Author: yamaguchiz

After our discussion on plastic representation in Tuesday’s class, I was feeling disenchanted in the media and the ongoing lack of meaningful representation. That night, I watched Luca for the first time, at the insistence of two of my housemates. They are both queer and love Luca, thinking of it as a story of coming out and being accepted. The movie is about two young boys—runaway sea monsters who can turn into humans while on land—experiencing a summer of self-realization together with their newfound human friend. Integral to the plot is their fear of being found out by the inhabitants of Portorosso, an Italian town known for hating and hunting sea monsters. Luca and Alberto have to hide who they really are in the presence of judgmental and fearful humans. At the climax of the movie, Alberto reveals his identity as a sea monster and Luca does not, betraying his friend and immediately regretting it. But Luca makes amends by saving Alberto from the movie’s villain, revealing his secret in the process. To both of their surprise, the town accepts them, with two town inhabitants revealing their scaly skin as well.

The plot has obvious potential for queer allegory and Luca and Alberto’s relationship can easily be read as a budding romance (falling in love with your best friend who you’re afraid has a heteronormative crush is a common gay experience, right?). Thus many viewers of the movie think of it as a queer story. To this point, Luca and Alberto’s identity as sea monsters, something they hide out of fear, is not something that can easily be changed without significant reworking of the plot. That is to say, Luca and Alberto don’t feel plastic or malleable or lacking depth. However, they are not explicitly gay. The director, Enrico Casarosa, has said that the boys are meant to be pre-pubescent and thus their friendship has the potential to develop into a romance, but is not of a romantic nature in the film itself. While disappointing, the boys are still visibly different and accepted as sea monsters—if not as gay lovers—which is heartwarming. Their sea monster-ness also seems to avoid the risk of positive or negative representation. Their fictitious identity can’t be compared to the ‘real’ experience of that identity, nor does their depiction on screen represent anyone explicitly. 

Watching Luca provoked questions for me that we’ve been grappling with throughout the term: is it possible for movies to have organic (not plastic) representations that aren’t too positive or too negative or non-representative of the creators of the movie? Why are so many movies that queer people find community around not explicitly queer? Is that inherently bad?

In Janelle Monáe’s film Dirty Computer, the music video “PYNK” begins with Jane (Monáe’s character)  driving a (hovering) pink convertible with other women of color through a pink desert, arriving at the Pynk Rest Stop and Inn, denoted with an old-fashioned drive-in sign and another sign advertising that “girls eat free and never leave.” The song then starts with close up shots of fingers snapping and high-heeled feet tapping to the beat, images of women of color dressed extravagantly at an empty pool and Janelle Monáe in the pink desert, often gazing directly into the camera. As her voice comes in with the lyric “pink like the inside of your…” the scene shifts to Jane and four other women of color wearing frilly pink, yonic pants, as well as two other women sans pants, dancing with the pink desert as their backdrop. Their dancing is interspersed with shots of Jane on her own and an oyster covered in pink glitter, then a close up of Jane with Zen’s (Tessa Thompson’s character) head between her legs, seeming to be the clitoris of the vulva image evoked by the pants. More dancing scenes follow, in the convertible, the empty pool, and the desert, before a short instrumental—during which Zen and Jane are on opposite ends of a row of women of color in white underwear, with the camera zoomed in to their butts, thrust into the air. When the soft chorus starts again, Jane is dancing on a fluffy pink bed with more women, with close up images of their underwear with “sex cells,” “great cosmic mother,” and “I grab back” embroidered on them, as well as images of a fluffy cat, more oysters, hands grasping silky sheets, and feathers and lingerie. The second part of the chorus and the following verse is danced to in a diner and the poolside at night, interspersed with scenes of the women working out. The scene then shifts back to the desert for the chorus, where Jane and Zen are on a mattress, staring into each others’ eyes and dancing sensually, switching to rapid close up, evocative images of women’s bodies—tongues touching, a bikini being untied, spit falling from a mouth, a stomach—and yonic objects before the song ends with the lyric “pink is my favorite part.”   

PYNK is a brash celebration of creation, self love, sexuality, and pussy power! PYNK is the color that unites us all, for pink is the color found in the deepest and darkest nooks and crannies of humans everywhere. PYNK is where the future is born.

Janelle Monáe

The song and music video seems to be a celebration of feminine sexuality, featuring only women of color. “PYNK” seems to offer a utopian alternative to the pop and hip hop music videos of the 90s and early 2000s, where women’s bodies were objectified, becoming accessories to the (often male) singer, and female viewers had to choose between identifying with the victim or the perpetrator of the phallocentric gaze—where bell hooks would call for an oppositional gaze. Close-up images of black women’s butts and breasts are featured in the “PYNK,” but for a female audience. The women are the holders of a sexualizing gaze, rather than the object of this gaze, with their constant movement and direct eye contact with the camera giving them a sense of agency. This agency is furthered by the scene with Zen’s head between Jane’s legs, where the pseudo clitoral stimulation seems to argue that women can be the receiver of pleasure, provided by themselves or other women. The yonic pants worn in this scene seem to be a performance of objecthood—in this case, the women become a vulva—where the costume/avatar circumvents the prescribed limitations on black women in the public sphere. Janelle Monáe finds power in her femininity, instead of a reduced notion of self.  

The music video for “Lucky,” a song off of the pop and R&B album Where the Butterflies Go in the Rain, starts with an old-fashioned title card reminiscent of an old Hollywood film introducing Raveena and “The Worm.” You then see Raveena—wearing headphones and glasses and holding a book—run to her window and stare with intrigue at The Worm walking by her house. The Worm is a human-sized caterpillar, a literal interpretation of the “love-starved shell” and “black shades” Raveena says her lover hides behind in her lyrics. The music video then shows a montage of Raveena and The Worm on dates at a bookstore or having a picnic, making drinks, playing the piano, and slow dancing. These scenes are spliced with up close shots on a cam recorder of them seemingly documenting falling in love while Raveena croones “my feminine love can heal all the hurt.” Occasionally, lyrics will be displayed on the bottom of the screen: “let me be your escape from the world,” and “you must know one thing—I will change.”

The second chorus sees Raveena waking up, looking around, and realizing her lover had turned into a little moth beside her. A white, plague doctor-esque moth holding a single white rose looks over the scene, before the cam recorder montage of Raveena and The Worm falling in love returns, with more lyrics displayed: “if only you can see how you make me blush,” “I see your roses in every moment,” and “won’t you see them fall?”

The music video ends with Raveena slowly walking towards a giant chrysalis in a white dress, then going back to the scene where Raveena sees the little moth. . . only this time, it flies away. 

The song and music video is about the transformational power of love, how the right relationship can help a person grow their wings. 

The only characters featured in the music video are Raveena—a beautiful thirty-two year old Indian American woman—and The Worm. While the montage scenes feel like they could have been taken from any movie depicting a love story, the social roles are somewhat subverted given that the love interest is a caterpillar, with no clear gender, age, class, or ethnicity. However, the identity of The Worm never posed a problem in their love story; both Raveena and The Worm are represented as normal, valuable, and worthy of love. Neither are objectified. While the ambiguity of The Worm’s identity seems to be a general representation of otherization (and not a specific intersection of marginalized identities), The Worm itself is not othered.   

As a music video, it’s a pretty lighthearted and silly piece of media. However, I found the rejection of the typical over sexualization of young, beautiful women in music videos no less meaningful!