Author: sinhaa2

Reality TV is entertaining. Real people are #cringe, and we love the messy, cringey reality depicted on screens. In the same vein, I recently spent three hours of my precious life watching a 2025 film called Sikandar (translation from Hindi: King, alludes to Alexander the Great). The film’s hero/protagonist is Salman Khan, a well-known giant in the Indian/Bollywood film industry. He usually (every Salman Khan film I’ve ever watched, which is 24) plays the hunky hot full of swag and nonchalant action hero. Tamil movie maker, AR Murugadoss, wrote the screenplay, dialogues, and directed the Sikandar movie. Yet there is nothing that really holds the story together. For two hours and 23 minutes, I watched in awe, and comedic disbelief (no comedic relief), how it built up a slow yet action-packed storyline that purely stroked the hero, Salman Khan’s male hero complex. It is simply action (men fighting each other in various positions and locations for various reasons), pure drama and action. There is no critical analysis needed, in fact, I propose this film does not require an ounce of thought to watch. It is meant for passive viewing (at least for me) because the film’s cinematography is beautiful, full of colorful action and people-packed scenes, and brilliant lighting. The film starts off with Sikandar depicted as an actual King (King of Rajkot) with fantastical superhuman strength. Immense wealth (he owns 25% of India’s Gold, which is several hundred metric tonnes). He is in the present-day post-COVID, digital age, contemporary India. He’s got a city that worships him and is a good man. The film emphasizes his fights with rap music in Hindi and English. Every fight is filmed in slow motion. All the punches land. He’s decidedly cool and does not break a sweat. But because of his various royal and philanthropic responsibilities, he is too busy for his kind and protective wife, Queen Saisri. She passes away within a year of marriage, dying while protecting him (in the first 35 minutes of the film). She donates her eyes, lungs and heart to three strangers. Sikandar, crying his eyes out, feeling really sad about losing his young late wife who he did not actually know (because he’s so busy and they were married only for a year) to find the three people who have his late wife’s organs for closure. The antagonist is artificially introduced as a high-ranking politician who wants to kill the three people with Sikandar’s late wife’s organs. Why? The politician believes that Sikandar is responsible for killing his (lecherous, entitled creep) beloved 30-year-old son (who actually died in an accident). Confused? I am, too.

Let me confuse you further. The Queen’s eyes go to a smart yet submissive stay-at-home wife, Vaidehi, who is not allowed to work because of a patriarchal family head (#my_house, #my_rules kind of situation). Queen’s lungs go to an orphan living in the polluted slums of Mumbai (the world’s biggest slums are in Mumbai, which also happens to be the movie capital of India #Bollywood). Lastly, the queen’s heart goes to a modern teenager Nisha who loves her gym-loving hunky Alpha male boyfriend (he does not seem to love her). Every person with the Queen’s organs has their problems solved by Sikandar. Sikandar teaches feminism to an upper-caste Brahmanical patriarchal Indian family, solves an environmental problem in the most polluted city in the world, and ALSO makes a young girl realize that her alpha male boyfriend isn’t emotionally available and she shouldn’t waste her precious heart on him (literally). Impossible premise. 

The reason I chose to explain this impossible film is because of the explicit mention and commentary on ‘alpha male’, how Sikandar, as the ‘real’ alpha male, corrects and changes the wrong alpha males to save the women and empower them, allegedly. My question is, why does so much of it still hinge on hegemonic associations of power and the very real capacity to do harm and violence? The way Sikandar solves problems is primarily through his wealth and violence: by beating the shit out of goons who want to beat him up, or killing hitmen who want to hurt women and children (who have his late wife’s organs). It is hard to analyze and answer such questions. This film is so hard to take seriously. I cannot analyze any part of it seriously because it is so bad, yet I try, as it remains enduringly popular. It may be a commercial failure, but it still grossed over 50 million dollars in the first few months of its release. 

Figure 1. Netflix Does Not Allow ScreenShots!! Nisha in Yellow.

