Hegemonic Masculinity and My Thoughts on Disney’s Luca

*MAJOR LUCA SPOILERS AHEAD*

Disney movies, despite the corporate hell that they mask, have amazing creative teams behind them that keep me coming back every time to see what new gorgeous creation has come out. So, when my sister asked me to watch Luca with her after our camping trip, I was 100% down. I knew close to nothing about the movie, I had intentionally avoided reading any press about it for spoiler purposes, but on the drive back from the campground this morning I encountered the greatest spoiler yet. One of the film accounts I follow on Instagram had uploaded a new post on cinematic parallels between Luca and Call Me By Your Name, and immediately I thought I knew what all the hype was about: conservative parents were probably angry about some gay trickery in the movie that sums up to a total of like, .02 seconds of screen time, if that. But, after watching the movie, I realized it was much more nuanced than that.

To give a brief synopsis, the film centers around Luca and Alberto, two little mermen (merboys? merpeople? why are merterms gendered?) who come from the ocean off the Italian Riviera. Luca comes from a small undersea town, where his overprotective mother warns him never to go above water, lest he encounter deadly “land monsters” that would not hesitate to kill sea creatures like them. Luca has immense curiosity surrounding life on dry land, which he satiates with a couple human artifacts he finds in the field where he grazes his goatfish. Alberto then reveals himself to be the culprit behind these stolen objects, and he eventually leads Luca out of the water where he transforms into his human form for the very first time. They become fast friends, and they bond over the mysticism surrounding the Vespa scooter (because Italy). When Luca’s mom finds out that Luca has been transforming and spending time on land, she resolves to send him to live in the Deep Sea with his uncle, so that she can be totally sure of his safety. Luca, enraged, runs away to his friend Alberto and they resolve to go to the nearest human town to find a Vespa and travel the world together. Shenanigans ensue, they technically do get the Vespa, but we learn that maybe the real Vespa was the friends we made along the way. In the end, Luca and Alberto find friends and new human family in the town of Portorosso, Luca’s parents learn that letting Luca grow means letting him broaden his horizons and find community everywhere (wink wink), and we all live Italian ever after.

Not gonna lie, I got gay allegory vibes from this movie since the moment it started. I mean, sheltered young oppressed person meets other young oppressed person, and together they infiltrate a space full of oppressors in a form where they can pass as them to have a shot at a cool life together? And the storybook ending is that everyone loves and accepts each other for exactly who they are? Were we born yesterday, Disney? I did some quick googling to see if any film critics felt similar to me: the movie itself isn’t specifically gay, because Luca and Alberto aren’t romantically linked, but it felt super gay. These two articles I found were the first ones I clicked on, and they articulated my exact sentiment really well. A lot of the plot points and visual cues in Luca seemed very similar to experiences articulated by queer people that I am personally familiar with, as well as queer narratives that I am familiar with from other sources of fiction. First theres the whole binary of sea monster/non-sea monster, which reminded me of what we discussed in class when we were talking about institutional racism and intersectional identities. Sea monster is obviously the oppressed part of that binary, but it has the peculiarity that it is water activated, so as long as Luca and Alberto are not wet, they can pass as human boys. Unlike race, which is very visually apparent all the time, sexuality is something that many queer people mask by policing their mannerisms, vocal intonation, and other aspects of appearance to fit heteronormative standards. In the case of men, hegemonic masculinity forces queer men to embody stereotypical male traits in hostile spaces so that they aren’t targeted for their queerness. It isn’t quite like transforming into a fish boy when water touches you, but there’s similarity in that Luca and Alberto were able to effectively mask their fish boy-ism when they thought everyone in town would kill them for being fish boys. There are scores more cues like this throughout the movie that clue us into a pretty gay narrative with no mention of actual gay things going on. This beat around the bush approach to LGBT+ themes, and the outcry I witnessed online from queer Luca defenders and detractors alike, made some gears turn in my head.

When I found the two articles I linked above, I also found this one titled, “Woke Reviews of Pixar’s ‘Luca’ Attack Male Friendship” by Douglas Blair. Blair states that queer analyses of Luca “pervert the innocent concept” of male friendship. Blair goes on to say that this “hyper sexualization” of male friendships is extremely harmful to young men, because it conveys the false idea that strong male bonds can only occur in the context of romance. With men being more prone to suicide due to social stigma on being emotional and confiding in others, Blair argues that these queer analyses that attack male platonic relationships only reinforce the very toxic masculinity that threatens the mental stability of young men. This article is just one, pretty concise example of the kind of conservative backlash Luca and the discussion around it was getting, and it really got me thinking about how pervasive hegemonic masculinity really is in the minds of many people.

I’ve seen this argument a lot in various contexts in and out of my personal life because straight men get often extremely defensive around subjects of queerness. People want to separate male closeness from queerness because men might be discouraged from closeness as a result, but my question is, what’s the issue with queerness? For most of my life, my answer to this question has just been the knowledge of the internalized homophobia present in everyone. But after the discussions we have had recently, I feel like hegemonic masculinity complicates this a little further. Understanding hegemonic masculinity not just as a system in place that oppresses women, but a system that upholds the changing definition of masculinity as a cultural ideal, puts Blair’s thinking into perspective for me. Hegemonic masculinity generally discourages men from acting in ways that could possibly be construed as not straight, not manly, and not white. When men try to push back against the emotional repression that constitutes manliness because of staggering suicide statistics, the fear around being associated with queerness materializes. So then, we get people like Blair blaming queer people and “the woke left” for stigmatizing emotional vulnerability. On the flip side, the lack of queer media and the stigmatization of emotional vulnerability among men in the first place is part of what causes so much Luca-esque discourse around intimate male relationships in movies. So at the end of the day the options for men are to be depressed and never get your sexuality questioned, or have healthy relationships and have people think you may be gay, and therefore not an ideal man. Ultimately, I just think it is very interesting to see how far straight men are willing to go to deflect accusations of queerness because I just think it is very telling of the power that these social norms hold over people’s security and sense of self. In a world where our lives weren’t dictated by hegemonic masculinity, men could literally have their cake and eat it too. They could express themselves fully and emotionally without attracting any assumptions regarding their identity, no shaming involved. I also thought that the shifting of “blame” to queer people and the left was really interesting to read about, because it just seems so absurd to blame such a small subset of people for a whole entire social apparatus that restricts all kinds of men and oppresses so many kinds of people. Luca was a really cute movie, and the type of discussion being had around it was just really interesting to think of in this context.