American narrative film focuses intently on underdogs and antiheroes. This appears in the near-worship of grey-area figures created by the likes of Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, and intense critical devotion to underdog first-time-directors-turned-auteurs like Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, and Spike Jonze. They decorate just about every Top “Your Qualification Here” American Film list, and continue to remain in academic, critical, and pop culture discourse as unimpeachable greats.
This introduction is not to decry love of the white male directors who fight (symbolically but not systemically) against the industry that eventually embraces them. Certain films and directors may deservedly decorate our AFI lists, and our personal Criterion closets. However, underdog films that center queer women, made by queer female directors, are often disqualified from the same continuous, cyclical high praise and worship in the American cinema canon. This isn’t because they’re inferior, but because they lack the decades of positive mainstream criticism, theatrical or physical redistribution, and lasting cultural recognition to back up the legitimacy of liking them, or funding their next project.
One such film that demonstrates the power of historical context around the canon of American film, as well as the subjectivity of film criticism and verified appreciation, is Desert Hearts.
When out lesbian filmmaker Donna’s Deitch’s narrative debut premiered in 1985, it did so to a film environment in which LGBTQ+ critics, filmmakers, and characters were still sidelined and thought of as freak attractions or special interest pursuers more than serious artists, especially if those filmmakers and critics happened to be queer women. Regardless, Deitch’s neo-Western depiction of two lonely, stubborn women falling in love against their own instincts of self-preservation took over screens anyway. It made the assertion that queer women have always existed, and that their clumsy, argumentative, and honest yearning can lead to an open road (or train track).
This was a revolutionary notion for a major release of a film with a conventional structure. Even after the repeal of the restrictive Hays Code in 1965, homosexual characters in major motion picture releases still tended to either be a joke, or overwhelmingly end up in the graveyard, with a notable exception being the adaptation of Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band in 1970. The independent art film scene was friendlier to gay characters earlier than Hollywood was — not a surprise given it was also friendlier and freer of restrictions as to who could create noncommercial and socially rebellious films — but queer film criticism only began to emerge as a field during the post-Stonewall and Black Cat Riot period of the 1970s. Though independent, grassroots queer and feminist press created their own openings for criticism that married politics and aesthetics, queer critics were still barred from most major publications and respected critics’ circles, just as their films were kept out of major circulation.
That was the analytical groundwork to which Desert Hearts arrived. Critics had just started to applaud some of the camp of John Waters, and audiences were slowly preparing for the experimental, energetic nihilism, pastiche, and irony of the hyper-independent, hypersexual outsider narratives that would eventually produce New Queer Cinema in the 1990s.
A loose adaptation from Jane Rule’s 1964 novel, Desert of the Heart, the film version first came into being because of Deitch’s relief and fascination with a queer female-centric story that didn’t find its emotional peak in either suicide, or, as Deitch related in an interview with Patricia Aufderheide, a “bisexual love triangle.” Five years before the much more highly-advertised and budgeted Thelma & Louise (1991) was to throw critical readings and popular reception into turmoil over its lesbian subtext and emotional and physical female violence, Deitch wanted to overtly explore risk, intimate female relationships, and the internal conflict of women as influenced by the external world.
1959 Reno, Nevada, as created by ample placement of vintage roadsters and an overdose of Aqua Net hair spray, and accompanied by a lingering, Patsy Cline-infused soundtrack, is the incubator for those internal/external conflicts that main characters Cay (Patricia Charbonneau) and Vivian (Helen Shaver) face. Vivian, the guarded Columbia University English professor fleeing to Nevada for a quickie divorce, and Cay, the wayward, semi-out casino change operator whose only true supporter is her aspiring nightclub singer co-worker (the delightful, late character actress Andra Ackers) construct a charmingly playful relationship. It is also, of course, a relationship rife with drama and frustration, as one could expect to bloom while pursuing love in a widely homophobic era.
Robert Elswit’s (Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love) by-turns sweeping and intimate camera gives Cay and Vivian a wide berth in the streets and against the picaresque Sierra Nevada, and pushes them together into lingering close-ups when they think no one is looking. By harnessing Elswit’s versatile eye, Deitch hints at the collateral damage the women face in order to live free from societal restrictions.
In this case, Cay and Vivian’s society is comprised of their closest friends and family — mimetic of the closeted lesbian life and “social homophobia” that historian and filmmaker Vito Russo blamed for the deaths of so many fictional gay men and lesbian women. However, this danger, exposed in sometimes melodramatic arguments and exoduses from said family, concludes without either woman being forced to marry a man, dying, committing suicide, or accepting misery for the rest of her life. Desert Hearts is sensational for not only Cay and Vivian’s survival, but for the autonomous nature and aesthetic lushness (greatly assisted by costume designer Linda Bass) afforded two complex but ultimately romantic and optimistic women.
Although its initial release was met with incredibly lukewarm critical reception from major publications — and promotion for the film was often done by Deitch herself because distributor Samuel Goldwyn largely abandoned it as a special-interest piece — the film surpassed box office expectations. Over a million dollars for a lesbian love story that Deitch had wanted to sneak into theaters “in the garb of a mainstream Hollywood romance,” was a stamp of public approval worthy of both historical and critical note.
