A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

We’ve had a run of posts about movies and shows that have influenced us in the past. (Given the crowd here, they’ve mostly been creepy.) Which is timely: my kids, at 12 and 15, are just old enough that I can show them my favourite movies that live rent free in my brain. It’s great. They haven’t seen enough yet to be jaded by tropes. Everything is new and wonderful. The Sixth Sense, for instance, had them yelling “PLOT TWIST” and “no wayyyyy”. Back to the Future III, in which Doc falls in love in the Wild West but has a falling out with the lady, had my twelve year-old wail “My ship! They sunk my ship!”

It’s been educational for all of us.

Last week, I showed my kids The Full Monty – the unexpected international success about laid off steel workers in Sheffield trying to put on a strip show in the style of the Chippendales (remember the Chippendales?). It blew my mind back in 1997. In a very British way, it took on several unmentionable subjects (being laid off, depression and male stripping in a very manly man environment) and made them hilarious and heartfelt and exciting. It still holds up, by the way. Highly recommended.

There is this scene where two of the blokes, having escaped the police in nothing but their red thongs, make it home, climb through the window and tumble into the bedroom. Just for a beat, they stare at each other, grinning, close enough to touch. And then the scene is cut. It’s never mentioned again. (But in all the later scenes, whenever they are on, they are always next to each other, looking quite happily smug. )

My kids, raised in the omnipresence of extremely popular gay romance such as Heartstopper and Heated Rivalry, looked puzzled. “They’re gay, right? Why does it just break off there?” And I mumbled “well, it was the Nineties?” The subtext was clear to everyone who wanted to see it, but also deniable to anyone who didn’t, and that was the best solution we aspired to back then? This was progressive, for something that charmed a mainstream audience? Maybe.

Last May, at Gay Pride, there was a whole group of young women marching with signs. They read “Let me be the Ilya to your Shane.” And “Homophobia has a cure: Watch Heated Rivalry and come to the Cottage!” That blew me away. For good or bad, these fans feel so strongly about their – I believe the technical term is “blorbos” – that they semi-ironically think that show could cure homophobia. And you know, why not.

Everyone who reads this blog is well aware that pop culture reflects society, and it works the other way too. There is, for instance, that running joke that Generation X is collectively traumatised by having consumed Stephen King books at a far too early age. It’s one of those self-descriptions that have been clanging around in my head for years now because there is some truth about it that I cannot articulate.  

When I read this blog and people reminisce about the media that influenced them, this is the part that fascinates me. What did those movies and shows do to us? What do they say about who we were and who we still are now?

Perhaps this new, still unjaded generation can be… whatever the opposite of traumatised is… by romance. Gay romance. Color-conscious romance like in Bridgerton. Perhaps it is a hope-inspiring thing that the genre itself is attracting a growing male audience, too.

I’m not holding out hope. I mean, I’ve been around long enough to see shifts and backshifts in whole genres of fiction. Also, I believe that the gestalt of who we are as a society right now is more accurately and depressingly reflected by current movies like Obsession.

But still, this is nice. It is nice that one day these women will be reflecting on the shows that blew them away in their youth, and one of them will say, “Do you remember Heated Rivalry?”