Why It Was So Important For Me To Watch A Movie with Accurate Lesbian Representation

I have spent the past four years anxiously searching out a film that accurately depicts a lesbian relationship as an actual relationship.

I remember when Blue is the Warmest Color came and everybody raved because there was a movie about lesbians that had hit the mainstream. I, on the other hand, spent those three hours cringing in my chair as I watched scene after scene of two women having sex in a way that could only have been imagined by a man. I watched them squirm into uncomfortable positions, I watched so many unnecessary close ups, and I cried in the end when everything was unstable. I cried because I was newly out and as I watched I thought, this is my future, I will be sexualized and unstable for as long as I date women (which will be until the day I die, thank you very much).

Then there was Carol. I loved Carol. I wrote about how much I loved it, here. But Carol is a story of the past and didn’t give me hope for the future, it simply gave me a moment in history that I could connect to.

And then, on August 26^th, 2016 a wonderful little movie directed by Clea Duvall quietly came out. The film, entitled The Intervention, chronicles a weekend away with four couples. While the film’s plot revolves around the intervention of a straight married couple, what drew me to the film was the presence of a lesbian couple that is neither sexualized nor fetishized.

Played by Clea Duvall and Natasha Lyonne (a fun callback to lesbian cult film, But I’m a Cheerleader), this couple is exactly that, a couple. They have normal problems and normal chemistry and they are normal people who found each other and fell in love. It is exciting to see a queer couple represented in this way and even more exciting that the director herself is a queer woman. You heard that right, an actual queer woman wrote and directed a movie that portrays queer women.

It is upsetting that it is 2016 and this is a revelation, but it is what it is and I hope it is only the beginning. Hats off to you, Clea Duvall, I look forward to all you make in the future (and if you wanted to keep making But I’m a Cheerleader reunions happen, I wouldn’t complain).

The Intervention is now available on Digital HD across the Internet.

By Hannah Rimm on September 14, 2016
Hannah Rimm is a writer, educator, and filmmaker living in New York City. When she isn't writing, she is the marketing coordinator at an Academy Award-nominated arthouse animation company.