Warning: This article contains spoilers for Single White Female, as well as discussions of ableism, hom*ophobia, sex and violence, sexual assault, and animal abuse/death.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve looked at movies I’ve had pretty positive things to say about for this series. However, we aren’t really giving the history of queer horror an honest look if we don’t have an eye for the questionable, dubious, and problematic, too. This week I’m getting a little more ambivalent about 1992’s Single White Female.
I’m not the only one who’s ambivalent. Single White Female, itself, doesn’t seem to be entirely clear on what it’s aiming for. I’ll get into that a bit more shortly. With a screenplay by Don Roos and direction by Barbet Schroeder, Single White Female is based on a thriller novel by John Lutz, titled SWF Seeks Same.
It fits squarely into the body of erotic thrillers during a time when censorship regulations and debates relaxed after the 1980s. It became de rigueur to see how far those boundaries could be pushed before they snapped. Namely, in the form of working nudity — usually, if not always, nude women — and softcore sex scenes worked into a script wherever remotely possible. In other words, SWF and its cohort exist in the temporal space between “video nasty” and easily accessible hardcore p*rnography.
To the movie’s arguable credit, the script does away with the novel’s clunky, racist-inflected title. Instead, it has our main character, Allison, simply post “SWF seeks roommate” in her want ad in the early stages of the film. Things are, however, not that simple. Allie is looking for a roommate in the wake of her breakup with fiancé Sam, after discovering that he cheated on her with his ex-wife.
The problem? Her apartment is rent-controlled, and she’s not supposed to have a roommate. Here, Single White Female falls into the same trap as just about every movie set in New York City I’ve ever watched. That is, characters with modest salaries living in anything other than a shoebox apartment in a city that’s famously hard to thrive in. Still, we’re meant to believe that Allie doesn’t need financial help with the rent, but simply doesn’t want to be alone after the breakup.
Okay. Premise accepted, I guess. Allie navigates the search for a roommate with occasional input from friend and neighbor, Graham. In an arguably refreshing move for an early 1990s film, Graham is casually introduced as gay, without fanfare or conflict. I daresay this isn’t unrelated to Don Roos’s involvement in the film as an openly gay screenwriter. We’ll return to why that’s important. For now, suffice it to say that Don Roos’s role in this film is likely one of the reasons Single White Female has been retroactively adopted into the queer “canon” in the years since its release.
Two weeks ago, I looked at Jennifer’s Body, and discussed the ways that metatextual references and subtle cues are often a hook for queer audiences, intentionally or otherwise. Single White Female certainly draws on threads from previous films — most notably Ingmar Bergman’s Persona — but these are largely only visible if you’re really looking for them. What stood out to me, watching SWF, jumps out most starkly in one scene in particular.
Allie’s search for a roommate essentially takes the form of a montage, wherein several women rotate through her apartment, getting to know her and the space before they each make a decision. What struck me was that each and every one of the four women that visit the apartment resembled spitting-image archetypes of queer women I’ve known in my personal life. Stereotyped, yes, overdrawn, absolutely. There’s no question about that.
Nonetheless, we rifled through a butch woman with a penchant for leather jackets and home hardware who wants to impress Allie with her knowledge of carpentry and home repair. Then came a femme woman who spends almost her entire sequence wordlessly checking Allie out, and being checked out by her. A bookish, bespectacled and hyper-talkative woman drops her personal trauma in Allie’s lap within moments of meeting her. Finally, a cleanly-dressed, politely-spoken, But I’m A Cheerleader-esque blonde throwing off waves of “I’m a professional gay, please like me.” appears.
It’s hard to say if these particular ciphers were deliberate. On the one hand, they’re barely even ciphers, and it’s hard to believe Don Roos didn’t know what he was doing. On the other hand, the butch candidate, for instance, is simply credited as “Mannish Applicant” on IMDB. This is hardly the only time the movie almost says something about lesbians, only to duck it when it gets too close.
