The bisexual movie canon: From Thor: Ragnarok to The Mummy

There is not a universal experience for bisexuality, other than the possibility of feeling attracted to one or more of two genders. But our shared sense of self-inflicted humor can sometimes feel pretty close to one — community in-jokes abound about how we sit, what we wear, and what movies we watch. The memes about what it means to be bi seem endless, but they serve a purpose: They’ve created an online community in a world that encourages queer loneliness. People who are closeted, in a rural area, or disabled — or for that matter, in a pandemic — may not have access to a physical community. However, we can share, like, or even share memes that are about bi to make us feel less isolated.

Similarly, we’ve been building a cultural canon. Bisexual people online often claim specific films as “bisexual movies,” regardless of the presence of bisexual plotlines, characters, or actors onscreen. There isn’t a comprehensive definition of a bi movie, because there isn’t one reason for films to be designated as bi movies, other than that bisexuals have watched them and claimed them, at least semi-jokingly. This tongue-in-cheek social media movie list is both a mirror of how we connect with film, as well as a magnifying window that shows us the ways film continues to fail.

Two films in social media’s bi movie canon outshine the rest: 1999’s The Mummy and 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok. Many headlines have been applauded Thor: Ragnarok as a “bisexual anthem film,” “bisexual masterpiece,” and one of the “10 Most Bisexual Things You Can Watch on Netflix Right Now.” That puts it up against shows and movies with openly bi characters who kiss, have sex, and use the word “bisexual.” As one virally spread (but now deleted) tweet joked, “The gays have Love, Simon. These are the straights To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. Bisexuals are a group of people who have. Thor: Ragnarok.” OtherMemes soon followed. Similarly, a new bisexual MummyThere are many memes. everyFew months. It is the most famous is perhaps “No one is ‘born bi,’ you watch The Mummy at a formative age and the whole cast turns you bi.”

Movies are referred to as “community movies” by the community The Mummy “bi awakening movies.” With mind-bogglingly beautiful people at every turn, every scene of a bi awakening movie raises the question: “Why do I have to be attracted to just OneGenre Everyone Click here is so hot?”

Photo: Marvel Studios

In an essay analyzing queer thirst for straight actors, Grace Perry explains some things that certainly apply to the concept of bi-awakening movies — particularly how straight actors like Rachel Weisz and Cate Blanchett often become gay icons and objects of queer desire after playing queer characters on screen. In their cases, queer audiences transfer the queer identity of an actor’s past characters not only onto the actors themselves, but to their other roles. Thor: Ragnarok’s Hela becomes gayer because of Cate Blanchett’s starring role in the sensuous sapphic period drama Carol, while Weisz’s roles in Favorite DisobedienceMay have contributed The Mummy’s retroactive addition to bi film canon.

Perry cites two reasons for this phenomenon. First off, sapphic filmgoers posting Rachel Weisz thirst tweets (Perry’s example) and MummyMemes are, in some way, liberating their own queerness by making it available to other queers. Perry also points to an oversaturation of straight actors in queer roles: Queer audiences grant straight actors queer-icon status because tClick here aren’t as many out queer actors setting themselves up as objects of desire in mainstream cinema. Once again forced to make space for ourselves in a medium that makes no space for us, looking for queer characters onscreen becomes like a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: “Sure,” I can tell myself, “she isn’t gay hereGay, or? Realism, but I’ve seen Cate Blanchett have movie sex with Rooney Mara in another movie, which makes this movie gayer, too.”

Both The Mummynor Thor: RagnarokMany movies that feature bisexual characters and storylines are true to the Bicanon. That’s representative of a larger problem: the film industry’s lengthy history of censoring anything suggesting or positively portraying queerness. Major studios such as Disney and DreamWorks continue to self-censor, even after the MPAA lifted its long-standing ban on portrayals of queer persons and relationships. Many studios blame this self-censorship on concerns about distribution restrictions in other markets. However, the domestic market is similarly unfriendly to queer characters and relationships, both due to conservative audiences and the MPAA’s habit of giving higher age ratings to movies with queer characters and relationships even when sex isn’t shown.

There’s a world in which Thor: Ragnarok could have been the “bisexual anthem film” critics claimed it to be. Three of the film’s characters are queer in the comics (Loki, Valkyrie, and Korg) and Hela’s backstory is ripped from Neil Gaiman’s un-adapted lesbian character Angela, first introduced in the pages of Spawn Marvel Comics Universe was incorporated in 2013 Onscreen, Hela doesn’t say anything about her sexuality, but she still “feels gay” because of Blanchett’s filmography.

Valkyrie was played by Tessa Thompson (bi actress). Disney famously deleted a scene of her with another woman and similarly removed a sapphic scene from Dora Milaje, second-in command Ayo. Black Panther). While Eternals The film features a gay protagonist and will be featured in the Taika Waititi movie. Thor: Love and ThunderDisney, which has promised significant queer representation, has also a long history of queer baiting audiences. They have repeatedly promissed queer representation while instead offering an unnamed line or character. In cases like Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker EternalsQueer kisses are now censored in overseas films.