The interesting analytical bit is in the last 30 minutes of the movie. Nisha (modern teenage girl with Sikandar’s late wife’s heart) is outside her large mansion-like house with her dad, Sikandar, and his bodyguards. The audience can assume she’s wealthy and modern because of her Westernized clothing, streaked blonde and brown hair, low-cut dress, and luxury cars strewn around. Kapil, her boyfriend, shows up with a bandaged eye and bruised body. She’s erratic and frantically apologizing to her “boyfriend,” Kapil, who was beaten up by Sikandar at his gym.

Her dad tries to tell her that Kapil is here to tell her that he doesn’t love her. And the teen daughter, Nisha, screams back and says it doesn’t matter because she loves him and that’s enough.

Immediately after, she says, “Kapil is an Alpha and Alpha means King.” 

One of the hunky bodyguards (their one dimensional role is to literally stand by Sikandar) exclaims (putting her back in her place, allegedly!) that she has no idea what she’s talking about.

He further reveals that the Sikandar isn’t a random nobody but the “King of Rajkot and very very wealthy man who is taking care of the people who have his late wife’s organs.” In a sense, Sikandar is established as the real alpha.

Nisha, in less than two seconds after her erratic outburts apolgies and asks for the King Sikandar’s forgiveness.

I infer Nisha’s character as stereotype in opposition to the masculine men around her. She’s the chaotic, emotional feminine. She is the heart of the film cinematically, narratively, ideologically and discursively owned by Sikandar. She is less a person and more a custodial vessel of the hero’s grief, a surrogate mourner, a daughter-substitute, a body on lease. She’s a young woman who feels too much, who loves wrong, and who must be guided, corrected, or mourned. What a sterotype! I infer her mistake, as not being too emotional but being emotionally loyal to the wrong man. The solution? Sikandar reeducates her affective compass. She’s not punished directly, she is rescued into clarity by male rationality, wealth, and muscle. This is not love. This is re-domestication.

For the life of me, I could not tell you the plot or motivation except the film follows Sikandar helping (empowering) poor and disadvantaged common folk and that all of this started because his wife died and he is trying to be less nonchalant and be a better man. Indian cinema is rich, complex and contains multitudes. This film is not emblematic of Indian cinema, yet it is typical of a popular action packed genre of Indian films. Let my critique not dissuade you from Indian cinema, especially bollywood. Although it has all the hallmarks of a bollywood movie: 1. Intense choreographed dancing, singing 2. Length (Bollywood films are egregiously long. Much like this thought piece. They are a time investment.) 3. Colorful. 4. Repetitive plots and definite happy endings. It is not a symbol of a good movie. And Sikandar definitely proves that popularity may not mean good content.

Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (2022) is the reason I double check my Airbnbs. In this thriller horror movie, a nightmarish situation unfolds when a woman and a man double‑book a shitty looking Airbnb. It doesn’t end well (it ends in the rubble of a Detroit house that hides generations of violence). I love horror films! Especially ones with female(ish) villain/antagonist characters. I always love seeing what trope the female monsters take – “mothers, monsters or whores”. Last year I took a class with Summer Forester, called Women and War in the Middle East, and I read a paper that tried to make sense of women who commit unimaginable political violence, murders, violence in war etc. I’m drawing on this particular reading called “Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics” by Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry to understand how in Barbarian (2022), the main female monster is understood.

I’ve always wondered, why are there so many female monsters? Why is it so easy to villanize womanhood? In Barbarian, the “monster” is named Mother. And, she’s a monster living in a giant underground basement of a house for more than 40 years. She’s 6 feet 8 inches tall, gargantuan proportions, matter hair, naked white body, no ability to speak, and epic strength. You can tell she’s the “monster.”