Moving on. Enter Jennifer Jason Leigh as Hedy Carlson, a seemingly mousy late arrival who catches Allie mid-crying jag over Sam. Despite Allie’s attempts to get her to come back the next day, Hedy quietly but insistently inserts herself into Allie’s space. This point of the plot might feel a little contrived to anyone who’s gone through a similar roommate search to Allie. A refusal to respect the very first boundary set down probably throws up a red flag already.
Still, there wouldn’t be much of a movie if it simply ended there. Allie reluctantly hunkers down, and it seems to work out okay. After some laughter over a disaster involving a broken sink, the two women settle into an easier rapport and seem to warm to each other.
Indeed, everything about this scene is set up like a “meetcute” and for what it’s worth, it works. Giggling while getting a little wet and having to take your clothes off to dry feels like a date. It’s a date. Sure. The more deliberately queer Bound (1996) worked in a sexier version of the sink-fixing scene four years later. Apparently this is a mating ritual for queer women in 90s erotic thrillers? No wonder I spent my coming out years unable to get a date. Damn.
During the conversation after the sink incident, Hedy utters the first of many indications that she will struggle with defining her place in between Allie and Sam. She is concerned about moving in with Allie and then being displaced if Allie and Sam get back together. She says “I don’t wanna move out here and catch you on the rebound and have things change.”
This isn’t really an unreasonable concern, if you ask me. I, too, would be worried about moving into an apartment only to find myself kicked out a month later because my roommate changed her mind. What jumps out at me here is the phrasing; “on the rebound.” It gives off the sense that Hedy is worried about being a temporary replacement for Allie’s straight, charming, neurotypical, philandering but socially acceptable ex-fiancé. She fears being someone to set aside when Sam gets back into Allie’s life. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t really sound like something straight women worry about too much. Just a feeling.
It’s not a surprise to anyone in the audience when this is exactly what happens. However, at this early point in the film, Allie dismisses Hedy’s concerns and reassures her. A scene that follows shortly after Hedy officially moves in adds a convoluted thread to the plot that is never really visited again. This thread could have gone a long way toward solidifying the story if it was pulled on more than once.
While Hedy is in the shower, Allie enters Hedy’s bedroom and begins looking through her things. She tries on Hedy’s perfume. She holds up Hedy’s pearl earrings to see how they would look on her. This almost feels like a red herring for Allie being the intrusive, inappropriate one. Though Allie is apologetic and flustered when she gets caught, Hedy clearly takes this as the two of them being the same. She is immediately emboldened and less mousily timid, abruptly more comfortable and confident in Allie’s space. She goes so far as to strip naked in front of Allie without hesitation or so much as a by-your-leave.
Allie quickly averts her gaze, but it’s a strange moment to create and then never revisit. Indeed, as the film rolls on and Allie continues being nice to Hedy without kicking her out as her behavior gets increasingly inappropriate, this scene would have lent itself to a different interpretation. Even a nod or two back to it would have been an improvement.
I might have found this movie more interesting — and perhaps less hashtag problematic — if the script used that scene to leverage the idea of Allie being equal parts intrigued and unsettled by Hedy’s behaviour. To play Allie off as someone who is complicatedly flattered, and curious to see how far Hedy will go, would be an improvement. Because Hedy lives out the kind of impulsive, consumptive abandon Allie wishes she could play out herself.
From where I’m standing, that would have grounded the characters’ relationship more solidly, rather than leaving us constantly asking why Allie doesn’t just leave or kick Hedy out. It would also offer up a more recognizable and perhaps less troubling queer allegory. Namely, “Hedy does and takes and says what she wants. Why can’t I do that?” I guess Allie had to be a nice girl, though, or the story wouldn’t work? Is this a cautionary tale about the “evils” of the closet? What is going on here? I have some questions, Mr. Roos.
Moving on. It isn’t long before the two women settle into a domestic rhythm. However, reading between the lines of the film, it’s soon evident that it’s a fairly calculated one. Hedy goes out one day and comes home with a golden retriever puppy she names Buddy. When Allie confronts her because she can’t have a roommate in a rent-controlled apartment and certainly can’t have a dog, Hedy is wide-eyed and apologetic, blaming it on an impulse. “They were just giving puppies away,” she says. “I had a dog called Buddy when I was a kid,” she also mentions, which is something Allie already knows is a difficult time for Hedy, as Hedy previously told her she is a surviving twin whose sister was stillborn. It is hard to say no to that, and the puppy is very cute.
