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Bisexual Women in Film From the Early 1990s to Today

The classic Hollywood take on bisexuality has always mirrored popular stereotypes about bisexuals.

Bisexuals are indecisive, and incapable of commitment. They are promiscuous, omnivorous sexual predators quick to hump anything that moves. They are confused, or psychologically damaged, or both.

Bisexual women in particular have been further patronized as sexual toys for straight men – women who are willing to bring to life the male fantasy of girl-on-girl action that welcomes male participation. And they have been further demonized as twisted, evil, duplicitous double-crossers whose punishment is perpetual insatiability and an ultimately gruesome end.

Personal Best, which hit theaters in 1982, is often hailed as the first film to prominently feature female bisexuality. It was also one of the few to present a relatively positive portrayal. Two pentathletes (Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly) competing for one spot on an Olympic team fall for each other, and their love, as well as their sex scenes, are dealt with sensitively and matter-of-factly, even though one winds up leaving the other for a man.

Since then, there have been many more theatrical releases prominently depicting bi women, particularly in the last five years. But are bisexual women still subject to the same stereotypes on film?

Yes and no.

A character’s bisexuality is still used all too often as shorthand for criminal insanity, capital-C complexity, or “have your cake and eat it too” self-indulgence. Or it’s played for laughs, cheap thrills or both.

Of course, none of these categories are mutually exclusive.

The first major release to feature a bisexual woman after Personal Best came ten years later, and it typifies the way many movies still use bisexuality as a convenient way to signal psychopathy when criminal and pathological behavior simply isn’t enough.

Basic Instinct (1992) brought bisexuality to the forefront of public debate, quickly drawing the wrath of activists who objected to the hackneyed portrayal of the murderous bisexual woman. Their protests drew nearly as much attention as the sneak peek of Sharon Stone’s naughty bits that one legendary scene affords viewers. A police detective (Michael Douglas) is drawn to a Stone’s character’s air of danger and mystery, which is partly communicated by her turning out to be bisexual.

The sequel to Basic Instinct due out next year (with the working title Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction) will also mix bisexuality and criminality.

The bisexual character Vera (Neve Campbell) in When Will I Be Loved (2004) is marked by scheming vengefulness and spite. Femme Fatale (2002), a twisting, sex-filled thriller about jewel thievery, opens with Laure (Rebecca-Romijn-Stamos) seducing a diamond-adorned supermodel in a restroom in order to steal the goods. Laure then double-crosses her fellow criminals.

Her more serious relationships involve characters played by Antonio Banderas and Peter Coyote, and her bisexuality is more opportunistic and conniving than it is natural. She plays the proverbial sexy, manipulative, cold-hearted blond, and being bisexual simply bolsters that stereotype.

The early 2000s saw a spate of teen thrillers that mixed drugs, murder, and bisexuality, including 1999’s Cruel Intentions (although bisexuality was only hinted), 2000’s The In Crowd, 2001’s Soul Survivors, and 2002’s New Best Friend, starring The L Word‘s Mia Kirshner.

Most recently, the opportunistically bisexual Kimberly (Evan Rachel Wood) in Pretty Persuasion (2005) is manipulative, duplicitous and downright malicious. The cruel and scheming high school sophomore leads her friends (Elisabeth Harnois and Adi Schnall) to falsely accuse their English/drama teacher (Ron Livingston) of sexual assault. Kimberly hopes the attention will help further her acting career, and to that end, she seduces the female reporter covering the case.

She reveals true malice, thinking nothing of exploiting the seriousness of harassment/molestation charges to ruin an innocent man’s reputation and destroy his life. She uses sex to manipulate men and women alike, seducing them to get what she wants, which isn’t necessarily (or usually) the sex itself.

While bisexual women are now somewhat less likely to be portrayed in films as homicidal sex fiends, they are still unlikely to be shown in a positive, or even realistically human, light. Making them out to be devious and malicious is a timeworn tactic that shows no signs of waning.

The industry seems far more willing to portray bisexual women as homicidal sex fiends than daring to present them as good-natured, happy-go-lucky or even ordinary.

Bisexuality as sign of a tormented soul and hindrance to ultimate fulfillment is another popular theme in big-budget movies.

