Good Kisser (M.L)

From the begging of the film you could tell that the relationship between the two was not very strong. Kate was pressuring her girlfriend Jenna into a threesome with another women when she was clearly not comfortable in that position, once they arrived at the other women’s house Mia, Kate did not change her behaviour, Jenna was clearly not comfortable and wanted to go home, but Kate kept pushing her to get drunk, relax, and try it out. But when Jenna seemed to take Kates advice, and she begins to come out of her shell, Kate appeared to get jealous, and seemed to try and stop Jenna from having fun in some ways. Throughout the film I felt that although the acting and filming had its weak spots, the true fault was in the writing. The storyline was given away to early on in the film, you could tell within the first few scenes that Kate and Mia already knew each other, past what they were letting on. I also felt I could see the ending coming from a mile away.

The film was a part of the LGBTQ+ film festival, which I thought would have been a way of expressing the positives of the community, but instead this film seemed to show a struggle and an unhealthy relationship in the lesbian community. I also felt that there was very minimal representation throughout the film, although it follows a lot of different stereotypes, regarding lesbian behaviour and characters.

 While the attempt with the film Good Kisser seems as if the director was trying to portray a lesbian relationships and hardships that can come with it, it seemed as if she was only highlighting negative attributes of the couples relationships, and portraying the lesbian community in this way through Kate lying to her girlfriend, and attempting to cover up the fact that she had cheated on her partner in the past. Now while the negatives are mainly all we see in the film; it is a strong way of developing the characters and giving heterosexual viewers something to relate to. In every relationship there are ups and downs, and I really like the way the director took it upon themselves to show these issues in a lesbian relationship as it points out how heterosexual relationships and homosexual relationship are parallel and show how in all relationships we fight, bicker, but we also all love, and cherish. Showing the negatives in the relationships, from a neutral point of view and not Kate or Jenna’s point of view, really allows for many different viewers to relate to the struggles in the relationship while also normalizing lesbian relationships within society.

The film lacked representation of many different groups, it only really represented the lesbian community, as well as mainly only having Caucasian females. While in part this was because of the fact that it was a movie depicting a lesbian couple, there was also a lack of characters, in the film there was only 5 characters that we ever see. We see the two Caucasian women Jenna and Kate who are the couple, the third women who is involved with the couple Mia, The Chinese/Mexican female uber driver Yuka, and the Male neighbour named Clark.  With this limited cast, the representation within the film suffered as there were not enough characters to show a wide range of sexual or ethnic orientations, because of this there was no representation of people with disabilities, there was very limited representation of non-Caucasian characters as we only see a couple of scenes involving the uber driver, and there was very minimal representation of any male characters other then the few conversations shared between Jenna and Clark in the back yard. There is also a lack of women of colour in the film, “Gender dynamics of power intersect with racial dynamics so that women of color are structurally inhibited to an even greater degree” (Banet-Weiser & Miltner 2016), women of colour are at the greatest degree of intersectionality, which I believe may play a role in why there is a lack of representation of women of colour in this film.

Within the characters we did see, there were many stereotypes followed as there was the soft butch lesbian, the mysterious lesbian, and the femme. These stereotypes did seem to play a role in the power dynamics between the interactions of the characters. Kate was portrayed as a soft butch, as she was a little more “tom boy” then Jenna was, but was still very feminine in the way she acted and styled her hair, Jenna was the femme, she was portrayed as a very feminine figure, from the way she dressed, acted, and styled her hair. Mia had more of the stereotypical mysterious lesbian vibe going on, her character in the film was mysterious as we never really understood who she was until the end of the film, as she leads a second life as a famous author whose identity isn’t known by anybody. The power roles between the three show these stereotypes to be true as Kate takes on a more dominant figure as she takes control of the situation, she seems to call the shots, while Jenna seems to be slightly more submissive, and wants to please Kate so she goes along with what Kate wants and says to do. This is described as Emphasised Femininity in regard to power dynamics between females and men where females are “oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men” (Connell 1987 pp 184-185), and this is similar to the behaviour we see between Kate and Jenna as Jenna accommodates for the desires of her partner.

The power dynamic between the couple changes as the film goes on, it starts with Kate being more dominant in the relationship and Jenna being more submissive, but as Jenna begins to find faults within her relationship with Kate, and she emerges from her shyness, the power dynamic seem to change, Kate although remaining dominant, seems to be pushed aside by Jenna’s new found courage, and Jenna becomes more confident and stands up for herself to Kate, leaving the relationship and the group date, to return home.

Overall I think the movie had the right message but fell short on its Representation, If there were more characters involved I think that the film would have had better representation. I also would have critiqued the writing slightly, Hiding Kate and Mias relationship from the viewers, making the ending harder to spot

Resources

Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and power: Society, the person and sexual politics. Cambridge: Polity.

Sarah Banet-Weiser & Kate M. Miltner (2016) #MasculinitySoFragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny, Feminist Media Studies, 16:1, 171-174, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2016.1120490