As the audience, though, it’s not hard to identify that Hedy has gotten the dog on purpose. The dog is there to distract Allie from Sam and to give them a “child” to take care of together. In doing so, she brings Allie closer to her, and binds their life together as a “family” in which Sam isn’t wanted or needed. To unpick Allie’s reservations about the dog, Hedy deliberately leaves Buddy behind a closed door in the apartment and simply lets him cry and whine, watching through a crack in her bedroom door as Allie goes to tend to him.
She looks pleased to see Allie warming to the dog, and we next see Allie at work with Buddy sitting in her lap. Hedy’s plan has clearly worked. She has made room for herself and her “child” in Allie’s life. Hedy soon takes on the role of helper, bringing Allie tea and snacks as she works, cleaning the apartment and commenting on how hard Allie is working. In other words, Hedy has positioned herself as a very stereotypical, backwards rendition of Allie’s “wife.” Gross. I know. It was the early 90s. I am dealing with this movie with a whole fistful of salt, not just a pinch.
In the first half of the movie, Hedy also positions herself both emotionally and physically as a protector against Sam. She acts as a mediator when he calls to apologize so that Allie doesn’t have to talk to him if she doesn’t want to, and inserts herself physically between the two when Sam forces his way into the apartment to confront Allie about dodging him. However, Hedy is also deleting messages left on the voicemail machine from Sam, and hiding notes Sam writes to Allie. Though Allie seems relieved not to hear from him, she probably doesn’t realize what Hedy is doing in getting Allie all to herself.
Of course, this doesn’t last. Hedy’s fear from the very early moments of the movie comes to fruition. Sam and Allie make up, and not long after begin sleeping together again. Intercut with scenes of Sam and Allie are scenes of Hedy acting like a jilted girlfriend, going through some very familiar “breakup” imagery. She’s sitting around watching melancholy romance movies, eating ice cream, seething in the bathtub, and having no emotional space for the dog she adopted to get closer to Allie.
Her delicately created “family life” is falling apart, and she’s finding herself standing on the outside of it looking in. All the while, just as she feared, Sam takes her place as Allie’s “most important person.” When Allie finally returns home, Hedy is sitting in Allie’s bed in the dark, seemingly having been there for hours.
The mousy, nervously-spoken girl is nowhere to be seen. Her voice is suddenly hard and dark with rage when she bites out, “Where the hell have you been?” and “I’ve been waiting since six o’clock last night to hear from you.” Though Hedy quickly reframes this as concern that Allie might have been in danger. “Things happen in New York” she points out. The growing desire to have Allie is clear from her tone.
Curiously, Allie tries to laugh this off as Hedy “making her feel like she’s sixteen.” It’s, apparently, easier to nervously crack wise about Hedy taking on a “fatherly” role than it is to confront the reality that Hedy might have had feelings for her and gotten them stepped on. Yeah. Lesbian desire is really scary, I guess. It’s totally less weird to call your queer roommate your dad. Okay, Allie. Let me know when you’re ready to talk.
To say the least, Hedy isn’t reassured by Allie’s attempts at nicety. Perceiving her relationship to Allie as under threat, and resolving that she can’t just tell Allie this, she instead begins trying to stoke Allie’s jealousies and insecurities by having Allie question Sam’s fidelity again. For instance, Hedy approaches Sam not long after Allie and Sam have just slept together, to talk to him while he is lounging naked in bed. This is something that clearly makes Allie tense and uncomfortable.
The surface reading — and probably the intended one — is just that. Hedy is trying to make Allie jealous and mistrustful of Sam. When I watched it, though, a question arose of whether Hedy was only trying to vilify Sam, and thereby draw Allie back to her. Or was she also trying to drag Allie into a proper confrontation with her, rather than the walking-on-eggshells niceties Allie has been displaying all along.
