Opengender

The style of lesbian-made feature films was generally very different from that of male-directed queer films. The lesbian features were, on the whole, contemporary, upbeat and 'feelgood.' There was minimal exploration or re-evaluation of the past and minimal overtly politicised or critical content or deconstructive form. On a reverse trajectory from that of queer film, the commercialisation of lesbian filmmaking seemed to carry an acknowledged degree of re-presentation towards the uncritically positive. Turner observed that "angst is out" and "the feelgood factor is in" (quoted by Florence, 1994: 299).

Oh my God, if we did our normal lives, we would never sell this movie [...] Especially if you look at what was going on behind the scenes while Go Fish was being made — crazy shit compared to, like, what was in the movie. (Rose Troche quoted by Abramowitz, 1996: 84-5)

This seems reminiscent of black critical commentary on the limitations of authorial control in New Black cinema. And not all lesbian critics were celebratory about the incursions to the mainstream effected by queer.

By and large, strategies aimed at achieving social integration — or, more pointedly, assimilation in liberal society where the sexual orientations or 'lifestyles' of lesbians would be treated offhandly — accept without question the dictates of consumer culture, equating cultural value with economic success [...] This [middle-class] constituency fosters narratives of lesbian cultural identity reproduced in the image of consumer culture, a strategy that invariably feeds self-aggrandising myths of possession and control. (Gever, 1990: 200)

It certainly seems very clear that the rubicon of 'bums on seats' largely superseded any political or aesthetic considerations as a critical measure of cultural worth. This tendency was frequently justified on the grounds of 'pleasure.' Numbers of lesbian 'bums on seats' were often cited as evidence of this new lesbian 'pleasure' — effectively not so much even as visual pleasure or desire, but pleasure in the consumption of lesbianism as a commodity.

Again, this process of institutionalisation quickly produced contestation, often drawing on resistant black and Latin forms:

While a 'garbage esthetic' can at times produce junk, we have begun to create work that reflects our production circumstances while nonetheless challenging the limits of what can be done on the low end of the production scale [...] There is an entire crop of lesbian video-makers, [...] who have developed an elaborate defense of down and dirty video activism. (Lebow, 1993: 19)

The gay and lesbian film festivals, set up only in the previous decade, were already being seen as implicated in the assimilation of queer filmmaking to dominant praxis:

With the advent of 'The New Queer Cinema' which is a predominantly narrative, white, male, dominant culture approved category — it becomes increasingly important for community-based film festivals to maintain a vibrant oppositional position and refuse to let the mainstream media dominate the definitions of gay and lesbian cultural expression. Unfortunately the vast majority of gay and lesbian film festivals are in formal and demographic lockstep with the dominant trends. (Schulman, 1996: 134)

Increasingly, oppositional, experimental and culturally marginal film production is moving away from an ineffectual stratification of aesthetic and identificatory boundaries and towards emphasis on sites of production and consumption in networked 'localities.' The New York Mix festivals, for example, represented the intersecting boundaries of marginal cultural production in localised contexts of production:

With the gay community's lurch toward assimilation, 'obvious' notions of what it means to be experimental have evaporated, [...] something only marginally different is marginalized as experimental by the mainstream [...] [Furthermore] with the dominance of video, there seems less of a connection to the pillars of the film world [..] The community of people making film (celluloid), was so small, it was knowable [...] concentration on parties is a marked shift [...] The idea of polymorphousness was promulgated, while [...] standard notions of 'gay' and 'lesbian' were de-emphasised. (Jusick, 1996: 91)

It might be expected that such fundamental shifts in the nexus of queer, lesbian, and feminist, cultural production might also problematise lesbian spectatorship of both indie and mainstream commercial cinema.

