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Writer's pictureLizzy Gravelle

Queer Readings: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Tragedy Girls

“There’s Something Queer Here” is the first chapter in Alexander Doty’s book Making Things Perfectly Queer, in which he discusses queer film theory. This chapter focuses on existing popular “queer readings” of popular genre fare, in which Doty articulates the idea of queerness existing beyond rigidly gendered sexual interest. He argues that ostensibly straight characters in fiction, and by extension straight audience members, can have “queer” relationships and experience queerness: “I would like to propose ‘queerness’ as a mass culture reception practice that is shared by all sorts of people in varying degrees of consistency and intensity.” (2)


Doty returns to this idea of “straight identifying” people experiencing “queer moments” at various points throughout the chapter. One common form of queer readings he discusses is the “buddy movie” where two male characters have an intense emotional friendship that is “buffered” by a female love interest for one or both of them. One of the movies he uses to illustrate this concept is the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. A much more recent film that has a similarly queer reading is the 2017 film Tragedy Girls. These two films both portray two ostensibly “straight” female friendships with intense emotional connections that outweigh their respective romantic entanglements, and together present an interesting portrait of how this type of relationship has evolved.


Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was directed by Howard Hawks in 1953. Tragedy Girls was directed by Tyler MacIntyre in 2017. The first film is a musical romantic comedy that tells the story of Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) and Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell), two best friends who work as showgirls and embark on a trip to Paris together after Lorelei gets engaged to a wealthy man, and the bumps in the road they come across along the way. Tragedy Girl is a horror comedy that follows childhood best friends Sadie Cunningham (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla Hooper (Alexandra Shipp) as they capitalize upon a local serial killer to embark on killing spree together in an attempt to get famous, and how their love for each other is put to the test by the men around them.


While on the surface these sound like very different films, at their core both films are about the arc of a passionate female friendship. Both films present major scenes that could easily be read as queer. Both films feature male love interests for the friends, one a more passive background figure, the other a more active participant in the events of the film. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, these men take the shape of Gus (Tommy Noonan), Lorelei’s wealthy fiancé, and Ernie Malone (Elliott Reid), a private detective hired by Gus’s father to spy on Lorelei who ultimately romances and falls in love with Dorothy. In Tragedy Girls these roles are filled by Toby (Josh Hutcherson), McKayla’s ex whom she is still hung up on and the girls’ third victim, and Jordan (Jack Quaid), Sadie’s boyfriend and an unwitting collaborator in the girls’ killing spree as he edits together their social media videos about the murders.



Of these pairings, the most interesting men are Ernie and Jordan and their respective relationships to Dorothy and Sadie. Both films feature a scene between the couples where the man insists to the woman that they “know they’re better than this” in a plea for the women to abandon their friends. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the scene takes place at the end of the second act when Ernie tries to convince Dorothy that she should disentangle herself from Lorelei, even saying so to Lorelei. Dorothy rejects him out of hand, angry at him for hurting Lorelei, in a scene that functions as a “third act break-up” for the couple. A similar scene plays out during the climax of Tragedy Girls, where after finding out that Sadie and Mckayla were the serial killers all along, Jordan pleads to Sadie that she is “nothing like her [McKayla], I know you, I love you, the real you.” In response, Sadie smiles and replies, “You don’t know me at all” before ultimately killing him and reuniting with McKayla.


These scenes functionally depict the same thing: one main character rebuffs her male love interest in favor of her beloved friend. What makes them distinct is their respective place in the story. Ernie and Dorothy’s exchange takes place when there is still an entire half hour of story left; this rebuff is not a definitive end to their relationship, but rather an obstacle they must ultimately overcome. In contrast, Sadie and Jordan’s confrontation happens in the final five minutes of the film, and serves as Sadie’s final decision to choose McKayla over Jordan.


Similar scenes echo this in each movie in a background way. Near the beginning of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Gus expresses concern to Lorelei that Dorothy may be a “bad influence” which Lorelei passionately disagrees with, asserting that “Dorothy needs me”. Once again a direct parallel can be found in Tragedy Girls. As part of the plan the girls kidnap and hold captive a local serial killer, Lowell Lehmonn, a large burly man directly aping Jason Voorhees and Micheal Meyers in his appearance. Half way through the film, he attempts to persuade MacKayla into abandoning Sadie, “she’s not like you”, we hear again. “You can’t trust her.” Lowell whispers to her from inside his cell. Just as Lorelei wouldn’t hear any bad things said about Dorothy, likewise MacKayla initially rejects Lowell’s assertions. “Like you could ever get between me and my BFF!”


The films both feature another pair of related shots that have queer readings: wedding dresses. The final scene of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes features Lorelei and Dorothy walking down the aisle together on their shared wedding day in matching white wedding dresses. As they walk toward their waiting respective male partners, the men are merely present. The takeaway image of the scene, and indeed the final shot of the film, is of Lorelei and Dorothy standing together in white. A similar motif can be seen at the end of Tragedy Girls. Having murdered their respective male love interests, the girls hold hands, wearing spotless white prom dresses, as they gleefully burn their school to the ground together. Both films use the same imagery to end their stories – two women who have chosen each other over the world, standing together in white dresses. The key distinction between the two is that Gentlemen maintains the heteronormative buffer of the male love interests, whereas Tragedy Girls does away with this buffer entirely.


Doty described a “queer pleasure” in the “tender and boisterous rapport between Lorelei and Dorothy.” (8) Rather than the female viewer’s simple enjoyment of projecting onto Dorothy as she dances with shirtless men, he suggests an alternative interpretation of “Russell being the ‘gentleman’ who preferred the blonde Monroe.” (8) The queer reading in Dorothy and Lorelei’s relationship comes from their devotion to each other, routinely choosing each other over men. Ernie can only truly have a relationship with Dorothy once he accepts Lorelei. But again, the men, ultimately, are still there to reassure the audience of the characters’ heterosexuality.


Tragedy Girls represents a step forward on this front by making a film with queer potential that simply rejects the male love interests outright. Doty identified horror as a “film genre typically linked to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals” (14) as “the central conventions of horror actually encourage queer positioning” (15) so it’s hardly surprising to see this shift in a horror film. This is not to say that Tragedy Girls has an explicitly queer story; it is very much still a matter of interpretation. However, the film is entirely unafraid of opening itself up to such an interpretation, firmly making the only relationship that matters in the girls’ lives be each other.


The lack of fear about queer readings and queer themes shows the evolution of the film industry of the 1950s to the 2010s. The rigid studio system, and the industry that operated under it, resulted in a world where female-centered and queer-themed films had to buffered by heteronormative relationships. This rigid system led to a world where queerness had to exist in the shadows and was othered to an extreme. By the 2010s, queer expression and queer art experience could thrive openly in a world where “‘queerness’ as a mass culture reception practice” was not only received, but returned at various levels of intensity.


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