How Love, Simon and Cameron Post make gay people something more than tragic.
This essay was originally written in January 2019 for my university course.
Love, Simon (Berlanti, 2018) and The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Akhavan,2018) (Cameron Post for short) are both teen comedies that discuss homosexuality in a comedic way rather than a tragic way. In this essay I will explain how the two movies make gay people something other than a tragedy and why they should be included in future forms of the module. In Love, Simon we follow a closeted gay teen who begins an anonymous online relationship with a classmate, but a different classmate finds the conversations and begins to blackmail Simon over his sexuality. Meanwhile in Cameron Post, we follow a teen who has been freshly outed as she enters a gay conversion therapy camp.
In the first scene of Love, Simon we see the titular Simon (Nick Robinson) ogling a gardener outside his house, the twist is that he is ogling a man. The Sexual Subject (Screen, 1992) argues that “male homosexual desire is present in a repressed form in many films” it could be said that Love, Simon is one of the first major Hollywood movies in which the lead male character shows male homosexual desire in a way that isn’t negative and repressed. Throughout the movie we see Simon admire many men, this is very uncommon in major studio releases and Love, Simon was the only one of 2018 to feature this. In comparison the first scene in Cameron Post shows Cameron (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her best friend from bible study in a secret relationship. What follows is a montage set to Anyone Who Knows What Love Is as Cameron and her friend continue their straight façade at their prom until they are caught having sex by their dates. It is interesting to see the mainstream movie take a very generic approach to it’s opening scene meanwhile the smaller movie takes a more nuanced approach. The smaller movie (Cameron Post) is also very clearly the more professional product.
In Love, Simon’s second act, Simon is outed by his blackmailer. There are several scenes where Simon is extremely vulnerable, more so than men usually are in mainstream movies. This can be argued as a form of new masculinity. He is seen crying a lot more than a man would normally be in a movie. After this Simon becomes the subject of homophobic bullying and in one scene we see Simon talk to a fellow pupil who is an effeminate gay black man. The movie uses the cliché gay character in a way that’s not insulting. You could say that this conversation gives Simon the confidence to be proud of his sexuality and that it motivates him to make a big romantic gesture, a cliché of romantic movies that Berlanti choses to keep as it is very effective.
In Cameron Post the titular Cameron has multiple explicit dreams in which she is having sex with her counsellor and her roommate. In The Sexual Subject the author suggests that “female sexuality is censored rather than repressed” Cameron Post shows that this statement is at least false when contextualised within recent movies. These dreams are a manifestation of her pull between being heterosexual and being herself, a lesbian. The dreams also show Cameron’s uncomfort with her situation, her wish to be elsewhere and her sexual desire. The latter being a thing that teen movies are afraid to discuss. One could say that Cameron Post is a good example of counter cinema as Susan Hayward describes it in Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (S. Hayward, 1996):
“the point of cinema she envisioned was not one that relied on self-reflexivity or foregrounding the conditions of film production alone but one that would draw on female fantasy and desire”
The movie uses Cameron’s desire and fantasy to get information across that would not work if they were just spoken. In Immortal Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image (T. Wilton,1995), Tamsin Wilton argues that “many women savoured the delights of explicit lesbian sex on screen, felt uplifted by the romance between two women that does not end in disaster or punishment” this could be used to argue that Cameron Post is a good representation of a lesbian woman.
In the conclusion of Love, Simon, Simon makes his big romantic gesture, he tells his anonymous pen pal to meet him at the ferris wheel at their school fair. In a shocking turn of events it turns out his pen pal is his friend Bram (Keiynan Lonsdale) they have their big romantic moment and kiss in front of the whole school. We then cut to a scene that repeats events of the opening scene, this time Simon wears brighter colours and his body language is different. We then see a similar car scene to one earlier, but this time Bram is in the car. It is implied that they are in a relationship now. They get their happy ending. To any viewer of queer cinema this would be a surprise as rarely does that happen.
