Luca deserves to be part of the required viewing of children’s movies even if it’s messy, maybe especially because it’s messy. A movie that Slate called “Call Me By Your Name” but with mermaids is as close as it gets to a movie about queer coding and passing. We’re going to spend some time breaking down how flexible the metaphor for the queer experience shapeshifting is, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because even a simplified version of the story made explicit is better than the crumbs that Pixar and Disney have provided up to this point.
Wife and I sat down to watch this last night and it took nary two minutes before we found our belly laugh. When you’re watching any movie made for television, the goal, I think, is to find a gag that you want to pause and rewatch until you’re dead, and for me that happens about ten minutes in with Luca’s grandma. There are some strong resonances with The Little Mermaid early on that make you worry it’s going to be unreflectively derivative, but that worry lasts up until you meet Alberto for the first time and the montage that builds their budding friendship.
The concept of Mermaids but Boys was very clever. I know that The Orange Years talked a lot about how how the going theory among television executives in the 90s was that “girls would watch shows with boys as the main character but boys wouldn’t watch shows with girls as the main character,” and that there’s some history present that makes the decision for how to cast your main characters in this movie difficult, but I think it works really well to position Luca and Alberto as the One True Couple and slowly introduce the Julia character in the second act. Wife asked afterwards how I felt about Julia being (spoiler) a kind of rival for Luca’s attention or affection. She says that she likes the fact that Julia shows that “love doesn’t need to be exclusive; you can care about more than one person and you can have more than one best friend.” I’m fine with the queer subtext running the gamut of genders. I think it makes it more expansive and maybe even sharpens the allegory. Alberto is concerned because Julia might be more desirable. She’s at least as knowledgeable than he pretends to be, and she’s not hiding her true identity.
I’m still turning over the flexibility of the metaphor in my mind and the final outcome of the story, which resolves about as a neatly as Happiest Season. I don’t think that the movie would be any better if the movie had ended with the people of Porta Rosa being less accepting of the mermaids. I should start with that. At the same time, the movie logic seems to be based on some faulty assumptions about the way that homophobia works. In the equation laid out by Luca, the regular humans are 1) afraid of mermaids for no reason, 2) have never hurt them in recent memory, and 3) are mostly indifferent to positive about them when they finally meet a mermaid in the flesh (there’s some generational advantages too–the younger you are, the easier it is to change your mind, it appears). I kind of wonder how the movie is different if Julia’s dad, rather than being a lifelong unsuccessful mermaid hunter had actually done real harm to a mermaid, maybe even a parent of Alberto’s, say. Would that have made it a little harder for the assimilation at the end? The basic assumption seems to be that the people we fear are already living among us, but they’re hiding themselves for fear of rejection by their loved ones and peers or harm by their enemies. But homophobia doesn’t work that way, does it? Sure, some homophobes are kind of baseline assholes in the first place, much like our antagonist in Luca, but is the town’s final “sea-change,” so to speak, the way that coming out works? Not slowly, but all at once?
I remember many years ago hearing TAL do a story about a theater operator in a small conservative town who transitioned to a woman later in life and how normal it seemed to all of these folks you might not have expected to be that accepting–the whole “small town’s common sense and close connections are better than liberal politics any day” narrative purported in every Guy Falls in Love With Sex Doll comedy you’ve ever seen.
I’m still not sure to what extent this particular narrative about rural/small towns is going to be helpful for our politics, but honestly, the sentiment is good and even when it’s broken down in that final scene, it’s pretty nuanced. The town is divided on how to process the news of Luca and Alberto’s identity, but one strong leader who’s willing to fight for their inclusion is able to tamp down any explicit threats of violence and smooth things over. Talk about the value of being a good ally!
I have been waiting a long time for a movie to touch a nerve without gazing too deeply at its own navel (Inside Out) or threatening to kill the kitten (Toy Story 3&4, or Up!), with no pretensions for a franchise or a musical. This movie handles some serious topics with real stakes (“Seldom,” Wife says, “is it that the main characters are threatened with death in a Pixar movie”) and does so simply and neatly.
