The Comp Het Canon: Frances Ha

By A. C. Howard

THE PRESSURE TO BE HETEROSEXUAL SATURATES OUR IMAGE BASED CULTURE

PARTICULARLY IN MOVIES THAT ARE DESIGNED TO BE “FUNNY” OR “ROMANTIC”

THE COMP HET CANON IS A SERIES UNPACKING DECISIONS MADE IN POPULAR FILM THAT FRAME HETEROSEXUALITY AS NORMAL, GOOD, AND RIGHTEOUS AND QUEERNESS AS QUIRKY, FREAKY, FUNNY, OR PHASE

IT PROBLEMATIZES WHAT OTHERS ENJOY

I had a really good conversation with a friend recently while they were watching Frances Ha (2012) for the first time. 

I was really excited to hear she was watching it—the first time I saw that movie, it spoke to a lot of feelings that I was having, ones that felt deep and mysterious at the time. So I was surprised to hear that the movie was pissing them off. 

Just wait for The Look, I thought. You know, The Look. The Look at the End of Frances Ha?? When Frances looks across the room at the party and meets her friend Sophie’s eyes. Sophie, who moved out of their shared apartment to live with her boyfriend, whose absence sparked Frances’s second coming of age. At some point in the movie someone asks Frances to explain what she thinks love will feel like. Her answer is that she’ll be able to mingle through a party as a solo person, to explore and feel confident, and then look over at someone else and feel implicitly loved, and understood, and still free. And when she gets it, it’s from her bestie. Awww., So sweet, right? 

The first time I saw this moment it made me sob uncontrollably in the middle of the night. I was staying with my parents, home for Winter Break from my first semester in college. My boyfriend at the time had already gone to bed. Inconsolable, I made myself chocolate chip cookies at two in the morning and tried not to wake my parents up. But talking about it from the other side of the closet door, I realized that Frances Ha is another one of the comp het classics. 

The message subscribes to the “women just have closer friendships” principle, an idea that explains away feeling a special way about a certain someone, if you and that certain someone are both girls. It’s Anne and Diana making up a flag-waving language so that they can communicate even after they’re forbidden from seeing each other. It’s Muriel and Rhonda moving to Sydney together in Muriel’s Wedding (1994).

Throughout my teen and college years, I had tight, tight relationships with people that seemed normal to me, even virtuous when compared to the romantic connections I saw my peers building. There were “friends” with whom I would text every day, and dream of moving into houses together, and be naked around each other all the time. I offered someone a Green Card marriage. That’s what friends are for? 

I remember a conversation I had about this with one of those close college friendships. I was whiny about wanting to be in a relationship, and she would ask me why I didn’t think that love between friends could be as fulfilling as love between partners. “Society doesn’t value friendship as much as relationships.” I remember thinking that she was just totally missing the point. 

It’s not that society doesn’t value friendships as much as relationships—it’s that there is a cultural agenda to make sure women who are in love with each other are framed as friends.

When Sophie moves out of the apartment she shares with Frances, Frances goes through the emotions of a breakup, but she’s not able to face them directly. Instead she spends the movie sleepwalking through social scenes and trying to adjust her expectations for her career. She continues to get love from Sophie, but is supposedly satisfied by not being able to be with her ever again. They stay in each other’s orbits. They give each other The Look. In the end, Frances learns that what she wanted out of romance, she had through friendship all along. 

My friend thought Frances deserved better.