In The Hours (2002) the stories of three women in three time periods who are all somehow connected to Mrs. Dalloway – a character from a Virginia Woolf novel who presents a brave face to the world but harbors deep regrets with life and love. Mrs. Dalloway’s highest moment of passion is a single kiss shared with a female friend, much like suburban 1950s housewife Laura (Julianne Moore).

All three of the film’s characters have experienced attraction to both men and women within their lifetimes. Laura shows more love for a female friend than for her husband, suggesting her unhappiness might be a result of compulsory heterosexuality.

Woolf herself (Nicole Kidman, with a now-legendary prosthetic nose) is ultimately unsatisfied with her marriage and with her life, and, unfortunately, shares a kiss with her sister. And present-day Manhattanite Clarissa (Meryl Streep), is in a lesbian relationship, raising a daughter (Claire Danes) with her partner (Allison Janney) but still in love with a former lover (Ed Harris), who is now dying of AIDS. The film links each woman’s depression to their sexuality, which is a source of struggle.

Then there are the plethora of movies in which bisexuality seems tossed in for no apparent reason beyond titillation.

In The Haunting (1999), for example, one character’s (Catherine Zeta-Jones) bisexuality is implied in the beginning of the film and never addressed again, aside from a few innuendo-laced glances at Lili Taylor’s character.

Similarly, in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004) we discover that Kate (Christine Taylor) is bisexual when she announces it late in the movie, apropos of nothing.

In both instances, the characters share a meaningless kiss with another woman despite otherwise showing an attraction to men. It implies they are bisexual but in a gratuitous way, where it serves no ostensible purpose except perhaps to make the character seem somehow sexier.

Bisexuality often functions in mainstream movies as a way to raise a woman’s coolness quotient, suggesting she is particularly daring or edgy, with both positive and negative results.

In 2002, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko, whose work includes High Art and several episodes of The L Word, brought us LaurelCanyon. In it, a sexied-up Frances McDormand plays a 40-something hotshot record producer who – in addition to having a rock-star lover (Alessandro Nivola) half her age – seduces her son’s sheltered fiancee (Kate Beckinsale).

While the film might have bolstered the stereotype of the bisexual woman who preys on younger women (as in Personal Best), here McDormand’s character is secure in her bisexual identity, and Beckinsale is seduced by a whole world she’s never known, which can only partly be attributed to her bi-curiosity.

In a similar vein, Prey for Rock & Roll (2003) features lesbian icon Gina Gershon (who has played queer in both Showgirls and Bound) starring as Jacki, a 40-year-old would-be rock star who is bisexual. Her Clam Dandy bandmates are played by Drea de Matteo, Shelly Cole, and Lori Petty (whose character is a lesbian).

In this film, Gershon fans are treated to a hot but humorous sex scene she shares with Shakara Ledard, and viewers in general are treated to a film that has a fluid approach to sexuality and depicts it as just one aspect of the multi-layered characters – without fanfare or ulterior motive.

But Laurel Canyon and Prey for Rock & Roll are in the minority when it comes to movies that casually include themes of bisexuality.

It is more common to find bisexuality employed as a way to take a character’s propensity for sexual adventure up a notch.

In movies like Basic Instinct, Wild Things (1998), starring Neve Campbell and Denise Richards), Pretty Persuasion, and When Will I Be Loved (2004), bisexual characters are seen making out with or having sex with a woman to indicate they are superfreaks.

Vera in When Will I Be Loved has spur-of-the-moment sex with a female friend, which is just one of the indicators that she’s a “wild thing” in this movie, too. It serves the dubious purpose of establishing Vera’s sensuality, bottomless desire and hidden complexity.

In 2004’s Head in the Clouds, bisexual Gilda (Charlize Theron) gets involved in a love triangle with her boyfriend Guy (Stuart Townsend) and her female roommate Mia (Penelope Cruz) in 1930s war-torn Europe. But the women’s relationship is always positioned secondarily to, and framed by, her relationship to Guy, and seems to exist primarily as just another way to mark Gilda as “modern”.

In these cases, bisexuality is a mark of being highly sexed, and same-sex encounters positioned as especially sexy.

A common scenario for bisexual characters in movies is simultaneous involvement with a man and a woman, bolstering the idea that bisexuals are by definition non-monogamous.

From Personal Best and Basic Instinct to Head in the Clouds and When Will I Be Loved, bisexual characters are often portrayed as needing to have it both ways, so to speak, a sign of their self-indulgence.

