The “Good Old Days” are Now: Heartstopper, season Two

This blog posts contains some spoilers for Heartstopper season 2.

Those of us who spend time on social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, often see posts shared by friends and family (as well as total strangers) of a certain age, where they declare that their childhoods were better because they played outside instead of on the computer, or because we spoke to friends face to face instead of on messenger, etc.   They are posted with an air of nostalgia, of course, rather than through any real belief that our childhoods were better – and, it’s fair to say, that to say that they were is total bollocks. 

Who would want to go back to a time where most queer kids would never dream of coming out, knowing full well that they would be beaten each day at school if they did?

Who would want to go back to time where even being suspected of being gay would result in a beating, too? 

Who would want to go back to a time where disabled kids were not properly catered for in the school system and didn’t have the same rights as the rest of us? 

If we look back at our childhoods with a sense of reality rather than through rose-coloured glasses, would anyone really wish them on today’s kids?

And LGBTQ teenagers twenty, thirty, or forty years ago didn’t have anything remotely like Heartstopper, the second season of which dropped on Netflix this week.  The first time I saw anything close to a positive portrayal of male homosexuality on TV was when Beautiful Thing was first shown on Channel 4 somewhere around 1997 or 1998.  I was twenty-four.  Prior to that, most gay characters I saw on screen were dying of AIDS, being murdered, or committing suicide.  

Beautiful Thing (1997)

The BBC did try in the late 1980s with their then-controversial drama Two of Us (see pic, below) – a kind of hour-long Heartstopper of its day, and originally intended to be shown as part of the schools daytime programming of the time.  Around the same time, Section 28 was brought in by the Tory government.  This legislation officially banned “promotion of homosexuality” in schools.  By “promotion” they basically meant “don’t say anything remotely positive about it.”  The BBC got cold feet about Two of Us and pulled the programme, eventually showing it late at night instead when the people it was aimed at would have been in bed – and it was only shown then with a revised ending where the two gay teenagers didn’t get together after all.  Ah yes, the good old days.

Two of Us (BBC, 1987)

LGBTQ teenagers of the time (such as myself) had no-one on TV or film that they could relate to.  If only we’d had a film or a show like Heartstopper to relate to, and to convince us that everything was going to be fine, and that we’d get through whatever life was throwing at us.  I’ve seen criticism of the second season on social media, with people (mostly of my age) saying it is unrealistic because of its lack of sex (or references to sex).  I can only assume their minds have somehow been programmed to think such a thing after enduring the gay-themed indie films of the 1990s onwards, where it was thought that showing full frontal nudity every ten minutes or so was the only way of getting a gay man to sit through a film.   Any adult watching Heartstopper and wanting a sex scene is rather missing the point of the series in the first place.   

Season two continues pretty much where season one left off.  Nick and Charlie are, by and large, happy, and this season follows Nick’s journey through the coming out process – and it’s nice to see that journey depicted as not one “coming out” moment but the realisation that people keep coming out for the rest of their lives.  Also nice is that Nick isn’t forced to come out.  But, as with the first season, there is more going on than that.  Tao and Elle are working through a will they/won’t they relationship.  Tara and Darcy are going through various stresses in their own relationship – although I would like to have seen Darcy’s home life explored more.  The strand focussing on that doesn’t even appear until episode seven.  Perhaps there will be more next season.  Isaac is slowing working out how he fits in (or doesn’t fit in) to the whole relationship thing, and we also get to see more Mr. Ajayi’s personal life, which is really nice, too.   

It is a busy series (and includes a very charming three-episode jaunt to Paris), but none of it seems rushed, with the exception of the Darcy subplot, and, perhaps, the rather strange situation that homophobic rugby player Harry doesn’t make any play after finding out Nick and Charlie an item.  There are some wonderful put-the-arrogant-idiots in their place moments in this series, where Harry, Nick’s brother, and Ben all basically get told where to go – although it would have been interesting to see one of those moments not work out so well for the one putting them in their place. 

But, for the most part, this remains a series about good people doing good things and looking after each other.  It’s still surprising, perhaps, that a series based on that premise has been so welcomed in our cynical times – and that it’s just so damned good.  If there was an Emmy for Most Charming Series, it would win, hands down.   And it shouldn’t be surprising that adults are watching the series and being moved by it, too.   

Heartstopper, season two

Ten years ago, I wrote a novel called Breaking Point, dealing with a pair of teenaged boys who are friends but realise their friendship is becoming something more.  At the same time,  a bully and his friends do what they can to drive them apart.   But I confess that, while I am very proud of Breaking Point and its sequel, Breaking Down (both still available, I might add!!), I’d much rather have written Heartstopper.   There is almost an audaciousness and daring in writing something so simply driven by nice people doing good things.  What other drama series or book series does that?  It’s an utter masterstroke, and so what we need right now as the country continues to tear itself apart.

The writing this season is both sharper and more subtle, and the acting has also improved – although the slightly rough-around-the-edges element to the first season in that regard was rather beguiling.   There are also sequences that appear to be improvised, giving the show such a natural feel, helped by how well the cast clearly gel with each other.  Talking of which, don’t miss the recap of the last season before episode one, which is narrated by the cast as themselves, and is very sweet. 

