Heavenly Creatures, 1994

One of Peter Jackson’s earlier films, Heavenly Creatures is a psychological-crime-fantasy film, and best of all, it’s queer. The story is pretty simple: two teen girls develop an intense relationship with each other and lose their grip on reality, leading to a murder. It stars Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey in both of their screen debuts, which were heavily praised by viewers and critics alike. Heavenly Creatures has been my favorite film of the queer marathon thus far, and overall it is beloved by many (even receiving an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1994). However, the more interesting conversation to be had about Heavenly Creatures does not revolve around its merits as a film but instead around its depiction of queer people. And as we’ve seen throughout this marathon, queer representation has been a struggle for a lot of cinematic history. Even though the film is an interpretation of a real-life crime that took place in 1954, the overall approach to the queer characters has been questioned. In a Decider column called “Was it Good for the Gays,” Tyler Coates writes:

“As for if the two were lovers, there’s no real proof. After the film premiered in 1994, Anne Perry admitted that her friendship with Pauline Parker was, while intense, just platonic. The film does, however, suggest that queerness is, inherently, equivocal; it’s not a black-or-white, yes-or-no kind of situation. Whether or not the film was a good representation of the queer experience can also be debated at length — although I think it’d take a completely basic person to read this as some artistic examination of how queerness is dangerous, even if the only two queer characters in it express their emotions in a violent manner. Instead, the film serves as a celebration, of sorts, of how queerness requires one to create her own world in order to cope with the one around her, and how that can result in an emotional displacement from which it can be difficult to recover” (2015).

Sarah Warn’s review of the film on AfterEllen is more critical of the queer portrayal. She writes:

“Historical accuracy is all well and good, but it just seems unfortunate that Heavenly Creatures, which is a very well-done film, is yet another movie about killer lesbians. There are movies based in real-life events, like Boys Don’t Cry, that take a truly tragic story and make something positive out of it. In comparison, the screenplay (written by Peter Jackson and Frances Walsh) fails to humanize the characters of Juliet and Pauline, something that could have been done by continuing the storyline with a lengthier coda in which we learned what happened to the two girls after they were released from prison. (They never saw one another again, and it seems that they both truly felt remorse for their crime.) It may be that the real events behind Heavenly Creatures were simply not suitable for any kind of positive portrayal of lesbianism, but I can’t help but wish that the girls had been written as a little less mentally disturbed. As it is, watch Heavenly Creatures for excellent acting and direction, but not for its portrayal of lesbianism” (2004).

My own interpretation of the film more closely aligns with Coates, but I do think Jackson could have added a few more elements that would have better humanized the characters, as Warn mentions. My favorite take and the words we shall end on here is written by Jordan Crucchiola of Vulture in the brief history of 90’s queer cinema:

“Queer cinema went through a distinct transformation in the 1990s with the arrival of what B. Ruby Rich dubbed the New Queer Cinema, a movement that centered queer experiences on film while refraining from glamorizing its LGBTQ protagonists. “No longer burdened by the approval-seeking sackcloth of positive imagery, or the relative obscurity of marginal production, films could be both radical and popular, stylish and economically viable,” writes Michele Aron in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader. Paris Is Burning chronicled the experiences of trans black and Hispanic participants of drag ball culture in New York. My Private Idaho made stars of male prostitutes. Lethal lesbians were made into complex heroes in movies like Heavenly Creatures, Fun, and Butterfly Kiss. As Aron puts it, “These films are unapologetic about their characters’ faults or, rather, crimes: they eschew positive imagery” (2018).