Straight romances in tv and movies
I put on Hit Man last night and about an hour into - it once some romance got going - I just.. stopped caring. I realized I just don't care.
I am strictly homosexual, important to note.
It wasn't even mainly a romantic movie. Nor a bad movie. It was pretty average but I often quite like these turn-off-your-brain type action/comedies. The weird thing is that the same director made the Before trilogy which are some of my favorite movies of all time, but maybe it's just that they're better movies?
In any case, it just kind of surprised me that I had this reaction since I usually don't mind this "tier" of movies. It's not disgust or anything either! I just.. didn't care. But if it were a gay or lesbian romance, I would have definitely been super into it.
I assume I'm not alone in this. I'm just having kind of an epiphany moment here! You'd think a 30 year old who's been out for years would have had this realization a bit earlier: we/I am not the "default" target audience.
Feels pretty weird?
I think the other commenters are off the mark when they bring up the way romance is handled in romance movies. Action movies that feature romance, even as a key component of the plot, are very different from actual romance movies in terms of the expectations from the audience in terms of the development of the romantic relationship. But this doesn't absolve action movies that feature romance from the obligation to make us buy in at least enough to root for the couple. This can be done well -- Baby Driver and Drive are the two action movies I've watched most recently that do this well -- but it requires skill that just lazily including romance to tick some box doesn't. The result is a lot of movies with romance elements that feel rote and tacked-on.
By contrast, queer romance is almost always included very intentionally -- to the point that I can't think off the top of my head of an action movie where the lead participates in a queer romance subplot. Almost all the queer romances I've seen in film have been in films in which that romance is the focal point of the movie -- either the movie is a romcom or a straight-up drama. Which I guess makes sense from movie executives generally playing it safe in other movies.
Love Lies Bleeding kinda fits the bill for a genre-movie (it's kind of a thriller/dark comedy) with a queer romance that isn't really central to anything. Like if you swapped one of the leads with a guy and made it a straight romance I think the film would still stand on its own.
Also, please, if you like Love Lies Bleeding please for the love of Sapphos watch Bound, the 1996 noir film by the Wachowskis.
Yes! I cannot recommend Bound enough. I was fortunate enough to get to watch this in an actual theater back when it was released, and am delighted to say that Criterion is releasing it on 4K this month.
If you liked Love Lies Bleeding, do yourself a favor and watch Bound.
Yes I'm so excited for 4k Bound. I'm probably gonna buy a BD drive so I can rip it myself, it's truly one of the greatest movies ever made, and definitely the best gay movie I've seen yet. I have a lot more to watch though.
Love Lies Bleeding is full of homages to it, so I really think if you like one you owe it to yourself to watch the other. My hot opinion is that Bound is a better movie but they also aren't trying to be the same thing, and I can't fault LLB too much for trying to be a summer popcorn flick but gay. It got me thinking actually, they should do an Oceans 11 style heist movie but all queer because I would watch that in a heartbeat.
I haven't seen it, so I can't weigh in, but I'll check it out if I get the chance!
Highly recommend. Deeply fucked up movie, but in all the best ways. Also extremely gay and a slice of gay rarely portrayed in Hollywood.
How fucked, exactly? I heard good things from Red Letter Media and it seems up my alley, but my wife can't handle (realistic) gore, torture or people being burned to death, so I'm unsure if we could watch it together. I don't like looking that stuff up beforehand, because I prefer to go into things completely blind, so sometimes we accidentally watch movies that fuck her up.
You might find use in the website doesthedogdie.com. she would be able to look up a movie beforehand and see if it has any of the content she doesn't handle well, and you can still go in with no pre-knowledge.
Pretty fucked. In the realm of violence there's domestic abuse and a few graphic violence scenes which include death of characters. Generally not very gore-y but one scene towards the end shows a rather mangled face/body after a short scene of violence.
How narrow a definition are we using of movie? Because shoutout to Nimona - cartoon action movie, and the queer romance of the lead is very much a subplot. (I love Nimona.)
Ooh I remember reading Nimona back when it was a webcomic! I think its origins in a different medium are a plus there, but you're right it has the sort of thing I was describing.
Oh, cool! I didn't realize it existed in other mediums. Graphic novel going on my to-buy list.
Nimona is so good. I couldn't remember at first which characters even had the queer romance, which just goes to show how well-integrated into the plot it is. There's nothing wrong with movies that are explicitly gay, obviously, but as a straight I tend to prefer movies that happen to be gay over gay movies, if that makes sense.
