MoviesLuc Besson’s 1997 adventure boasted a wildly nonconformist character who refused gender labels, but also objectified women and relied on a lot of men
Given that it’s supposed to be giving us fleeting, tantalising glimpses of the nebulous future, Hollywood sci-fi is often surprisingly conservative. The new Alien movie features a gay couple among its crew of colonists to another world, while there was plenty of discussion over producers’ decision to give Sulu a male partner in last year’s Star Trek: Beyond. And yet both these examples are really only newsworthy because it’s so rare that we see anyone in space at all (certainly in mainstream cinema) who’s not heterosexual.
Star Wars fans hoping to see queer representation in the long-running saga have picked up on a few moments of intimacy between John Boyega’s Finn and Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron in The Force Awakens as evidence for a relationship. And there’s little wrong with that, except that it does seem to be an example of extreme wishful thinking. But it might be worth noting that a full 20 years ago, Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element gave us a hero so outrageously unorthodox – on both a gender and sexuality level – that it makes Hollywood’s current gentle tilt towards a more diverse depiction of humanity’s future look pretty weak in comparison. In Ruby Rhod, played with eye-bulging, thrusting sexuality by the young Chris Tucker, the frenetic sci-fi romp presented us with a hero of rare queer vitality, more than two decades before fans begged Marvel to give Captain America a boyfriend.
Decked out in extravagant Jean-Paul Gaultier outfits, and spending most of the movie either squealing in high-camp horror at the sight of aliens taking over an luxury intergalactic cruise ship or luring fluttery-eyed space vixens into virtual orgasms merely by his presence, Rhod is a character whose rejection of gender norms is so elevated that they seem to have arrived through a wormhole from the year 3000, never mind 2263 (The Fifth Element’s ostensible time frame). At one point Tucker chooses to be called “Miss” Ruby, and yet there is a definite hint of phallicism in that rock star surname. Moreover, Rhod appears to be the very definition of red-blooded masculinity. Is it any wonder that Prince was the model for the role, with Tucker only recruited once it became clear the purple one was not going to sign on the dotted line?
How ahead of his time was Besson here? Is Rhod the film-maker’s vision of a society so comfortable in its own skin that gender roles have slowly melted away, or merely a reflection of the director’s nutty, French comic book-inspired sci-fi leanings, a progressive pearl formed entirely by kind happenstance? Does the talkshow host’s apparent heterosexuality undermine the bravery of the character’s inclusion, or add to the sense that societies of the future might not really care who their heroes love, nor how they define themselves, provided they rock a high-necked leopard-print jumpsuit like it was designed for them at a genetic level?
The inclusion of Rhod is hardly Besson’s only outrageous call in The Fifth Element. We should not forget that the Frenchman also gives us a female Christ figure in Milla Jovovich’s title character – described throughout as a supreme being and “saviour”. And yet there’s an argument to be made that these unorthodox characters only stand out so much precisely because Besson’s space epic is otherwise so crushingly conservative.
The real hero of The Fifth Element is Bruce Willis’s Korben Dallas, a blue-collar white guy with a military background who’s called in to save the world from a giant black planet of fire and death, despite the fact that Jovovich has just been hyped up as the answer to all humanity’s prayers. It’s Dallas who rescues her after she’s blown half to bits by Gary Oldman’s scheming Zorg; Dallas who finds the other four elements by digging them out of an alien singer’s stomach and Dallas who works out how to unleash all five elements to destroy the black whirling planet of doom just before it hits the Earth. For good measure, he then gets to have sex with female space Jesus as the credits roll, rather in the style of 60s James Bond.
Other aspects of The Fifth Element are far more problematic, from the film’s depiction of wanton identikit flight attendants, cleavage-thrusting future McDonalds waitresses and Dallas’s unseen mother, who’s constantly calling him up for a nag. It seems that this is a future largely populated by brainless space bimbos and stereotypes of middle-aged women. It doesn’t help that (apart from Jovovich) pretty much everyone in a position of power, from Tom Lister Jr’s president to Brion James’ General Munroe, is a man.
But perhaps it’s unfair to judge Besson’s film according to progressive mores in 2017. This is, after all, a movie that was dreamt up by the film-maker as a comic book-obsessed teenager, at a time when the queerest thing about mainstream space movies was C3PO’s obvious close bond with R2-D2. It is the very definition of boys’ own cinema. Perhaps we should be content that in the virile, lissom form of Rhod, the French director created a hero so eccentrically kinky that their like will surely not be seen in big-budget Hollywood sci-fi for at least the next 20 years.
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