I could be convinced by the latter if — as with the scene where Allie is rifling through Hedy’s things early on — the movie committed to it. There could be a case to make here for Hedy trying to provoke a confrontation. One that would allow her to either A) break down and insist how much better than her Allie is and how much Hedy needs someone good to be around to keep her on an even keel, or B) end the relationship for good so she can stop feeling like the third wheel. Either of those might be more interesting than what we were given. As is, though, I’m not altogether convinced the movie knew what it was going for here. Sadly that is something of a recurring issue with SWF’s overarching story.
In any case, after planting the seed of doubt about Sam’s fidelity, Hedy kisses Allie’s cheek and goes to bed. Allie gets into bed but is clearly not comfortable, staring at the ceiling fan and ignoring Sam. She wakes up in the middle of the night and reaches for Sam, initially panicking for a moment when the mattress feels empty, until she realizes he’s just further away from her than she thought. However, she then hears a creaking sound from down the hall and goes to investigate.
After a few moments, she can clearly hear the sounds of Hedy masturbating. Yet Allie goes to look in on her anyway when she finds the door is partway open. Hedy seems oblivious and fully absorbed until she hears the puppy in Allie’s arms yelping from just outside. At this point, Hedy startles and sits up, suddenly stopping, and prompting Allie to rush back to her room and pretend to be sleeping. Given everything that has led to this point — plus, seriously, who “accidentally” leaves their bedroom door open when they’re going to masturbat*? — it’s hard to believe Hedy didn’t want Allie to see her. That’s not even mentioning the fairly easy implication that she was fantasizing about Allie while doing so.
If we indeed take this as Hedy’s intention, it becomes abundantly clear the next day that it has backfired. Allie is cold and distant from Hedy and is making serious moves toward finding a new apartment into which she can move with Sam. Hedy, of course, perceives this as a rejection and betrayal, even though Allie is trying to temper her feelings of obligation to Hedy by allowing her to keep the current apartment. After all, she has already put a lot of money and time into it.
Allie, for her part, feels that she can’t leave Hedy alone or entirely cut her off as she thinks she’s Hedy’s only friend. This feels a little out of step with Allie’s coldness to her the morning after the incident. Though a generous reading allows for Allie being conflicted between guilt, discomfort, and genuine care. Sure. For the sake of argument, let’s buy it.
Hedy, however, reacts to the circ*mstances with losing her patience and temper, as she stays alone in the apartment for hours. It’s heavily implied that she “gets back at” Allie by killing the puppy they’ve been taking care of together. This could be read as revenge or simply lashing out because Allie getting back together with Sam means she doesn’t need the distraction of their “child” anymore. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue that it’s a little of both.
Needless to say, Allie is rightfully distraught, and blames Hedy for leaving the window open out of which Buddy fell to his death. Hedy seems genuinely contrite and willing to take the blame. Though the moment Allie rushes out of the apartment again, she turns to a stony, silent coldness that suggests otherwise.
During Hedy’s later display of grief and guilt over Buddy’s death, which may be questionably genuine, she gets very physically close with Sam. She throws herself into his arms as she cries and even leans in for a kiss. However, he pulls away and quietly closes her into her bedroom. It seems at least at a surface reading, that Sam has truly been redeeming himself from the cheater we first met. Your mileage may vary here — I personally don’t trust the guy — but I guess I can appreciate that Single White Female recognizes the fundamental humanity of its characters and doesn’t assert that any of them are unequivocally “bad.” Maybe. If I’m being generous.
For Hedy’s part, one could argue that this scene hinges on her looking for the physical comfort and intimacy she hasn’t been able to get from Allie. In a way, this also reminds me of a point I raised regarding Jennifer’s Body, where Jennifer has been eating boys that Needy has expressed some form of interest in. Hedy can’t have or be with Allie, so she compensates by consuming, threatening, or otherwise isolating Allie from the men in her life. Failing that, if we squint, maybe she tries to seduce Sam as some kind of proxy “this is the person that kissed Allie last so it’s the next best thing to kissing Allie herself” situation? It is hard to say. Single White Female needs to make up its mind.
If the narrative wasn’t murky already, this is where it gets increasingly so. Hedy has moved on from trying to be with Allie to trying to be her. She purchases identical clothes to Allie in her own size, and gets an identical haircut and color to Allie when they go to the hair salon together.
