Kicking off Pride month, here’s Stevi Costa with Mike Mills’ lovely, semiautobiographical drama Beginners and how its depiction of queerness contrasts with the film’s overall hegemonic whiteness and heteronormativity.
This is what queer cinema looked like in 2011. The people were white. The gay roles were played by straight actors. The queer parts of the story took place in the past. The central romance was straight.
But in spite of these optics, there is still a lot of plaintive loveliness to Mike Mills’s Beginners, a film in which Ewan McGregor’s American accent often narrates the differences between the past and present by showing old photographs or objects against a black screen as though he is offering the viewer a vacation slideshow. Beginners centers on McGregor’s Oliver, who has just lost his father Henry (Christopher Plummer). From Oliver’s slideshow montages, we learn that his mother didn’t know she was Jewish until she was 13. His father didn’t know he was gay until he was 13. And yet, in 1955, they married and stayed together until Oliver’s mother died four years before the events of the film take place. His father came out of the closet shortly thereafter and lived the remaining years of his life as an out gay man. “I don’t want to be just theoretically gay,” he says to his son. “I want to do something about it.”
I’ve been openly bisexual since I was a teenager, but I only became theoretically gay when I got to grad school and read theory. When I saw the film in 2011, I recall telling my husband that the film’s propensity toward slideshow-style narration reminded me of Ann Cvetkovich’s notion that queer trauma is experienced at the level of the everyday. Each time McGregor’s Oliver shows us a photograph of an empty bathroom stall where his father, Henry, would have to sneak into to have sex in 1955, the seemingly banal is imbued with importance for queer subjects. The chronicity of the film is inherently queer (and crip) as it skips back and forth between Oliver’s present, his final years with his father, and his memories of his childhood. Queer time is often theorized in similar terms of recurrence, of orientations other than futuric. When Oliver describes his mother’s death, he says she was “skipping back and forth through time inside her head,” a visual style which is also the temporal structure of the film. The movie is as much structured by this crip temporality of death and dying as it is by its queer orientation toward the past.
I am also struck by the way the photographic sequences work to show normalcy and deviance on multiple levels. Oliver shows us images of “what pretty looked like” that depict smiling white women with light-colored hair and red lips when describing his Jewish mother’s childhood or of athletic white men in polo shirts and crisp slacks when describing his father’s upbringing. Cut from magazine advertisements, the images pile on top of one another to show us just how slender, WASPy whiteness became normative, how ideal gender presentations are constructed. Oliver, who is working through the loss of both of his parents by creating a graphic novel called The History of Sadness, also shows us “what happy looked like” through the repetition of red-painted smiles and bright white teeth and couples in love. This is what heteronormativity looked like. This is what neurotypicality looked like. This is what hegemonic whiteness looked like. The film is clear that cultural norms are produced and reproduced and that we are very rarely aware of them. In short, it explains through these sequences how ideology works, which it reinforces in the following monologue that Oliver delivers to his father’s Jack Russell terrier: “You think you’re you when you want to chase the foxes, but that’s not you. Someone planted that in you years ago…and now you’re chasing tennis balls because that’s as close to a fox as you’re gonna get.”
Oliver also shows us images from his childhood and from the perspective of the film’s present, 2003. The repeated slideshows from different moments in time invite us to see history as progress, as a breakdown of the hegemonic norms listed above. The juxtaposition between 1955 images of empty bathroom sales and gay men being arrested for public sex and 2003 images of Henry surrounded by the L.A. Gay Men’s chorus or beaming beside his younger boyfriend Andy (Goran Visnjic, in a truly unfortunate wig) or waving a rainbow flag at L.A. Pride clearly show the costs Henry would have paid for his authenticity in 1955 and the freedom he could finally experience at the end of his life in 2003. There are people of color beside him in the group photographs. His world is no longer pristine and white. And he is no longer alone. The film implies that happiness is impossible when one can’t be themselves, and that the loving marriage Oliver was raised under was fundamentally unhappy because neither of his parents could really be themselves. It suggests, then, à la Cvetkovich, that depression is a public feeling. When Oliver’s comic book begins with an image of the sun, he notes “sadness hadn’t been invented yet,” and he’s right because the logic of the film suggests that sadness is culturally produced through the desire for normativity.