The reason she’s the monster is because of Frank. In the movie, flashbacks to a hppaier “white picket fence” America back in Raegen era reveal a man named Frank. He spent decades spent decades abducting women, imprisoning them in underground rooms, and fathering children with them—children who were, in turn, assaulted and inbred. I hated watching this part, but Mother is the last of last of those descendants: feral, gigantic, and desperate to nurture whatever human stumbles into her tunnels. as animalistic, but the film repeatedly frames her actions as warped caregiving: she bottle‑feeds Tess, cradles a camcorder playing a nursing tutorial, and ultimately throws herself off a water tower to save Tess’s life. Using Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry’s reading, I think popular culture slots violent women into three reductive tropes—mother, monster, whore, thereby stripping them of political context and restoring patriarchal “normality.” When women’s violence is monstrous, the narrative pathologizes the woman and lets the system that produced her off the hook . Barbarian weaponizes that very expectation: we enter anticipating a freakish killer, then discover she is the living evidence of men’s unchecked power. But, it also tried to humanize her by showing us that her actions aren’t just scary and violent. It’s all she knows. She’s never left her house. And all she knows about the world is from one education DVD in her captive basement, on how to rear and nurture young babies.

But, I don’t want to just analyze her. I want to analyze the men in the movie. I think they’re the real monsters — respectable men who build or exploit brutal systems that hurt women. I choose to analyze AJ Gilbride, a character we are first introduced as a white able bodied guy riding a beautiful red sedan without a hood, in a picturesque ocean side road. He’s the kind of villain twenty‑first‑century capitalism loves: a slick Hollywood bro who can monetize anything— even a torture labyrinth. When he discovers the hidden hallway beneath his Detroit Airbnb (where the Monster lives), his first thought is not Who suffered here? but How much can I list this for? Tape‑measure in hand, he tries to convert trauma into real‑estate value. To me, he’s the real barbarian. Not the “monster.” AJ’s entrance shifts the film from gothic nightmare to #MeToo parable. He’s an actor who’s accused of sexual assault (He admitted to his guy friends that it just “took some convincing” but they were both totally into it), and he arrives in Detroit AirBnB to liquidate the property and fund his legal defense. He descends into the tunnels, tape measure in hand, giddy over “livable space” even as bloodstains darken the walls. That instinct to monetize is its own violence, turning trauma into square feet and victims into line items. But at the end of the film, there’s a small moment of redepmtion. The three characters, AJ, Tess the girl, and a homeless man sit by a makeshift fire a few blocks outside the house they were trapped in, after having almost escaped the clutches of Mother. AJ says,
“I did that” (Alluding to having SHOT the girl while runnign away from Mother in the tunnels)
“It was an accident,” says the girl.

“Doesn’t matter. It was my fault,” says AJ.

“I hurt somebody. It matters. I might be a bad person. Or maybe I’m a good person who did a bad thing.” He pauses for a moemnt of reflection and with tears in his eyes, and almost genuine concern, he says, “I can’t change what I’ve done but I can fix it.”

The homeless man interjects, “You ain’t gonna do nobody no help if you get yourself killed” pointing to the dark outside. Mother arrives almost immediately after. Rips Frank, the homeless mant o shreads and runs after the two characters, her ‘babies.’ And his almsot redemption arc evaporates the moment danger looms. He throws Tess off the water tower to buy himself seconds, proving that his earlier remorse was never about repair, only optics. Where The Mother kills to protect her “child,” AJ kills to protect his brand. In the final scence, Tess, the girl, is lying on the road, with Mother crooning and towering over her. She has a gun in hand, the same gun that AJ shot her with. And Tess whispers “I’m sorry” before ending The Mother’s suffering. Her apology acknowledges the creature’s stolen humanity and invites the audience to grieve, not simply recoil.

I think of this film often, especially its succint title, because it forces me to rethink: Who is the monster, the barbarian? Is it easy to point to The Mother’s grotesque form which is mostly because of the the violence impressed upon her body by her father/grandfather/abuser Frank. Or is it Frank and AJ , men who embody the systemic barbarism that mainstream society rarely names?

