TV

Fan videos and female characters

I’ve often thought that there’s a Ph.D. thesis to be written on the overarching effect of the internet on the gay and lesbian community. On the one hand, there’s the fact that the net potentially exposes the gay user to homophobic hate groups spewing more bile than (hopefully) he or she encounters in the real world on the average day. On the other hand, there are communities like … well, like AfterEllen.com, which mean that you no longer have to live in a big city or be a bar bunny to gain some sort of feeling of belonging to a lesbian community.

And then there’s the phenomenon of the lesbian (or lesbianish) fan video. Fed up with searching for nonexistent out lesbian characters in TV and film, some people just get hold of a film editing program and create their own story lines and emphases out of the raw material provided by the networks.

Which means if I want to see a video that focuses on the subtexty bits between, say, Serena and Blair on Gossip Girl, then it doesn’t take me very long to find one:

And a well-made one at that. Admittedly, there’s a bit more of Blair rolling around with various interchangeable boys than I need to see, but I think this video does a great job of capturing the fact that the most powerful emotional relationship on the show is really between the two girls. Which makes a nice change after all the shows — from Starsky and Hutch to Nip/Tuck — focused on male pairs who secretly seem to need each other more than they really need the inconsequential women who pass between them.

Then there’s this video centered on Andie (Anne Hathaway) and Miranda (Meryl Streep) from The Devil Wears Prada:

Ingenious, no? Especially the choice of Madonna‘s “Frozen” for the song, which actually fits Miranda’s character perfectly. As lesbianish pairings go, there’s a rather huge age gap — if I’d been making a video, I probably would have tried to make it between Hathaway and Emily Blunt‘s characters — but then, women of Hathaway’s age get cast opposite men of Streep’s age without a second thought in Hollywood. The “fresh-faced female ingenue meets powerful female boss” is certainly a new twist.

One pairing I always secretly wanted to see was Joey (Katie Holmes) and Jen (Michelle Williams) on Dawson’s Creek.

Perhaps because there was never really enough subtext in the original program to support that, I couldn’t find any lesbianish videos featuring them — but I did find this rather excellent, and funny, one that illustrates how the two of them envied and competed against each other in the early seasons of the show:

This just reminds me of the thing I really loved about Dawson’s Creek, which was that it had not one but two smart, complex female leads, neither of whom could be slotted easily into the stereotypical characters of “the brain” or “the beauty.” I’ll admit my crush was mainly on Joey, but Michelle Williams is pretty much my pick for most talented young Hollywood actress.

Which female TV and film pairings would you like to see get a lesbianish twist? Which relationships between female characters do you find interesting even if they don’t feature gay subtext? Let me know below.

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