LUCA: The Depths of Queer Coding
Let’s talk about Disney’s 2021 release LUCA.
I should immediately tackle one key component of this piece; LUCA is an overtly queer coded story. To this day, this remains a divisive statement to make. A film featured around two young male protagonists, whose true forms are colourful monsters that they hide away, out of fear of revealing themselves for being persecuted and attacked; simultaneously being told by friends and family to hide this side of themselves because they are different. All of this is wrapped up in a coming of age story, focused on self-acceptance and a powerful message about who truly is the monster in this situation. A very clear reflection of the way young LGBTQ people feel and treated in today’s world.
Here in lies the issue that is riddled within this conversation. I for instance can sit and watch this film through a lens that allows me to interpret the on screen symbolism and visual imagery as being a clear link or allegory for all things queer. I can relate the narrative and themes to that of a teen struggling to come to terms with their queer identity, of being told or feeling like it is something to be concealed, even to the tune of ‘it’s for your own safety’. I watched a scene of two older women, relinquishing their umbrellas and letting the rain soak them after so many years, revealing who they truly were underneath and saw the parallel of later in life lesbian women, finally feeling safe and confident enough to announce their true identity to those around them.
Cast your minds back to June 2021, the release of Luca. The online division and discord revolving around this film was everywhere, factions were fighting over whether something that is coded as queer but never outright stated in the text could in fact be a film about said topic. I became extremely defensive online about how people were misinterpreting or deliberately interpreting the film incorrectly. As a 22 year old bisexual man, I felt both attacked and like it was my duty to stand up for this take on the film; to me the film was so incredibly overt with the symbolism, theming, metaphors and the narrative itself, that to view it as anything else must have been a deliberate attack on the queer community and feeding back into the systemic erasure that my community had faced time and time again. And after long back and forth arguments online, and even in person debates with some friends, the film student of old kicked in and I came to a realisation.
The queer community at large were latching on so hard and so deeply to this film, as portraying young queer children, because as a community it is so starved and depraved of mainstream representation, that being able to convincingly argue that this film was about LGBTQ issues (in a Disney movie, where the representation was taking place at such a young age) would have been such a huge breakthrough for the community as a whole. So of course, we held tightly onto this take and fought tooth and nail for something that so deeply portrayed a relatability to the young queer experience but with that came the hard truth. After all my arguing: that the visual language was so heavily targeted, that the colour coding was so evidently referential, the release date being in pride wasn’t a coincidence and the themes being so spot on that it was simply intended to be a metaphor for the queer experience, that even if all of that was true - it was an interpretation. Perhaps it was the interpretation that the filmmakers were going for, but none the less, it was an interpretation.
It is a difficult pill to swallow and brought up a more important issue in itself. We as allies of the LGBTQ community may well read this as a pro narrative in favour of anything except the heterosexual normative story and one that shines a light on an otherwise underrepresented issue, but it doesn’t have to be interpreted that way. I’ve seen an enormous amount of dismissive comments and arguments under the veil of “It’s a story about sea monsters”, an ironic thing to say when the baseline reading of ‘deceptive monsters that hide among us, getting revealed and having their perception by the people around them change, as their secret comes out’ isn’t an exact summary of both the narrative of Luca and how a young gay man or woman can feel coming out in their small town or community. To those people I say, congratulations on grasping the very basics of the LGBTQ community and still struggling to understand the direct paraelles between this story and the very real, lived experience of these ‘monsters’ who live among you even now.
Can you see the issue that is arising here? Disney spear headed a film, with themes and values that directly correlated to the queer experience and the abnormal, people uncomfortable in their skin, or afraid of the backlash from those around them and placed so many symbolic and queer coded visuals and moments within the film but once again could not commit to making the film about that same community. Instead, here is subtext and visual imagery that evoke the same feelings and themes so that you feel represented and heard and that your story is being told but in actuality, it isn’t about you. We never outright stated the word ‘gay’, we never clarified that this story is about that same interpretation, we never dedicated this film to the historically oppressed community but if you want to read it that way, good for you, go buy those tickets!