In this “thought piece,” I use queerness as a framework, an analytical lens. To me, queerness means to decenter the normative, to destabilize the hegemonic, the “natural.” A queer analytic, a ‘queering’ it means to question, deliberately, intersectionally, and intentionally. It means to ask the why, the what, the how, and the what now? Queer(ing) is both a noun and a verb, and a framework I use to analyze a beautiful scene. Queerness is a possibility. As elusive as it is, I seek to define it in ways that my reader may be able to use and contextualize to this particular example. 

Although, the film scene I analyze is not explicitly queer – it has little to do with sexuality (althought, this may say more about my understanding of queerness as a sexuality based theory/existence). Still, it has a lot to say about relationships with people, characterized by race, wealth, and being an “insider.” I analyze a scene from the movie called “A Great Divide,” directed and written by Jean Shim. Informed by her experience living in Jackson, Wyoming, at the start of the 2020 pandemic, and inspired to add to the discourse on Asian-American hate that spread, as deadly as the COVID-19 virus, during the pandemic. It was a way for her to reflect on and process the reports of discrimination and violence against Asian-Americans that had begun erupting across the country.

In this movie, Ken Jeong stars as Isaac Lee, the family patriarch. He is why his family moved from their California community to Wyoming. Co-starring is Jae Suh Park, the uptight, yet full-of-depth, mother, called Jenna or Mrs Lee. She is driving their big black Escalade car across gorgeous Wyoming plains, going to a restaurant to celebrate Ellie’s arrival.  Ellie (Miya Cech, who plays a Chinese character) visits Benjamin, played by Emerson Min, the son. The main cast is all ethnically Asia (Korean and Chinese), and the rest of the characters are all white Americans. I love Americans, but watching this scene reminded me why I am terrified of a very particular branch of American racism (patriotism). It is not overt and is dilated to ‘protecting’ their land and culture from outsiders. And the outsiders are, of course, not white. 

Scene:

The family is in a large, comfortabel car, driving across rural expanses of Wyoming. Issac is chuckling with Ellie and his son about K-pop Drama. He’s trying to be cool, and Jenna is affirming and smiling along. Then he starts talking about a book about the immigrant experience in the United States of America, and his wife, Jenna, asks him where the immigrant is from. Issac, the dad, chuckles and dismisses her quip and says, “It doesn’t matter,” and instead says to just listen to him read the book.

His wife protests, “Of course, it matters” (0:36:36). The kids sing along to the song, and drown out the mother’s further comments and questions (unintentionally). They reach their intended destination: a cafe called “Yankee Doodles.” The scene in the cafe is, quite frankly, painful to watch. It screams a particular type of loud patriotic American: guns, bullets, American flags, “freedom fries” (bullets in a fry bag), gun memerbolia, (all white) customers staring at the out-of-place Asian Americans trying to order food, the hostess rudely denying options to assist and engage with the family. It was made more awkward by the dad, trying to commit to playfully using a “cowboy” southern accent while trying to order.

I think this scene’s foreshadowing of “patriotic iconography, flags and people” made racism seem made all the more real. One can see it on the screen and except that this particular kind of American pride, aloofness from the government, may be intertwined together with bigotry, or distaste and distate for ‘outsiders’ in rural America. I admit, it is prejudice, on my part, to assume that certain people in certain parts of rurual(ish) America is a stereotype. But, I think it is also the film’s intention to make it more than obvious. I, along with Asian Americans may have to deal with ‘microaggressions’ and subtle racism (and the less obvious and less visible systemtic and systematic discriminatory practices) every day, but here, it feels more overt, dramatized, real. Yet, how the couple interacts with and deals with racism is different. I think they gloss over it. But the kids are confused by it. Ellie jumps back into the car with Benjamin and finds Mrs Lee sitting at the wheel, without her husband. She asks Mrs Lee if the people in the cafe were being, “you know, racist in there?” (0:41:23). Benjamin tries to push the conversation aside, but Ellie persists and asks Mrs Lee again. The absence of a clear answer is itself a gesture. 

