radiantfracture | Queer Chat Time! Our Flag Means Queer Futurity, or Munoz + Waititi 4 Ever

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Queer Chat Time! Our Flag Means Queer Futurity, or Munoz + Waititi 4 Ever

This is the post where we take the Muñoz doll and the Our Flag Means Death dolls and make them kiss.

So I’ve been doing a (roughly) fortnightly series here reading José Esteban Muñoz’ book of queer theory Cruising Utopia (2009, 2019), chapter by chapter.

And then we all watched Our Flag Means Death.

It just seems right to try a mashup and see what happens.

Muñoz’s project in Cruising Utopia is to find and (re)claim visions of queer utopias in order to provide inspiration for livable queer futures outside of the stultifying constraints of capitalist heteronormativity.

Pirates are semi-famous for somewhat similar endeavours. Can Our Flag Means Death do some of that work (and play) with and for us? What visions can we use it to conjure?

We could boil down the central questions of the first three chapters of Cruising Utopia sort of like this:

How can the utopian visions of past queer communities inform our visions of a future that's livable for all queer folks, not just the privileged few?
What do the utopian visions of the past tell us about what we are missing and longing for right now?
What practices already exist in our present communities that could provide inspirations for queer futures?

So some questions about Our Flag Means Death might be these:

What images from the past (history, media) do you see Our Flag Means Death talking back to?
- Ex. histories of piracy, readings of history, queerbaiting in mainstream series, Black Sails?
What are you longing for that these pirates have? How does OFMD illuminate what is missing in the present?
What about this show (or how it came to be) could be useful in thinking about how to make queer art / art about queers going forward?
Alternatively, what do you know about queerness and community that Our Flag Means Death doesn’t yet know?

For example, I really like that you do not have to be cool to be part of this queer pirate crew. In fact, trying to be cool makes you miserable, fake, and impossible to live with (Izzy Hands, the French). Being a big ridiculous grimy mess is ideal on the Revenge. I appreciate this.

Anyway, the formal invitation is to think about Muñoz with OFMD, but feel free to party any way you like, provided it's respectful and consensual.

And if part of the way you appreciate things is to talk about what's flawed or disappointing about them, that is welcome, too.

* * * * * *

Previous posts on Munoz:

Munoz Chapter 1

Munoz Chapter 2

Munoz Chapter 3

{rf}

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I don't think I said anything more clever than noticing that OFMD explicitly places toxic masculinity at the root of a lot of evils. Also I haven't read Munoz and it's been a long time since I did any queer theory. But I'm happy to talk about the show!

1) Talking back to the past: It's responding in a complex way to the romanticization of violence in pirate mythology. Yes, it says, this was a culture that demanded brutality, and wasn't that awful and miserable and damaging? Wasn't it really the opposite of freedom? Blackbeard is utterly imprisoned by the persona he has to embody; he's the terror of the high seas, but he himself is terrified to show a tear or touch a piece of silk. By extension, it's critiquing the image of the past as a time when men were real men and women were real women.

Stede, meanwhile, was imprisoned by a different kind of normative masculinity, the expectation of marriage and fatherhood. I think in some ways the boldest move OFMD makes is portraying the breakup of Stede's marriage/household as a good thing. Even when he first runs away, it's ultimately liberating for all concerned, and it's even more successful when he does it again with Mary's and the kids' consent and cooperation. Although part of it is that heterosexual domesticity is all set to reassert itself in a happier form behind him after he leaves. (An interesting question, though, is whether Mary and Doug intend to get married now that Stede is once again officially dead. I don't think it's at all clear that they do. Mary is pretty content as a widow. So the better version of heterosexual domesticity may be a much less conventional one.) Anyway, no nostalgia here for traditional marriage.

It's definitely talking back to queerbaiting. I was exceedingly pleased when Taika Waititi said, in a tweet, not to call Stede and Ed's relationship a bromance, because it's a romance. (When I watched the show for the first time I was unspoiled as to what the "queer content" I was promised was going to be. So at first I thought "maybe I'm reading too much into this," then I thought it might be queerbaiting and was prepared to be angry. As it turned out . . . certain things make me think the show may have been deliberately NOT queerbaiting, if that makes sense. The episode title "This Is Happening" gestures towards all the shows that have teased and then said "of course it's not actually happening." Gestures towards them with a middle finger.

(An interesting question, though, is whether Mary and Doug intend to get married now that Stede is once again officially dead. I don't think it's at all clear that they do. Mary is pretty content as a widow. So the better version of heterosexual domesticity may be a much less conventional one.)

Everything about the show is so deliberately written that your take is almost certainly the correct one. The widow's group is the textual evidence that we need. These are women taking joy in their power and freedom. Doug isn't really part of Mary's social class—she can only have a relationship with him in the context of her being a widow. Marriage in this society is about property relations, and Mary has no desire to be property.