At the same time, Hedy is once again playing the role of protector. When Allie suffers an attempted sexual assault by Mitchell, a man for whom she has been working throughout the movie, Hedy is her comforter and steel spine despite previous hostility. Hedy places a threatening call to Mitchell, pretending to be Allie and assuring him that she will destroy his career and his family if he uses the assault to discredit her professionally, then hangs up.
This scene toes a strange line of genuine affection and desire to protect Allie, versus quiet delight that it gets Allie relying on her again to guard her against the both perceived and real threats coming from the men in Allie’s life. Indeed, once she hangs up the phone, she is clearly hoping for Allie’s approval, which she gets, after a fashion. If you’ve already guessed where this movie is going, there’s something nearly hamfisted in Allie’s answering, “Gee, Hedy, I hope you never get mad at me.” Even so, Hedy seems thrilled by the perceived affirmation and Allie’s at least surface acceptance of her help.
Nonetheless, it soon becomes clear that this exchange hasn’t restored all of Allie’s trust in Hedy. Once again, while Hedy is showering, Allie sneaks into her room. This time, she is looking through Hedy’s shoebox of keepsakes that she keeps tucked away in her wardrobe. Within the box, she finds the “family photo” of the two of them with the dog, as well as an older photo of two twin girls and a puppy. This discovery clearly brings home the realization that Hedy lied about her twin sister being stillborn.
Among the other items in the box is also a newspaper clipping about Hedy’s sister’s death by drowning at age 9 during a family picnic. Allie learns that Hedy’s real name is Ellen Besch, together with some letters addressed to Ellen from her father. The final discovery is the letter Sam wrote to her shortly after the breakup, which contains a heartfelt apology and returns his key to the apartment. The envelope is already open, suggesting Hedy/Ellen read it and then hid it from Allie deliberately.
Too unsettled by her discoveries to confront Hedy about her lies, Allie quickly leaves the apartment, telling Hedy she is going to go visit Graham. Meanwhile, Hedy prepares to go out for the night. Allie carefully follows her to what she soon realizes is an underground sex club, within which Hedy is calling herself Allie as she talks to men at the bar.
Watching Hedy use her look and name to seduce people in the midst of a smoky club full of flashing lights, pulsing music, and scantily leather-clad customers is clearly overwhelming and unsettling for Allie. In the same scene, though, she also flinches away from a woman who latches onto her and offers to “play.” It is hard to disentangle her discomfort looking at Hedy from a burgeoning sense of “lesbian fear” that seems to permeate the film.
Afterward, Allie returns to the apartment building, and goes to visit Graham in order to decompress and make sense of her thoughts. Despite the strain and discomfort of this encounter and everything that led up to it, Allie insists to Graham that Hedy needs help, and that she still feels in some way responsible for her. Graham is skeptical, and expresses his readiness to take Hedy to task if Allie won’t. In perhaps one of my favorite lines of this movie, Graham says “I can be butch when I have to, I get it from my mother.” Nonetheless, he ultimately offers to get in touch with his therapist friend to see if there might not be some way to help Hedy, or at least to help Allie disentangle herself from her.
Unbeknownst to both of them, while this is happening, Hedy has already snuck into Graham’s apartment to try and confront him after Allie leaves. She has heard the entire conversation through the air vent. She almost decides against it and is trying to leave when Graham catches her. He initially mistakes her for Allie from behind, but quickly realizes it’s Hedy.
He then tries to reassure her and tell her they only want to help her, but she already knows from overhearing them that Graham is not “on her side.” She frantically insists that she didn’t do anything wrong and she doesn’t want help, but eventually snaps and beats Graham with a fireplace poker. It looks fatal, and for a good portion of the movie the audience is led to believe it is.
Fractious and increasingly volatile after this (clearly unplanned) act of violence, Hedy drives the point harder on trying to convince Allie that Sam isn’t to be trusted. This time she insists to Allie’s face that Sam “will cheat on her again” and that, when he does, Allie shouldn’t come to her for help or comfort, “because she’s had it with her.” Seeing that Allie is upset and angered but not coming around to Hedy’s side, Hedy instead proceeds to trick Sam into a sexual encounter with her. She uses her new appearance to fool him into thinking she’s Allie until the last moment.
