A Place and Time You've Been Before: When the Future is Fantastic, but the Romance Stays Stagnant
I'm tired. Just make it gay already.
August hasn’t been the chillest of months for me, so for this edition of FYC, I’ll just get to the point: Reminiscence would have been more interesting if the Hugh Jackman character had been a lesbian.
Reminiscence is a sci-fi thriller set in a future where the sea has risen to overtake land, and people pay to relive their memories in surround sound 3D. Westworld writer/producer Lisa Joy’s feature directorial debut is blockbuster-shaped, with elements that only begin to approach something unique. Ramin Djawadi’s score is wonderfully reminiscent (sorry) of his score for Pacific Rim, but the same can’t be said for the quality of the world building. The cadence of Jackman’s “You’re going on a journey…” narration is so [thesaurus check] evocative of Inception’s “You’re waiting for a train…” mantra, Cobb feels more deserving of a retroactive writing credit than Paramore does for “good 4 u.” I digress. The point is, it’s not exactly the best movie I’ve seen since getting back to the theater.
So how does making Jackman’s Nick Bannister a lesbian help with any of this? The way I see it, the bones of the film are decent. I love recognizable genre conventions of science fiction and neo-noir. But I want to see those conventions played with. First of all, neo-noir should belong to women by now. Give me women who are driven to destruction, who are hard-drinking, unreliable narrators, who are haunted by an ethereal lost love – preferably another woman who also has agency. Second of all, I’m dying for butch representation. When I say “make Nick Bannister a woman,” I don’t mean “bring in one of the go-to glamorous actresses, give her a pixie cut, and call her Nicki.” I want Nick, a tall, handsome, bedraggled butch woman. If her (their?) relationship to gender isn’t even that definable, that’s sexy too. All I know is, this movie needed to work a lot harder at making me care about this character, and a major shortcut would have simply been to not write and cast the easy choice yet again.
Making Bannister a woman would improve two key relationships, the first being the primary romance with Mae (Rebecca Ferguson). There’s definitely a chemistry issue between Nick and Mae. They meet, they flirt, they have very sweaty sex. This presumably leads to something deeper, because then we cut to her gone, and him spiraling, losing himself in his own memory machine to find out what happened. The structure of the story and the intrigue I’m supposed to take away is apparent, but there’s just no spark. It’s not even that I could never be convinced to care about a white, heterosexual couple – have you seen the Conjuring movies? But the femme fatale thing, the wrongfully presumed damsel whose redemption comes the way it comes for Mae is pretty played out. I think about Fear Street, and how refreshing it was to see a girl fight seemingly insurmountable supernatural odds to save another girl. Creatively, what is would stop one from making this romance gay? Especially when we’re dealing with fictional futures. What does Jackman do in this movie that couldn’t be done by a tough but begrudgingly tenderhearted dyke?
More interesting to me is how my humble suggestion would affect the dynamic between Nick and Watts (Thandiwe Newton). Newton is a bright spot in the movie, but Watts’s relationship to Nick as it stands was incredibly frustrating. On the one hand, it’s kind of neat that she’s Bannister’s old war buddy and not some other guy, but it’s also super eye-roll inducing that she’s been carrying a torch for him all these years. Would an oblivious lesbian Nick be more deserving of Watts’s loyalty and quiet yearning? Not necessarily. But I am a simple gay and I’d simply be more interested in seeing that. At the beginning of the film, Nick changes his clothes when he gets into work, and Watts fixes his tie for him. I knew in that moment she was bringing something to the table that he wasn’t reciprocating, and then they double down on the intimacy of her fixing his tie by having her do it again in their final conversation at the end of the film. Why can’t this man tie his tie??? Picture this instead: butch 4 butch tie assistance. Nick tries to do the jacket and tie thing to look professional at her job after the war, but can’t be bothered to learn proper knots. Watts chooses not to rock a tie, but she definitely could, and she can’t let Nick get away with looking totally disheveled. Was this image the catalyst for this entire post? Perhaps.
I feel a little bad picking on Reminiscence for this. I did still buy a ticket to see this movie despite having HBO Max because I’ve missed going to the movies so much, so they have my box office contribution. My boredom with unoriginal, straight romance in heightened genre works is obviously an overarching problem. We’re still at a point where if the characters are gay or even just all women in the script, maybe the movie doesn’t get made at all. Maybe I’m still driven disproportionately by a hunger to see myself in what I watch, but I really do think if we start with the “who,” plenty of well-worn tropes could begin to take new forms.