I would take an entire spinoff on Mary and the widows.

The episode title "This Is Happening" gestures towards all the shows that have teased and then said "of course it's not actually happening." Gestures towards them with a middle finger.

God I love this.

I was absolutely unspoiled for the show. The only things I knew were the real historical accounts of Stede and Blackbeard and that I'd probably like it because Taiki Waititi is good at everything. I started to see "he made the pirates gay!" posts on Tumblr, but Tumblr thinks that everything is gay, bless its heart.

And of course we don't really meet Blackbeard until the third episode (OFMD follows romance beats but not at the expense of the story it's telling), and we have Lucius as a bit of a red herring. Okay, this is a fun sitcom about pirates and we have an obviously gay side character who may get a romance with another side character. This isn't uncommon these days. It's the drawn out romance with the two leads that makes it completely unexpected.

wait, Stede is a historical figure? whoa. *goes away to read*

Oh my gosh, yes. And the depiction of him on the show is not, as far as I know, all that exaggerated (he absolutely did have a library on his ship). Nor is the theory that he remained unmurdered by Blackbeard for a whole year and a half because they were fucking a wildly unlikely theory.

(For that matter, the theory that Blackbeard actually killed very few people and relied on his reputation and theatrical effects has quite a lot of historical evidence going for it.)

i am ineluctably reminded of the Dread Pirate Roberts in the Princess Bride - major overtones of that whole thing going on here. and OFMD doesn't treat the subject very seriously, which probably contributes to the resemblance.

the historical bit makes it much more fun. i understand the show isn't shooting for historial accuracy per se (loads of contemporary colloqualisms in the dialogue, etc) but though i understand it as an artistic choice, it is a bit jarring for me. so it's helpful to know they're not making things up whole cloth as well, but instead riffing on a series of actual events! i am reading through Stede & Blackbeard's wikipedia pages now, to get an outline.

i am ineluctably reminded of the Dread Pirate Roberts in the Princess Bride

Also YES. (Also I always thought that part was a bit queer.)

it kind of is, isn't it?

They bloody well quite PB at the end of ep 1 (which we just finished last night) when they suggest perhaps they'll kill the captain tomorrow.

Ha, of course! Good catch.

Are you just starting this sail? I would love to hear updates as it goes...

Just finished the second ep with all the Star Wars references, yep.

I hope you understand that each time you say something like this you send me back to watch the episode again.

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radiantfracture - 2022-04-08 04:55 (UTC) - Expand

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elusis - 2022-04-08 05:31 (UTC) - Expand

Nor is the theory that he remained unmurdered by Blackbeard for a whole year and a half because they were fucking a wildly unlikely theory.

Right -- another thing I love is that this is a wholly plausible theory, and much more plausible than any number of other plot twists in any number of other "historical" shows -- and I feel like the showrunners know this, know that queer history is about reading these gaps and interstices in the official records.

-We know queer relationships happened
-Here's an odd explanatory gap for some human behaviour
-Here is a totally reasonable explanation for it: a queer relationship

Yep. They've said as much.

Oo, can you point me to where?

A bunch of places! But here's one.

https://mashable.com/article/our-flag-means-death-david-jenkins-interview

"Darby and Waititi's interactions are among the highlights of Our Flag Means Death. Their different energies speak to a curious real-life camaraderie, as their two pirates did actually collaborate in the early eighteenth century. "The central thing that makes the show interesting for me is that Blackbeard took Stede under his wing, for some reason, in real life," Jenkins said. "And it really makes no sense — there's all these holes in it. Filling those holes in with things of your own invention is one of the joys of doing a true story like this.""

Didn't the historical Blackbeard also have at least a small library? I saw it . . . on Twitter . . . somewhere. If it's true, it's an interesting angle on the choices the show is making about him as a character. They're playing up Blackbeard as Stede's opposite, and having him sign the pardon with an X implies that he's illiterate or very nearly. A literate Blackbeard would complicate the show's trajectory. And while I can understand the need, if you're making a short-season half-hour comedy, to work in broad strokes, I'm a bit mournfully fascinated by the more nuanced version that might have been achieved by sticking more closely to history.

Oooh, I did not know that.

...did Stede teach Blackbeard how to read?

Now that I've actually googled it, the evidence for Blackbeard's literacy is very, very weak. A few fragments of the 1712 edition of Cooke's "A Voyage to the South Seas" were discovered in the breach of a cannon on the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge. They had been used as wadding, which doesn't suggest great reverence for books. Although presumably this happened at Ocracoke so it may just have been desperation. There's an article here.

Apparently some documents have been found pertaining to an Edward Thache who may have been Blackbeard. If it is him, he was literate and had an elevated social origin. Article here

For the show, my head canon is that Stede will definitely teach Edward to read and write!

Edited (typo) 2022-04-11 01:50 (UTC)

Ooh, great finds!

