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emotionallychargedtowel · 3 months

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Desert Hearts rewatch notes

Desert Hearts (1985) is one of my favorite movies, but as with most of my favorites, I've gone quite a while without seeing it at times. I put it on the other day for the first time in years and took some screenshots in the hope that I might get some folks on here to give it a try that haven't, or at least bring back some memories for those who’ve seen it before. Then, when I sat down to post the images, I found I had more to say than I realized.

This was my first time watching this movie since I got into the whole BL/QL genre and I was curious to see if it would seem any different to me after a period of being more immersed in queer stories than usual. Mostly it swept me up into its own world, something this film is really good at. But I did find myself thinking at times about how aspects of it mapped onto QL tropes and more general romance tropes. I also couldn't help but see some parallels to the actual lived experiences of myself and people I know.

Queer romance tropes in Desert Hearts

Three tropes stood out at me that I've run into in the QL world, some of which I've seen in hetero romance settings as well.

Fish out of water - Vivian goes from her life as an academic in New York City to staying at a ranch outside Reno in pursuit of a "quick" divorce. (Having to spend six weeks in a strange place in order to get a divorce was "quick" by 1959 standards.) Helen Shaver, who played Vivian, points out in a featurette included with the Criterion version of the movie that Vivian has been living a very cerebral life, living inside her own head while cutting herself off from her body from the neck down. This radical change of scenery is exactly what she needs to be able to open up to something different.

There’s a similar dynamic at play in hetero fish-out-of-water romances. But I find this trope a lot more interesting in a queer context. Queer identities have a more complex relationship to difference. Among other things, characters who seem to be at home in the environment of the story often turn out to be alienated from it due to others’ perceptions of their sexuality.

Age gap (with the younger person pursuing) - Cay, who is ten years Vivian's junior, is definitely the pursuer here. This isn't a specifically queer trope per se, but it can manifest in some specific ways in queer love stories.

LGBTQ+ identity can put people on unusual timelines in their lives. (This is an idea I first ran into in a book by Jack Halberstam in undergrad.) Sometimes this means being in a more "youthful" mode later in life than cishet people. Other times it means being a particular kind of late bloomer. And so on. So with life stages not conforming to typical expectations, what does it mean to love someone you have a significant age difference with?

In the case of Vivian and Cay, Vivian may be older, but Cay is poised to initiate her into practices and feelings that are pretty familiar for Cay and totally, mind-blowingly new to Vivian. This creates a kind of role reversal. At the same time, Cay has never felt this way about a partner before, so in many ways, their relationship is causing her to have some new and intense experiences as well.

The thing where a character figures out their sexuality for the first time because their feelings toward a love interest act as a catalyst - This is certainly a trope that comes up in stories about queer romance, but it's more debatable whether it's a queer trope in the sense of a trope that is used by and resonates with queer people. I guess I'd say the theme comes up in different ways when a story is very geared toward the "straight gaze" and when it's more authentically queer. With the "straight gaze" version you get things like "gay for you." With more authentic versions, well, I don't think I've noticed many commonalities there. But I will always defend the use of this trope when it's done well in a way that centers queer experience, if only because falling for a specific person is exactly what forced me to come to terms with my own sexuality.

Side note: Speaking of coming to terms with my sexuality, it really is an indication of how deeply in denial I was about my bisexuality in college that seeing this movie for a class didn't help me figure it out. I was deeply affected by it and fixated on it for weeks after seeing it, but it didn't get through the thick shell of obliviousness I had built up around myself.

A connection to personal experience

There are quite a few ways that Desert Hearts resonates with my own experience but one really stood out to me this time around. [Spoilers ahead.] When Cay goes to see Vivian at the hotel where she’s staying after she leaves the ranch, she goes for a last-ditch, Hail Mary move—she takes off her clothes and climbs into Vivian’s bed. At first Vivian tells her to leave, but then she softens a bit, clearly interested but conflicted. Then this moment happens.

I related to this so much. When I fell in love with a someone who was (at that time) presenting as a woman and it started to look like I might actually have a chance, I had so much anxiety about whether and how I could be intimate with my crush and whether I’d be able to “perform” decently. It turns out, as we learned when we compared notes sometime later, we had each had the same worry and we’d both bought an instructional book about lesbian sex (I think it may even have been the exact same book!).

I think part of my anxiety back then stemmed from the prospect of starting from scratch with a new set of practices and skills after being acclimated to sex with men. It made me feel like I was off balance. But when I actually did get close to my crush, another, much more pleasant side to my inexperience came up. It turned out that not having a familiar script for what to do made me much more present and gave me a sense of freedom. I remember thinking that it was like going from traveling down the same old route to exploring a new place that we had to write our own maps for. And that was pretty exhilarating.

Soon after that relationship happened, I read Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. There was a passage where Lorde described something very similar from her own life. In this passage, she’s reflecting after her first sexual encounter with a woman after having a similar set of anxieties.

So this was what I had been so afraid of not doing properly. How ridiculous and far away those fears seemed now, as if loving were some task outside of myself, rather than simply reaching out and letting my own desire guide me. It was all so simple.

She’s so amazing at evoking these feelings, isn’t she?

I can’t think of any other places I’ve seen this type of experience discussed besides these two. (I’m pretty sure others exist, but the fact that I haven’t come across them suggests there aren’t very many.) There are plenty of stories out there about hetero sex performance anxiety and its eventual resolution, but I think the queer version of this kind of learning has some big inherent differences that go way beyond the genders of partners being different. So it’s really nice to see it come up here, and be handled in such a sweet way.

In case you’re wondering, once Vivian is able to “let her own desire guide her,” in Lorde’s words, she also finds that her fears were misplaced. The resulting love scene is beautifully executed even by current standards. It’s even more remarkable to see it in a film that was released in 1985. It’s equally remarkable that this sex scene was shown in rather explicit detail.

about, by, and/or for?

I'm also thinking about this movie in terms of the for/by/about queers typology that @wen-kexing-apologist came up with a while back. In my estimation, Desert Hearts belongs right in the center of WKA's Venn diagram. It's about queers, of course. I'd also place it in the "by queers" category. The director, Donna Deitch, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is an out lesbian. It's not clear whether the other co-screenwriter was queer. Her personal life was mysterious enough that it seems like a definite possibility. And the movie is based (somewhat loosely) on a novel by Jane Rule, who was also an out lesbian and whose work as a writer was very focused on lesbian characters.

I'd also consider this movie to be "for queers." It was marketed to a wider audience, of course. But as I watched some of the bonus material and looked at writing about the movie, I saw a lot of evidence that Deitch made the film for her community and they embraced it.

Shaver had a really lovely story in the featurette I watched about this. I forget the exact nature of it, but she described how she attended some kind of event with Deitch and Charbonneau where the audience was full of queer women who gave them an incredibly long standing ovation that she found very moving and helped her see how impactful the film had been.

I’m also sure Deitch had queer viewers in mind (at least in part) when she set out to fill a glaring gap in Sapphic representation. In an interview with AfterEllen, Deitch said, “My goal was to make a lesbian love story that did not end in a bisexual love triangle or a suicide. Because that’s all that had been made at the time I set out to make Desert Hearts.” (Note: I’m not linking due to transphobia concerns regarding that site but folks should be able to find it easily if they look.)

In summary…

If you haven’t seen Desert Hearts yet I really can’t recommend it highly enough.