At the Sundance Film Festival in 1992, B. Ruby Rich sat down with a panel of filmmakers who would someday become the major figures of queer cinema. Back then, queer cinema was reaching a point where it was being critically accepted and enjoyed by the independent film market. A movement took formation called New Queer Cinema. Unlike many major film movements, the dozens of works considered to be in the vein NQC shared no aesthetic properties—instead, they were all united in their general themes and political ambitions.
This past year at Sundance, B. Ruby Rich returned to moderate a panel fourteen years later with a collection of filmmakers premiering films on the subject of LGBTQ life. But the landscape of queer cinema has dramatically shifted. With the pressure of the AIDS crisis, most of the New Queer Cinema filmmakers dealt with difficult themes of death, oppression and marginalization. The new films are much tamer, featuring a new frontier of queer cinema called “Queer Incidentalism.”
Termed by Rich, Queer Incidentalism references the growing normalization of LGBTQ figures in movies, television and media. But what separates Queer Incidentalism from other categories, like Homonormativity (the depiction of LGBTQ as “normal” as heterosexual couples) is the fact that narratives about actual queers of Queer Incidentalism focus more than just their sexual orientation. For example, in the 2016 Sundance Selection, “The Intervention,” two lesbian characters are featured, but it’s not about two lesbian women grappling with their sexuality. They are gay, the other characters accept it and everyone moves on.
But is Queer Incidentalism the right direction for Queer Cinema? What happened to the rage and rebellion of New Queer Cinema? In some ways, Queer Incidentalism may seem like internalized homonormativity. Queer filmmakers are trying their best to create content that declares, “We are just like you! We have problems just like you!” But as Clea DuVall articulated at B. Ruby Rich’s panel, her two lesbian characters in “The Intervention” are there out of selfishness. They don’t exist there to show straights that queers are harmless; they are in “The Intervention” because DuVall wanted to see someone like herself represented in a film that could feasibly do well in a major film market.
During my first year of college, I was sitting in a Queer Cinema class and the professor, a woman I highly respected, talked about the dangers of homonormativity. We had just spent several weeks celebrating and studying the New Queer Cinema movement. I was full of rage over the injustices being committed against the LGBTQ community over the past twenty years, so I was eager to call out directors and films that were homonormative.
But what’s so bad about healthy representations of LGBTQ individuals? Other panelists at the 2016 talk agreed with DuVall. Andrew Ahn, director of “Spa Night” (2016), said he wanted Queer Incidentalism. So much of Queer Cinema is about depicting “sad gay men,” he said. But the trope of the “sad gay man” can do more harm than good—while it articulates feelings of oppression and pain, it’s important to move on from inner darkness. Queer Incidentalism is able to exist because of the changes in our society and wider acceptance of LGBTQ-identified individuals.