But what follows next is the scene that broke me. The powerful tour-de-force monologue of Jenna/Mrs Lee that I related to. This scene is right at the turning point of the film, where the family has already delath withe veral instances of weird, kind of racist and just not-neighborly behaviors from the community they moved into. And Mrs Lee seems to have enough. I think she wants to yell and fight but instead she sits in her car.

And with tears in her eyes, Mrs Lee gently pauses and enquires, “Can I share something with you, Ellie?”

When Mrs Lee, or Jenna, was in the third grade, she started in a new school. She was the only Asian girl in the whole class. There was another girl in class, Leanne, with the most beautiful blonde hair and green eyes. 

“And she wore the prettiest dresses, that my parents couldn’t possibly afford.” (00:58:13)

Her favorite princess was Cinderella. If she had the right dress, she too could be a princess. Then, one day, a woman showed up with a beautiful powder blue dress. Little Jenna thought she could “borrow” this dress when her parents, who worked in a laundry and dry cleaning service (day in and day out to pay the bills!) weren’t looking. She hid it in her backpack to wear to school, hoping that everyone would look at her the way people looked at Leanne. (I sense there was in implict understanding of how people percieved and treated Leanne because of her beauty and social standing. For Jenna, the dress symbolized a longing. Something she may never really realize fully, but perhaps for a moment).

She wore the dress to school, which turned out to be Leanne’s dress. Leanne called her a thief and said, “Since an ugly Chinese girl wore it, she couldn’t wear it again,” and the kids at school called her a dirty thief and told her to “go back where she came from.” (00:44:25)

What’s worse is that when the teacher called up Jenna’s mother (Benjamin’s Halmoni or grandmother), she refused to pick her up because even the mother thought she was a thief. Hard. Tough love. Through tears and a choking voice, Jenna says that she curled up into a ball and cried forever. She couldn’t be Cinderella, she couldn’t even be Leanne. 

In this scene, I sense the clear intersection of wealth and race, whiteness and wealth, and vice versa. Jenna’s parents were refugees from North Korea who escaped the Communist party and fled to America to pursue a education and better life opportunities. After a point, they couldn’t afford their graduate education, so they had to leave their educational institutions to work, earn money, and support their (unplanned) family. They worked as dry cleaners and dishwashers (this is the classic deptiction of an Asian American version of the immigrant struggles to ‘Make It In America’). However, I read Jenna’s outpour of truth and emotion as a disruption to the immigrant narrative. Unlike Isaac’s experience as a first-generation American and his relatively wealthier experience growing up in America, for Jenna, it matters who the immigrant is. I categorize the dad, Issac Lee’s dismissal of the immigrant’s identity (earlier in 00:36:36), as a wealth indicator. Mr Lee’s parents were diplomats and wealthy and were privileged in a manner that Jenna’s parents were not. Both of them faced forms of racism, being visibly Asian, but they faced different levels of struggles while ‘making it.’ I see it in Jenna’s eyes and her deliberative, tear-filled pauses. Her story is not about childhood cruelty. It is context. A gesture. Her recounting is almost “anticipatory performance,” an embodied act that reveals more than it resolves. Gestures, as Rodriguez writes, are “literal and figurative. When Mrs. Lee shares her formative memory with Ellie, she recounts it in such a powerful manner. The single shot centers her face, her expressions, and her deep, deliberate pauses. And it is enough to visualize the depth of her experience. Her anecdote is a deep, lasting wound of a racist lived experience, hardened by her mother’s tough love actions. But, she shares her story with the two kids, and reopens it not to heal, but to show: as resistance. It also alludes to her repression of emotions. As an Asian woman, she laments how her mother treated her. Her mother (Halmoni) did not treat her with the open love and comfort she would have expected, and through her monologue, he disrupts the silence she held within her. She had never shared this story before. But the cafe scene, along with Ellie’s question and her son’s presence, perhaps, pruned her open for a moment. I interpret her disruption as a way of imagining an alternative reality. Perhaps not for her, but for her children who have not yet endured the open racism that she may have. Queerness, as José Muñoz retells, is a horizon, a way of imagining a world that does not yet exist. “A not yet.” When Mrs. Lee shares her story, she does not seek sympathy or catharsis. In my purview, Jenna’s openness, as opposed to her typical stern behavior in the rest of the film, I view through the praxis of queering: a refusal to accept the normative logic of assimilation, of silence, of shame. 