Why? Because Disney have to make that revenue, the stocks must rise and the investors satisfied. Had Disney ever publicly acknowledged any part of this film being intended for or about the queer community then they risk a substantial faction of their audience not contributing to the GDP of the mouse. Accidentally confirm anything marginally queer coded in this film and bye goes China and their box office, bye-bye angry American Christian groups campaigning outside the local movie theatre and goodbye to the homophobic parents who refuse to let their child be subjected to a woke film that will brainwash their innocent children. So it is loosely implied…but only if you read it like that! After all, it’s about so many many things,about openness, self-acceptance and growing up. This level of being so non-committal to taking a stance is completely and utterly fuelled by the market, by money…
Going back to an earlier comment about interpretation, an argument I saw constantly regarding the dismissal of the film being queer coded was an interview with the director "This was about their friendship in that pre-puberty world,". This comment has been used a lot as a sort of ‘check mate’, but in itself is more telling of those that rely on this comment as a crutch to their view of homosexuality. To put it bluntly, this is a very homophobic and uneducated understanding of that comment. The implication around this is that the only way to make a film for a queer community is to have two same gendered characters as love interests, this in itself is enough to slam my head against my desk. This line of thinking is even more baffling to me because it almost always comes attached to the idea that the LGBTQ community are somehow repulsive for wanting kids to have a romantic connection to each other, which God forbid, our media ever portrays two preteen children showing feelings of love, affection and the understanding of a relationship.
As a filmmaker this entire conversation has bothered me on a completely separate level. As a former film student who wrote multiple essays on Czechoslovakian new wave films, yes that it a genre and I would highly recommend watching films such as ‘Daisies’ and ‘Closely Observed Trains’, I have seen my fair share of films that mirror this same philosophy of filmmaking. Czech new wave films were of an era where speaking out about the occupation of the totalitarian government that held sway over them (USSR) were banned; so a new wave of films that focused on hidden meanings, developing techniques and symbolic sequence that were indicative of the feeling and emotions of the people without overtly stating what the meaning behind the film was, began to arise. An entire genre of films dedicated to the idea of “Well the interpretation is there if you read into it but also it definitely isn’t about that”. Sound familiar? I can’t help but feel 70 years later, this same philosophy is being portrayed in the media of today. Here is a segment of an interview from the director back in 2021 when asked about his feelings towards the queer reading of the film that had been going viral:
“I think the reason probably we didn’t talk about it as much and, to a certain degree, we’re slightly surprised by the amount of people talking about romance, is that we were really focusing on friendship and so pre-romance.” - “But it is a kind of love, right? There’s a lot of hugging and it’s physical and my experience as a straight man certainly wasn’t that… some people seem to get mad that I’m not saying yes or no, but I feel like, well, this is a movie about being open to any difference” - “It’s not where I was coming from but it’s so wonderful and even more powerful for the LGBTQ+ community who has felt so much of as an outsider, right, where this is so real and stronger than my experience, I’m sure to have to grow up with that kind of a difference, I felt really honoured… I love that that metaphor is reading in all these different ways”
I hold no grievances towards the director Enrico Casarosa, he set out to make a beautiful coming of age narrative based on his real lived experiences growing up and I think he made a brilliant film. His comments above however, read with a tinge of lawsuit in his vocabulary, like some overlord is watching his every move and ensuring that he does not outwardly say “Yes, you can read it as a gay allegory”, instead he is just saying how nice it is that people have that interpretation. To pinpoint the exact comments that perpetuates this suspicious feeling in me are, ‘There’s a lot of hugging and it’s physical and my experience as a straight man certainly wasn’t that…” and “it’s not where I was coming from”. I will not try and put words in his mouth or twist his meaning here, but I will highlight how he very clearly states that this film, written around his own experience as a straight man growing up in Italy, does not reflect in its entirety the characters on screen with their physical intimacy.
