Even after the MPAA gave up its decades-long prohibition against portrayals of queer people and relationships, major studios like Disney and DreamWorks have continued to self-censor. That’s representative of a larger problem: the film industry’s lengthy history of censoring anything suggesting or positively portraying queerness. Neither The Mummy nor Thor: Ragnarok feature openly bisexual characters or storylines, which is true of many of the movies viewers have embraced into the bi canon.
Once again forced to make space for ourselves in a medium that makes no space for us, looking for queer characters onscreen becomes like a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: “Sure,” I can tell myself, “she isn’t gay here, or gay in reality, but I’ve seen Cate Blanchett have movie sex with Rooney Mara in another movie, which makes this movie gayer, too.” Perry also points to an oversaturation of straight actors in queer roles: Queer audiences grant straight actors queer-icon status because there aren’t as many out queer actors setting themselves up as objects of desire in mainstream cinema. First off, sapphic filmgoers posting Rachel Weisz thirst tweets (Perry’s example) and Mummy memes are on some level liberating themselves by performing their queerness for other queer people. Perry proposes a number of reasons why this happens, and two stand out. Thor: Ragnarok’s Hela becomes gayer because of Cate Blanchett’s starring role in the sensuous sapphic period drama Carol, while Weisz’s roles in The Favourite and Disobedience may have contributed to The Mummy’s retroactive addition to bi film canon. In their cases, queer audiences transfer the queer identity of an actor’s past characters not only onto the actors themselves, but to their other roles. In an essay analyzing queer thirst for straight actors, Grace Perry explains some things that certainly apply to the concept of bi-awakening movies - particularly how straight actors like Rachel Weisz and Cate Blanchett often become gay icons and objects of queer desire after playing queer characters on screen. The community calls movies like The Mummy “bi awakening movies.” With mind-bogglingly beautiful people at every turn, every scene of a bi awakening movie raises the question: “Why do I have to be attracted to just one gender when everyone here is so hot?” The most famous is perhaps “No one is ‘born bi,’ you watch The Mummy at a formative age and the whole cast turns you bi.” Similarly, a new bisexual Mummy meme rolls around every few months. The bisexuals have Thor: Ragnarok.” Other memes soon followed. The straights have To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. A multitude of headlines have lauded Thor: Ragnarok as a “ bisexual anthem film,” “ bisexual masterpiece,” and one of the “ 10 Most Bisexual Things You Can Watch on Netflix Right Now.” That puts it up against shows and movies with openly bi characters who kiss, have sex, and use the word “bisexual.” As one virally spread (but now deleted) tweet joked, “The gays have Love, Simon. Two films in social media’s bi movie canon outshine the rest: 1999’s The Mummy and 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok.
This weird tongue-in-cheek social-media movie canon is both a mirror showing us how we collectively connect to film, and a magnifying glass, showing us how film continues to fail us. There isn’t a comprehensive definition of a bi movie, because there isn’t one reason for films to be designated as bi movies, other than that bisexuals have watched them and claimed them, at least semi-jokingly. Bisexual people online often claim specific films as “bisexual movies,” regardless of the presence of bisexual plotlines, characters, or actors onscreen. Similarly, we’ve been building a cultural canon. But making, liking, or sharing memes about being bi lets us in on a joke that suggests a common experience, and makes us feel less alone. People who are closeted, in a rural area, or disabled - or for that matter, in a pandemic - may not have access to a physical community.
The memes about what it means to be bi seem endless, but they serve a purpose: They’ve created an online community in a world that encourages queer loneliness. But our shared sense of self-inflicted humor can sometimes feel pretty close to one - community in-jokes abound about how we sit, what we wear, and what movies we watch. Outside of experiencing attraction to two or more genders, there is no universal bisexual experience.