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All-Girls’ Camp: Playful Exaggeration of Lesbianism in "The L Word" The Lesbian Look One of the major ways The L Word camps up lesbian life is through the Lesbian Look. In the pilot episode of The L Word, Shane enters the Planet wearing a thrift store button-down with cutoff sleeves, leather pants, greasy hair, lots of eyeliner and leather wristcuffs. Dana, not yet comfortable in her lesbian skin, complains, “Well, I wouldn't be seen on the street with you. Every single thing about the way you're dressed screams dyke.†Since one of the biggest ways lesbians identify each other, even self-identify, is through visual cues, The L Word rightly spends a significant amount of energy teasing apart the Lesbian Look. For example, in trying to determine the sexual orientation of Lara (Lauren Lee Smith), the sous chef at Dana’s sports club, the women perform a campy information-gathering maneuver worthy of a Charlie’s Angels episode. Bette begins, “We are going to deploy a mission to ascertain the disposition and intent of one Miss Lara Perkins.†They pile out of a Mini-Cooper and fan out into the dining room equipped with high-tech gadgetry. Tina wears a trench coat and most of them wear sunglasses. They begin to document Lara’s look:
After noting everything they can, they rush into the bathroom to debrief:
Based on simple visual cues about her look, the L Word women try to determine Lara’s sexuality—a campy take on the way we read each other every day. Dyke Drama Another classic trope camped up in The L Word is Dyke Drama—the stereotype that lesbian relationships have more drama than non-lesbian relationships, and that drama of the dyke kind can be particularly messy. Early in the season Bette asks Tina at a party, “Have you ever noticed that every time Shane enters a room, someone leaves crying?†Shortly, the scene cuts to Shane’s ex-lover Lacey (Tammy Lynn Michaels) running out the front door, ranting; she’s angry because Shane hasn’t called her back. Later, Lacey follows Shane in her pickup, assaults Shane with her camera, hijacks a microphone at the Planet and leads the room in an anti-Shane chant and distributes fliers like wanted posters to warn other women against sleeping with Shane. Gabby, Alice’s ex-girlfriend, even says, “Looks like Shane finally tangled with the wrong crazy bitch.†But what does Shane do to protect herself from her psycho-stalker? Call the cops? Ask her friends to intervene? No, she has sex with Lacey one more time. In later episodes, Shane starts having an affair with the married socialite Cherie Jaffe (Rosanna Arquette). Her husband nearly walks in on them the first time they have sex. After a series of close calls when it seems like Cherie’s husband is on to them, he unexpectedly asks Shane to date his daughter and then agrees to finance her own salon. Shane falls in love with Cherie, while Cherie’s daughter Clea (Samantha McLeod), of course, falls in love with Shane. The melodrama that follows—Cherie insists on increasingly risky sex; Clea witnesses her mother and Shane in a tender moment; Cherie won’t see Shane so Shane camps outside of her house in her pickup; the family gets a restraining order against Shane—are all campy turns-of-event that mock the dyke drama stereotype. In an even more over-the-top example of Dyke Drama, Alice grows tired of her overly-attentive lesbian-identified boyfriend Lisa (Devon Gummersall) and brings home a totally straight fellow, Andrew, for sex. But Lisa shows up at her apartment and interrupts their moment:
As Alice sees Andrew to the door he says, “Looks like you got your work cut out for you.†Alice replies, “Yeah, dyke drama. You know how it is.†And Andrew, in a superbly-written foil to this outrageous scene, smiles and says, “No.†By playing with this stereotype, the L Word writers reiterate the campy nature of the show and make it difficult for audiences to consider these storylines as literal representations of lesbian life. |
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