In her final sentence, she alludes that Jenna wasn’t just excluded for being Asian; she was excluded for not being able to afford the fantasy as a “Poor Chinese Girl” (Mind you, she’s Korean).

Asking the other question, looking at Jenna’s experience not just through race, but also class, gives the audience context for why her trauma was so repressed. Jenna’s story, her immigrant experience, her first-generation American experience is shaped by her refugee Korean mother’s resounding silence to “suck it up” and be quiet. She developed in opposition. I see it in Jenna, her desire to fight inequality and daily racism in Wyoming, but also her position as a woman, being her husband’s plus one, a complementary companion.

In the cafe and heartwrenching car scene, she takes back her agency. She cannot heal or fix or shield the children from the racism, but she can try and explain, and no longer repress it. She bears witness to her story, and the audience is able to carry her story too (in a very meta sense). Her emotions, her face, her pauses, and her struggle to be honest until the moment at the cafe seemed a queering act. In telling the story, Jenna does not erase the trauma. She rehearses it, perhaps. She gestures to it in a manner Ellie may seek to understand. I believe this is inherently political and vulnerable. Racism and white supremacy do not disappear at the crux of this speech. Her story gives it weight, and this weight is now shared among the children, who sought clarity. This is her love. And, I, too, bear witness to her her truth. Her love.

PUBLIC is a music band led by John Vaugh on vocals/guitar, Ben Lapps on drums, and Matt Alvardo on bass. They are a young band from Cincinnati, Ohio. I must confess, I do not know much about PUBLIC. I am not a superfan, yet I sincerely scoured the internet like one. The internet tells me that PUBLIC is a genre-bending classic-rock-indie-pop band that is famous for their viral (think: TikTok videos and soundtracks) music, and in this thought piece, I describe the music video of their song “Make You Mine.” A 3-minute, 55-second video, released on October 14, 2019, is directed by Brandon Chase and John Jigitz, starring male lead Manny Spero and female lead Ashley Puzemis. The music video and song “Make You Mine” (not to be confused with the more popular song by Madison Beer with the same song title) is about love: teenage romance, to be specific. 

Video Description: The video starts with a close-up of the male lead looking around and into the camera awkwardly, lips pursed. He’s a cute, teenage, shy boy with fluffy jet black locks on his lightly pimple-prone head. He’s light-skinned, white-passing, but ethnically ambiguous. He looks East Asian or mixed. And he’s chubby. The camera zooms out, and the audience sees that he’s at a party. The camera follows him; it’s his story. He’s holding a red solo cup; there are young people around, all talking to each other, but he’s not talking to anyone. He drinks from his cup, and at 18 seconds, the pretty blonde female lead walks into the party. She literally walks into the party after pushing party streamers away from her face, and is followed by a group of similarly pretty friends. She’s wearing a green top, blue jeans, and has a fresh and full blowout. She’s conventionally attractive and is confident in her smile. The camera flips to the male lead. We follow his gaze, eyeing the girl with a sense of yearning and longing. He walks away, and the camera pans to the singers of the band PUBLIC. They’re almost always in the background. juxtaposing and adding to the story that is unfolding on screen.

He’s walking across the party to get another drink and notices her looking at him. He raises his drink to say hi! A pull focus shot shows the girl’s reaction: she motions with her hand: Come here! Cue: Slow motion of the girl smiling angelically. He’s elated. He can’t believe it. He crosses the band PUBLIC playing at the party, and they’re hanging out at the party now! Cue: Chorus.

