Representation, Queerness, and the Gaze in Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun
WARNING: Contains plot spoilers for Aftersun (Wells, 2022)
Dear reader,
Over the last few weeks the American media appears to have collapsed in on itself as a result of its eternal quest for ‘representation.’ HBO Max’s Velma, centring around a more racially diverse cast and an openly lesbian titular lead, has been ripped to shreds by the press and public alike, with Variety’s Joshua Alston writing “the biggest mystery of “Velma” is why it needs to exist” [1]; over on MTV, Drag Race fans are up in arms that the show’s slot has been slashed from 90 to 60 minutes to make way for the Real Friends of WeHo, a new Real Housewives-style reality show focusing on the lives of gay men in West Hollywood. The backlash got so bad that a petition was launched to have it pulled from the air before the first episode was even available which has currently amassed over 30,000 signatures [2] and the show’s social media accounts have been subject to trolling on an unimaginable scale (just take my word for it, some of the images from their replies have been burned into the back of my skull).
(A promotional material for the Real Friends of WeHo. Credit: Twitter, @RealFriendsMTV)
This post isn’t an attempt to argue that representation isn’t worth pursuing. Of course it is. But there are ways of going about it.
And today I want to write a few words about a recent film that took an approach to representation I’ve never experienced before. That film being Charlotte Wells’s debut feature film, Aftersun.
A Welcome Surprise
If one goes by the material surrounding Aftersun, you’d be forgiven for not knowing it had queer themes at all. A lot has been made of Paul Mescal’s tender, nuanced portrayal of Calum (rightly so), the amazing feat of casting in putting him onscreen alongside Frankie Corio as his young daughter Sophie to create the most naturalistic relationship I can remember seeing portrayed in quite some time (again, rightly so), and the surprising maturity and singularity of Wells’s vision so early on in her career (RIGHTLY SO).
And yet, among many other things, it is indisputably a film about a girl on the edge of puberty and the conflicting sexual feelings this creates for her. Where are the comments on this? In fact, a Google search for “Aftersun gay” or “Aftersun queer” brings up articles and fora about Calum’s sexuality, not Sophie’s despite her being confirmed as queer in the momentary flash-forwards peppered throughout the film. One particularly incendiary Wordpress user, who won’t be linked here, suggests Calum either “struggles with depression, is gay, or struggles with depression because he’s gay.” Another claims that Sophie “isn’t aware of homosexuality” until she inadvertently catches two boys making out under the stairs.
Perhaps this reflects the press’s tendency to focus on male characters and the actors portraying them. Perhaps there are a lot fewer queer film writers out there than there should be. Because when I sat down for Aftersun I had no clue it had queer themes at all, let alone that it would somehow achieve a visceral queer experience unlike any I’ve felt before.
(Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio in Aftersun. Credit: British GQ)
It’s All In The Gaze
A lot of Aftersun’s queerness stems from the way it uses the gaze, and as such a little detour into film philosophy feels appropriate. Gaze theory broadly defined asks how and why the camera and the audience looks at certain images in certain ways. The gaze theory most people will be familiar with is the “male gaze,” coined by Laura Mulvey in her seminal article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema [3], in other words Hollywood cinema’s tendency to place men in an objective position and women in a subjective position from whom we are to derive visual pleasure.
A queer gaze, or how a film might be able to capture the experience of being queer beyond merely showing a kiss between two people of the same gender, has also been theorised but remains significantly less fleshed-out than its “female” and “male” counterparts. This might have something to do with academia’s attempts to queer absolutely everything by making queer a by-word for deconstruction or post-modernism while ignoring the fact that for most people queer is either (a) a word to describe the LGBTQ+ community or (b) a word to insult the LGBTQ+ community, depending on your generation.
The Queer Gaze in Aftersun
Aftersun is one of the first films I’ve seen where the camerawork has actively simulated something approaching my own lived queer experience. Initially I was made to feel uncomfortable. The lingering shots on pubescent couples’ bodies against one another, Calum’s central struggle as a young father, and Sophie’s steadily growing relationship with a boy she meets in the hotel’s arcade gave me the impression of an inevitable heterosexuality. “This film is very well shot and acted,” I said to myself, “but as a queer person there are limits to the extent to which I can engage with it.”
