Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of But I'm a Cheerleader
2000 · Jamie Babbit · But I'm a Cheerleader on Sightlines
The first thing that hits you is the pink.
Not a shade. A policy. At True Directions, the sexual-redirection camp where Megan gets shipped after her parents assemble their evidence, the girls are issued pink and the boys are issued powder blue. It's the pink of stomach medicine, the colour of something being settled down. Nobody on screen finds this strange. That's the joke, and it's also the film's entire argument.
Deleuze gives us a way to say why that pink is doing more work than a set decorator usually gets to do. In most movies colour belongs to objects: the dress is red, the sky is blue. Occasionally colour stops belonging to anything and starts absorbing. It takes the room, the light and the people standing in it into a single quality and holds that quality out for you. Deleuze calls this affective colour, the colour-image: colour as an intensity rather than a description. Babbit's invention is to hand that absorbing colour to an institution. The pink isn't the film's mood. It's the camp's method. You can enjoy the movie without any of this vocabulary, but the vocabulary is what stops you from making the mistake the 2000 reviewers made, which was to see candy and assume the film had nothing hard in it.
Watch what the colour does to the campers. A dozen teenagers, each unhappy in a private way, get dressed into one chromatic unit, and from then on the frame reads them as a group feeling rather than as separate people. Deleuze's word for that is the dividual: a collective rendered as a single affective block. True Directions is a factory for producing dividuals. Its therapy isn't really aimed at changing what a girl wants. It's aimed at getting her into the group's colour and keeping her there.
Babbit learned the technique from Sirk, and the debt is precise. In All That Heaven Allows the saturated Technicolor and the over-designed living rooms are the pressure the characters can't name; the prettiness is the prison. Written on the Wind goes further and assigns feelings to specific hues, hot reds against cold blues, until the palette is doing the moralizing. Critics spent years filing Sirk under women's pictures before circling back and finding the irony sitting in plain sight in the colour. Babbit takes that subtext and posts it on the wall as curriculum. What Sirk's hues insinuated, True Directions teaches.
The institution itself comes from The Stepford Wives, where women are reprogrammed into idealized housewives, and Babbit's variation on it is worth noticing: Stepford is a conspiracy, and True Directions is a syllabus. Nothing is hidden. The camp advertises that it manufactures gender, prints the steps, and charges tuition. Horror becomes comedy the moment the machine stops being a secret.
Which is where the film's best idea lives. The campers are taught heterosexuality as a set of postures and props, things you hold and stances you take. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that exposes a social relation rather than expressing a private feeling the gest. It's the difference between a body feeling something and a body demonstrating what it has been assigned. Babbit films the lessons so that we see the assignment happening, and the effect is devastating and very funny at once: once heterosexuality has been broken into teachable moves, it looks like a costume. That conceit comes straight out of John Waters, from Divine's grotesque-glamorous performances and Female Trouble's treatment of gender as broad theater. The Rocky Horror Picture Show supplies the harder inheritance, the tonal one, which is how to keep heightened artifice and sincere liberation in the same frame without either souring the other.
Then there's RuPaul, cast out of drag as an ex-gay counselor. Deleuze has a figure for this: the forger, the character who makes truth rather than finds it, and around whom true and false stop being separable. A drag performer performing a man performing having been cured leaves you with no bottom layer to stand on. Deleuze calls this a power of the false, and he means it as a compliment, because the falsity is productive. It generates the film's real proposition. If every layer here is a performance, the sincere one is whichever costs the least effort. The romance between Natasha Lyonne and Clea DuVall costs nothing. The institution costs everything. That's the whole moral system, and it's built out of casting.
Now go back to the beginning, before the camp. Megan doesn't much enjoy kissing her boyfriend. She's very physical with her cheerleader friends. Neither observation is evidence of anything, and both are used as evidence. Deleuze calls a gesture that could belong equally to two different situations an index of equivocity: the act is legible, the situation behind it isn't. Being handsy with your friends is either friendship or desire, and the same shot honestly serves both. The comedy of the first act is that Megan's parents are doing close reading, they're correct, and it's monstrous. Megan, who can't read her own signs, is the last to know.
One more thing, and it's the part that mattered most to what came after. Babbit could easily have made the film where Megan mostly watches. Confinement, a schedule, adults with clipboards: everything is arranged for a protagonist who can only endure, and that's the shape a serious film about this subject was expected to take. She refuses it. Megan perceives, Megan acts, and her actions change her situation. Deleuze would call that an intact sensory-motor circuit, the ordinary machinery of the movement-image, and the point is that it was not ordinary to grant it here. The contract of romantic comedy is that wanting leads to doing leads to having. Babbit claimed that contract for two girls in pink uniforms and never framed the claim as daring. The politics are in the genre, not in the form.
The MPAA handed the film an NC-17 for material that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow in a straight teen comedy. Babbit cut to an R and kept saying so out loud. That fight rhymes with the pink: a code applied from outside, enforced by adults with a rulebook, deciding which bodies read as normal. The film was savaged on arrival and has been climbing ever since, and the reason critics missed it is exactly the reason Sirk got missed. A shiny surface was mistaken for a shallow one, on a film whose subject was that mistake.
Watch it again and watch the walls. Watch a posture get taught, and then watch it get wanted. Then look around whatever room you're in and ask what its colour has been telling you to be.
Concepts in play
- affective colour (the colour-image) — The girls issued Pepto-Bismol pink and the boys powder blue at True Directions: a production design of aggressive artificiality in which colour absorbs the room and its inhabitants into one quality rather than describing objects
- the gest — The camp's central conceit, inherited from Waters and Divine, that heterosexuality is a learnable, performable set of props — postures filmed as assignments, exposing a social relation rather than a private feeling
- dividual — The campers uniformed into a single chromatic block, pink for girls and blue for boys, so the frame reads the group as one affective unit instead of as individuals
- powers of the false — The film makes heterosexuality look like the costume while insisting queer desire is the natural thing — gender's truth and falsity rendered undecidable as the film's creative principle
- the forger — RuPaul cast out of drag as an 'ex-gay' counselor: a drag performer performing a man performing having been cured, with no unperformed layer underneath
- index of equivocity — Megan not much liking kissing her boyfriend and being touchy with her cheerleader friends — gestures that belong equally to friendship or to desire, and are read by her parents as proof
- the movement-image — Against the expected film of confinement and endurance, Megan perceives, acts, and changes her situation; the swooning Lyonne–DuVall romance runs on the intact wanting-doing-having circuit of romantic comedy