In one of the most egregious recent examples, Dodgeball’s Kate makes out with a woman and then cheers up her male love interest by assuring him she’s bisexual and promptly kissing him – reinforcing the idea that bisexual women always date members of both sexes, at the same time.

Bisexuality’s potential to generate laughs – with bisexuality itself as the punchline – is realized in movies like Dodgeball, which pulls out all the stops in its quest for unrelenting hilarity. And in the current release Broken Flowers, Bill Murray plays a washed-up Don Juan (named Don Johnston) searching for the teenaged son he just learned he may have. One of the ex-girlfriends he visits, Carmen (Jessica Lange), is standoffish and her aloof “assistant” (Chloe Sevigny) is oddly protective of her assistant. Don’s inability to charm the two women is soon “explained” when the pair are revealed to be lovers.

Several of the recent and upcoming depictions of bisexuality in major releases are in movies based on true stories, mostly about bisexual woman who are artists or musicians-women who is already considered to be outside the mainstream.

Salma Hayek produces as well as stars in Frida (2002) as the free spirit artist Frida Kahlo, who is married to the equally bohemian ladykiller Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). The pair enjoy an open marriage, one filled with jealousies as passionate as the sex. Kahlo escapes the shortcomings of her marriage in affairs with both men and women, including Leon Trotsky as well as Josephine Baker. She is also tantalized by a tangoing American photographer, Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd).

In the upcoming Running with Scissors, based on Augusten Burroughs’s memoir of the same name, the minister’s wife (Kristin Chenoweth) appears to be bisexual. A biopic of Dusty Springfield is also in development (although she was more generally believed to be a lesbian than bisexual), and various versions of a big-screen portrayal of bisexual singer Janis Joplin have been in the works for years.

Finally, we have those films that make a female character’s bisexuality the focus of the film. Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) is one of the most well-known recent releases to take this subject on, with two women (Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen) finding love on the other side of the fence after a long series of disastrous dates with men. One places a personal ad for a girlfriend because she has given up on men-that mythical onramp to the lesbian highway. The women (played by the film’s two writers) navigate this foreign terrain with more awkwardness than passion.

Same-sex love, particularly between two man-loving women experiencing it for the first time, sets up most of the humor in this romantic comedy.

Rent, which opens on November 23rd, features a bisexual woman, Maureen (Idina Menzel) who has left her boyfriend to move in with her girlfriend (Tracie Thoms). Maureen’s struggle to manage both her girlfriend’s jealousy and her ex-boyfriend’s ongoing feelings for her comprise a good deal of the film’s narrative, with a raw honesty that is compelling (even if the lesbian does come off as a bit of a jerk).

The new British film Imagine Me and You, which will be released in theaters in the U.S. in February 2006, stars Piper Perabo as a woman who marries a man and then falls in love with the female florist for her wedding. Although the film never mentions bisexuality explicitly, the evolution of Perabo’s character as she comes to terms with her attraction to another woman is poignant and thoroughly explored, without being heavy-handed.

Kissing Jessica Stein, Rent, and Imagine Me and You are some of the better new theatrical releases about bisexual women, since, like Personal Best, they approach the topic with sensitivity. But films like these are still few and far between.

Bisexual women may be getting more screen time in recent years, but overall, they are still largely portrayed as disloyal, incapable of monogamy, and forever victim to their own insatiability. They are less frequently destined to meet a violent death, but they still find easy relief from underappreciation and disappointment with men in the arms of a woman.

And women’s bisexuality is still presented primarily as Hollywood shorthand for sexual adventurousness, rather than a valid and complex sexual identity.

It’s also worth noting that except for Frida Kahlo, every one of the bisexual characters I’ve mentioned here are white. Lesbians in U.S. theatrical releases are sometimes played by women of color (as in Rent, Head in the Clouds, Under the Tuscan Sun etc.), but bisexual women almost never are. This is largely attributable to the fact that the overwhelming majority of prominent female characters in American theatrical releases are white, with women of color mostly relegated to supporting roles, but is also a product of the prevailing notion that bisexuality is an luxury primarily indulged in by bored white women.

But the rising prevalence of bisexual women characters does at least improve the chance that they will more often be portrayed more diversely and realistically.

And as films like Kissing Jessica Stein, Imagine Me and You, and Rent become more common, films that only exploit bisexuality for cheap thrills will hopefully become just another shrugged-off relic of the last century.

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