I’m confused. If Drew Barrymore and Ellen Page are such a public item, why wouldn’t Barrymore put any dykes in her directorial debut and TIFF entry Whip It?
It’s about derby girls and the roller derby sport – about as dykey as you can get.
It’s completely weird that Barrymore gives us the impression there are no dykes in a scene where we know there tons, while promoting her film via her pseudo-sexual connection to Ellen Page in the pages of Marie Claire.
It’s particularly strange since there was so much lesbian and queer content at TIFF where you’d least expect it. Sometimes it surfaced when you had to have it – in Cracks and Tanner Hall, both about life in girls’ private schools.
But in the middle of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Julianne Moore appears out of nowhere as a predatory lesbian pornographer. Paula Patton plays the lesbian teacher Ms. Rain in Precious. Ben Barnes kisses Ben Chaplin as Dorian Gray and the painter Basil Hallward respectively. Each of these movies wants commercial success – and Pippa Lee and Precious will definitely get it – and none of them seems to have a problem with delivering queer content.
What bugs me most about the strategy is that Barrymore is happy to fake lesbianism to promote a movie that doesn’t have a single lesbian in it. During my interview for NOW’s September 10 cover story, Barrymore talked about how close collaborators become on an artistic project.
The context was her relationship with Jessica Lange during the making of the exceptional HBO movie Grey Gardens. Chemistry’s important, she told me, and she even mentioned that she’d fallen a little bit in love with Page during the making of Whip It.
When I asked her if she made a conscious decision to leave lesbians out in Whip It, she hemmed and hawed, before finessing her answer. It was the only time she lost control during our conversation.
I do appreciate that Page was prepared to go along with the dykey Marie Claire feature, given rumours circulating about her own sexuality.
But personally, I think Barrymore would have done more for lesbians by giving us proper visibility in Whip It than by staging a fake lesbo scene in the pages of a magazine.[rssbreak]