Were the World Mine was made in 2008, and it hits differently in 2020. I feel like it wasn’t that acceptable in 2008, either, but whatever. I sat on this review for a few days because I wanted to see if my opinion softened over time, but it hasn’t. I need to also place a disclaimer that I’m a bisexual woman, not a gay man, so I’m not the target demographic. I would love to get other perspectives on the impact of this movie, because it did nothing for me.
Timothy attends an all-boys school and is bullied constantly for being gay. His literature teacher encourages him to audition for the school play, and subsequently he is cast as Puck in his high school’s rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He DaVinci Codes the play’s text and discovers the formula for a potion that will turn anyone he sprays it on gay. He then sprays it on half the town, and they all start making out with each other. At the performance, he nullifies the effects of the potion and everyone is suddenly nice to each other because being gay for 24 hours somehow made them more empathetic.
I have to approach this like a fairy tale, because every single person in this movie is a stereotype. All the students at his all-boys school are dude-bros. The rugby coach (like, where do they live?!) is extremely homophobic and is constantly saying that pesky things like education and the arts are getting in the way of his team playing sportsball well. The entire town, save Timothy’s two friends and his love interest, are also vocally homophobic. His MLM hun mom’s upline literally starts screaming at her on a street corner when she finds out Timothy is gay, like OK.
The weirdest choice this movie makes is how it handles Timothy’s mother. In the first 10 minutes of the movie, she reacts disproportionately every time there is a hint her son is gay. He gets a black eye from getting beaned with a dodgeball, and she throws dishes across the kitchen because she thought someone punched him for being gay. She finds out he’s cast as Puck and she gets angry because Puck is a fairy (and her son is a fairy, because he’s gay, get it?). In one particularly egregious scene, she tells her son it’s his fault his father left her, and that she’s also suffering because he’s gay. After all the work they do setting up the unsympathetic “why can’t you just be different?!” mother type, some off-screen miracle takes place and she begins sewing him fairy wings out of her wedding dress. She also spends the rest of the movie telling everyone her son is gay and she’s proud of him. It’s like the movie didn’t like the narrative and pivoted immediately because they needed Tim to have more allies.
Here’s my problem with portraying people like this… not all homophobes are Westboro-Baptist-sign-waving-funeral-protesting nightmares. It’s easy to portray those people as wrong and absurd, even in 2008, because the general attitude of the country was supportive of the LGBT community. Not to be glib, but this is post-Queer Eye and Ellen. There were a lot more queer-positive media streaming into boomers television sets. Homophobia was being OK with gay people, but not wanting your children to be gay. It’s saying consenting adults can do whatever they want, but then getting upset when your kid’s boy scout leader is gay. It’s saying you have a lesbian friend, but not wanting to live with her because you’re afraid they’re going to fantasize about your body or whatever. It’s hush-toned dissent that is the most prevalent, and this movie does nothing to address that. It’s all dudes spray painting f-bombs on Tim’s locker and parents screaming at administrators that Shakespeare was a queer and having their kids act in this play has made them want to kiss each other. What kind of message is this this trying to send to heteros? That you’re either rainbow flag-waving ally, or beating up the gay kid just because you don’t like that he’s gay?
…I’m about to address the consent problem in a second, so here’s a palette cleanser of a genuinely adorable moment of Timothy dancing in his kitchen.
Timothy sprays the entire cast of his production of Midsummers with this potion he creates, including the guy he likes, to seemingly “make” him gay, and then he spends the next day pretending he’s his boyfriend. This guy was in a relationship with someone else at the time, and when that got too real because she was upset her boyfriend randomly left her for another person, Timothy sprayed her with the potion, too, to make her infatuated with his best girl friend. Everyone is now gay and horny and making out, and the ones who were not sprayed are trying to get the people attracted to them to go away because they are relentless.
I mean, this is perpetuating 3 terrible gay stereotypes:
- The Gay Agenda is real, and gay people are just trying to convert other people to be gay.
- Gay people will not back off if you do not share the same sexual preference
- Gay people are just constantly horny and weirdly do not care about consent?
Did nobody think about this for more than a few seconds? Are these people acting on their otherwise buried attraction, or are they forced to have this attraction now? Because I highly doubt everyone in this city was just closeted and now that the potion is coursing through their veins their inhibitions are down. Like, don’t fuck your friend when they’re too drunk, or under the influence of a gay aphrodisiac, is what I’m saying. BUT IT’S OK GUYS, when the potion wears off, nobody is upset, and it turned out his crush wanted to date him this whole time! What a hero, changing the world by drugging one person at a time.
Yeah, this premise was never going to work for me. Which is a shame, because I enjoyed the musical numbers a lot, even though there were only like 4 in the entire movie. The lyrics are based on passages from A Midsummers Night’s Dream, and their portrayal themselves live within Timothy’s fantasy.
I liked how they take place in heightened, romantic versions of real locations, and that the costumes were clearly of the homemade high school stage production caliber. They were great interludes into Timothy’s mindset, and had the most beautiful imagery of the movie.
I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I really wanted to like this movie, guys. I have been disappointed by more than a few straight girls, but not once did I have the fantasy “but what if I could change them to make them love me?”. It just feels gross. But I will be the first to admit that I’m overthinking this, and maybe it’s 12 years too late for this movie to make an impact on me.
Next is Meet the Feebles, which looks like it involves puppets of some sort…