(Frankie Corio in Aftersun. Credit: BBC)
The most potent scene in this regard is when Sophie leaves Calum for an hour to play pool with an older group of kids. Together they mock a young couple kissing by the bar and then by the pool. The camera pulls in just close enough to their bodies to create an intense unease: beyond societal taboos around presenting young peoples’ sexuality, their bodies look young and fragile while the adolescent libido flowing through them is clear in their proximity body language. The other kids jeer at them, but in the way jealous teenagers always do when they see their peers fulfilling their own repressed fantasies. Likewise, when Sophie and one of her new acquaintances push the couple into the pool in a prank, the rest of the gang quickly jump in after them. The camera then moves underwater, showing the characters’ bodies but never their faces. We see them tangled, pressing together, one giving another a piggy back, all presented together in a heady mix that occupies a strange boundary between childish whimsy and emerging sexuality.
In the fifth row of screen 1, meanwhile I continued to squirm. Not only was it uncanny watching moments that one assumes to be fairly universal while knowing your queerness meant you were excluded from those experiences, but it was also just slightly uncomfortable watching the slow march towards an inevitable one-(cis)boy-loves-one-(cis)girl paradigm. Let alone the level of implied sexual contact among characters quite that young. Maybe I was just a late bloomer.
It’s only in the film’s third act that it’s revealed that this uneasiness may have been the film’s intention all along. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flash-forward to an adult version of Sophie we see her in bed with another woman, and in the distance a baby can be heard crying. The conventions of narrative cinema would dictate the implied meaning is that said baby belongs to the two women onscreen.
A lot of pieces fell into place in this moment. If you were sitting next to me in the cinema, you most likely would have heard the gears slowly begin to grind together in my head. What if the film wanted its viewer to feel uncomfortable because some part of Sophie then or ‘present-day’ Sophie now felt something similar. Perhaps shots were held a moment too long because when Sophie saw the couple she didn’t quite know where to look or what to feel; perhaps the mish mash of bodies in the swimming pool were intended to show her attraction but also her confusion. A feeling like something wasn’t quite right. A feeling that with time, self-exploration, and presumably a little bit of exploring others, would grow into full bodied queerness. A feeling I knew well from my own life story.
The Work of Representation
This is only a suggestion based on my own personal experience of the film. Lord knows I have a tendency to look for the queer where there is none. I’m not alone in that - deprived of proper representation for decades, many queer people instinctively hunt for queerness as an instinct despite the wealth of queer cinema we now enjoy. Sometimes it has unlikely consequences - M3GAN’s transcendence to queer icon being a more recent example [4].
(A still from M3gan. Credit: The Daily Beast)
And we’re lucky we can do so; for many communities its not so easy as speculating whether or not Velma and Daphne were actually in love, or whether Harry and Ron secretly held hands on their way back from dinner. And that’s why good, interesting representation is important. There are going to be hiccoughs along the way, but that’s not a reason not to try. Creatives can learn from these mistakes and hopefully, someday, everyone will see something that they feel represents their experience as well as I feel Aftersun captures queer adolescence. If only the press were more willing to let people know just how queer a film it is.
References
[1] J. Alston, “HBO Max’s ‘Velma’ Can’t Scare Up a Reason to Exist: TV Review,” Variety, 11, January, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://variety.com/2023/tv/reviews/velma-review-hbo-max-queer-scooby-doo-mindy-kaling-1235486171/ [Accessed Jan. 23, 2023]
[2] Change.org, “Bring back 90 minute episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race and not air The Real Friends of WeHo.” [Online]. Available: https://www.change.org/p/bring-back-90-minute-episodes-of-rupaul-s-drag-race-and-not-air-the-real-friends-of-weho [Accessed Jan. 23, 2023]
[3] L. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 6-18, 1975. Available: Oxford Journals, https://academic.oup.com/screen/article-abstract/16/3/6/1603296 [Accessed Nov. 8, 2022]
[4] E. Piepenburg, “A Doll That Wears Sunglasses With Attitude? Oh, ‘M3gan’ Is a Gay Movie,” The New York Times, 19, January, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/movies/m3gan-gay-sensibility.html [Accessed Jan. 23, 2023]