"Wonderful, heavenly, beautiful, and ours": lesbian fantasy and media(ted) desire in Heavenly Creatures.
Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994) is the story of two girls in New Zealand who form an intense erotic friendship based on a fantasy world they create, and how their forced separation leads them to commit matricide. Beneath the sensational surface, though, is another story: this is a film about cinema, about desire, and how queer spectators create new and unexpected meanings. This article argues that Heavenly Creatures is a queer love letter to the power of cinema, revealing how queer consciousness may indeed be constituted from foreclosed possibility by the medium--providing a landscape, a stage, and a mise-en-scène of desire.
English Department, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia 22030, USA. adscahill@gmail.com
Andrew
A
Scahill
D001504:Beauty; D004882:Erotica; D005201:Fantasy; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006708:Homicide; D018452:Homosexuality, Female; D006801:Humans; D008149:Love; D009040:Motion Pictures; D009520:New Zealand