The Flattening of Netflix Characters

It is one of the more perverse ironies of our times that, as society has become more tolerant, it has also become more hysterical. The acceptance of homosexuality has progressed at a remarkable pace, from criminalisation to celebration in the space of a single generation. Yet the manner in which this acceptance has been expressed in art, particularly in cinema and television, leaves one with the impression not of mature integration but of frantic compensation.

There was a time—within living memory, though it already seems distant—when homosexual characters in films were either delicately implied or robustly ignored. It was not that their existence was denied, nor that audiences were composed entirely of reactionary yokels incapable of recognising coded gestures or subtle inflections. Rather, there was an unspoken understanding: that a character’s sexuality, like their digestion or their dentist’s surname, need not be paraded as the defining feature of their moral and narrative universe.

A raised eyebrow, an artfully placed silk scarf, a curiously intense male friendship—these were the signs, more coded than spoken, of a character’s orientation. No one was fooled, of course. But crucially, neither were we beaten over the head with the idea that such an identity must be the sole—and indeed sacred—defining trait of a person’s existence.

Now, however, the pendulum has swung with the force and subtlety of a wrecking ball, and in the opposite direction. We live in an era that demands confession not merely as a spiritual exercise, but as a performative duty. In modern film, characters are no longer permitted to simply be gay; they must proclaim it, revolve around it, and allow no scene to pass without reference to it. Their orientation is not one detail among many but a kind of metaphysical centre of gravity, around which the entire narrative and moral architecture is built. This approach, far from normalising, risks rendering such characters alien, even cartoonish. For no one—gay, straight, or otherwise—goes about their daily life with a flashing neon sign affixed to their foreheads announcing their erotic proclivities. At least, no one with any sense of proportion or self-awareness.

This modern tendency betrays a strangely philistine view of what it means to be human. Take, for example, the character of Michel in Gilmore Girls—a man who is incidentally black, incidentally gay, and primarily irritable. His sexuality is neither concealed nor weaponised. It simply exists, like his French accent and his distaste for incompetence. He is not paraded as an emblem of progress but is allowed the dignity of being a character first and a category later. In this way, he resembles the people one actually meets in life, rather than the ones one is hectored into applauding.

What we are witnessing now, I fear, is not so much liberation as reduction. The person is flattened into the identity; the identity is weaponised into a politics; and the politics is recycled into a product. Characters are not written but assembled, like flat-pack furniture, from checklists: gay, check; person of colour, check; trauma, check. That none of this makes them more compelling or more human seems beside the point. The aim is not to understand, but to affirm.

It is tempting to ascribe this shift to mere ideological fervour, but I suspect something more banal and yet more troubling is at play: cowardice. Writers and producers, anxious not to offend, produce only what they know will be approved by those who might otherwise take to social media with all the fervour of the Spanish Inquisition, albeit with less subtlety. And so we are left with a cinema of slogans, where the human soul is subsumed beneath the banner of representation.

The danger now is not that gay characters are too few, but that they are too simple, too sanctified, too strenuously correct. They are not allowed flaws unless those flaws are pedagogical in function and overcome by act three. But what is this if not a new form of dehumanisation? It is not the bigot who says, "You may not exist," but the ideologue who says, "You may exist only like this."

Long story short, we have traded invisibility for caricature, which may feel like progress but bears all the hallmarks of neurosis. The best characters, gay or straight, are those who behave as people do—unexpectedly, irrationally, with humour and sorrow and vanity and grace. Until the film industry rediscovers this rather obvious fact, it may as well use mannequins draped in rainbow flags in place of human actors.

For like mannequins, these poorly conceived characters are easy to position, but impossible to believe.

Image Source: Gilmore Girls (2000-2007)