The Ugly Truth about why The Kids ARE All Right

A guest post by Jasbir Puar (JKP) and Karen Tongson (KT).
SPOILER ALERT: important plot points to The Kids are All Right are revealed in this post. 

On opposite coasts, KT and JKP diligently turned their attention from World Cup fever to an important mission: sussing all the hoo-haa about the latest “lesbian film,” Lisa Cholodenko’s highly-anticipated The Kids Are All Right.  KT saw TKAAR on a Friday night at the Arclight in Los Angeles, a well-appointed Hollywood multiplex with assigned seating and other bourgie accoutrements like Italian mineral water, chicken sausage baguettes, and a full-service bar and restaurant in the lobby. To put the setting in perspective, Nic and Jules--the lesbian couple played by Annette Benning and Julianne Moore in the film--would probably go to the Arclight to see something like TKAAR for a “date night.” (Admittedly, KT was there for that same purpose).

Lesbeaux pairs were neatly dispersed across the stadium-style seats, and a collective clutching of hands could be felt as the movie started, as if everyone was steeling themselves for yet another “dick intervenes” narrative about dyke couples. Despite what KT only half-jokingly refers to as her lesbian fundamentalism, she actually didn’t leave the theater hating the film, but felt provoked in ways both reparative and hostile.
 
On the East coast, in the heart of Chelsea’s gay male homo-ville, JKP went to see The Kids are All Right the weekend it opened, a few hours after a tepid, snooze-fest World Cup finale between Spain and the Netherlands.  She too was on “date night,” and her beaux, being thoroughly nonplussed by the merits of watching football at the local BBQ joint while downing greasy pork ribs and cheap cuba libres, was more than happy to have something interesting to mull over.  While JKP left the theater feeling more than a little uneasy with the liberal depiction of gay family, A.O. Scott's ringing endorsement finally making sense, the movie was a relief: entertaining, fury-rousing, thought-provoking and head-scratching.

We can see why the film has been pretty much reviled by many of our friends and colleagues. We felt compelled to nod vigorously along when reading Jack Halberstam's and Claire Potter's lively critiques of TKAAR. We’ve also been wowed by Daisy Hernandez’s bravado dissection of the film’s race politics in Colorlines. We definitely laughed out loud and hard upon reading Lisa Duggan's proclamation--undoubtedly true--that TKAAR has the worst lesbian sex scene in the history of cinema (Claire of the Moon be damned).

Within the reception spaces of these reviews, however, the film had gone from questionable to bad. Really bad. In fact, consensus has seemed to build among queer academics in particular that TKAAR is the worst movie of this summer, if not this year, if not EVER. How is this so? How is it that TKAAR can be trashed for not transcending the racial, sexual and gender stereotypes that dominate all of Hollywood filmmaking? Neither of us can remember the last time we saw a mainstream release that didn't have shitty race politics, gender politics, sexual politics, class politics or all of the above.

Maybe we’ve approached TKAAR with too much earnestness and not enough salt. What if everything that’s wrong with the movie is actually what's right about the movie?