As he doles out advice on getting used to high school in a new place, negotiating conservative parents, and figuring out feelings for a guy at school (Benji, also white), Simon becomes one of the primary reference points for Victor’s idea of gayness. Victor pines to be what Simon is and has become.
Yet, through this process, Simon, whose public proclamation of love on the ferris wheel (seen in the movie) has been turned into a hallway folk tale at his high school, is a guiding light. Love, Victor feels built upon the film’s emotional potential to provide teens and young people a pleasant and accessible coming out movie, but also reactive to the critiques of the original: the Atlanta of the show is more diverse, Victor’s class background initially shapes his relationship with how he wants to negotiate his sexual identity, and his process of sorting through his feelings and erotic impulses is messier. Less “homo sapiens agenda”, and more “homonormative agenda”. It was the first major, studio-released gay teen movie, and one that was, for all its merits, subject to thoughtful and valid criticism regarding the insularity of its queer perspectives: its wealthy, white, masculine presenting lead (played by a straight actor) whose primary goal was to assure the (possibly straight) audience that he was just like them.
#LOVE SIMON CAST ETHAN MOVIE#
the Homo Sapiens Agenda, made: to simply state that it was the first coming out movie, or the first gay teen movie, or the first gay movie without a tragic ending would be an erasure of the queer media that came before, like The Edge of Seventeen, But I’m a Cheerleader, and The Wise Kids. One has to be very specific when describing the milestone that Love, Simon, directed by Greg Berlanti and based on Becky Albertalli’s YA novel Simon vs.
Curiously, by doing so, Love, Victor complicates its own intentions regarding representation, creating and contributing to a mythology of white gayness. But over the season, Victor and Simon develop a correspondence over Instagram DM, turning the character from the first movie into a gay mentor for the frustrated, scared, and confused Victor.
#LOVE SIMON CAST ETHAN FREE#
Victor is going through a similar crisis of personal and sexual identity: Though moving to a new town suggests he will be free to explore his attraction to men, the casual homophobia he experiences at school, at home with his family reeling from the move, and by his awkward only friend Felix (Anthony Turpel) the confrontations with the popular bully on the basketball team Andrew (Mason Gooding), and the social pressure (mixed with internalized homophobia) to date a popular girl, Mia (Rachel Naomi Hilson), all make his coming of queerness slightly messier than many on screen representations. that exist somewhat in opposition to Simon’s conventional “All-American Boy” archetype. There are more details, nuances, and specificities to his character and his background - his race, his class background, his family’s relationship to religion, etc. That is to say, contrary to Simon (Nick Robinson), Victor is not “just like you,” and that’s a good thing.
As the camera slowly pans over piled up moving boxes filled with scuffed up shoes, a Puerto Rican flag, trophies, and a drawing of the state of Texas, the premiere of Love, Victor, a 10-episode Hulu spin-off of the 2018 film Love Simon, establishes who Victor (Michael Cimino) thinks he is and who he has known himself to be.
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