Literature Review
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Call Me By Your Name (2017) The Celluloid Closet (1995) Divine the Drag Queen Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1989) The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) “Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness” by Jack Curtis Dubowsky Moonlight (2016) From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Motion Picture Production Code, commonly known as the Hays Code, strictly regulated the depiction of sexuality on screen, effectively prohibiting explicit portrayals of homosexuality and requiring that any queer-coded characters be framed negatively or punished narratively. The Celluloid Closet (1995), a documentary directed by Robert Epstein and Jeffery Friedman is perhaps the core of this project. It is a foundational text in the study of queer cinema and it is also what sparked my interest in this topic to begin with.
The documentary examines a handful of films throughout the 20th century and includes direct interviews with industry professionals to trace the long history of how LGBTQ+ individuals were represented, distorted, and erased in Hollywood films. Based on gay rights activist and film historian Vito Russo’s 1981 book of the same name, The Celluloid Closet argues that due to strict censorship laws, filmmakers of mainstream cinema often embedded clever hidden messages and tropes that signaled to audiences in “the know” could pick up on. This method could be achieved through the use of particular costumes, mannerisms, and songs. The documentary highlights several examples of queer coding but one in particular stood out to me. It occurs in The Maltese Falcon (1941) with a character named Joel Cairo. The audience is told that this character is gay before they are even introduced to him, as Sam Spade is told that there is a man there to meet him wearing gardenia scented perfume, and in the background is a flouncy, feminine, flute-forward tune to indicate that the character is effeminate and therefore probably queer.
In “The Influence of the Hays Code on the Representation of Queer People in Mainstream Film & Animation,” Wesley Ward examines how censorship has shaped queer cinema long after Hays Code itself ended. In 1961, Hays Code was altered to allow depictions of homosexuality only if handled tastefully and not presented as a positive or valid life choice. In practice, this meant that queer characters were portrayed as murderous, psychologically disturbed, perverse, and generally evil and villainous people. This fueled lots of homophobia among audiences and it became common for audiences to root against queer people, which often meant celebrating the punishment or death of a queer character. Hays Code was abandoned in 1968 and replaced with the Motion Pictures Association’s rating system, which is still in use today. Ward argues that although the Hays Code was abolished, its legacy did not die with it. Ward explains that queer film tropes created under Hays Code in order to get around the restrictions are now ingrained in the genre. Ward uses the word “tradition” to describe this. Rather than a means to express a hidden meaning while keeping within the law, filmmakers inherited such habits because of decades and decades of repetition.
Ward’s analysis is especially useful because it discusses how these ideas have reached younger audiences through animated villains. Characters like Scar from The Lion King (1994), Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1989), Jafar from Aladdin (1992), and HIM from The Powerpuff Girls (1998), exhibit stereotypically queer characteristics, and although children may not consciously read them as queer, they still absorb the association between queerness and deviance. This idea connects closely with Harry Benshoff’s argument in "Introduction: The Monster and the Homosexual,” from his 1997 book Monsters in the Closet. Benshoff argues that certain popular film genres often communicate the broader social anxieties of the time. Benshoff’s focus is on horror films, and he believes that horror films are not just meant to scare, but to function as formulaic stories that communicate essential social information, especially to younger audiences. Just as fairy tales help children process fears about growing up and separating from their families, horror films prepare adolescents for the anxieties surrounding sex, desire, and adulthood.
Benshoff examines the long-standing relationship between horror films and cultural perceptions of queerness, arguing that the genre has historically coded homosexuality as something monstrous and deviant. Like sexuality and gender, monstrosity isn’t inherent or biological, it is socially constructed. What gets labeled as monstrous is usually what falls outside of the dominant social norms, especially around things like gender, sexuality, and race. Benshoff outlines the social rhetoric surrounding the subject of homsexuality, explaining the longstanding belief that homosexuals are a danger to others, with media frequently linking homosexuals to violence, rape, or child molestation, and that homosexuality is a threat to society as a whole as it undermines traditional gender roles and family values.
