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?
One reply on “Queer Representation in Luca”
Thank you for your thought-provoking questions you asked at the end! I haven’t seen Luca, so I appreciate you sharing more about it (maybe I’ll watch it over the summer now). It sounds really cute. As you point out, Luca could be read as a queer alegory, but as you also say, there is nothing explicit and they are children. I do think it’s so interesting how so many movies queer people find community around do not have explicit queerness. While I don’t think it’s inherently bad that people do that, it does seem bad that that queer people must so often do complex excavtions of subtlety to find representation. The issue then lies in who is making the representation, and why. The creators of Luca seem to be trying to teach children to accept people who are different. Would it be better if they were more explicit in who they meant that difference to be? I’m not sure I know.