But in spite of these techniques, which I find so compelling and beautiful, the film itself is what hegemonic whiteness looks like. It is what heteronormativity looks like. In its attempt to expose the constraints of normalcy that make people sad, it also reproduces them. By focusing on Oliver, the heterosexual product of a secretly queer marriage, and his attempt to break through the surface of his grief by making art and making love to French actress Mélanie Laurent, the story of Beginners becomes decidedly less queer. Oliver does not live in a queer world. His only interactions with queerness are through his relationship with his father’s younger lover, Andy, which is barely a relationship at all. In flashbacks, Oliver politely watches while Andy and Henry coo over each other, nodding with a smile and demurring from eye contact. After Henry’s death, Oliver has Andy watch Arthur the dog while he flies to New York to chase Mélanie Laurent (who, unbeknownst to him, is still in L.A.). When Oliver returns for the dog, Andy confronts him. “It’s because I’m gay, isn’t it? That’s why you don’t like me.” Oliver shakes his head, tears in his eyes. “No. It’s because my father loved you so much.” There’s a lot to unpack in this line, but one reading of Oliver’s answer reiterates the film’s heteronormativity. There’s no issue with queerness, per se, except in the utter undoing of Oliver’s understanding of his father as a person who had loved his deceased mother and his family. Oliver clings to an image of watching his father kiss his mother on the cheek or the forehead before heading out the door to work each morning. Oliver shows us this memory several times as though it is part of his picture-perfect slideshows, and Andy’s presence in his world reframes it in ways that obviously make Oliver uncomfortable.
Aside from a Black coworker and a few people of color at the fringes of photographs and parties, Andy is the closest thing to a major character of color in the film…and he is not a person of color. Andy is foreign, from an undefined country with an undefined accent. He is played by Goran Visnjic, the Croatian actor you have probably seen as a villain in many things (especially the absolutely batshit television series Timeless, which I loved for its unabashed stupidity). We know nothing about Andy other than his childlike energy, illustrated through a propensity to cup bugs in his hands and bring them to Henry, and a line in which he mentions he moved to the United States so that he could live as a gay man. In 2003, as in 2021, there are many countries in which homosexuality is a social taboo, many of them being countries populated by the non-white global majority. I find the lack of specificity in this character’s backstory to be problematic because it allows the film to take on the flavor of a person of color without actually committing to casting one or truly telling that story. That Visnjic possess a certain “diversatility” that allows him to play characters of ambiguous ethnicities is not his fault so much as it is a casting director’s. I have no evidence that this role is written to be a person of color, but the film invites us to read Andy as though he might be. This is what hegemonic whiteness looks like. In a way, the vagueness of this character seems to fit the tone of the film, which is melancholic and always a little distant from its subjects, but in 2021, it really does a disservice to the film’s ability to capture something authentic about queerness from a non-white, non-Western perspective. (The 2020 film Uncle Frank does a much better job of this by giving Frank’s Middle Eastern partner Wally a sizeable role and specific character traits that are both tied to his ethnicity and not.)
The critique of Andy is necessary because the film is so deeply concerned with the notion of authenticity. The most moving moment for me is Oliver’s queer reading of The Velveteen Rabbit, which he quotes over photos of his father’s brief life as an out gay man. “What is real?” “Does it hurt?” Of course, realness and authenticity are aspects of queer culture that come up in drag discourse. “Realness” indicates a kind of authenticity in representation, be it executive opulence or butch queen or whatever category one might be walking at a ball. In The Velveteen Rabbit, the Skin Horse tells the rabbit that becoming real doesn’t happen all at once; it takes a long time. “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby,” he advises. “But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” Oliver quotes this piece of advice in the film, beautifully emphasizing his father’s ability to finally be real with himself and with the world later in life when he is loose in the joints. In Beginners, to become real via coming out is to live authentically, and that is a process that can indeed hurt, depending on where you sit in the world. We are well aware of that becoming real earlier in life would have been impossible for Henry without “risking everything.” But there’s also a sense that Andy’s realization came with significant loss, even though his horrible wig hasn’t been loved off and he retains his youth. The film is highly aware of what is at stake in becoming real, and yet it doesn’t allow space for Andy to really do so authentically.