It's the drawn out romance with the two leads that makes it completely unexpected.

For me it was also an incredible relief to have a show finally admit that this is always a possibility in any story of human connection -- one option is that they are in love, one option is that they desire each other. Yes folks even if it's men. Two men can have feelings in the same room without it burning down.

It just *is* a possibility, and if that energy, that chemistry is there, it can be the best way to tell a particular story. And it can weirdly distort your storytelling if you *don't* tell it that way, or if you go out of your way to try to unstitch all the queerbaiting you did in earlier seasons. (Looks beadily at /Sherlock/.)

But was the slow burn slow and burning enough for you?

For once, I'd say yes, within both the confines of a sitcom-length show with 10 episodes and the additional challenge they'd imposed on themselves to follow rom com beats. Especially since they're determined to make it difficult.

Like of course my platonic ideal of queer relationships on telly are things like BS, which took five seasons to tell its queer love stories, She-Ra, which did about the same, or things like Good Omens and Guardian (which I would argue are not examples of queerbaiting for different reasons) with, respectively, 6000 and 10,000 years of the characters pining for each other. But it's not so much the speed for me as the emotional journey, the "fuck, I love this person who everyone around me has told me is not a possibility in any way." And it does that beautifully and painfully.

which I would argue are not examples of queerbaiting for different reasons

I think I can work out for Guardian, but if you like tell me about your Good Omens theory (or both -- I just like theories) --

Guardian isn't really a theory: the source text was explicitly gay, the protagonists have sex on page multiple times and end up as partners (who call each other husband and wife, which is a bit icky but I'll chalk that up to translation), and they could not show it on screen without Chinese censors coming down hard. Though, in doing that but still trying to signal the relationship, they somehow made it more queer. I don't particularly love the sex scenes in the book—partly it's a translation issue, but also some of the dynamics are quite problematic—and the eye-fucking that happens in the show really gives the sense that these two characters have been in a star-crossed relationship for 10,000 years, which feels more true emotionally to the core of the story.

With Good Omens, the show is getting a season 2, and you can kind of sense they might have been saving some things in case it got renewed, so I really don't think it's queerbaiting so much as testing the waters to see what they can get away with in the future. Neil Gaiman has said that they're meant to be in a relationship, all the beats are set up as a relationship, and we don't even get a No Homo decoy love interest for either of them to suggest that there is any possibility of another relationship in their lives.

But there is also the fact that 1) this is a slow burn love story with immortal characters, and 2) they're not human and don't have the same relationship parameters that we do. Canonically they don't have parts. Which means that the creator saying that they're queer and together, and everything in the show pointing to a relationship as the characters would define it, doesn't to me feel like queerbaiting at all. It just suggests a relationship that is not human and that evolves at a glacial pace.

I am also concerned, in GO's case, about the close relationship of the creators to fandom. Fandom really wants things to be explicit on screen, but fandom is not a unified body, and there are people who want to see the characters get naked on screen and fuck, presumably, and people who are clinging very hard to them as ace representation. I think both are very valid interpretations but going either direction cuts some possibilities off, and I hope the creators at least keep those details a little ambiguous, both for storytelling's sake (I do not want to see Awkward Representation Dialogue inserted in a story that really isn't about that), and to allow for imaginative possibilities for fandom to interpret.

I think I've mentioned this before, but my comparison is always my favourite het relationship in The Hour, where you have Lix and Randall alluding to a relationship that was definitely sexual during the Spanish Civil War—they had a child, after all—but never actually doing anything on screen besides touching hands and eye-fucking, and it's approximately 1000x more compelling than the main characters' relationship (which, don't get me wrong, is great). It's all subtext but done in such a way that it is obvious to the viewer what they are to each other.

It's interesting in OFMD that the creators reference Mulder and Scully, which IMO opinion was absolutely ruined by them getting together on screen. I think that could have happened in a satisfying way, but it was a result of fandom interference and you can tell.

explicitly places toxic masculinity at the root of a lot of evils

I really feel that, though -- the way Ed's "return" to being Blackbeard is an expression of grief and hurt that makes him more miserable (and breaks up a great crew.)

It's responding in a complex way to the romanticization of violence in pirate mythology

That's such a great point. The violence in the show is traumatic or grotesquely comedic, but not heroic; the most heroic act is arguably Ed's act of surrender to the British. *Not* making a doomed heroic last stand, but a pragmatic act that saves everyone's lives.

deliberately NOT queerbaiting,

Totally! I think they gave us the exact setup of queerbait -- strong chemistry between the leads + plus side characters to "channel" the queerness -- and then were like "nope this was the story all along." Revisionist queerbaiting. Queetbait baiting.

The violence in the show is traumatic or grotesquely comedic, but not heroic

Ooh, good point. There hasn't been a single heroic act of violence onscreen.

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