Duck Butter: Expanding the Queer Narrative through an Exploration of Intimacy `
(Spoiler Warning)
Duck Butter, Miguel Arteta and Alia Shawkat’s 2018 duet, is an indie verité that explores the missing intimacy in modern relationships and dating culture, in which the immediacy of sex sometimes veils our longing for real emotional closeness. The title is also a pseudonym used by character Sergio, (played by Laia Costa), to describe the texture of smegma: a sticking metaphor for the reality of raw, sometimes uncomfortable truths underlying the facades we front. Its overtly sex-positive portrayal of a queer relationship earns its place in the LGBTQ+ canon in a basic sense. But what other than the incidental queerness of the film’s two lovers makes its narrative a particularly queer one?
‘People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it's a gay film… It's such a failure of the imagination… Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that, then what kind of a structure would it be?’ - Director Tom Haynes for Film Quarterly.
Unlike Sciamma’s iconic Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Duck Butter offers no haunting tale of forbidden love, self-identification, nor does it contextualize the queer relationships it portrays against social pressures - tropes of struggle that seem integral to LGBTQ+ cinema in an era of identity politics. Rather, it frames a reality in which two young LA women, troubled in their own respects, can bypass the identification with their queerness as some glaring aspect of their self-hoods, which - as we discover - isn’t all figured out yet. They enter a 24-hour romantic commitment to skip the tedious courting stage in dating - an experiment that consists of sex on the hour with an added bonus of forced icebreaker interrogations, (mostly carried out by Sergio). Duck Butter quickly becomes more than just a ‘sexy queer utopia’; it’s a holistic character study of two naturally flawed twenty-somethings that emphasizes each person’s subjectivity beyond their queer identities.
The film extends a definition of queer cinema that isn’t limited to seen before tropes. It’s a wonderfully naturalist modern commentary on our obstinate performances of self, even in our private spheres. Thus it elides the contextualization of its story in a heteronormative world to empower a more fluid portrayal of budding romance that is honest about its sometimes chaotic nature.
Directed by Arteta and co-written by himself and Alia Shawkat, (who also plays the main character Naima), it’s surprising to find out that the two intended the latter’s character to be a man. This is because the styles of dialogue and cinematography of the film emphasize typically feminine modes of interaction so explicitly; our characters sob and scream about their mom-traumas, and the filming of Duck Butter’s many sex scenes avoids the fleshy sexualization of its two naked women, as seen in Blue is the Warmest Colour. It was Shawkat herself who felt that working with a male actor took away from the naturalness of the interaction. The film’s emphasis on dissolving egoic and emotional barriers seems to be a part of its anti-patriarchal conceptualization from the very beginning, regardless of the genders or sexualities of its eventual casting choices.
Many critics and reviewers are quick to label the empty intimacy between Naima and Sergio as a failure of the film to achieve real romance, but it’s clearly a deliberately ironic portrayal of how our characters’ eagerness to achieve this intimacy is just another ego-driven disguise to protect or glorify their own senses of self hood. The impulsive Sergio, an aspiring but unfortunately mediocre musician, parades her supposed self-assuredness and hedonism to probe Naima into matching her shameless tendencies. However, when Sergio’s mother arrives for an impromptu breakfast at Naima’s house where they end up by morning, we see a recoiled Sergio absorbing criticisms from a pretty imposing mother, in front of whom her daughter’s so held-together bravado completely collapses. We learn quickly of her real vulnerability as someone whose traumas have clearly not been processed nor healed, but rather aggressively redirected into a sense of false freedom.
Naima on the other hand, an aspiring actress, is equally caught up in the act of proving herself. Despite being clearly more shy and less outgoing than Sergio, she still plunges thoughtlessly into going along with Sergio’s full-forced suggestions, including sending a nastily-worded email to the directors of the film from which she just got fired. Notably, she’d had an electrifying one-night stand with Sergio the day before, but prioritized showing up at her job over their romantic adventure. It’s only when she learns that her role has been re-cast that she runs to Sergio; the first red flag against the sincerity of her intentions going into the arrangement. Her strained tolerance of Sergio’s chaotic headiness - and neediness - turns out to be her only great acting feat.
So we circle back to the question of what exactly makes Duck Butter a queer narrative. It’s an insightful fiction that rejects the rigid, unwritten rules of engagement in dating and romance - rules set up to be inherently centered around opposite-sex couples in a heteronormative world. But equally, it doesn’t actually offer its own alternative: in a culmination of stress, dishonesty and exhaustion, Naima admits that she doesn’t want in on their pact anymore, and leaves the short-burning relationship with both of them defeated.
Something changes in the relationship, but neither of our characters fundamentally change. The opening and end scenes reveal Naima sleeping in the same self-protective position that Sergio calls her out for: fists over heart as if to never allow anything, or anyone in. The queer aspect of the film’s narrative appears to be precisely its rejection of the insistence upon definition in storytelling; our characters’ unusual romantic undertaking, portrayed in an act of defiance of norms, parallels the film’s avoidance of structural cohesion on a narrative level. In this way, we see a ‘queer’ fiction that decentralizes queer identities in favor of a more fluid, holistic portrayal of how the self is challenged in romantic relationships. The resulting inner-conflicts realistically portray the many growth-piquing dilemmas that most twenty-somethings are still far from figuring out.
Sources:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kzx4jy/duck-butter-queer-film-alia-shawkat-laia-costa
https://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/duck-butter-review-1202790135/
https://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article/46/3/2/41030/Cinematic-Sexual-Transgression-An-Interview-with
https://www.vulture.com/2018/04/alia-shawkat-and-laia-costa-on-duck-butters-queer-utopia.html