Love, Simon (2018)

directed by Greg Berlanti

Dane Engelhart

For most of its history, homosexuality on film has had a curious relationship with “badness,” be it the threat of negative stereotypes from a homophobic mainstream, the obscenity charges that plagued the underground films of Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger, or the bare aesthetic poverty and poor taste of a Warhol or a Waters. In the early ‘90s, filmmakers of the New Queer Cinema replayed or confronted each of these traditions in one way or another, flouting moralism and good taste often with nihilistic abandon, while demonstrating a hunger for movies on queer themes that were both critically and commercially viable. The legacy of badness traced here is actually what excites me most about the possibilities of queer cinema, perhaps because I feel most represented by gays on screen when they are terrible people or perhaps because a strident rejection of good taste can be a powerful antidote for aesthetic and moral orthodoxy as well as that gravest of sins, mere banality. Watching Love, Simon when it hit theaters in 2018, I was glad to see it lived up to this legacy in at least some sense—it was very bad. It was bad in the most traditional ways a movie can be bad but also in ways I think quite unique in the history of gay cinema.

In order to understand this significance, we must consider that the film was sold as the first romance about a gay teenager to receive a wide theatrical release. This last qualifier is key, as Love, Simon is far from the first gay coming-of-age romance, but part of a long cycle of such films that follows directly in the wake of the New Queer Cinema. Most of these movies, I am sorry to report, are good, at least in the sense that they strive for positive images of gayness and base their emotional appeals on authenticity and sincerity, with “coming out” always at the center of their narrative. Many are also bad, in the sense that they are cheap and amateurish. Love, Simon shares all of these qualities, but was also packaged by a major and premised explicitly on its mainstream appeal.

This explains why the opening monologue immediately interpolates us as heterosexual viewers in contrast to our closeted gay protagonist, who informs us, “I am just like you, except I have one huge secret.” We are presumed not to share in this secret. This also explains why the movie presents a vision of gay life that is indistinguishable from an Old Navy back-to-school commercial, and then just as quickly dismisses it as a too-gay fantasy unbefitting our exceedingly dull and average hero. Good intentions confront aesthetic failure and a desperate, self-effacing dive for the lowest common denominator. As a result, Love, Simon is not only bad and gay but bad at being gay, insofar as the weight of its failures and commercial expectations override its very purpose: to affirm Simon’s identity, and in a way our own, through the travails of his coming out.

It might be objected that as a twenty-something with a disdain for feel-good commercial cinema, I am simply not the appropriate receptor for the film’s sincere teenage theatrics. Moreso, I would add that when I first looked to film to find a reflection of myself, it was rarely in the right places. I took to Hitchcock villains and Derek Jarman and eventually the trashiest movies I could find in the Gay & Lesbian section. I saw in these “bad” images something different. I suppose I ultimately sought in this mix of nihilism and mindlessness not so much an affirmation but a negation of a sexuality that can seem so harrowingly overburdened by meaning. It is not without some irony that I found this cantankerous spirit running throughout Love, Simon and simply could not let the film go.

To attempt a full summary of the story and its characters from here would betray the film as it exists for me—a sequence of ineptly directed cliches laden with inscrutable motivations whose place within the whole feels almost irrelevant. The whole, such as it is, is ugly, not in the trashy sort of way that evokes fantasy and rebellion, but in the insipid kind of way that begets a constant, low-grade eyestrain. Greg Berlanti’s direction, like the screenplay, is obtuse yet brutally efficient and calculated, rendering scenes of hollow, alien-like pathos within a barren terrain of joyless pop references and native advertising. Two teens debate the relative merits of Drake and Beyoncé in such stilted tones that we wonder if anyone in the film is capable of enjoying music at all. For Christmas, Simon gifts his sister a hand mixer and signs off deadpan with “It’s a Cuisinart,” undoubtedly marking the first time their brand name was so willfully over-enunciated on the big screen. Love, Simon is, in short, banal. Crudely safe and cravenly commercial, in the hands of a low-skill craftsman, was the only way it could come to be, the only way Fox could imagine delivering a benign gay teen drama to its desired general audience.

In this light, Love, Simon seemed like a dead end. From the go-for-broke, lowbrow daring of past luminaries in the gay canon, we arrive at a Hollywood film devoid of risk. Like all the middlebrow coming out narratives that came before, it strives instead for positive images and sincere emotional pay off. Unlike those other films, however, it was not tucked away in an LGBT film festival or in a corner of some streaming platform. As if the logical end of this cycle, it is a coming-out film that came out, on wide release. The result of this outing is a cipher. No allusion more difficult to parse than to Harry Potter. No emotion undetermined by the deadweight of cliche and generic formula. It is a purely formal, cynical exercise in the production of the kind of innocent enjoyment and pathos that one seeks in positive representation. If this is the best Hollywood can offer, it should inspire only disdain and retreat. At least, that was my immediate reaction, though it cannot account for the preponderant place it still occupies in my mind two years later, the four subsequent rewatches, the time spent dissecting scenes and foisting them upon others. I have seen a lot of bad gay movies, gay movies that were bad in good ways and bad in bad ways and found something strangely beautiful in all of them. But still to me Love, Simon is bad in a very special way.

Lest I proceed any further without telling you anything that actually happens in this movie, consider this account of my favorite moments. Having failed to meet the terms of his blackmail and set up one particularly annoying teen with his friend Abby, Simon has been outed to his entire high school. Alone in his room, he is approached by his younger sister who, with the tone of one waiting anxiously to use the restroom, attempts to console him. Simon’s response is affectless and then callously angry and belligerent, prompting his sister, now hysterical, to run away crying. The next day, Christmas, Simon comes out to his parents. Visibly uncomfortable, his father starts riffing to make light of an awkward moment. His daughter yells at him. He runs away crying. Simon, left in dread and embarrassment, proceeds immediately to the Cuisinart exchange. Sometime later in a randomly placed scene, Simon approaches his mother to ask if she had known he was gay. She proceeds rather unprompted to use her perceptive powers as a psychologist to analyze her son’s emotional turmoil over the last several years. Seeing him visibly shaken and in tears from her words, she accepts a job well done and calmly walks off screen leaving Simon once again alone.

This little family melodrama represents the dramatic highs of the film, and to my relief none of them seem to register a legible human emotion. Every delivery is obtuse, every staging choice seems either cruel or alien, and every product placement uncomfortably forward. In a film so ruthlessly anodyne and formulated, they did not make an adequate investment for it to be either. It is crassly commercial and dull but garishly so. It makes banality seem revelatory. If the point of a coming-out film is to speak a truth, to affirm one’s identity, the fate of Love, Simon is, for me, tragicomic. Its greed and ineptitude negates the possibility of authenticity or sincerity. It is a gay narrative split at the seams by its own contradictions, yet revealing nothing. It is a failed performance of homosexuality. It is inverted camp. For me, “It’s a Cuisinart” has the same ring as “But you are in that chair, Blanche!” If Hollywood wants to make bad gay movies, I see not a dead end but a gleeful self-negation. As I repeatedly watch his entire family respond to his coming out by running away crying, I am bemused and deeply comforted. Like Simon’s entire family, I see in his struggle for love and meaning, simply, a way out.

Dane Engelhart can be found on Twitter @daneonmyparade.