After three weeks in the theaters and some impressive returns at the box office, the horror comedy M3GAN has solidified itself as a hit — and, as you may have heard, a gay movie. SNL did a digital short with two M3GANs hitting the club, The New York Times did an explainer as to why gay men are losing their minds over the little murder doll with an attitude.
The thing that’s funny to me, though, is like… yes, of course M3GAN is a queer movie. But M3GAN is a queer movie, not because the little robot has sunglasses and an attitude and does TikTok dances. It’s a queer movie because M3GAN, herself, is extremely gay for Cady, the little girl she was built to befriend. Autostraddle has a good write up of why the film is essentially dyke drama, and it’s funny to me that, for all the commotion about the growing gay male obsession with the film, the general public is utterly silent about the fairly obvious sapphic-coding of the film’s central relationship. Oh yes, a little girl doll that’s so obsessed with her female friend that she’s protective to the point of murderousness; very heterosexual, absolutely.
Anyway I was thinking about how, short of being a period piece about sad women by the sea, films rarely get referred to as sapphic, even when they so clearly are. And this phenomenon leads to a double erasure for films about the bi female experience: not only is the depiction of sapphism likely to go under the radar for people, but if a character has cross gender attractions, then she’s automatically assumed to be straight. You have to pick one, right, and the merest implication of heterosexuality is always going to overshadow even the most blatant sapphism.
Carmen Maria Machado* wrote a fantastic essay about the bisexuality embedded in Jennifer’s Body, a movie which, well, most people do not see as bisexual despite the fact that it is not very subtle about it. You really should read Carmen’s essay (it is, as I mentioned just a second ago, fantastic), but one point that she raises, one that I think is worth thinking about, is that Needy’s passionate best friendship with Jennifer is fundamentally different from her relationship with her boyfriend; it is easy to erase her queerness because her queerness does not look like, does not take the form of, her hetero partnership.
I think this is part of what can make bisexuality (and specifically female bisexuality) so confusing, so difficult to depict in stories: sapphism itself can be a slippery sort of thing; a romance, a sexual attraction that does not neatly align itself with heterosexual norms of sex and romance (hence that old chestnut “How do two women even, you know, do it?” and many more). If women are obsessed with each other, well, that’s just what the girls do, right? And if there’s any attraction to men in the mix, then clearly, the girls are just straight**.
And this is also probably why a fair amount of bi media leans into the whole Very Special Episode™️ format, where viewers have to be hit over the head with a lot of messages about how the character is bi and what that means. Because if you go subtle, there’s a solid chance that people will miss it! I mean, honestly? Sometimes I’m “people”: I went into The Owl House knowing that the protagonist was bi and yet still got confused at one point because there was no big “I’m bi” speech and her attraction to men was depicted rather subtly (though there was a very cute scene with a bi pride patch in the first episode of S3, also omg, so tragic that they cut S3 short).
Anyway. I feel like I’m supposed to come up with some big idea here of how to make better, more visible bi representation in movies and on TV, how to really hit it home so that everyone in the audience just walks out of the movie theater thinking, “Well I just saw a story about a bi chick.” But honestly? That sounds kind of exhausting and not particularly true to life. As a bi woman myself, well… my bisexuality often is understated, it is subtle; it’s not something that screams itself when I enter a room, and I would prefer if bi characters were afforded some of that grace as well.
I think, for me, the real takeaway here is the limits of media representation as a way forward for bi progress. I mean, yes, cool, it’s good and worth doing, put bi characters in your art, and definitely tell bi stories. But people are going to see what they want to see, and many of those people are going to mentally erase the bisexuality out of your work. People are going to decide that M3GAN is a gay movie because a robot does a TikTok dance and not because she’s super fucking gay for the girl she’s been linked to for life. What are you going to do, you know?
* Hi Carmen!!
** Obvs this is also related to the belief in the all powerful dick, which will absolutely take hold of your life if you ever touch one for even a brief second. But I think it’s interesting that, even as people insist that bi men are obviously gay, their relationships with women are simply assumed to be fraudulent rather than… the passionate yet obviously not sexual because there’s no penis right? label that often gets affixed to bi women’s sapphism