Makes sense to me. I'm pan-ace, so my edges are pretty fuzzy, but I'll take a movie with people being people who happen to be gay over Gay People Being Gay. Erasure vs. spotlight vs. casual inclusiveness.
Drive is another one of my all time favorite movies and a great example of a romance done really well, and it serves as the motivation, but it's not the focus of the story - and yeah, it's straight but I don't mind in that one because of how great the atmosphere is.
And it's very true that queer romance isn't not the focus. I also can't think of anything like that either..! Interesting point!
Titanic was a movie where I believe the action and the romance elements of the film are inseparable. Remove either side of the equation, and the film simply doesn't work. Contrast that to something like Pearl Harbor, where the romance element was shoehorned in, just to get the female demographic to buy tickets.
In terms of queer romance, I'm of the generation where all the ones I've read or watched tended to be either transgressive or tragic. Gen Z is much more on the normalization tip. My queer daughter absolutely loves the Heartbreaker books and TV show.
Titanic is one of the few examples I've seen where the balance tips the other way -- it feels like "romance with a side of action" as opposed to the more common "action with a side of romance". I think you could remove the action from Titanic and have it be a good straight romance (though obviously that would require ignoring the historical event it's based on). Though I do think the two are largely well-integrated. Pearl Harbor was just a blatant failed attempt to do Titanic again.
I've also seen the trend change to more optimistic queer romances and less queer tragedies over the past decade or so, and I'm also all for it. I haven't seen Heartstopper myself (though I know it by reputation) but I can't imagine it even existing when I was a kid. I'm glad queer media not just portraying our suffering these days.
Ace person here, and I'm just tired of seeing romance subplots shoehorned into movies that aren't romance movies. A lot of the time it's very obviously an attempt to try to appeal to more demographics, and Hollywood sees romance as the go-to shortcut for women. It's just part of the standard Hollywood formula at this point to me. A lot of the time, the story could be told exactly the same without the romance subplot because it really is just a tacked-on extra bit, or else could even be better since they could've spent more time on the rest of the movie instead of building up bare-bones "chemistry".
However, that's mainly for straight romance. Queer romance is still so new and fresh in cinema, that it's not seen as a standard/default option for appealing to some extra demographic. It's also still controversial in several markets, namely China and Russia, so super big-budget movies are wary of tacking it on and cutting off part of the market. So whenever queer romance is featured, it tends to be more intentional and more relevant to the overall story in some way, and thus more well-developed.
It's worth noting this is something that has probably improved over time: the completely incongruous romance subplot was a staple of films in the early to mid 20th century, and they were often absurdly bad and pointless. Particularly for adaptations of novels and short stories, there would frequently be cases of a single added female character who obviously was there for the sole purpose of a contrived romance subplot with the protagonist that in no way fit the original story, but was required based on the cultural view of studios at the time that women would simply be unable to appreciate a film that didn't have romance, however contrived.
Fully agree with this. It never feels like a studio pitch to pull more women in (or bring guys in by making it Hugh Jackman or something.)
For me, I just don't like romance in general (I also don't really enjoy sad dramas or trauma movies about how sad it is to be queer. My empathy and general exhaustion has put me in a real escapism only media consumption place). I've never seen Brokeback, but only because I don't enjoy romance particularly.
I don't feel the same immediate turnoff/tune out to a "straight" romance in an otherwise enjoyable film (I'm also bi) but I generally do agree they're poorly written as a set of tropes and I'm only really impressed when they do something different. I feel similarly about a queer romance moment, they're just rarer and because of that IMO they tend to be better written, if only because straight directors/writers don't have the lazy mapping of gender roles to put traits and plot points on.
I do love 10 Things I Hate About You as a teen romcom, and I think it is a good example of a) good source material via Shakespeare and b) while it hits the beats of "set up romance, real romance, set up comes out, reconciliation" it does them well and creatively. It also may have hit the right age for me, but I've rewatched it as an adult and still really enjoy it.
In novels, I'm usually more easily sucked into romantic or sexual scenes/relationships because you're in the character's head. I'm still obsessed with Gideon and Harrow from the Locked Tomb series despite them being explicitly not romantically involved. But they're so involved regardless.
To be honest I had a similar thought while binging the second season of The Big Door Prize yesterday and ended up being moved by a romantic non-starter by a tertiary character. But i don’t think it’s fair to say that I had just learned it, rather that it seems so rare for a gay romance to be depicted well in media I just kind of forgot about it. Prior to this the last gay romance I have seen was Red White and Royal Blue, a film based on a book by a straight woman for an audience of straight women.
