I've decided to convert this blog into literary, synopsis versions of the podcast I have with my friends (the first episode of the 3rd season dropped today, so maybe I should've done this earlier, but I digress), The Council, but I'm still keeping my old work on here because I'm far too sentimental. On this podcast, we discuss movie/TV news, reviews and the occasional game at the end of the episode that's almost always rigged. But on here, since it is my blog, I'll be choosing and converting my favorite episodes to this format which will most likely be me stroking my own ego (and Liam's. He's my second favorite.). Please note that I will only be doing the literary versions of the "bigger" parts of the episode, as each host comes in with their own main part of the episode they would like to focus on, that will still be the same with this.
This was (as you can guess) my episode! I can't remember why I chose this as my topic, I don't really know what became the catalyst to spark such a hypothesis so I won't make up one here, but my question still remains: Why are so many lesbian films just white women in period pieces?
We (Liam, Ben, Joseph, Sohail, and Special Guest: Gico and I) all approached this differently, with Liam opening with a list of "14 Top Lesbian and Bisexual Dramas" and out of all those, only 2 were not white women (1 black couple, another Indian couple in South Africa) and all of them were period pieces. Progress!
From then, we aired out the confusion of a series of films that all blended together in the boys' heads' thanks to Liam thinking that Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the "original" version of Ammonite even though they are two different movies set in two different eras about two different white lesbians. Sohail thought we were talking about Carol (Joseph helped him out in remembering Rooney Mara's name), and as Sohail put it: "They look the same."
After all of this chaos came my entry which can be summed up in: It's far more difficult to find a mainstream lesbian film that isn't about white women and it's even harder to find one that isn't full of fetishization, and the degradation and complete lack of representation that comes with it. Also: Shout out to T'Nia Miller, a black lesbian who played a straight woman in a period piece while the other couple was a pair of white women [Bly Manor].
Our Special Guest Gico was up next and I was very intrigued his answer to the period piece part! He said that his theory as to why Hollywood creates so many movies on these period pieces with lesbians smack in the middle is to incentivize the movie-goer to go see a period piece: a thing that rarely happens. I will admit that I do usually have to drag myself a bit to watch some period pieces if it's during a time that A) I'm not familiar with, and B) terribly white. It tends to be more of the latter.
And finally as Ben puts it: "It was great making these films in 2000's, but could you [Hollywood] maybe move forward, please? Like, you can do it on TV and stuff, but I'd like, for Natalia's sake specifically because I can tell it really annoys her, for them to move forward? This isn't really a winning strategy: making movies about the past. Make movies about the future, make movies about the present, the now. HANDMAIDEN IS GREAT!"