I have previously addressed arguments that avoiding mainstream cinema and confining lesbian spectatorship to lesbian-controlled production and exhibition contexts would solve the ambiguities of resistant readings and identifications in mainstream film. Because lesbians imagine that the filmmaker shares in a lesbian order of meaning, there is a tendency for lesbian sub-cultures to adopt a more collusive reading strategy in relation to lesbian indie features such as Desert Hearts (1985), Go Fish (1994), Bar Girls (1995), Thin Ice (1995), and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1996). This seems to occur even though the lesbian identities of some of the filmmakers are, at the least, ambiguous, and the film's exhibition context is mainstream. The personalising focus on love and desire in the romance genre also omits many of the politically confrontational elements of 1970 and 1980s lesbian-feminist-made indie features such as Not a Love Story (1981), A Question of Silence (1982), or Born in Flames (1983), which were challenging in form and confrontational in content. Gay male filmmaking in the 1980s had consisted, on the other hand, mainly in 'safe' representations of identity politics. Whilst queer cinema radicalised male queer film practices in the 1990s, queer lesbian filmmaking moved in the opposite direction towards a more realist mode of identity politics. "The stories we want to tell should be assumed to be as normal as anyone else's story. That is an extraordinary political and historical shift" (Maggenti quoted by Abramowitz, 1996: 84).

This inconsistency between the political trajectories of lesbian and male queer work does not seem explicable entirely in terms of greater economic or cultural access for gay men. Even the 'catch-up' theory that lesbian indie has not yet had the opportunity to build up a 'safe' tradition to rebel against rather founders when the relative political and aesthetic riskiness of lesbian experimental features of the 1980s is taken into account. Obviously the literary respectability and commercial popularity of the 'coming out tale' or 'lesbian romance' genre makes it a relatively safe commercial bet for cinema. Nobody is threatened by women falling in love, besides the 'loony-right.' Thus, the commercialisation of lesbian cinema seems to have moved the line of lesbian contestation towards the right since the 1980s.

It also is interesting to note that the interracial couple which was characteristic of many of the 1980s revisionist buddy appears at the centre of just about every lesbian feature made in the late 1980s and the 1990s including She Must Be Seeing Things, Go Fish, Bar Girls, Thin Ice, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love and Watermelon Woman. Although Go Fish and True Adventures do, to some extent, situate black characters in or against cultural context, none of the other films made any effort to do so with the exception of Dunnye's Watermelon Woman (1997), produced by James Shamus (who also produced The Wedding Banquet).

Dunnye used complex anti-narrative technique to explore issues of history and identity surrounding representation of black lesbians. Avoiding inscription either in the 'ghetto aesthetic' of New Black cinema or the 'lite' form of new lesbian cinema, Dunnye produced a critically challenging text which resists over-collaborative reading, and is both re-evaluative towards black lesbian history and challenging to current configurations of identity and their material effects (as well as ironically comic). This more challenging film was both critically and commercially unsuccessful and sank like a stone commercially after its initial critical success on the festival circuit.

There are many arguments surrounding lesbian reclamation of popular film texts, versus a cinema of our own. To a certain extent, these arguments have already been overtaken by developments in the independent sector. In 1993, Philadelphia grossed $75m. By 1994, there were 50 mainstream film projects with lesbian or gay characters or themes in production (Murphy, 1994: 93). Three lesbian-themed film projects were in the pipeline at major studios and queer was big business. Murphy (1994) did not think the change in major studios' attitudes to gays and lesbians was due to economic factors alone, however, but partly resulted from the political response by queer activists to Basic Instinct. Following energetic protests, studio executives agreed to meet with activist groups to discuss representation of gay characters and themes:

In the '80s, women grouped together and formed such organisations as Women in Film and made it a point to get together and push their own agendas. Well now gays and lesbians are doing that. (Murphy, 1994, quoting 'Chad': 140)

GLAAD had gained considerable leverage from the increasingly lucrative popularity of gay storylines in US TV soaps. Nevertheless, the economic factor was the deciding one. "We now believe you can gross 20 to 30 million dollars per film on business just from [the lesbian and gay] community" (Murphy, 1994, quoting a Sony executive: 138).