“It’s nothing funny, just to talk. Put your hand in mine.

You know that I want to be with you all the time

You know that I won’t stop until I make you mine

You know that I won’t stop until I make you mine

Until I make you mine.”

They dance in slow motion and smile at each other till one of the blonde girl’s friends pulls her away. Before being politely yanked away, she taps the left side of his chest with her pink, freshly done nails. White men throw ping pong balls into red solo cups. Battling against these pretty white men in black tank tops and t-shirts are the girl and the boy. There are more montage scenes of white girls, primarily blonde, dancing and swaying to the music in the disco-lit house, followed by several shots of the boy and girl chilling by the pool and then in a bathtub with two more friends. Their hands are close. Then we see wide-angle shots of the boy and girl at a tennis court. They’re playing tennis while the band is in the foreground. They’re at a park. At a beach.

Then, skateboarding. Holding hands at the beach. Running around. The light changes to a pinkish purple. It almost feels like a memory. The video is interspersed with shots of the band PUBLIC. The three men in the PUBLIC band are sitting on the beach, playing their respective instruments.

The camera zips back quickly to the present – coalescing all the romantic shots of the boy and the girl into the shots in a quick four-second montage. We now see that all the scenes of the girl and boy being cute and romantic were just a fantasy in the boy’s head. The camera re-focuses on the boy, who is still at the table, getting a drink. He looks at her again, from afar, and shakes his head. She’s talking to another boy, yet she steals another glance at him. The camera pans back to the band and they sing:

“You know that I won’t stop until I make you mine.” 

The boy walks back across the party with his second drink. And he bumps into her accidentally. In slow motion, she looks shocked. She mouths an apology, “I’m so sorry!” and he shakes his head again, smirking and smiling, affirming that it’s okay.

The band continues: 

“Until I make you mine.”

Balloons appear, falling from the ceiling, and she’s dancing again, with him. They’re both smiling and there is no denying that there is a spark of hope – end scene.

Analysis: The music video is geared at younger audiences – teenagers. The two lead characters are young high schoolers at a party. The red solo cups, LED lighting, a band playing in the background, friends talking, and jamming to music are reminiscent of a quintessential American High School culture portrayed in popular media. I know that the video follows the boy’s gaze. And in his gaze, I follow the girl too. Vicariously. I understand longing and yearning. I understand that this music video, although seemingly innocuous in its message, makes me feel more frustrated about the narrative of teenage love. 

It’s a boy and a girl. Boy likes girl. Boy can’t really have girl. Oops! 

A cis-hetero lovers’ tale as old as time. 

To add more context, in this video, it’s a shy, unconvetentionally attractive boy who yearns for the popular, conventionally attractive, nice girl. How will he ever fulfil his desire? Will it just be in his head? The narrative is certainly framed by his view, his longing. I infer that this story is set up in a way that reminds the audience that while you may have a shot at love, it may also be contingent upon gendered themes of luck (are you a boy? or a girl?) and looks. The video shows that she’s popular, always surrounded by friends and guys trying to talk to her. Yet, she is nice enough to steal glances and smile at the boy who yearns for her. She isn’t mean or pretentious. She’s skinny, able-bodied, blonde and simply beautiful. She is the archetype of the female protagonist in an American movie. There is nothing duplicitous or multi-dimensional about her character. She exists, without any depiction of how or why she is yearned and wanted. She is simply wanted. We know that. We can glean all this information. She’s pretty. Of course, she’s wanted. 

All we see her as is the girl who is wanted. The girl that the boy dreams of – skating, playing tennis, running around the beach with. She has no say. No lines, besides mouthing an apology when he spilled his drink on himself by bumping into her at the crowded party.

