As Pride Month continues, we celebrate an important contemporary icon whose career is still on the rise at 32 years old. She is an out queer movie star who has appeared in many queer-themed films, including The Runaways, Certain Women, and J.
Even when she doesn't embody queer characters, her choice of roles takes her into territory well understood by the LGBTQ+ community, which is of the dispossessed and marginalized, misfits and outcasts who suffer the emotional toll of identity crisis and of not being accepted by family, She was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of an emotionally distraught Princess Diana in Seberg and Spencer.
It took us awhile to get here. The history of queer representation in Hollywood is really bad. Even as the code ended and Hollywood became more radical in its themes and content, queer characters were still mostly taboo. Even the rare film that tackled such material at the time, such as Midnight Cowboy, earned an 'X' rating, reinforcing the misconception that homosexuality was socially and morally abnormal.
Ellen and Anne Heche came out in 1997 on the eve of a new century. The careers of both actors were damaged by it. Straight actors, like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia and Matthew McConaughey in Dallas, were acclaimed for their bravery and their amazing range when they played the roles of the LGBTQ+ characters in American movies.
Both Hilary Swank and Tom Hanks have recently admitted that trans and gay actors should have played their roles, with Hilary saying, "We now have a bunch of trans actors who would obviously be a lot more right for the role and have the opportunity to actually auditioning for the role." Hanks wondered if a straight man could do what he had done in Philadelphia. I don't think people will accept a straight guy playing a gay guy. Hollywood, despite its avowed progressivism, seems to be at least a decade behind the times when it comes to both on and off screen.
We go back to Stewart. Representation is something we hear a lot about. She and the movies she watches practice what they preach. A queer person playing queer in high profile productions is a rare event, especially in the movies, with its lower financial stakes. It is true that Stewart only came out five years ago, but she has always been a friend to the queer community, so it is unlikely that her queer roles before she came out will count.
Her films represent a spectrum of queer characters of all different colors. She gets to play a gay character, but she doesn't do it as a particular kind of gay character, which is the best way to challenge stereotypes for viewers. She plays characters that are ambiguous about gender and sexuality. She appears to be saying that she is me. Don't worry about anything else.
Her first major role was in Panic Room, in which she played an 11-year-old girl who moved with her mother to a brownstone on the Upper West Side from her hometown. Sarah is atomboy, someone with little interest in girls her age. After the turn of the millennium, when Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Paris Hilton dominated a mainstream media still firmly driven by the male gaze, playing the character this way was no minor choice.
As she got older, Stewart would ease in and out of her androgynous look as she rolled through the apartment on a scooter. She and her mother found themselves fighting off three home invaders after moving into a house with a panic room. Sarah is far from being a shrinking violet. Stewart plays a hero with an impairment in the film.
Foster didn't believe that Stewart would continue acting. Stewart continued and has been prolific. She appeared in fourteen films in six years, most notably as the teenager who develops a crush on a doomed hiker in Sean Penn's Into the Wild. Although her role as someone who is bisexual is an outlier for her career, her role in the five vampire movies that became enormous is an exception.
She accrued along with the success of the gothic melodramas, both gay and straight, everything aligned to potentially destroy not only her career, but her personal life as well. She was young, a tabloid obsession, and the center of a billion dollar franchise. She suffered a lot of abuse in the media, even though she was the heartiest of souls. She had become radioactive in the cruel and unforgiving celebrity press, so she risked being typecast, not being cast anymore, and so forth.
She tried to push the boundaries of where the audience would accept her even while she was making them. She used her star power to take on queer positive roles, such as her performance as the young Joan Jett in The Runaways, which chronicles the musician's early career and her struggles to forge an all- girl rock band. Jett's relationships with women are dramatized in the movie, as well as her insistence on appearing as a more traditional male rock figure.
The Runaways is a standard rock movie, but it has both queer and female desire. There is a comfort in the material that conveys the sense of self-possession Jett herself had strutting the un-self-conscious, tough-girl style that made her a queer fashion icon. Stewart has become quite the queer fashion symbol in her own right, and the most exciting creative sequence in a film full of rock performances is when Jett makes a homemade Sex Pistols t-shirt. It is possible to feel the character's joy in flipping the bird to patriarchy, capitalism, and a bunch of other repressive institutions. It could symbolize Stewart's career because of its pure punk ethos.
Stewart has shown a lack of interest in big budget movies like Snow White and the Huntsmen. She's always been drawn to directors that were innovative. Her appearance in Crimes of the Future is one example. Her involvement in Woody Allen's Café Society may seem problematic now, but she got in on the tail end of the era when Allen helped legitimize an actor's career just by casting them. She is great in the part, even if you don't like him or the film.
Two of her best performances and most interesting roles came in a pair of films by French director. She played Jean Seberg, an American actress who became an icon in a French movie, Breathless, but now she is the icon. She is all the more captivating for her unconventional beauty and her performance is typical of Stewart's. She is doing more than that. In a performance that The New York Times called exceptional, she plumbed the depths of grief, disassociation, and ennui.
Stewart has helped to expand the types of genres in which queer characters can appear. The lesbian Christmas movie, Happiest Season, was the cause of a lot of joy for the LGBTQ+ community, because it was a holiday movie that focused on traditional notions of home and family. Stewart has kicked butt in a couple of recent action flicks, Charlie's Angels and Underwater, helping expand representation in a genre that desperately needs it.
Stewart doesn't think it's a good idea to discuss if only queer actors should play queer roles. If you are telling a story about a community that is not welcoming to you, then you should stop. There is nothing wrong with learning about each other if they are an ally and you are as well. The cinematic journey of the queer icon has been described in this way. Can't wait to see where she goes next
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