These sociocultural biases are not communicated through narrative alone. Film relies heavily on formal elements like mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. Jack Curtis Dubowsky’s introduction of his 2016 book Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness, provides a very useful framework for understanding how audiovisual tools, specifically music, influences queer meaning in film. Gender and sexuality are essential aspects of identity and culture, and therefore create important ways of analyzing both film and music. Dubowsky introduces the term, “new musicology”, which describes the focus on the cultural study, interpretation, and criticism of music, rather than solely on technical analysis, which was the focal point of most musicology scholarship before the 1980s. He emphasizes that soundtracks function on two levels: Music interacts with the world of film itself, but also interacts directly with the audience. He denounces the claim that film music is unheard by audiences and is not meant for active listening and draws a rather interesting connection between this notion and the obscurity of queer voices by mainstream media. He argues that soundtracks are not purely there for decoration, rather, they construct identity and meaning. Including queer theory in this discussion allows for a deeper analysis of how audiences respond to films, how production choices are made, and how social understandings of sexuality and gender are created.
To explore how these ideas operate in practice, this project turns to two contemporary case studies: Call Me By Your Name (2017) directed by Luca Guadagnino and Moonlight (2016) directed by Barry Jenkins. These films were released around the same time, both were highly critically acclaimed, and both center stories of queer desire. Call Me By Your Name, based on a 2007 André Aciman novel of the same name, follows Elio Perlman, a 17-year-old boy spending the summer with his family at their home in Northern Italy. Elio’s father, a professor of archeology, invites Oliver, a young American graduate student to be his research assistant for the season. Over the course of the summer, Elio and Oliver develop a close bond that gradually develops into a romantic relationship. Despite the film’s major success and glowing reviews, the film still has some critics. Brandon L. Foskett’s article “Pretty and Problematic: The Use of Music in Guadagnino's 'Call Me by Your Name'” describes how the film’s soundtrack aestheticizes and romanticizes an immoral relationship between a 17-year-old boy and a 24-year-old man. He reviews several musical moments throughout the film and warns that the soundtrack’s beauty and vulnerability can enable harmful misreadings of queerness as predatory or indoctrinatory.
Moonlight is a coming-of-age drama that follows Chiron, a young Black boy living in Miami across three stages of his life. As he moves through each chapter of his life, he struggles with poverty, bullying, a tumultuous relationship with his mother, and the pressure to conform to traditional expectations of Black masculinity while also beginning to understand his queerness. As for its audiovisual experience, Rick Warner conducts a very helpful analysis of Moonlight’s sonic landscape in his article, “Audiovisual Rhythm and its Spectator: Barry Jenkins' Moonlight as Example.” Warner argues that rhythm organizes a film’s images, sounds, narrative structure, and mood into patterned movements, shaping how spectators perceive and emotionally respond to what they see and hear. He analyzes the use of hip-hop, recurring wave and water imagery, and repeated musical themes throughout the film to demonstrate how Moonlight’s rhythm challenges traditional expressions of hypermasculinity and allows for moments of intimacy and self-discovery.
Overall, the scholarship reviewed here highlights that film music is never a neutral or purely aesthetic inclusion. Across these works, there is a consistent emphasis on the media’s role, specifically film, in the sociocultural perception and understanding of queerness. Queer representation in film has historically been shaped by censorship, creating genre conventions, tropes, clichés, and stereotypes through decades of repetition that are still present in contemporary queer cinema. These scholars also discuss the key role of music in shaping audiences interpretations and emotional responses to film, and therefore to queerness.
This project uses these frameworks to guide its direction, focusing on how music in Call Me By Your Name and Moonlight shapes percieved meaning in ways that either echo or challenge censorship-era ideologies. By comparing and contrasting these films through careful analysis, this project aims to connect the dots and address the gap in scholarship between historical censorship, film soundtracks, and the ongoing construction and formation of queer desire, queer identity, and queer meaning more broadly in mainstream cinema. Moonlight (2016) Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet (1981) Joel Cairo from The Maltese Falcon (1941) HIM from The Powerpuff Girls (1998) “Monsters in the Closet” by Harry Benshoff Call Me By Your Name (2017) Call Me By Your Name (2017) Call Me By Your Name (2017) Moonlight (2016)
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