My issue with this film in retrospect and as time as gone by is that I do not wish to watch a film that so closely captures the feeling of a young lonely LGBTQ person, trying to hide who they really are, just for the filmmakers to turn around and not acknowledge that the film is intended for that exact purpose. I understand this may seem counter intuitive to anyone who has not gone through this themselves or perhaps just isn’t part of the community itself. The best analogy I can equate this to is that song, the one that you so deeply connect to, that feels like someone tore a page straight from the diary of your life and put into words exactly how you felt in that moment and then that same artist turns around and says it’s about something else, or have people online who equally love the song tell you that is not the correct interpretation. Right or wrong it hurts; how can someone sum up something so perfectly and then others still can’t understand it. This analogy doesn’t even reach the depths of damage as the actual situation here. In this context, the queer community has a piece of media, aimed towards children that reflects so much of what the struggle of a young queer person is like but the people that we need to understand is not us, we lived it, we get it, we see it. By not labelling it as a queer story we have the perfect all encapsulating piece of art that depicts what it is like and those who do not support or understand the queer community get to dismiss the story. They truly see two young sea monsters. They see a town of hatred towards fictional characters, but they cannot see the truth in that around them, in the real world. Part of it is because they are told that it’s an interpretation. Had the filmmakers outwardly stated, this is a film that reflects the feelings and torment of the LGBTQ community, that would have been huge but instead those that need to understand and learn this get a free pass to ignore the metaphor in favour of ‘that’s not how I see it’.
Let’s play a quick exercise in script writing. Take this moment to think how you would apply a queer coded subtext to a Disney movie. What devices, imagery, themes, shots, dialogue would you use to ensure your up and coming Disney movie gets the green light from the Mouse while also ensuring that this is a film about discovering your sexual identity. If you’re answer involves any of the following, then your screenplay was rejected by Mickey himself:
A kiss between two same gendered children
Dialogue that states the sexuality of the character (as anything other than heterosexual)
Overtly stereotyping the main character as ‘camp’ or gay
A script containing any of the above and even more, would be rejected by the mouse for losing too much of a guaranteed target audience and losing the studio revenue. So how do you do it? You add lines of dialogue with double meanings, that allow interpretation one way or the other so to please both sides and allow them to argue it out on social media and raise engagement. You use visual imagery and metaphors, such as queer colour palettes, slow motion shots of a sea monster jumping out of the water to the background of the sunlight, older ladies removing their umbrellas and letting the rain reveal their true identity they have been hiding for years. You theme the story on something that is around self-acceptance and openness, a universal feeling that leans heavily into the queer experience but is still universal and so can be relatable in a completely non queer context. As I alluded to before, a film does not need to be romantic to be reflective of the queer experience, that is a very simple yet fundamental misunderstanding.
The fact of the matter is this, whether the director, writers or executives meant to make a film that encapsulates the queer experience or not is irrelevant, they did. Of the hundreds of individuals that work together on a project of this magnitude, it is beyond unreasonable to assume that none of them caught the parallels and symbolism of the film they were making with that of the LGBTQ community. For the minimum of 3 years that this film was under development, I ask, do you truly believe that not one; cinematographer, actor, editor, production manager, animator, assistant director or any of the other countless roles involved in the making of this film did not catch the queer coding in this film? We live in an age of tick boxes and token characters, gay best friends and forced female girl bosses but when it comes to LUCA you think that this marketing strategy just happened to have bypassed this one film? Or did it already tick the boxes due to the nature of the story?
To summarise my feelings on this film, a cute, whimsical heartwarming film for all to enjoy. A film aimed at the idea of self-acceptance, and you know what LGBTQ community? There’s even a little something in there for you! Something to feel seen and represented, to show children that it is okay to be different! But keep quiet about it. We wouldn’t want the homophobic demographic in all its forms to get wind of this and not pay the Disney+ subscription out of a moral sense of outrage.
Anyway queer community, you already have a coming of age, homosexual love story, between two young men, set in Italy, that uses water as a queer metaphor throughout the film and ends with the cliche romantic goodbye at the train station. Go watch Call Me By Your Name and don’t think too hard about the parallels.
