire. If there are to be productive critical frameworks that utilize “male” and “female” gazes, they must be understood as needing a prism held up to them in order to properly understand the full spectrum of what informs a particular vision. There needs to be an understanding of intersectionality intrinsic to their uses.

On that note, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, the stars of Blue is the Warmest Color, are the only actors to have been awarded Cannes’ Palme D’Or alongside their director, Abdellatif Kechiche. It was done by a jury made up of Steven Spielberg, Bollywood actress Vidya Balan, Christoph Waltz, We Need To Talk About Kevin screenwriter Lynne Ramsay, Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu (whose Beyond the Hills and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days have tackled themes including queer femininity and access to abortion), Japanese writer-director Naomi Kawase, Nicole Kidman, and Ang Lee. Nicole Kidman, it must be recalled, co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s erotically charged Eyes Wide Shut with then husband Tom Cruise. Ang Lee’s career as a director has been built almost entirely out of critically lauded portrayals of queerness and eroticism including The Ice Storm; Lust, Caution; Brokeback Mountain; and Taking Woodstock. The crowning of Kechiche, Exarchopoulos, and Seydoux by this jury, Lee and Kidman in particular, ought to have carried with it all the mythic importance of Quentin Tarantino, as head jurist, awarding Chan-Wook Park the Palme D’Or for Oldboy a decade earlier. Instead it’s treated as a footnote. Presumably because in this instance, that jury was more attuned to the nuances of the male gaze than the American critical establishment that presaged its arrival on US soil with cries of exploitation and misogyny.

The Cannes jury made it clear that they wanted to define the film as a collaboration, and I would extend that further to define it as a conversation. At its heart, Blue is the Warmest Color is a film about performances of identity and how the stresses of assimilation can erode and destroy fundamental parts of our being. One of the primary ways that we can perceive Kechiche’s self awareness that his masculinity limits his ability to conceive of and portray female queerness accurately is the insertion of a viewpoint character for him, an Arab actor Adele originally meets at a party thrown for Emma’s artist friends. He asks naive, well meaning questions about their relationship that queer women the world over hear, but understanding that he’s probed far enough or perhaps too far into her life and identity as an interloper, he opens up to her. He tells her about how he’s an actor and he’s just been to the United States, describing New York City in the same way that we dreamily describe Paris. “They love it when we say Allahu Akbar,” he says with a smile, telling her about how there’s always a hunger for Arab terrorists in Hollywood. Kechiche is, himself, Tunisian, and this is his exegesis.

He’s approaching the queer experience from the perspective of the immigrant experience. This is the Adam’s Rib that he proffers up towards the goal of uncovering female pleasure in art. This is the part of himself that he bares in order to justify the depth with which he probes Adele and Emma’s relationship. The clearest way that we see his Arab identity in the film is in the act of cooking and eating, which easily transcends the specific cultural context he takes it from thanks to the intimacy and care with which it’s handled. Cooking is framed as emotional labor, seen most keenly as Adele frets over making Spaghetti Bolognese for Emma’s friends, fretting over it as she serves it. Eating is, except for Adele’s junk food stash, a communal act, the consumption of the emotional labour of cooking as much as the food itself. This merges with queerness as Adele tries oysters, possibly the most yonic food imaginable, at dinner with Emma’s family. Her hesitance and discomfiture with eating oysters despite the welcoming attitude of Emma’s family mirrors the overwhelming tension she’s experiencing in her performance of queer femininity, and the difficulty she’s experiencing in how accepting Emma’s family is of it.

The broader sense of how Kechiche attempts to conceive of queerness through the best available lens at his disposal is how he constructs France’s queer community as a diaspora. He portrays Adele’s budding queerness and her experience of the queer nightlife in much the same way as the child of immigrants might feel overwhelmed and illegitimate by their first exposure to their parents’ native culture. There are certainly parallels between Adele’s entry into the queer community while still in high school and A Prophet’s Malik’s early uncomfortable interactions with the Arab prisoners after having been forcibly assimilated into the ranks of the Corsicans.

Where they differ is that Malik is able to thrive within the group by shedding attachments to the structures that will never accept him while Adele folds under the pressure of maintaining both a queer identity and the public performance of a straight one, immolating her relationship with Emma and leaving her isolated. Similarly, the Arab character returns to the film as Adele visits Emma’s latest show after their reconciliation. He tells her that he’s left acting, that he got tired of that one narrow performance of identity that the film industry allowed him. He’s never been happier. Adele remains unable to shed that attachment to the normative world and leaves feeling more upset and isolated than ever before.

The pressure of assimilation asserted by heteronormativity and white supremacy are distinct yet similarly functioning forces, which is one of the main achievements of the film. While it is by definition an uneasy attempt at capturing the queer female condition, Blue is the Warmest Color succeeds magnificently by providing a context and a shared struggle with which to build solidarity between marginalized groups in contemporary France. In the scene immediately following Adele’s break up with Emma, we see her leading her children in a celebration of African culture, with Adele wearing a cheaply thrown together pastiche of African fashion, adopting a clearly false and ill fitting identity. It’s a stark metaphor for how poorly Adele assimilates into heteronormativity.

Kechiche’s attempts to conceptualize of others’ struggles by finding commonality is by no means uncommon or uncelebrated in contemporary film. Jim Sheridan found common ground with 50 Cent when making Get Rich or Die Tryin’ by taking him to where he was born in Dublin and exploring their differing experiences of 1980s New York City. In an oddly similar way, Steve McQueen launched his feature film career by exploring the Northern Irish experience of otherness in his account of Bobby Sands’ imprisonment in Hunger.

In regard to the female gaze, Blue is the Warmest Color isn’t an exemplar, but a cautionary tale in how conflating the gendered gaze with the gender of the director can obscure and severely harm incredibly brave and vital filmmaking. Especially in the case of a film that strives to achieve a sense of understanding between distinct groups that suffer similar forms of oppression.