It seems that Hedy’s intention here is to prove that Sam isn’t capable of being faithful to Allie, as she insists that Sam knew it was her all along and went along with it anyway. Yet clearly, this is not how the scene reads as Sam is clearly stunned, hurt, angry and repulsed. While we can arguably credit the movie for not falling into familiar and worrying tropes of “men can’t be raped,” this conflicts with Single White Female’s efforts to position Hedy as a sympathetic yet unhealthy figure, much like I commented on in my review of Assaf Bernstein’s Look Away.
These women are either violent rapists or they’re people we should sympathize with. Approaching these films in our current climate, it’s difficult to wrap my head around someone who could be both. From where I’m standing, SWF loses its grip on the balance between Hedy’s destructiveness and her sympathetic attributes by having her engage in sexual violence.
This scene culminates in Hedy’s second attack of the movie. Although she clearly doesn’t go to Sam’s place with the intention of killing him, she ends up doing so on an angry, wounded impulse when Sam insists he’s going to tell Allie what she did. This flight of panic can either be read as Hedy being unable to handle the concept of Allie knowing what she’s capable of or as Hedy balking at the idea that Sam might steal her show and take her place again as protector and most trusted person. Once again, this is probably a little of both.
Hedy’s secret doesn’t stay a secret for long, though. Allie hears of Sam’s death through a news broadcast, and promptly rushes to throw up in the bathroom, where she sees a bloody stiletto heel of Hedy’s on the bathroom floor. She quickly, and fearfully, draws the conclusion that Hedy must have killed Sam. Hedy soon confirms this in one of the more tense scenes of a movie that, by this point, has really been starting to drag on.
Hedy tries to control the narrative, spinning a version of events that had her kill Sam in self-defense and insisting that Sam “deserved it.” When Allie is not reassured by this explanation, Hedy’s edges harden once more, and she points out that Allie has effectively become her alibi. By not putting Hedy on the lease, hiding her from the other tenants in the apartment building, and through Hedy stocking her wardrobe with identical clothes to Allie’s, the two women have, albeit inadvertently on Allie’s part, created a scenario in which there is no Hedy. As Hedy points out, “I was you” when she killed Sam, and she insists that Allie has to run away with her, or she’ll be arrested.
The water here is pretty unavoidably muddled, calling attention to the core confusion of Single White Female’s narrative. It seems to flipflop time and again between being queer or not being queer, textually. It gets close, and then strafes sideways into “oh, Hedy is just obsessive and crazy.” It gets close, and then turns another corner into “no, Hedy isn’t gay, she wants Allie to replace her twin who died.”
Pieces of media that uses “brotherly” and “sisterly” relationships to avoid the suggestion that two characters might be queer are dime a dozen. It’s possible that framing Hedy as a “crazy” girl obsessed with replicating her twin was the only way this movie got financial backing in the early 90s. Even so, with how much queer text (ciphered and overt) is repeated throughout SWF, I still struggle to wrap my head around it. How exactly did a gay screenwriter manage to write a movie about gay women, who aren’t really gay because they’re sisters, for a target audience that seems to be mostly comprised of cis straight men? Wait, what?
Indeed, the climax of Single White Female continually comes across as confused in its own right. It centers on Hedy’s desire for a replacement twin, but also hinges on pivotal scenes like Allie persuading Hedy not to slit her throat through kissing her on the mouth and saying, “Don’t make me leave you, Ellen.” This prompts a clear conflict in Hedy/Ellen, as Allie has just affirmed her true identity and has really seen her in a gesture that is hard to read as anything other than romantically intimate. This leads Hedy to break down crying in Allie’s lap.
We also learn during this part of the movie that Hedy has seemingly done something like this before, as she makes an off-hand remark about a “stupid girl in Tampa” that she had previously been close to. There is emphasis on previously as the girl in question called Hedy’s parents and “told them all her secrets,” which is hard not to read as Hedy being outed as queer against her will. SWF then reverts back to the “twins” question, as Hedy asserts, “Did you know that identical twins are never really identical? There’s always one who’s prettier. And the one who’s not does all the work. She used me, and then she left me. Just like you.”
