The artifact I’m choosing to write about for the final project is the movie “Alex Strangelove”, released on April 14, 2018, and produced by Ben Stiller, Jared Goldman, and Nicholas Weinstock. This movie is about a teenage boy in high school dating his best friend. His main goal throughout most of the movie is to have sex with his girlfriend for the first time. Alex thinks he loves his girlfriend until he meets a boy he may like at a party. We see him start to question his sexuality and face some hardships while trying to figure it out. The movie displays themes of suppression/question of sexuality and suppression of one’s self which we can see as a recurring theme in many of the books we have read in class during the course. 

In the movie, we first see Alex question his sexuality when he attends a party with his girlfriend and meets a boy he thinks he might be interested in. While attending the party with his girlfriend, Alex wanders off looking for the bathroom and stumbles upon a girl and boy sitting in a room smoking. He joins them and gets high with them. After getting high, Elliot, the guy Alex meets, lays down across from Alex and asks him about his craziest hopes and dreams. Alex replies with a heteronormative goal that we also see occur in the book Giovanni’s Room. Alex says he hopes to become a marine biologist, get married and have kids which David also says getting married and having kids is his goal for the future. A bit later at the party, Alex and Elliot lay down next to each other and Alex exclaims “National Geographic photographer.” Elliot questions why Alex says that, and he tells Elliot that this is his craziest hopes and dreams. This is the first sign of Alex hiding his true self from others because he says telling people he wants to be a marine biologist sound more “lucrative”. It also allows Alex to hide his true dreams and goals to fit a more heteronormative view of life. Although Alex and Elliot just met, he finds comfort in Elliot and trusts him enough to tell him something personal about himself.  

The next scene we see Alex question and suppress his sexuality is when he comes out to his friend as bisexual. After hanging out with Elliot for a day, Alex starts to question whether he’s completely straight. He starts to think he’s bisexual and “comes out” to one of his friends. His friend denies Alex’s sudden sexuality change and says he’s just worried about having sex with his girlfriend for the first time and is using sexuality as an excuse to cancel his plans with his girlfriend. His friend even goes as far as pulling down his pants in front of Alex to prove he isn’t bisexual. He even tells Alex that he has a “man-crush on a gay guy” and Alex starts to believe this and again suppresses any idea of him being into guys. This denial from a friend affects Alex because he trusts his friend and wants him to help and support his question of sexuality. When his friend makes Alex’s choice for him, Alex doesn’t question it at all and believes everything his friend told him. We don’t even see Alex consider his question of sexuality after talking to his friend, he goes straight to denial and believes he’s straight. Compared to some of the books we’ve read in class, the main characters were not “coming out” to others for support on their sexuality. Alex also takes a chance of questioning his sexuality compared to some of the main characters we’ve read about. What they do have in common is suppressing their own sexuality because Alex could’ve chosen to listen to himself and not his friend, but not receiving support causes him to repress exploring his options. 

While hanging out with Elliot for a second time, Alex makes a decision he instantly regrets, and it causes him to repress himself again. Elliot finds Alex in a store and asks him to go somewhere with him. When he does, they go to Elliot’s house and hang out for a while until Elliot asks Alex to sit next to him on his bed. This leads Alex to kiss Elliot and as soon as he realized what he was doing he thought about his girlfriend. Then he blames Elliot for leading him on by asking him to go on a drive and dancing for him in his room. Alex even says to Elliot “I gave you what you wanted.” Therefore, excusing his behavior by shifting the blame on someone else and repressing himself once again. He doesn’t want to believe he likes Elliot as anything more than a friend and also doesn’t want to think of himself as being gay. This repression is a constant theme throughout the movie and the books we’ve read in class.  

When Alex finally realizes who he wants to be with, he comes out to his girlfriend and no longer needs to suppress his feelings towards Elliot. After attending a party to get over failing to have sex with his girlfriend, Alex gets drunk and tries to have sex with another girl at the party. When he realizes he can’t do it, he leaves and stumbles into a pool. When he falls, he has a flashback of himself as a kid. In his flashback, he sees himself in a public shower with other boys his age. When the other boys realize Alex was watching them, they called him offensive words, blocked him from leaving the bathroom and pulled down his pants. This suppressed memory is when Alex realizes that he’s gay and has been since he was young. This memory is also the reason why Alex formed the habit of constantly repressing himself throughout the movie which we can see in multiple scenes. Compared to the main characters in the books we’ve read in class, Alex eventually came out to his friends and family. The characters we’ve read about never got this chance. They continued to withhold themselves and never got a chance to express themselves as their true selves. They expressed themselves privately and at times Alex did this too when he spent time with Elliot. Although, most of the characters from the books and Alex did face hardships about their sexuality and expressing themselves. Devon from “My Brother” displayed himself as heterosexual by continuously dating women and having sex after he contracted AID’s to upkeep his heterosexual act. Alex kept up a heterosexual act by dating his best friend and having heteronormative American goals. All the characters relate in some way due to the reoccurring theme of suppression of oneself. 

The first time I saw this movie was with my best friend in June when it came out on Netflix. We used to watch cheesy romantic movies together and laugh about them every time we hung out. When we saw the trailer for Alex Strangelove, we thought it would be like those but with an LGBTQ representation. What I didn’t know while watching the movie was that my friend had already seen the movie before and what she was going to tell me afterwards. When the movie was over, she came out to me and told me she had been struggling with her sexuality for a while. She never told anyone because she felt ashamed due to the struggle of acceptance in Caribbean families. She also told me I was the first person to know and it made me so happy to know she was no longer struggling with how she felt about her sexuality.  

The reason why I chose this movie is because it displayed the theme of repression which related to the themes of the books read in class. The question of sexuality was recurring throughout the movie and all the books we’ve read. I think this movie was a good way of representing the LGBTQ community to families and teens who are also struggling with their sexuality.