Up until the 1980s, lesbianism had been stereotypically represented by Hollywood as evil, pathetic, exotic, or as a social-problem. Homoerotic subtext in popular film tended to be accounted for as an accidental by-product of the opening out of the heterosexual ordering of visual space in regressive fantasies effected by the dream-like qualities of the high-production Hollywood text. Reading a mainstream film as subtextually invoking lesbianism involved a subversively motivated resignifying process. What now seems to be happening in mainstream production is something more akin to 'window' advertising:

To be successful in Hollywood terms [...] movies will have to offer "marketable subjects that are provocative to straight audiences" and "women that men will really want to see." (B Ruby Rich, 1994, quoting Lauren Lloyd: 81)

Sophisticated contemporary audiences are able to access and manipulate genre codings as communicative signs in a way which might have been accessible only to students of semiotics thirty years ago. This has enabled a shift in the economic function of genre. Rather than producing generic copies of previously financially successful films, marketing analysts are now able to isolate narrative and iconic elements of previously successful movies from a range of genres and sub-genres (by now, the source films are usually also of mixed-genre). Genre codes and narrative elements can be mixed and matched at a self-reflexive level of ironised communication constituting a 'window' technique as well as utilising generic 'brand familiarity' for marketers. These marketing techniques also further problematised critical distinctions between mainstream and 'marginal' cinemas which had already been challenged by the absorbtion of experimental aesthetic practices into the mainstream in indie filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s.

Abramowitz (1996) distinguished two mainstream lesbian feature genres: 'lesbian noirs' and 'lesbian lites' (84), noting that the lite films were mainly female-produced and directed whilst the noirs were mainly male produced and directed. Lites were the positive, angst-free narratives of the romance genre kicked off by Desert Hearts and Claire of the Moon. In the noirs, lesbianism was represented as transgressive, criminal, outlaw, and with a 'fuck-you' attitude to society. Probably as a result of the relative cultural and economic privilege of their male directors, the latter type tends to have higher production values; for example, Single White Female (1992), Heavenly Creatures (1993), Fun, (1994), Butterfly Kiss (1995), and Bound (1996). However, there may be a further explanation. The lite films are niche marketed — that is they are produced in the knowledge and expectation that their appeal is limited to a specific marketing-demographic group. As such, niche filmmaking is limited to the low-budget end of the indie sector. If a window technique is employed instead, however, the resultant text can be expected to be marketable to a much wider audience sector. This means that a film which encodes the maximum multiplicity of points of entry will be more likely to command mainstream budgets.

Formally, lesbian noir is minimally distinguishable from other self-reflexive and deconstructive indie reworkings of the noir genre in the 1990s ranging from A Rage in Harlem (1991) to The Last Seduction (1993). Clearly, noir's representations of lesbianism encoded an address to film-literate white, heterosexuals as well as lesbians. Similarly, lesbian sub-texts which have apparently knowingly been inscribed in mainstream western-genre films such as and Bad Girls (1994) are minimally distinguishable from other revisionist texts in this genre which reflected cultural insecurities and conflicts in post-modern and 'multicultural' America. Lesbian reception of lesbian noir was variable. Many felt that such representations were negative and homophobic in aligning lesbianism with homicidal perversity (Galvin, 1994); whilst others felt that this actually made them much sexier and in many ways more enjoyable than the lite films (Tasker, 1994). The residual element of resistant activity in decoding the multiplicity of readings offered by male-produced films could, however, also be a major element of lesbian pleasure in the noirs. Lewis' remarks on print media might be illuminating here:

[I]n the case of a 'dominant' text like Vogue [...] the eroticization comes via the exercise of a subcultural competency. But this pleasure is heightened into a thrill by the sense of transgression that comes from constructing an alternative narrative. In the case of lesbian magazines, where the same subculturally recognisable codes are the denoted rather than the connoted of the text, they read differently and sometimes, I think, produce less visual pleasure. Context is all. (Lewis, 1997: 96)

Or perhaps It was a combination of these 'transgressive' features which produced a lesbian excitement in noirs such as Bound which appeared to go beyond mere pleasures of consumption.

But whatever happened to feminism amongst all this glamourous transgression? It seemed to find a rather unlikely refuge. The tomboy had stuck with the Western through its many liberal-revisionist phases. In the late 1980s and into the '90s, the Western and its sub-genres — the 'road' and 'buddy' movies — enjoyed another modest resurgence kicked off by the Brat-Pack opus Young Guns. The urban and space 'cowboy' actioners of the 1980s succumbed to ironical self-reflexion and were also looking for novelty. The tomboy found herself back in action and female rebellion seemed, once again, rather a lonely frontier.