The next pick in our series of writers highlighting their favourite comfort watches is a box office dud from the 2000s that became a queer cult classic
“A
re you kidding me?” snaps Ms Petrie, Holland Taylor’s power-suit loving intelligence chief, towards the end of the 2004 spy satire DEBS. “We conduct a nationwide manhunt for you, and you’re boning the suspect?!”
In a nutshell, this is the basic premise of Angela Robinson’s 2004 debut feature film, a critically panned box office flop which has transformed into a cult classic over the last 20 years thanks to its refreshing and cheery nonchalance towards the subject of sexuality. The heavily sanitised trailer, which erased virtually all evidence of a sapphic storyline, meant that DEBS passed me by for years. Now, I’m making up for lost time.
Though DEBS is far from being the first film to explore queerness through the lens of a criminal caper – bank heist thriller Set It Off, gory noir flick Bound and David Lynch’s classic Mulholland Drive all beg to differ – Robinson’s take on a longstanding trope stands out for its distinct lack of grit or peril. It is also an outlier compared with other, more lighthearted lesbian films of the same era. While more traditional romcoms such as Imagine Me and You and Saving Face also attempted to shift the dial, the shame and inner turmoil of their closeted lead characters wrestling with forbidden desires still provided much of the narrative thrust. And while Jamie Babbit’s equally tongue-in-cheek But I’m a Cheerleader has the most obvious similarities, that satire hinged on something much darker and more sinister, parodying the very real harm caused by gay conversion practices.