The reviews for this second season have largely been excellent, although it appears the reviewer in The Independent has a heart of stone.  Perhaps he has forgotten that the show is actually aimed at young teenagers, and not middle-aged men – although there is plenty for adults to enjoy, I might add, including the appearance of Olivia Colman (stunning as always), but also that feeling of watching it and being thankful that today’s kids have Heartstopper instead of Section 28. 

We should never forget how much of a good thing that is.

Closet Monster, and the scarcity of gay-themed movies on blu-ray

It is undeniable that, more than a decade into the blu-ray era, queer cinema of the past is woefully under-represented on the “new” medium.

Through the DVD era of the late 1990s and up to about ten years ago, queer cinema blossomed on home video. The new, cheaper-produced, more easily accessible DVD allowed for more content for niche audiences. I remember having a handful of gay-themed films on VHS, but I would have been lucky here in the UK to have found more than two or three such films on the shelf in even the biggest of stores. DVD – and the era of the internet – changed that considerably. Through labels such as Water Bearer, TLA and Strand Releasing in the US and Peccadillo, Millivres and TLA in the UK, dozens upon dozens of queer films became easily accessible. True, some were good, some were bad, and some were downright ugly – but they were there, nonetheless.

But precious few of those titles have made it to a blu-ray upgrade. We are still waiting for blu rays of the films of Andre Techine and Gael Morel, for example. Also much of Ozon’s earlier work, too. There is no blu ray release of what many would view as gay classics such as Beautiful Thing, Get Real, Trick, Were the World Mine, etc. (NB. I confess I stick to gay-themed films in my comments here – there are others out there far more knowledgeable than me of films featuring lesbian, trans characters etc, and I would love to hear from you).

The sad thing is that this situation isn’t likely to change in the future. While Strand have released coming-out classic Edge of Seventeen on blu ray, it is the exception and not the rule. While some of the titles I have mentioned above can be streamed on various services and channels, streaming is not a way of owning a film, and movies can be removed quickly and without warning. As the DVD becomes used less and less, we are in a worrying position where some key, historically important films are simply going to be forgotten and not seen by future generations unless the current situation changes rapidly. While the BFI, Eureka, Kino etc occasionally release a queer film, it is not where we should be at this stage. And it’s worrying.

Thankfully, the situation is somewhat rosier for films made and released within the blu-ray era itself. While many were/are still only released on DVD, others have had a blu-ray release as well, although not enough. One of those lucky films (and lucky for us) is Closet Monster, one of the best coming out/coming-of-age movies made during the last decade. Strand released this on blu-ray, although there is no such release in Europe. This tells the story of a young man who witnessed a traumatic incident when a child, and then suffered the breaking up of his parents while trying to come to terms with that incident. Now, around a decade on, he also has to come to terms with his sexuality – a sexuality inextricably connected with the incident he witnessed years earlier.

The film manages to thoroughly explore the themes of coming-of-age, coming out, and PTSD so well partly because it concentrates on a surprisingly small amount of characters. Oscar Madly (what a suitable name for a character in a film watched this week!) is at high school, but we don’t really get any view of his high school experience, thus removing peripheral characters that would otherwise take up precious moments within a ninety minute movie. The most important member of the supporting cast is Oscar’s pet hamster, which Oscar converses with a great deal as a way of trying to process the difficulties that he is going through. This relationship between teen and hamster could have turned into sentimental mush, but it’s never allowed to, and the final line from the hamster at the end of the film is just utterly perfect in this regard. Just as the viewer is blinking away those tears, they are snapped out of it in a wonderful way.

Connor Jessup, as Oscar, is stunning here. If ever an actor and character were made for each other, it’s here. Jessup (now most famous for Locke & Key) is a natural screen presence at any time, but this probably still ranks as his best performance to date. Isabella Rossellini provides the voice for the hamster and, again, this is brilliantly judged. Cute and charming, but more when the script calls for something else. Writer/director Stephen Dunn has managed to create a film that has fantasy elements but which also remains rooted in a hard-hitting reality even during those sequences. It is such a shame that, despite numerous awards for the film at festivals (including Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto festival), Dunn hasn’t followed this up with another feature-length movie. Perhaps Covid simply got in the way of that happening, but I’m guessing the reasons are probably more to do with the difficulties and (lack of) funding of indie filmmaking.

Closet Monster very much deserves its place on the still-slim roster of gay-themed films that have made it to blu-ray (and certainly deserves a space on your blu-ray shelves) but many others deserve a place, too – and one feels that, if those titles from the 1990s and 2000s don’t make it in the next couple of years, then they will be forgotten for the coming generations, and to deprive queer teenagers of seeing some of the best coming out movies ever made would be a tragedy – but rest assured that Closet Monster is every bit as good as the movies that it follows.