In the past, queer individuals have had many options to be seen on film and under media censorship. Harvey Fierstein, gay film director and filmmaker, explains this in his 1995 documentary. The Celluloid Closet, “Readings in school were heterosexual. Every film I watched was heterosexual. It was my job to translate it. I had to translate it to my life, rather than seeing my life.” For queer people, this process of media translation is a constant — we’re always finding ourselves in media or finding ways to relate to it by decoding it.

In the context of deciphering and translating, it’s easy to have films “feel” bisexual. The role of deciphering, coding, and translating is crucial in queer history. In Britain, homosexuality was a crime until 1967. Gay men used techniques such as wearing green carnations or using Polari slang to communicate with their friends. the same way visual cues and subtext have allowed queer people to survive, they’ve helped our stories to survive too.

In Ben-HurGore Vidal, a biscreenwriter, was not allowed to give Ben-Hur a gay textual relationship with Messala. But he did tell Stephen Boyd. Boyd was Messala in this way, and each glance at Ben-Hur (played by Charlton Heston obliviously) is filled of longing. You can read more about In The Mummy, when Rick (Brendan Fraser) stares at Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr) while striking a match on his jaw, what’s to stop that from feeling just as suggestive as Rick’s glances at Rachel Weisz’s character Evie?

Universal Pictures Photo

In DreamWorks’ animated movie El Dorado’s RoadTulio might feel enchanted and Miguel may be, however, equally in love with each other. Kenneth Branagh (who played Tulio) was told to stop calling Miguel (Kevin Kline) “darling,” as then-head-of–DreamWorks-Animation Jeffrey Katzenberg noted the endearment was suited to a “different kind of audience.” When the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) gives Loki a suggestive glance (or the code for his “orgy ship”) in Thor: Ragnarok, the media bi people have grown up with has trained us to “read further into it.”

When even a carnation can be freighted with meaning, it’s unsurprising that queer audiences have found significance in aspects of film as subtle as lighting. While it seems to have originated as a term on twitter, “bisexual lighting” has been covered by the BBC and discussed in academia, with increased public awareness of both the trend and how bisexuals are represented on screen. “Bisexual lighting” or “bi lighting” refers to when a TV or film scene is lit with the colors of the bisexual flag (magenta, purple, and blue), which can be read as a wordless acknowledgement of an character’s bisexuality. When you’re primed to see it, it’s everywhere. It’s in the spy thriller Atomic Blonde, When the protagonist has had sex (and is then violently murdered), the gay Black MirrorEpisode San JuniperoThe poster is available here Moonlight.

Grid View

Bi lighting often feels ubiquitous, even when there isn’t a hint of bisexuality in sight. Kyle Kallgren, a YouTuber, explained that the magenta and blue color combinations have a cinematic function beyond representing bisexuality. The intense purples, pinks, and blues we’ve come to call bi lighting are colors that rarely occur in nature and thus often act as a cinematic shorthand for the unnatural. These are colors that can be found in magic, fantasy and sci-fi. They also include the neon lighting in cyberpunk and nightclubs. As such, both Twitter users as well media critics noted bi lighting.John Wick 3., Blade Runner 2049, 2019’s The Colors of SpaceAnd Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, there’s often a less gay logic for doing so.

That said, even if bi lighting first came to creators’ attention because of the memes, they’re now consciously embracing it onscreen. It’s used in a musical number when a character comes out as bi on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It’s in the third episode of LokiLoki appears as bi during the scene in which he is portrayed. It’s in a scene in the Disney cartoon Owl HouseWhen the bisexual protagonist is with her lesbian lover. The case of LokiSophia Di Martino (who portrays Sylvie), told the story. VarietyShe was sure that Kate Heron had used bi-lighting on purpose, as she said. Mari Alizor was also a visual designer and color developer. Owl HouseTwitter user @stylisahoka noted that the series’ creators deliberately referenced lesbian and bi flags in lighting it.

Most of us don’t truly equate bi lighting, suggestive glances, or memories of past roles as substantive representation. Movies that are bisexual allow us to create a space in media that erases us, and stops us from taking part. On the upside, there are more real bi movies now to celebrate: DC’sBirds of Prey unabashedly queer-codes its villains, but it also stars multiple queer heroes — including Harley Quinn, portrayed as openly bi and victoriously escaping an abusive relationship while blowing stuff up and making friends along the way. Or there’s the chaotic indie comedy Shiva Baby, written and directed by bisexual filmmaker Emma Seligman, with a plot focusing on a young bisexual woman’s struggles to find herself as she navigates her past and present relationships.

Screen stories are now more inclusive of bisexuality than ever before, but bisexual viewers continue to look for themselves in media. Perhaps we’ll eventually reach a point when the Shiva BabyThe odds of s being successful outweigh those of the Atomic Blondes, but for now, the online community’s shared canon and constant conversation about bi movies helps bridge the gap. When cinema erases queer narratives and refuses to hire queer actors, it creates an annihilating vacuum — it tells us we don’t exist. The line between serious humor and absurdity is crossed by jokes, memes, or tongue-check identifications for new members to the bi movie library. Above all, that canon was created out of a collective desire for community to fill this void through any and every means.