{"id":449,"date":"2025-06-04T23:50:11","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T23:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/?p=449"},"modified":"2025-06-04T23:50:11","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T23:50:11","slug":"queer-representation-in-luca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/?p=449","title":{"rendered":"Queer Representation in Luca"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After our discussion on plastic representation in Tuesday\u2019s class, I was feeling disenchanted in the media and the ongoing lack of meaningful representation. That night, I watched Luca<\/em> for the first time, at the insistence of two of my housemates. They are both queer and love Luca<\/em>, thinking of it as a story of coming out and being accepted. The movie is about two young boys\u2014runaway sea monsters who can turn into humans while on land\u2014experiencing 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The plot has obvious potential for queer allegory and Luca and Alberto\u2019s relationship can easily be read as a budding romance (falling in love with your best friend who you\u2019re 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2014if not as gay lovers\u2014which is heartwarming. Their sea monster-ness also seems to avoid the risk of positive or negative representation. Their fictitious identity can\u2019t be compared to the \u2018real\u2019 experience of that identity, nor does their depiction on screen represent anyone explicitly.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Watching Luca<\/em> provoked questions for me that we\u2019ve been grappling with throughout the term: is it possible for movies to have organic (not plastic) representations that aren\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After our discussion on plastic representation in Tuesday\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":454,"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions\/454"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rgsinpop.2025.cmoore.sites.carleton.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}