Which is it, SWF? The movie doesn’t seem to know. One of Allie’s most significant lines during the final confrontations is, “I’m not your sister, Hedy. Not anymore. I’m like you now.” What does that even mean? In the reading of this movie whereby Allie envies Hedy’s impulsive abandon — in an interpretation that takes this as an allegory for being openly queer — we could take this as Allie coming out. That doesn’t seem to have been the intention, though, and even if it was, putting it in the same line as “I’m not your sister” just comes over as, frankly, bizarre.
It bears mentioning at this point that Graham isn’t dead, he’s merely unconscious, which is revealed in a moment that, I’ll admit, surprised me. I certainly wasn’t expecting the lone canonically gay character in an early 1990s film to survive, let alone take on a heroic role in the final fight with Hedy. Yet he does, buying enough time for Allie to get the upper hand over her. There’s some clear positives in the casual way Graham is introduced as a gay man, along with his survival of the film, and his pivotal role in resolving the movie’s central conflict.
However, he also winds up tangled in the dubious at best and troubling at worst depictions of queerness in Single White Female. We see neither hide nor hair of a partner, relegating Graham squarely into the category of “sexless gay best friend,” something the Horror Queers also discuss in their podcast episode on this movie. Despite the pleasant surprise of his survival, as the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast points out, Hedy attacking him also brings Single White Female into the lineage of 1980s queer thriller movies set in New York that hinge on violence inflicted on gay bodies, including Cruising, Windows, The Fan, and Dressed to Kill.
At long last, the film wraps up with a voiceover from Allie after Hedy’s inevitable yet arguably tragic death. The last line of the movie is Allie’s, “And every day I try to forgive Hedy for Sam. And every day I try to forgive myself. I know what can happen to someone who doesn’t.” This portion of the script is, in its original context, clearly intended to be a reference to Hedy’s survivor’s guilt over outliving her twin and how it manifested through Hedy’s spiraling out of control. Your mileage may vary on whether you want to join Allie in forgiving her. I have to be honest though, I truly don’t think Single White Female needed to be almost two hours long.
This portion of the script also lends itself to two of the frequently seen trends in retroactively reinterpreting this movie in the decades since its release. A common supposition is that Hedy had borderline personality disorder. I don’t think this is necessarily too far off base, as a lot of the ways in which Hedy’s behavior manifests would seem to line up. However, I’d be hard pressed to say this was intentional as that diagnosis is never used. Additionally, the diagnostic criteria for BPD were still messy and unclear in the DSM-III-R that would have been in commonplace usage when Single White Female came out.
As I mentioned earlier, though, Single White Female has also been retroactively canonized as a queer work by a lot of queer viewers. Approaching the film from that vantage point is, obviously, complicated and troubling given the definitely problematic depiction of queerness here. However, it also adds a layer to “I know what can happen to someone who doesn’t.” If we interpret Allie’s character journey as queer, this line could lend itself to a commentary on the layers and challenges of being in the closet. It also adds commentary on the mental health significance of feeling at liberty to come out and act on your queer feelings and desire.
Yes, we can interpret this movie as queer. Many of us do, myself included. Though I still struggle with the heavy involvement of a gay screenwriter in an ultimately very questionable product permeated by lesbian fear. I think it’s ultimately too generous to characterize Single White Female as a movie that ever had sympathy or empathy for queer women in mind.
At the end of the day, I have to agree with Inkoo Kang, previously of The Wrap and Slate and more recently of The Hollywood Reporter, on this one. SWF is “a historically fascinating but unsettlingly lesbian-phobic cautionary tale about female independence.” No kidding. I guess I should marry the boyfriend who cheated on me so I don’t end up in the clutches of a crazy lesbian-slash-codependent twin. Or maybe I’m the queer threat in this scenario? Who knows. Don Roos can tell me about his brainspace writing this movie any time he feels like it.
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