Boy Meets Girl (2014)
Written and Directed by Eric Schaeffer
101 min.
Spoiler-free.
Gender is weird. Think about it: there’s two types of a being, and they have to come together in order to procreate. That’s just strange as hell. Like, why isn’t it that there’s just one type of being, and when it wants to make more beings, it just makes them? There’s probably some evolutionary reason for this I guess, like that sexual reproduction makes evolution faster because DNA recombines as opposed to asexual reproduction where DNA doesn’t recombine and thus evolution takes way longer (I checked Yahoo Answers) but still, it’s weird. I don’t care that it’s why we’re here and why we continue to be here—it just doesn’t jive with our modern minds, conceptually. We like things instant. It’s lame that I can’t just tell my body to make a baby and then a baby happens. Oh well, maybe in the next update.
It’s not just that we’re all a bunch of spoiled technobrats, though—love itself makes us realize how dumb gender is. People don’t fall in love with gender—we’re not a bunch of wandering automatons with procreation as our sole directive. We’re philosophical beings looking for a person that our soul gels with. The downside of that beautiful reality is that sometimes, said person isn’t someone we’re sexually attracted to—whatever, that’s what friends are for. Another downside is that maybe said person is someone you are sexually attracted to, but they are of a gender you are not used to being sexually attracted to. That can get messy.
Here’s the thing, though. There’s a point of time in everyone’s life—whether you’re gay, straight, or bi—where even the gender, or genders, that you are currently sexually attracted to, you weren’t used to being sexually attracted to, because you weren’t used to being sexually attracted to anyone at all. This period is called early adolescence, and everyone goes through it. And because everyone goes through it, everyone should be able to relate to this film, no matter what their sexual orientation.
On top of that, when you think about it, falling in love in general is like falling in love with a gender you’re not ready to fall in love with, because it’s always just that scary, and new, and strange, and confusing, even if you’ve fallen in love several times before. Eric Schaeffer understands this, and has imbued this seemingly specifically-themed film with universal themes. As a result, Boy Meets Girl transcends its Queer Cinema sub-genre and has more to say about love than the vast majority of romance movies.
Continue reading Gender is Queer: A Review of ‘Boy Meets Girl’