Beyond that, I find that a lot of straight romances aren’t written terribly well to begin with. They are often side-shows meant to add to another story, where they can easily end up subtracting from the story instead. Even if they weren’t, it’s been decades since I have realized that being in a straight relationship isn’t going to happen for me, so they just aren’t quite as powerful emotionally as they were when I thought otherwise.
This certainly wasn't a terribly well written movie to begin with so you're definitely right about that - I was decently entertained up to this point though. So yeah it's just a new experience to me that as the story shifted a little bit to be romance scenes/themes, I checked out. Definitely nothing powerful there!
Different strokes for different folks. Social media has done huge damage to the concept of "not my cup of tea, but you enjoy." If you don't like it, you don't like it and that's just that. Nothing's wrong with not liking something, and what others think shouldn't matter.
Hit Man isn't a classic gem for the ages, but saying "it's not terrible well written" seems overly harsh. Nothing's wrong with Hit Man. It's a simple, straightforward tale about a guy who meets a girl and they fall in love amid hijinks. It's definitely not trying to be Pulp Fiction or Casablanca, but neither is it Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo or Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Romance is like any other genre, or sub-genre. There's core fans who adore that core story shape. And then there's everyone else, who need more than the "couple meets, couple flirts, couple loves, couple fights, couple breaks up, couple mopes, couple makes up, couple lives happily ever after."
For the everyone else, Romance leans heavily on the charm and acting of the couple. And usually also pulls in non-Romance elements to interest that non core Romance audience.
Glen Powell seems like he's one of the most Tom Cruise actors since Tom Cruise. Powell has charm and charisma in spades, and basically carries Hit Man with that ability to be appealing and interesting. Plus he's handsome, and a truly good actor. Adria Arjona I'd never seen before, but she had tremendous chemistry with Powell and definitely more than held up her half of the film.
It's a movie, so as with any story you have to agree to suspend a bit of disbelief in places. For one, according to this story, New Orleans is the murder-for-hire capital of the whole damn world. A lot of people were looking to hire an assassin in this. Of course, they were all just there to provide for funny scenes. And to allow Powell to pad out his show reel with "see what range I have?" Which, to be fair, Powell did very well; he does have range.
Romance always leans into the actors though. Any other stuff is there to pull in people who aren't core Romance fans, or core fans of the actors involved. Titanic for example has a Romance underpinning the story of Jack coaxing Rose out into living her life on her terms. The Princess Bride relies on the action and comedy to underpin a bog simple fairy tale telling of "a hero rescues a princess".
Hell, even Twilight used the supernatural monster angle to try and pull in people who weren't content to just go "oooohhhhh squuuuueeeeeeeeee he's so cute, they're sooooooooo cute together" audience.
But, again, you like what you like. Not liking something doesn't mean it's bad, or poorly crafted. Something can be of the highest craft and quality and still be something you hate. And that's just that. It's okay to not like stuff.
I'm genuinely confused what I said that gave the impression that you aren't allowed to enjoy whatever cup of tea you want.
This is ~lgbt so it should go without saying that I am obviously fully onboard with respecting what other people like.
Overly harsh how? This is quite a mild criticism in my view.
Besides, I already said it wasn't a bad movie, and that I was decently entertained. It was a solid 6/10 movie for me (from what I did watch) because you are completely right that there is nothing wrong with it. Anyway, I'm not critiquing the movie in this thread because that would be unfair since I only watched half of it - if I can be so frank, I think you misunderstood the point of this thread:
I no longer care about simple, straightforward tales about guys meeting girls. It's straight. And I am gay. So they do not interest me.
You like what you like and that's cool. :)
What might be happening as well is seeing tropes with certain types of story. In a gritty noir the jaded detective is always gonna have some 'secret' troubled background and such.
Not sure I've explained it very well but for me it's a cause of scrolling endlessly trying to find something to watch because you can usually map the whole movie out from a title and description alone.
Hence I like the mindless stuff you mentioned quite a lot.
Straight guy here. I kind of get annoyed with the hetsex.
All I ask is for the girl to be hot lol, otherwise, don't bother.
The gay sex is more interesting, plot-wise. I feel like there's more of a "risk" showing gay sex in a movie or TV show, which makes it SLIGHTLY more tolerable for me.
Otherwise, please spare me from either
This is fairly objectifying. As a woman, it feels really icky to read.