justice for Lily Gladstone's hairy pits
in which I am called upon to be toxic in community
Things that lesbians do in The Wedding Banquet (2025): tend gardens, eat burritos, study worms, say “I love you” many times, collect queer books, grapple with the ways their mother damaged their psyche, have sex with men, get pregnant, keep the baby even though one of the only things we know about them is that they don’t want to be a mother, wordlessly accept a reality in which they will co-parent with their weird flop cheater girlfriend and the marginally employed grad school dropout guy she spontaneously fucked to avoid having a conversation and, what’s more, all of those people get to live in her beautiful ancestral family home.
Let it never be said that these characters do not reliably pantomime traits associated with the contemporary cultural understanding of The Millennial Lesbian. We do wear loose-fitting linen garments and own Certain Women1 on DVD. My girlfriend and I do drizzle I love yous around so liberally from the very first moment of waking and on all day that sometimes I’ll imagine being overheard by, like, Brian the NSA agent who listens through our phones and am a little bashful for half of a moment. That these women are fully formed people with minds, values, worldviews unavoidably impacted by their experiences as gay women and the way heteronormative society persists in marking them as abject is less clear. Angela and Lee are empty signifiers in service of a featherlight story about? Family? Growing up? Being a mid-thirties goober with no communication skills or sense of self whose existential distress can only be solved by the introduction of a baby into your care?? Unlike the specific, charming weirdos populating director Andrew Ahn’s previous feature Fire Island, the women in The Wedding Banquet never quite come to life. There is no texture to them, nothing at all to grip onto, to understand emotionally or feel closeness with. That these women have spent years together and know one another well is something we can only accept on faith, as there is no evidence of the chemistry or closeness associated with intimacy. The same is true of the men, but I’m less offended because none of them are played by the luminous Lily Gladstone, now flashing spectacular hairy armpit2 in a film which simply does not merit the honor.
The Wedding Banquet is a remake of an early 90s Ang Lee film of the same name. With great respect to Mr. Lee and an understanding that times and minds have changed, as it were, his tale of Gao Wai-Tung, a gay Taiwanese yuppie and slumlord with a miserable attitude who marries one of his tenants, a broke artist named Wei-Wei, so that his parents won’t found out about his white boyfriend is not such a great hang itself. That film hinges on a drunken wedding night sexual encounter between Wei-Wei and a very resistant Wai-Tung that is presented as problematic only for its resulting in a pregnancy. There is never any concern over the fact of Wai-Tung’s sexual assault, this corrective rape, which leads me, perhaps overgenerously, to presume the filmmakers simply did not consider—and did not expect the audience to consider—that it was a rape at all. Given that Wai-Tung is a fictional person to whom no harm can come, it’s fine, I guess, for the Wikipedia page to deem him bisexual and for the intercourse with Wei-Wei to be framed as merely a bad choice. Bisexuality is real!! I have seen it with mine own two eyes. Life is complicated and weird fucking things do happen. Sometimes those things are crimes and sometimes they are blameless misadventures and often they are something stickier and in-between. But the dubious provenance of the child Wei-Wei elects not to abort3 ensures—far more so than the realistically inadequate acceptance offered by Wai-Tung’s traditional parents—that the film’s closing vision of unconventional family is blanketed in the stink of homophobia.
My hope—my assumption, frankly—that Ahn and his cowriter James Schamus, also a credited cowriter on the original film, would forego this pregnancy plotline entirely in reimagining The Wedding Banquet for our nominally more queer friendly, albeit still and uniquely rotten, times proved incorrect. In the middle of what might have been a simple, beautiful farce about gays doing fraud for their material gain, college best friends Chris and Angela (Bowen Yang struggling in an underwritten part that demands forceful emotional beats he does not manage to deliver, and Kelly Marie Tran4 doing worse with even worse) a gay man and a lesbian who are both in long-term, seemingly monogamous relationships, get trashed together and inexplicably end up having full-on, Mary Crawley murder weapon, penis in vagina, penetrative, procreative, straight people sex. Why, you ask? Impossible to say! They’re not bisexual. They say very clearly—after they have, in fact, fucked! — that they are not sexually interested in each other. They both have hot partners whom we’re to understand they love. The only detail given to help us grapple with how such a thing might happen is an offhand mention—in an early, exposition dump-laden art show scene—of the two having slept together as college freshmen. Surely, reasonable thinkers can agree that the self-obliterative fumblings of queer teenagers who’ve not come into their own as people (namely, dykes and fags) are something fundamentally distinct from a pair of grownups with farm box subscriptions and TUMS in the cupboard going to pound town together out of the blue one night when they’re a bit stressed.
