Throughout the centuries, female bisexual characters have gone from bad to non-existent to downright offensive
BY SCARLETT COUGHLAN, IMAGE BY FOCUS FEATURES
As far as the sparse deserts of mainstream queer films go, 2024 has seen somewhat of an oasis. While it’s true that Saltburn doesn’t paint gays in a great light, there’s a reason this eccentric envisionment from Emerald Fennell is categorised as a comedy as much as a thriller. Challengers was another cinematic success – and undeniably accommodating to the female, as well as the gay male gaze (pardon the tongue twister). The most hyped LGBTQIA film of late, however, has to be Queer. Starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, the Luca Guadagnino movie is currently all anyone can talk about at the Venice Film Festival. But you will, no doubt, sense a theme arising – the majority of this year’s queer releases are about men. And those that aren’t (which essentially leaves Love Lies Bleeding and Drive-Away Dolls) are not about bisexuals.
The depiction of bisexual characters in films has, by nature, followed a rocky path. While same-sex kisses in weird black-and-white films like A Florida Enchantment – where people swallow magical seeds that change their gender and go around kissing each other – seem like a decent start for bisexual representation in film, these early scenes were fuelled by trickery more than any real form of diversity. Take Morocco, for example. Filmed in 1930, the story sees a cabaret singer seduce a female patron. Though the subversive scene earned Marlene Dietrich – who, to be fair, turned out to be bisexual in real life – an Oscar, the same-sex kiss was all smoke and mirrors. Alas, Dietrich’s character was dressed up as a man.
After that, depictions of bisexuality in film went from the subtle and strange to the non-existent. Thanks to everyone in Hollywood getting over-excited (read: too many drugs and too much shagging), something known as the “Hays Code” was introduced to wipe clean the poor representation of the burgeoning American film industry. But, rather than clamping down on the cocaine – even if it did keep actors awake during long days on set – it was decided that the most logical solution was to remove any hints of diverse sexualities from cinema. Inevitably, the new censorship rules stifled any progress for queer representation in film until the arbitrary laws were eventually lifted in 1968.
This newfound freedom in film meant that, once again, bisexual and other queer characters appeared on screen. Limited social understanding of bisexuality, however, meant that plots were usually confined to certain tropes. In the same way that Greek comedies always end with a wedding, female bisexual characters would leave their husbands to run off with women, leave their girlfriends to run off with men (as seen in the queer classic, The Fox), or, instead, start running around with knives. It is this scenario – which essentially framed bisexuals as depraved – that caused the 1982 film Basic Instinct to be boycotted by the queer community at the time.
On top of this, Basic Instinct set another precedent for bisexual representation in the film industry. Just as Michael Douglas’ character, for want of better words, pervs on Sharon Stone and her girlfriend until he has replaced the latter, the bisexual character’s ability to cater to the male gaze has trumped her use as actual plot devices for decades. Just look at the 1998 film Wild Things, which is more or less lesbian porn for men, rather than an actual exploration of bisexuality.
Thankfully, depictions of female bisexual characters have become less one-dimensional since the turn of the millennium. By the end of 2010s, films such as Atomic Blond offered fleshed-out depictions of characters who are bisexual, but who are other things, too (and not just murderers). More recently, the 2023 Yorgos Lanthimos film, Poor Things, depicts lead character Bella’s sexuality as an essential part of her development into a fully-fledged woman. Meanwhile, this year’s cinematic re-telling of the story of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, in Frida, acts as another positive display of a bisexual woman on the big screen. So, yes, bisexual representation in film might be going in the right direction – there just needs to be more of it.
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