In contrast, the male lead, the boy, isn’t the conventionally attractive man that one would see in movies. He’s asian(ish), a little chubby, and doesn’t have an entourage of friends surrounding him at any given moment. Yet, there’s something about him that I find appealing. I am a romantic, and I love, love. I yearn for it in all forms and shapes. I make no provisions or exact criteria for who I love, yet while reflecting, I notice that I have never ever, loved or yearned for a person who may have been considered ‘ugly.’ I must note that being beautiful has a highly racialized context to it. I’m an Indian person, on the lighter end of the skin color spectrum. I dress and dye my hair in ways that scream: ethnically ambiguous. Yet, I am also seen as a girl (regardless of my non-binary gender identity), who is also a little chubby. I’ve been in the same position as the male lead is portrayed in. I implicty know how boys and men would find me more attractive (see my confessions above).

Except, I’m no man. I can fantasize, and I have fantasized about boys in just the way the male lead in the music video fantasizes about the unreachable, untouchable, too-pretty-for-him girl. But I can’t chase. I have never expected to bump into a man I yearn for, and then have him take me to a beach for a romantic adventure, or a tennis court for a friendly love-all match, or a park for an elaborate date. Here’s the key: take. Why did I, as the girl in my story, expect these actions to be done by a boy? Would it sound ridiculous if I were the one who took responsibility? The responsibility to chase and to attract does not solely belong to the male figure. Or does it? I certainly see the male protagonist do the ‘chasing’ more often in pop culture.

Additionally, I am frustrated because, as a girl, I cannot see myself in the female protagonist. I know, inherently, that I cannot be the skinny, pretty blonde girl that is so obviously wanted and undeniably, overrepresented. Representation matters. I am woefully aware of it, because I almost never see people like me represented in the mainstream media that pervades (my world and) the world of pop culture. I understand that teliologically, mere representation is not the same is fixing the cause of the issue. It will take more than an accurate representation to change the way we think about sexuality and maleness and femaleness, and how deserves to be on screen. Yet, perhaps, implicitly, I know that my attempt at looking more ethnically ambiguous stems from my desire to seem closer to the normative identity of whiteness (in America) while internalizing the exoticism of my skin, tongue (language), and culture to seem palatable and appealing to men I deem attractive. I know that true love will see past the attraction. Yet, it is the first thing I see. You do too, don’t you? You see that it’s always the boy chasing the girl. You know that no matter what the boy looks like, she’s definitely going to be pretty. And in most cases, she’s going to be white. 

I notice my otherness. I sense it refelcted in the boy. I know I can never be her. I know I could probably be him. Our social locations are too far apart. But I understand the sentiment of the video. I know what yearning and love feel like.

Beyond the racialized lens, I also noticed how I view the world through my consumption of teen romance (primarily Western-dominated) that shaped the better half of my life. And for most of it, I viewed it through the male gaze. Like the boy in “Make You Mine,” I saw the boys and men in romance movies looking at women and girls as desirable beings and things to chase. John Berger’s 1972 monograph Ways of Seeing sums it up nicely: Men act and women appear. I noticed how I looked at the woman in the video and recognized that I wasn’t just looking at her, I was looking to be like her. I was informing myself of how to be desirable. What is it about her that makes her the object of a man’s desire? I found nothing, besides luck and looks. 

Am I selfish for this cutting analysis? Perhaps! This reflection speaks just as much about the perspectives I hold due to my unique positionality and lived experience. Have I judged a relatively sweet and cute teen romance through an unforgiving lens and racialized critique of masculinity and femininity? Perhaps. A cute romance may make us all swoon and kick our feet in the air. I love romances. I am a soft, sentimental sob at heart. “Make You Mine” made me smile and cry, and it also reminded me that many love stories in the mainstream aren’t actively made for me or people like me. I simply cannot, on a temporal level, connect with the characters. Perhaps I am too cynical, and I should settle for the symbolic representation of young love and hope. But, for once, I would like to feel full – full of the I know you feel when you watch a love story unfold. Then, perhaps, this is the right class to take for such a quixotic task to happen!