Love, Victor (Season 1 review)

A couple of years ago, I wrote some very nice things about Love, Simon – the first ever movie by a major Hollywood studio to feature a gay teen protagonist. It was a huge step for Hollywood, and it seemed that, finally, things were changing.  And it had taken a long while.  To put it in context, the first movie to feature a gay lead character was the German Anders als die Andern in 1919.  It had took Hollywood ninety-nine years after that to put out a gay-themed teen movie.  But it appears now that, despite its success, Love, Simon hasn’t opened the floodgates.  We have been here before.  It was thought that Philadelphia would be the first of many gay-themed Hollywood movies.  And then we thought the same about Brokeback Mountain.  In both cases, it didn’t happen. And it hasn’t happened following Love, Simon either, and shame on the major studios for that.

However, while Hollywood movies remain decades behind the times, television – particularly streaming platforms – have stepped up to the mark.  It is there where the LGBTQ community turn to when they want to see characters and narratives that reflect their own lives.  Netflix in particular has done wonders in this regard, with the likes of Atypical, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Riverdale, 13 Reasons Why, Daybreak, Elite, Grand Army, I Am Not OK with This, and many, many more.  And, last year, Disney got in on the action with Love, Victor, a series that acts as a sequel of sorts to Love, Simon.   

Love, Victor (which I’m a bit late in watching!) is set in the same school as the 2018 film, but with a mostly new set of characters.  Victor Salazar and his family have just moved across the country, and he and his sister are now attending Creekwood High School.   As soon as he gets to the school, he hears about what happened to Simon, who is still rather a local celebrity even though he’s now living in New York.  But Victor is having his own struggles with his sexuality, and starts to correspond with Simon via email.  

There was quite a furore among some of the LGBTQ community last year when Disney decided not to screen the series, but to move it to Hulu.  But, having finally just seen it, this seemed like a sensible decision.  This is not traditional Disney fare.  There is talk of sexual situations, for example, marital infidelity, scenes set in a night club, and so on.  While Disney may well have got away with the first season on their own platform, the series wouldn’t have had room to grow in seasons that followed.  It rather reminds me of the situation that The Wonder Years faced, back in the 1990s.  Producers wanted the series to get more adult as Kevin grew older, but the network didn’t want that to happen.  The Wonder Years had attracted a certain audience in its 8pm slot, and the network didn’t want to challenge that, and so the who came to rather clumsy and hasty conclusion rather than compromise its integrity.  It’s worth adding that Love, Victor appears on the Starz section of Disneyplus in the UK.

Returning to Love, Victor, it is quite different from the film that it gets (half) its name from.  Being a series amounting to five hours of screen time, it doesn’t need to have some of the unlikely plot twists of the film to tell its story.  It can take its time, and explore the subject matter at a more sensible pace.  But there is a feeling that, perhaps, there are too many strands for it to deal with.  Not only is there Victor coming to terms with his sexuality, but there are the problems with his parent’s marriage, the difficulties his sister has in fitting in, the rather kooky neighbour who becomes Victor’s best friend, and so on.  It does sometimes feel that it is spreading itself too thin. 

But it’s easy to pick holes.  And the question I had watching Love, Simon returns for Love, Victor.  How different would my life have been had there been something like this thirty years ago when I was Victor’s age? Would my coming out process really have taken until I was twenty-six?  I very much doubt that it would, but beyond a handful of British films during the late 1980s, there were no positive gay characters on our TV screens back then.  There weren’t even many negative ones.  And certainly gay teenagers such as myself had nowhere to turn in many cases to see how others were dealing with what we were dealing with.  I knew no-one else gay at school – or, at least, I thought I didn’t, but now I realise I did.  We just kept it quiet.  The internet changed everything for me in that regard, but by then I was in my mid-twenties.   And it is heart-warming to think that shows like Love Victor exist.

The show is clearly not aimed at a forty-seven-year-old like myself, but there is still much to enjoy.  In fact, teen programmes are some of the best programmes out there these days.   And the series is genuinely funny in places, and emotional in others.  Other than the “trying to fit too much in” issue mentioned earlier, the writing is top notch, and the cast are perfect – and it’s nice to see actors and actresses who, in most cases, could possibly be taken for the age of the character they are playing.  Michael Cimino as Victor is utterly charming, and Anthony Turpel is very good indeed as the quirky Felix who lives in the flat upstairs.  While we’re mentioning Felix, the sequence where we get to see inside his apartment and he talks about his mother is very moving, and brilliantly executed, and a key moment to suggest that the writers here are more ambitious than simply serving up a coming out story.  Here’s hoping that Felix’s home situation is dealt with further in the new season.

There is the rather lovely touch that Simon (Nick Robinson, who also produces) appears in voiceover as he and Victor write to each other, even if that element might cause some issues going forward, and one can see how it might feel shoehorned in during future seasons.  In fact, the one episode that does seem somewhat like a misstep is the one where Victor and Simon meet onscreen.  It’s easy to see why this happens and why it was thought to be a sweet idea, but something doesn’t quite gel in this episode.

The second series of Love, Victor starts this month, and it will be interesting to see where it goes and how it grows, and whether it wants its audience to grow older with it, and how it negotiates the various thorny issues that are likely to come up.  Will it try to remain PG material, or will it go beyond that?  Either way, hopefully, the series will be with us for some time but, like Victor himself, it needs to take one step at a time.