Foregrounding Oliver’s story suggests that we read a straight story as a queer because he, too, is experiencing melancholia. Freud describes melancholia as a kind of loss of disavowed homosexual attachment, a desire to be with an object that cannot be attained or reincorporated into the self. It is different from mourning, which is the kind of loss we experience when we grieve an object that cannot return to the world. The film doesn’t quite make this distinction. It seems to conflate the grief Oliver is experiencing at losing both parents within a span of four years with the more Freudian melancholia his parents might have felt at living less than authentically during their marriage. But by literally dressing Oliver as Freud when he is dragged to the Halloween party where he will eventually meet Mélanie Laurent’s Annie, the film circumscribes his mourning, his grief as melancholia. The meet cute between Oliver and Annie is charmingly twee and insufferable in a way, but it is also Oliver’s only real brush with queerness in the film. Rather than socializing, Oliver has chosen to act “in character” as Freud, performing mock psychoanalysis on any partygoer who reclines on the couch next to his seat. When Annie lies down to be psychoanalyzed, she is in boy drag and can’t talk due to a bout of laryngitis. She writes all of her answers on a notepad and, at one point, asks, “Why did you come to the party if you are sad?” For once, Freud has no answer. They spend the evening together, her boy wig slowly creeping up her head to reveal her blond hair as the hours stretch on. Before they leave the party, they take off their wigs in the bathroom together and reveal that they are not, in fact, a German psychoanalyst and a strapping young lad, but Ewan McGregor and Mélanie Laurent. The queer desire of their meet cute is effectively diffused and their heteronormative romance can begin.
When I saw this film in 2011, I could not yet recognize the significance of Oliver sorting through his father’s papers in the first scene. But now, in 2021, I have twice gone to a family member’s home and sorted through their things after their death, deciding which to keep and which to donate and which to throw away. Death, for the living, is a series of organizational tasks, a process of curating the remnants of someone’s life and making meaning out of them. It is poignant that, in life, Henry was a museum curator, and in his death the task of curation falls upon his son. This is what mourning looks like in 2003. This is what mourning looks like in 2021. And this is why I think the film’s layering of mourning and melancholia are slippery and troubling. They are not the same kind of feeling. Mourning is temporary, not pervasive, and although it is often reiterated through everyday objects that may remind me of that loss, it stands in contrast to the feeling Oliver’s slideshows capture when discussing his parents’ histories of sadness. His own sadness through the film, I think, reads a lot more like the mourning. The inclusion of a heteronormative romance in the film also seems to suggest that beginning to love a person will help Oliver break through the surface of his grief and his loneliness. His story is oriented toward the idea of a future, a future his queer and Jewish parents, now deceased, no longer have and could never have.
This is what I think about Beginners in 2021. This is a story in which there is no crisis of coming out. The film welcomes the possibility that Henry loved his wife and also had queer desires that he could only indulge in theory until she died. In 2011, Beginners offered a unique and complex take on queer life and I think it still does, although it is limited by its whiteness. And while I find it challenging that this gay story centers straight, white masculinity, there is also something lovely about the inclusion of the straight child of a queer parent in a gay story. Oliver’s mother explains to him that he is one quarter Jewish, demonstrating what parents pass on to their children. And while the narrative that queer people are “born this way” negates the idea that queerness is a choice (which Henry subscribes to when he declares that he doesn’t just want to be theoretically gay), perhaps queer sensibilities and ways of being in the world might be inherited. And perhaps there might be room in the pantheon of queer narratives for something like Beginners, which asks us to move from the theoretical to the material as we leverage the past to shape the present.
— Stevi Costa
10 Years Ago: Films in Retrospective 