Out of Sight is a very playful romantic comedy with an exciting criminal element, but in watching the movie in class, I noticed something interesting. Five characters are killed (up to the point we've watched). We don't know anything about three of them. We know exactly one thing about the other two: they are queer. And in a movie about heteronormative love, maybe queerness is the most abhorrent thing a character can be.
The first two deaths in the film occur during the prison break. Following Chino and Lulu, another pair of prisoners come through the hole and are gunned down before Jack (Clooney) emerges. Those two prisoners took a lot of bullets, so are presumably dead, but they are dehumanized for the audience. We are kept in long shot where we can't identify with them, and to drive this distance home, their faces are literally obscured by dirt.
Then Lulu is killed off camera at the hobo camp. We hear about it* and see him zipped into a body bag. This is a character we've actually met, although he is entirely defined in relationship to Chino as the effeminate half of the prison couple. One could argue that homophobia and not coincidence explains effeminate Lulu being murdered while Chino--who meets heternormative standards if not being actually heterosexual, is further developed as a character and is arrested instead of killed.
The next two deaths also happen off screen when Snoop leads the attack on the wayward crack dealer who happens to be a cross dresser. He is killed for dealing on his own, but the film makes sure the audience gets that he is abnormal. In dialogue Snoop refers to him as "this cross-
dressin' nigga named Eddie Solomon" and in the shot of his body, Eddie is dressed in female clothing. The other body at the scene has his face blown off, preventing us from identifying with him in much the same way as the dirt on the slain prisoners.
So to make the audience okay with deaths in this rom com--to keep it light enough, the fallen character must either be obscured to prevent the audience from relating with him or her as a person, or he must be clearly identified with the taboo of existing outside of a conventional gender identity.
As breaking gender conventions was and continues to be a taboo, that alone could be enough to explain the film using this tactic to dehumanize the characters that are killed. But on top of the taboo, this is a film about a man and a woman finding the love and heterosexual relationship that is the ultimate fulfillment of their existence. Is it possible that this contrasting message of the film heightens the devaluing of the queer characters?
I appreciated your observations about the treatment of the queer characters in the film, and they made me think of other situations in film or TV in which queer characters are dehumanized or killed off. Two situations in particular come to mind: 1) trans women, usually of color, depicted as victims on crime/forensics shows, and 2) lesbian characters dying in tragic dramas. The first one is often connected to hate crimes on CSI or other crime shows, and the trans women are often depicted as sex workers. This is actually a sad reality, as many trans people often turn to sex work for survival while also having to live in fear of violence. Still, the focus on these depictions of trans people only encompasses a small part of some trans people's experiences, othering them instead of having a nuanced portrayal of their humanity. As for the second situation, I can think of countless dramas with lesbian storylines in which one or both women in a couple end up dead, which seems to happen at a much higher rate than for gay male or straight couples. Examples of this include Tara Maclay in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Naomi Campbell in Skins, Dana Fairbanks and Jenny Schecter in The L Word, Paulie Oster in Lost and Delirious, Cat MacKenzie in Lip Service, Maya St. Germain and Shana Fring in Pretty Little Liars, Leslie Shay in Chicago Fire, Tara Thornton in True Blood... the list goes on and on. Are nuanced portrayals of queer characters that difficult to keep around, or are writers unable to come up with stories about queer people that aren't only about their coming out stories or deaths?
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