In the conclusion of Cameron Post, Cameron and her campmates realise that their counsellors are irresponsible and decide to leave their conversion therapy camp for good. They hitch a ride in the back of a pick-up truck and we last see them being happy for what is the second or third time in the whole movie. They’re free, and they did it by themselves. In comparison to Love, Simon’s ending it is a lot more ambiguous and uncertain like what the future for these characters will mostly be like. It ends on a high because the characters need this moment of catharsis.
One could argue that Cameron Post isn’t bothered about pandering to a straight audience meanwhile Love, Simon must. Love, Simon opens with the line “I’m just like you”, you could say that this is both aimed at its homosexual and heterosexual viewers but is trying to gear itself more towards heterosexuals. Both movies feature teenagers going through a major point in their lives, they are coming of age. The movies show the many different sides to being a closeted teen, an important thing as no-ones story is really the same. The two movies deal with themes of identity and finding yourself, this is a common theme in movies aimed at teenagers Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002) is a good example of this too as that movie discusses identity within gender and race.
Love, Simon and Cameron Post make it very clear that they are aware of the tropes and clichés that are given to gay characters and try to subvert them unless it is to poke fun at the ridiculousness of the cliché or to use them in a genuine away that does not make them the butt of a joke. They don’t use trauma to manipulate the viewers like many other LGBT+ movies may, albeit most of those movies are made by heterosexual people.
Love, Simon and Cameron Post are both directed by openly queer people. This is important as these movies are essentially speaking for the groups they represent. It is important to allow queer people to tell their own stories because only they know what it’s like to be queer. Movies like Cameron Post and Love, Simon interestingly are no way near as acclaimed as movies like Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016). Which are both directed by heterosexual men and tell the stories of gay men. One could argue that this is problematic as these representations are from the perspectives of people who have never been in that character’s shoes. In Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts , Susan Hayward says that “gays and lesbian on the whole have a hard time being seen or given a space in which to be understood” this helps argue the stance that LBGT+ filmmakers should be allowed to tell their own stories. But it just so happens to be that the LGBT+ movies directed by straight men are a lot more popular when it comes down to awards and acclaim. And even now as I write this another LGBT+ movie is breaking new ground as The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), which features three lead women who are in a love triangle and yet again it is directed by a straight man and is receiving a lot of Academy Awards buzz.
Love, Simon and The Miseducation of Cameron Post in my opinion would make many contributions to the module. The two movies don’t treat being gay as a negative and they aren’t sombre. They treat being gay as something to be proud of rather than something to hide or to be ashamed of. I believe they would pair well with The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and Jeffery Friedman, 1995), as they show that LGBT+ representation has evolved to beyond queer characters being villains or the butt of a joke. The two movies show a startling defence to the movies that are shown in the documentary. The two movies show a step forward in representation behind the camera as well as in front of it, as mentioned earlier both directors are openly queer. This, in my opinion makes the movies more vital to the discourse surrounding LGBT+ representation.
In my opinion I also believe these movies are important to the discourse surrounding LGBT+ representation because they have had affected me personally as well as fellow LGBT+ people I know. The movies are important to people now and should be discussed now. But in saying this I should also say that the movies don’t get everything right, Love, Simon is in some ways a vain movie with more attention being given to the aesthetics of the movie and the screenplay rather than the quality of the acting on display.
In conclusion, Love, Simon and The Miseducation of Cameron Post both give homosexual men and women positive representation. These movies are about being proud of who you are and not allowing other people to control your narrative. They use the homosexual gaze to show homosexual desire in ways rarely done when being aimed at teenagers. Cameron Post gives female homosexuality the spotlight which to is rarely done. The last notable movies being Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015) and Disobedience (Sebastián Lelio, 2017). The movies are important in the current zeitgeist surrounding LGBT+ representation because they discuss topics without fear. They use the clichés and trappings of the genre they are in to improve upon and slightly critique them, even if that means using a cliché or two.
These movies are important to the cultural zeitgeist as well as to LGBT+ people who consume films and should be treated as such.
