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Complicated queer feelings
Oct. 24th, 2023 09:41 pmUp front I just want to say, I don’t tend to clutch pearls about fiction too often. I don’t believe characters need to be paragons to have valuable stories; if the level of violence or type of sex in something doesn’t appeal to me I just skip it. That being said...
One of the many spooky offerings I’ve watched this month is Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher—which, in general, I liked! I thought it was a pretty creative way to do an anthology series adapting a bunch of Poe’s works into a modern setting. The violence/gore could be intense at times, but it didn’t feel overdone for the source material. But there’s another element I’ve got some conflicted feelings about.
They made a lot of the characters queer for this adaptation which, on it’s own, doesn’t seem like a bad thing. But they are all at least a little awful and, more concerningly, frequently sexually deviant. Which might not be so bad if they hadn’t also omitted the actual het sexual deviance that The Fall of the House of Usher is known for. Even the best queer couple shown ends in murder, and as part of a story that originally didn’t have a romantic element.
I know that recently there’s been a big push from some audiences to let queer characters be messy/unsanitized, which I can get behind, but that wasn’t what this felt like. It felt more like adding elements for sensationalism’s sake, which bothers me in this case because it ends up depicting queer people the way that bigots already think we all already are. And we really don’t need more of that.
So I’m conflicted. And very grateful that at least one of the unimpeachably good characters is also one of the queer ones.
One of the many spooky offerings I’ve watched this month is Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher—which, in general, I liked! I thought it was a pretty creative way to do an anthology series adapting a bunch of Poe’s works into a modern setting. The violence/gore could be intense at times, but it didn’t feel overdone for the source material. But there’s another element I’ve got some conflicted feelings about.
They made a lot of the characters queer for this adaptation which, on it’s own, doesn’t seem like a bad thing. But they are all at least a little awful and, more concerningly, frequently sexually deviant. Which might not be so bad if they hadn’t also omitted the actual het sexual deviance that The Fall of the House of Usher is known for. Even the best queer couple shown ends in murder, and as part of a story that originally didn’t have a romantic element.
I know that recently there’s been a big push from some audiences to let queer characters be messy/unsanitized, which I can get behind, but that wasn’t what this felt like. It felt more like adding elements for sensationalism’s sake, which bothers me in this case because it ends up depicting queer people the way that bigots already think we all already are. And we really don’t need more of that.
So I’m conflicted. And very grateful that at least one of the unimpeachably good characters is also one of the queer ones.
