This week on MovieJawn, we are celebrating our favorite movies that turned 25 this year. All week long we are going to Party Like It’s 1999!

by Avery Coffee, Staff Writer

Imagine it: it’s four months before the world is predicted to end. Everyone is hysteric over technology and gay people. With all of the madness enclosing you, what is the ONE thing that could bring you peace? If your answer doesn’t start with ‘lesbian’ and end with ‘media’

Queer cinema in the 1990’s can be described as one thing: reformative. It’s an era of queer film known as New Queer Cinema. Coming out of the ‘80s, filmmakers were inspired to explore radical queer narratives encompassing the humanity of the LGBTQ+ community. Throughout the decade, the accessibility to this media increased and opened more opportunities for intrepid storytellers. Acceptance and equity were always the goal, but the lack of corporate intervention gave audience’s true on-screen representation. The late 90’s offered a sigh of relief once the art of satire was used to deconstruct the harm that film history projected. 

If it weren’t for Paris Is Burning (1990) and its Sundance premiere (when the festival was in its humble beginnings), we wouldn’t have some of our favorites.Paris Is Burning inspired so much queer art at the time. It all affixes to the success of a film like But I’m a Cheerleader (1999). The general population was convinced the world was going to end at the New Year, so we had to get more girls on screen kissing. Ask any sapphic person and they can recall where they were when they first saw this movie. It’s just as influential to our culture as The Wolf of Wall Street is to straight man culture. 

Independent film was always intended to be a fringe outlet that is dependent on community efforts. Director Jamie Babbitt met most of the cast through Clea Duvall, who she worked with on a previous project. The cast included well-known talent such as Michelle Williams, Melanie Lynskey, and Natasha Lyonne: all at equal intervals of their careers. Major studios have always played it too safe. I won’t name names, but let’s pack up the 10-film franchises. 

Independent films take their creative liberties to address subjects that mainstream media shy away from. Babbitt knew that young people were going to love it. They were hungry for it after the wave of bleak, post-epidemic films that killed our hope for representation: literally and figuratively. However, it was the older generation that gave push back. I guess it was still a little too sensitive of a topic? Taking on a more objective approach, film critics (white men) weren’t fans of the bubblegum pink mise-en-scene. Independent films often spark a fire that the general population isn’t ready to light yet.

But I’m a Cheerleader addresses external conflicts simultaneously with internal battles. For a while, it felt like LGBTQ+ characters were a monolith and, subsequently, were stripped of their humanity. Not every queer and trans person falls in line with one life experience. Other independent lesbian films released in the mid to late ‘90s sought out to prove that. Queer filmmakers were rebelling against a system that tried to pigeonhole their community. The complexities of gender, religion, and sexuality in Babbitt’s film aren’t just in the words spoken, but they’re also painted on the walls. They’re printed on the bed sheets. They’re planted in the rose bushes outside of New Directions. Critics may have gotten confused, but the intentionality of the production design didn’t go unacknowledged by the target audience. 

The abstract approach to But I’m a Cheerleader can easily be given credit for shaping queer cinema today. Babbitt’s unapologetic approach to storytelling carries on through the media we consume today and has inspired queer filmmakers to take bigger leaps. For example, Emma Seligman brought immoral lesbians back to our screens in Shiva Baby (2020) and Bottoms (2023), but with better intentions than some of Alfred Hitchcock’s lesbian-coded characters. The two most reputable independent film companies have released some of the biggest feature films in queer cinema within the past two years. We got to see our first giant lesbian on screen this year: no queer-coding involved. 

Supporting independent films, as audience members, is also an act of rebellion. The problems we face with inaccessible showtimes for newer movies and shortened theater runs rests in the hands of men in suits who probably don’t even know what AMC A-List is. Filling seats when and where we can is proof that our demand for original, diverse, and inclusive narratives is higher than the supply we’re given.