Now, listen. Do people get toasted and explore their friends’ bodies? Assuredly they do, and good for them. I would never deny that there are cool people out here having weird or playful or lovely or really bad sexual adventures with strangers and friends of all shapes and kinds, and I salute them. I was once among their number. I would, however, contend that these characters are most definitely not. This worm scientist and a bird watching tour guide who are both too emotionally stunted and awkward to have frank discussions with their respective gay life partners are not carrying, all the while, a subconscious desire to get off with one another! If Chris and Angela actually did want to be together and the film had turned into a perverse Coming In drama wherein two once proudly out gays had to burn all the novelty souvenir graphic tees they’d ever carefully hand cut into slutty tank tops and stop understanding Todd Haynes films so as to shamefacedly enter a life of straight romance, well, that would at least reflect a certain human truth. To be gay best friends who fuck but don’t even find each other hot and then spend zero time unpacking what happened is weirder! It is more bizarre, it is less legible, it is some freak shit but in the derogatory and not sexy way. I mean. They are gay best friends????? MUTUALLY AND DISTINCTLY HOMOSEXUAL BEST FRIENDS! In my experience, this particular arena being one in which I have actually quite a lot of relevant experience5, I think, like, babe it’s just not happening. It is sick and twisted and the new pope may have to take action on it.
So anyway, these homos bang and then Angela is pregnant. Meanwhile, there is 1. Chris’ filthy rich Korean boyfriend, Min (twenty-six-year-old South Korean actor Han Gi-Chan whose performance in his English language feature film debut is, if not exactly good, at least funny, and who in his broad goofiness does often seem to have been superimposed from a different, probably more enjoyable film), a sweet sort of dim textile arts student who needs a green card to be able to stay in Seattle when school ends6 2. Lily Gladstone looking so beautiful and having Sad That IVF Did Not Work as her solitary personality trait. 3. Joan Chen saving lives by being hilarious and perfect as Angela’s self-obsessed PFLAG mom, May. More Joan Chen in everything!!! 4. the great Youn Yuh-jung thanklessly holding it all together by the sheer force of even her smallest facial movements.
After his genuine, albeit pragmatic, marriage proposal is turned down by that cat on a boring tin roof Chris, Min—whose wealth traces to a corporation his family owns which does corporation things corporationally back in Korea—offers to provide the funds for Lee to do another round of IVF as a thank you for Angela marrying him before his student visa runs out and he is called home to the dreaded fate of working at the corporation and doing corporation things. Of course, this contrivance is necessary to propel the film, but it does leave one to wonder why this seemingly kind, sensitive, massively loaded young man hadn’t already offered to help out his broke friends with this most sensitive matter just out of goodness of his heart and in the spirit of queer community and divesting from one’s rotten corporation owning family to pursue art and gayness. Min reports this arrangement to his grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) and she shocks the whole crew by deciding to come to the States to reside over the proceedings.
When Fancy Corporation Grandmother arrives, glamorous and exacting, she reveals almost immediately that, of course, she knows Min is gay because she raised him, and she knows this engagement is a lie because she has eyes. They agree to go through with a wedding anyway so as to trick Min’s bigoted grandfather and protect his inheritance, importing homophobia from the unseen specter of Korean Corporation Man to make up for the absence, in an America where same-sex marriage is legal, of the friction that could make a charade like this feel purposeful. The planning and execution of the traditional Korean wedding ceremony (the titular banquet) allow for small moments of play and humor and sweetness which I felt myself clinging to, hoping the film would steer itself in that direction and find a soft landing.
Instead, it persists in introducing heady conflicts only to knock them aside with all the elegance of a bowler’s hurl. Boom, solved it! Angela’s reasonable anger about the hurtful years of estrangement it took for May to accept her daughter’s sexuality, and the hypocritical, self-aggrandizing manner in which she performs her support now? Carried away peaceably on the winds of an unplanned pregnancy. Lee’s justified hurt and upset that in the midst of her fertility struggles her girlfriend—the girlfriend who told Lee she isn’t sure that she even wants a kid! —cheated on her and got knocked up with her gay best friend’s baby? Smoothed like buttercream frosting over a gender reveal cake by a wordless sequence of sapphic staring and, really, I’m going to sue. Only Chris’ fears about not being good enough to marry Min are resolved in a manner which feels at all organic and that’s because his Gen Z queer kid cousin played by Bobo Le is such a delightful figure throughout that the audience feels inclined to accept their affirmation of Chris’ worth regardless of whether or not such a payoff is earned.