Now, 35 years after its initial release, Desert Hearts is enjoying a quiet revival, with the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project’s restoration and Janus Films/The Criterion Collection’s distribution bringing it back to queer film consciousness as a departure from the majority of previous film and television depictions of queer female melancholy and death, and even those morbid or ill-fated depictions that persist today. Even now, it is considered a radical film by queer feminist critics, and an unprecedented success in form and content.
If we are to look outside the circles of queer film critics and queer audiences, however, the film and its director, who went the way of many contemporary queer female filmmakers by opting into the more female director-friendly world of American television, barely made a blip. If one were to investigate the makeup of the most trusted critical voices of film history and academia at that point and their dismissiveness, if not blatant hostility, to the artistic worth of queer female directors, they might be able to understand why it is that this film had little chance of making any top 100 lists.
Deitch’s feature debut was a natural successor to Douglas Sirk’s social-outcast melodramas, the famed director formerly dismissed by critics and now hailed by the likes of Todd Haynes, Pedro Almodóvar, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Lynch, and Guillermo del Toro, to name a few. Somehow, her name has not been uplifted in the same tone, and the only other narrative feature she has made is Angel of Desire/Criminal Passion (1994), a psychosexual straight-to-video thriller.
The tendency to sort Desert Hearts into a special interest category both ignores the radicalism in its departure from decades of inherited filmic trauma perpetuated by murderous ends for lesbians, and dismisses its artistic worth. Despite its political intent, obsessively detailed and iconic costume and production design, and surprising success at the box office, it seems to have disappeared from the critical consciousness that rewards first-time male filmmakers, and, more recently male filmmakers, straight and gay, deigning to produce lesbian and gay romantic, melodramatic narratives.
More recently, these Academy-nominated lesbian and gay films include The Hours (2002), Brokeback Mountain (2005), A Single Man (2009), Carol (2015), Moonlight (2016), and Call Me by Your Name (2017), whose deeply serious, novel and play-adapted plots are threaded through with the romance and melodrama similarly present in Desert Hearts.
Deitch is not alone in a historical passing over of queer female voices in film — even those films that are more favorably reviewed have not been stalwarts of historical appreciation. The Watermelon Woman (1996), whose director, Black lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye created an entire archive of scrupulously aged black and white photographs, letters, and other documents in order to make her mockumentary about the fictional, “forgotten” Black, queer actress Fae Richards (Lisa Marie Bronson), is rarely studied outside of the specific categories of Black queer filmmaking or New Queer Cinema.
Dunye’s feature debut was largely considered a quirky, fun, but unpolished piece of fluff by its initial critics. This is despite Dunye’s fluid combination of direct address on video, straightforward narrative scenes shot on celluloid, and an awareness of the history, technique, and authority of white-sanctioned documentary practices to bolster her own fiction — all achievements that could easily be studied and lauded in any documentary, experimental, or auteurist lens.
Another film that was met with far poorer initial reviews than either Desert Hearts or The Watermelon Woman was lesbian filmmaker Jamie Babbit’s irony-soaked, meticulously-designed, straight-out-of-Susan-Sontag’s-journal But I’m a Cheerleader (1999). Major publications initially panned it as a “shallow, only mildly entertaining satire about a rehabilitation camp for gays and lesbians,” and “too limp to deliver,” the utter camp that these critics seemed to believe was reserved for Waters, even though the film was undeniably original, groundbreaking in its skewering of heterosexual obsessions projected onto the bodies of teens, and won a historic, misogynistic fight against the MPAA in bringing its rating down from an NC-17 to an R.
The breakthrough romantic comedy Saving Face (2004), the first feature film to star an Asian-American lesbian lead, from queer Asian-American director Alice Wu, was dismissed by many male critics as commercial fluff. Saving Face has only been unearthed recently by way of Alice Wu’s directing The Half of It in 2019, her second ever feature film intended for wide-release. This is an achievement she shares with Dee Rees, Nisha Ganatra, Angela Robinson, and scant other queer female directors in the American canon.
By exhuming this historical dismissal of queer female filmmakers’ works by those who identify with the antihero, applaud formal experimentation, consider gay period pieces worthy of Academy attention, and respect the rebellious eschewing of the standards of the MPAA, we are able to question the reception to such films as Desert Hearts, The Watermelon Woman, and Saving Face. We can wonder if any of these feats would be overwhelmingly celebrated if only they were achieved by male (primarily white, often heterosexual) directors.
Celebrated American cinema, if one is seeking to form a whole picture of the way in which appreciation of film is disseminated, should be looked at critically. Not every film directed by a queer female director is a work of genius — and Desert Hearts is not the end-all be-all of cinema — but given the historical background of censorship and suppression of their being made in the first place, their limited financial backing, and far diminished clout in comparison to the works of their male counterparts, it is necessary to view the written criticism and history surrounding them with a far more discerning eye.
These films don’t only belong on “Top 10 Lesbian Films” lists commissioned every June. They deserve their cults, flowers, and romances with audiences who want to immerse themselves in the beauty of the underdog, and, upon watching, want to see everything the director has ever made.
