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Lesbian Aging Hits the Road: Thom Fitzgerald’s Cloudburst (2011)

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the portrayal of lesbian aging in Thom Fitzgerald’s Cloudburst (2011). Hess discusses the film’s use of the road movie genre as the framework within which it negotiates themes of physical decline, caregiving, kinship systems, and same-sex marriage. Roberta Maierhofer’s image of the “salty old woman” serves to consider the film’s play with stereotypical representation, because it challenges the audience to question images of the aging female body as repulsive. Reading the film’s controversial ending, which problematically recalls the trope of the tragic queer, against the grain, the author explores the film’s ambivalence toward the heteronormative values of marriage, longevity, and consanguine kinship, even as these ideals become more attainable for LGBTQ persons and invite participation in the linear life course.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Windsor and Spyer got married in 2007 in Ontario, Canada.

  2. 2.

    While many of the stories are certainly touching, such a narrative approach to the stories can become problematic if it implies that those same-sex couples who have lived together monogamously for many years—or even decades—deserve equal marriage rights. Such narratives tacitly uphold the category of LGBTQ people who do not hold long-term monogamy among their ideals as “deviants.”

  3. 3.

    Obviously, not all LGBTQ persons saw marriage as a desirable goal. Canadian author Jane Rule, for example, noted pointedly, “To be forced back into the heterosexual cage of coupledom is not a step forward but a step back into state-imposed definitions of relationship,” she wrote. “With all that we have learned, we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there” (Martin 2017).

  4. 4.

    I do not read this simply as an attempt to avoid showing aging bodies naked on camera. Rather, given that most films will show topless women or naked women but no male genitals, which in the case of Prentice’s stepfather are shown twice in one scene, I argue that the film refuses to proliferate the male gaze.

  5. 5.

    Original German: “mutig, selbstbewusst und verantwortlich” (Maierhofer 2003, 21).

  6. 6.

    This point has been more explicitly emphasized in other works concerned with lesbian aging, such as Prism (1981) or Retirement Plan (2011), which both specifically discuss the issue of finances in old age.

  7. 7.

    One of the most famous fictional portrayals of such a situation occurs in Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man, in which George, the protagonist, is excluded from his partner’s funeral by his partner’s family and is forced to continue his life without the possibility of having his loss and mourning officially recognized. He learns about his partner’s death only because a cousin decides to call him against the will of the deceased’s parents. Numerous examples can of course also be found with regard to the AIDS crisis, when, time and again, families, the state, and the public refused to acknowledge partners and friends of the deceased.

  8. 8.

    The first part of the drama, If These Walls Could Talk , likewise a three-part film, was released in 1996 and focused on the topic of abortion and on three different women living in the same house in different decades of the twentieth century. If These Walls Could Talk 2 followed the same structure, but focused on three different lesbian couples as protagonists.

  9. 9.

    While the movie certainly is not a Hollywood blockbuster, it premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where it won the audience choice award, and it was awarded a large number of prizes at further festivals. It was shown in regular cinemas and is now widely available on DVD and through streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon. Thus, Cloudburst has the potential of reaching a large number of people, providing them with a more positive and complex image of lesbian aging than is generally disseminated through filmic representations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

    Linda M. Hess

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  1. Linda M. Hess
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Hess, L.M. (2019). Lesbian Aging Hits the Road: Thom Fitzgerald’s Cloudburst (2011). In: Queer Aging in North American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03466-5_9

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