Over and over again as we stumble toward a cheery domestic conclusion, The Wedding Banquet makes no attempt to explore the tensions undergirding any of these relationships, content to gesture vaguely at roiling, below-the-surface sentiment and then hold tight on an actor’s face until we understand that we were meant to have been impacted by that gesture. The result is a gay movie for straight people and teenagers who will come out as bisexual while working in HR a decade from now. Maybe, beneath the reeking, inky shadow of the Trump administration’s violent rhetoric about LGBTQ+ people and their efforts to claw back progress that gay rights activists spent the last sixty plus years fighting for, there is an audience for whom this warm but shallow ode to the beauty of found family and queer parenthood is meaningful and necessary. For those queers who need no reassurance of our personhood and right to civil liberties within and without the heterosexist nuclear family—and who, crucially, want Lily Gladstone to be allowed to be sexy7—a film must do more than hand some gays a couple infants if it seeks to win our hearts and minds.
in other news
I was profoundly moved by Jamie Hood’s Trauma Plot, a book which flits and twirls between styles—observing and examining the culture, the subconscious, the body—braiding itself together in the end to create, I mean, A Great American Rape Memoir. Hood’s writing is elegant on a sentence level, inspiring in its ambition, the seriousness with which she has tackled, yes, her pain, but more importantly her art, and, for me, at least, affecting on the level of the ecstatic, inflating in the cavity of my rib cage like a knife-shaped mylar balloon until I was delirious and teary from the expansion, the possibility, the blood and guts and breaking and everything that’s ever made me who I now am and also the hope.
The stupid Meghann Fahy horror movie where she is harassed via airdrop (or rather “digidrop”) kinda worked for me! Fahy has a scrappiness under those gorgeous freckles and wet blue eyes that came through quite winningly and the child actor who played her son is in like three total minutes of the film, so it not only did not matter that he’s bad at acting but, in fact, improved my experience.
My life at the moment is animated largely by shopping for a new shampoo and one thing I would like to say on that subject is, wow, whoever is in charge of Money in the world has really let the price of shampoo get out of hand. Do we have someone trying to figure out what’s happening with Money? I’d really love it if someone sorted this Money thing.
Ben Casparius starting a Dodgers game in April…. it’s more likely than you think. Even when it’s at the expense of the team I’m rooting for, I have to love that the game of baseball finds a way—I mean, arms exploding, usually, or regular old porcelain doll guys like Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow breaking again as they’ve always broken—to humble even the most Space Jam-ified of super teams to the point where some random twenty-six-year-old is opening a game by necessity less than a month into the season. What I love even more is that last weekend I found an opportunity to tell a 4/20 blaze it lesbian atheist Easter brunch full of people about how Ben Casparius’ girlfriend is the Michael Jordan of field hockey.
I have put some more effort into the shading of the background since taking this picture and I think next time I would approach the flowers a lot differently but, whatever—here is a watercolor I did over the weekend. Painting badly continues to be the most reliable way for me to get smooth brained without drugs!
Don’t think that I liked nothing about this movie! The nod to Lily Gladstone Mooning Over Kristen Stewart classic Certain Women during the house de-queering did get me.
I’m not trying to be a horndog but honestly this dumb movie is kind of worth seeing for just this.
Sorry, but both Wedding Banquets offer up prime, no-brainer, search and destroy, hurry up, doc, and get that motherfucking thing out of there scenarios and it is ludicrous to pretend otherwise.
It obviously sucks so bad for Kelly Marie Tran that a broad swath of the public only knows her as the woman who was bullied off the Internet by racist Star Wars psychopaths, and I really wish her well but nonetheless found her efforts here quite poor.
Which is to say: I am a reformed bisexual (jk but also…yeah, pretty much) who has had sex with men under a lot of different circumstances and for many different reasons and sometimes found it quite a fun thing to do, even, but would never consider having sex with my gay man best friend because that’s depraved and insane and because he too would have no desire to do anything of the sort with me.
Though his grandmother has already offered him a Creative Director role at a US-based branch of Korean Family Corporation. While Min understandably does not want that because Corporation sucks and it’s much more fun to be a rich lay-about and make art (my dream), like, once again the stakes here are incredibly low lol
Riley Keough x Lily Gladstone weirdly horny teen murder tragedy show of middling overall quality…thank u for your service. Shy butch cop Lily Gladstone, we won’t forget you!!