Quaran-Scenes: The Surrogate and the New Gay Villainy
Image via Monument Releasing
We’re all stuck inside stewing in our thoughts; ours happen to be about movies. In Quaran-Scenes, writers will take a look at some of their favorite scenes from cinema: how and why they “work,” and what about those scenes they love so much. Find past columns here.
With the privilege and awareness of living in a Western culture that has made relative strides to include, well, mostly cisgender white gay men in film and television (sort of), the sort of earnest but reactionary portrayals of male gayness, like in Alex Strangelove or Rocketman, has made me pine for a certain kind of nasty bitchiness that was the coded gay villain. I’m talking your Jafars and your Scars and your Professor Ratigans, complete with prissy affectations and sibilant “s”s. These archetypes carry the immense weight of political baggage, relics perhaps partially responsible for a socialized, disingenuous reading of gay and queer men, but it’s no less important to contemplate what gay villainy might look like recontextualized.
In Jeremy Hersh’s new film, The Surrogate, titular surrogate Jess (Jasmine Batchelor), her best friend Josh (Chris Perfetti) and his husband Aaron (Sullivan Jones) know that their fetus has an extra chromosome and will therefore have Down syndrome. The family is faced with the decision to either abort the fetus, with the awareness of the financial and emotional difficulties of raising a disabled child, and try again, or to carry through with the pregnancy and work through those circumstances. Jess, torn between wanting to support the wishes of her friends and weighing the moral weight of the question of why the fetus is being aborted, gravitates away from abortion, becoming consumed by the political implications of disability and finding the right reasons to go through with the pregnancy. That all sides are given their fair shake, and that it is truly, ultimately up to the viewer to decide: This is not an incorrect reading, and Hersh’s skill as a writer—and, in this case, rhetorician—makes space for that interpretation.
To Hersh’s strength, his characters are both ideas and people—representing, in some ways, the discourse behind how the agency of a woman’s body and abortion entangle with disability rights, Black femininity, and gay assimilation—vacillating between the roles effortlessly, anchored by strong performances (particularly from Batchelor). Much of this swinging between humanity and didacticism feels like a response to living life as someone on the margins, someone whose existence both lives at the matrices of power and is politicized, sometimes for unkind reasons. DP Mia Cioffi Henry’s camera floats with documentary realism in one scene, observing the possible parents-to-be and their surrogate best friend engage (or not engage) with children and parents at a community center for children with Down syndrome and their families. Her camera doesn’t so much shift as our space changes, once at a respectful distance, and then in a dialectical throng, as intent on interrogation as its characters.
This is preparation for parenthood, and yes, The Surrogate makes space for all sides, but it’s more fun to watch the film and canonize Josh and Aaron, simperingly nice, respectable people—Josh in his faux fur lined denim jacket, his cayenne pepper colored hair becoming gradually more unkempt as the film proceeds, and Aaron, in his perfectly tailored suit, his quiet stoicism throughout the situation reading more and more like passive aggression—as the gay villains we deserve, the product of endless HRC messaging and “#LoveisLove” campaigning. Gay villains for the age of Mayor Pete. For Josh and Aaron, the wanting to be wanted is so great that, in their moneyed Brooklyn apartment, they will seek to create a Kodak version of what they think others want them to be, even at the cost of dubious ethics.