Increasingly, we’re seeing more women onscreen dealing with mental illness, often in ways that treat their disorder as just one element in a fully human, complex character. But all of these women are white. Women of color—specifically African American women—are not afforded the same type of humanity onscreen, if they’re even represented at all.
In order to get right with ourselves, we have to see outside ourselves—and in order to do that, we need other people. Our survival depends on it.
In the 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, director Kimberly Peirce notes that her 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry was originally rated NC-17—which is considered the kiss of death for movies seeking a broad audience—in part because a main character, Lana (Chloë Sevigny), had an orgasm that was “too long.” Peirce speculates that the problem lay in Lana’s undeniable pleasure—“There’s something about that that’s scaring them, that’s unnerving them.”
The default pop cultural perspective remains that of the adult man, and from his vantage point, exposing adolescent female sexuality onscreen can feel predatory or perverted. These comedies have little interest in considering how those men will feel when they are transported into a girl’s bedroom. Girls’ feelings matter, too. And these girls feel so much.
We don’t just need historical documentaries, coming out narratives, or survivor stories—and we certainly don’t need any more devastating endings. We need something else, something that heterosexual people take for granted: romantic vision. We need the bread-and-roses romantic comedies that make our hearts soar to the theater ceiling.
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