Mission Impossible Ii And The Final Bastion Of Hollywood Villains Being Coded As Gay

‘Mission: Impossible II’ And The Final Bastion Of Hollywood Villains Being Coded As Gay

By Ariel Fisher/July 15, 2019 10:00 am EST

(Welcome to Queering the Scene, a series that explores LGBTQ themes and content in films of all kinds…especially where you least expect it.) Queer representation in cinema has often been problematic. As a result of queer coding, the LGBTQ+ community was often portrayed as violent, threatening, and abhorrent, an active threat to civilized heteronormative society. But queer coding isn’t a new concept. In fact, its roots lay deep within film history. 

Those roots will eventually take us to Mission: Impossible II of all things. But first, we need to look back. Far back.

A Magnum Opus of Homophobic Queer Coding

19 years ago, in May of 2000, John Woo created a stunning magnum opus to queer coding that has seldom been topped: Mission: Impossible 2. Or as I’ve come to call it while working on this piece, Homophobia: The Movie. In this installment, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team are after a deadly virus-turned-biological weapon called Chimera. The mission they’ve chosen to accept is to find it and destroy it before rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) gets his hands on it and unleashes it on the world.    Presumed friend of Hunt, Dr. Nekhorvich (Rade Serbedzija), created the virus, giving only this explanation as to its purpose: “Every search for a hero must begin with something that every hero requires – a villain. Therefore, in search for our hero, Bellerophon, we created a monster – Chimera.” It’s in these opening shots that we see the first hints of coding: a dark, sterile lab where death is born…with a rainbow? There’s no logical reason for this to happen. A little grade 1 science here, but rainbows form when light is refracted, reflected, and dispersed through, typically, water. You don’t get rainbows through straight sheets of glass such as windows. This placement is specific and deliberate. But it could be a fluke…right?When Nekhorvich leaves his lab, infected with the virus, he walks outside to a group of children dancing and singing “Ring A Ring ‘O Roses”, ashes ashes and all. For those who may not know, the nursery rhyme has a long history of being connected to the Bubonic Plague, though this is mostly just an urban legend. However, it’s a concept deeply ingrained in the public consciousness, often simply with the association of death. The fact that these kids are all in grey formalwear is both ominous and confusing. But the fact that there are couples walking all around them, and every pairing is same-sex? Well, now, isn’t this telling.  We then meet Nyah (Thandie Newton), Hunt’s love interest for the next hour and a half – a unique step in and of itself when you consider a fast love affair on the job is distinctly out of character for Hunt, and he never does it again in the entire franchise. But Nyah is special, because she’s the “beard” ex of our villain, Ambrose, and he wants her back at all costs. Ambrose’s right hand man, Hugh Stamp (Richard Roxburgh), isn’t pleased with Nyah’s return. They try to play it off as base-level suspicion, but Hugh is coded as the gay jealous lover from top to bottom. The framing, thanks to Top Gun director of photography Jeffrey Kimball, positions Hugh unequivocally as the jealous lover watching from afar. Hugh and Ambrose even have a quarrel the morning after her arrival that ends with some very suggestive framing. Ambrose holds Hugh down, standing behind him, in order to snip the tip of his finger off in a disciplinarian move that vividly suggests pleasurable sodomy. What was that? Oh, sorry. I thought I heard a volleyball match going on in the background. Perhaps you’re familiar with the harmful notion of “the homosexual agenda”, a term coined by the Christian right in the 1980s to condemn the normalization and social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people and lifestyles. It purports that gay folks infiltrate regular society by passing as straight in order to seem less threatening and, therefore, worthy of acceptance. It’s antiquated and pure homophobic fear mongering. But in 2000, it was something plenty of folks bought into. Hell, it still is. And what M:I 2 was doing at the time was coding Chimera, our destructive chemical weapon, as the homosexual or gay agenda. So in the process of coding the villains, Ambrose and Hugh, as gay, the heroes, Nyah and Hunt, as straight, and Chimera as the gay agenda, Woo successfully coded homosexuality in its entirety as a violent threat to mankind.From the very beginning, M:I 2 not only posits that queerness in general is an aberration, but that it’s synthesized. We watch as Chimera is created in a lab, a manufactured foil to the heterosexual Bellerophon. The very name itself, Chimera, stems from the creature from Greek mythology comprised of a lion’s head with the body of a goat and a snake for a tail. It’s an abomination. Bellerophon, on the other hand, was often regarded as one of the greatest heroes of all time and portrayed as the perfect specimen of a man who slays the Chimera. On top of the mythological elements, M:I 2 reinforces the grossly false ideology that has put queer lives in danger for decades while damaging the public perception of queerness: that queerness is itself an abomination, and an active choice implying its fabrication. The film presents imagery that suggests that the fight for normalizing gay culture, the fight for queer equality and rights for the LGBTQ+ community is tantamount to fighting for the world’s destruction. In the process of coding its queer villains and heteronormative heroes – the personifications of both Chimera and Bellerophon, respectively – Woo managed to code the entire LGBTQ+ community and queerness itself as not only villainous but threatening to the heterosexual norm, procreation, and the sanctity of life itself. Remember that heavily-coded opening scene? With children singing a nursery rhyme linked to the plague that decimated between 25-60% of the entire European population while same-sex “pairings” (READ: couples) walked around them? The end of the film steers as hard as possible in the other direction. Hunt and Nyah see one another across a sunlit field full – and I mean FULL – of children happily playing in the sun surrounded straight couples and families. They meet. They kiss. And they walk off into a living recreation of Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte, here positioned as the heteronormative future. Life returned to the status quo, where marriage is between a man and a woman, and children can run free unafraid of that dreaded gay agenda out to corrupt them. 

‘Mission: Impossible II’ And The Final Bastion Of Hollywood Villains Being Coded As Gay

By Ariel Fisher/July 15, 2019 10:00 am EST

(Welcome to Queering the Scene, a series that explores LGBTQ themes and content in films of all kinds…especially where you least expect it.) Queer representation in cinema has often been problematic. As a result of queer coding, the LGBTQ+ community was often portrayed as violent, threatening, and abhorrent, an active threat to civilized heteronormative society. But queer coding isn’t a new concept. In fact, its roots lay deep within film history. 

Those roots will eventually take us to Mission: Impossible II of all things. But first, we need to look back. Far back.

Those roots will eventually take us to Mission: Impossible II of all things. But first, we need to look back. Far back.

A Quick History Lesson

A Magnum Opus of Homophobic Queer Coding

19 years ago, in May of 2000, John Woo created a stunning magnum opus to queer coding that has seldom been topped: Mission: Impossible 2. Or as I’ve come to call it while working on this piece, Homophobia: The Movie. In this installment, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team are after a deadly virus-turned-biological weapon called Chimera. The mission they’ve chosen to accept is to find it and destroy it before rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) gets his hands on it and unleashes it on the world.    Presumed friend of Hunt, Dr. Nekhorvich (Rade Serbedzija), created the virus, giving only this explanation as to its purpose: “Every search for a hero must begin with something that every hero requires – a villain. Therefore, in search for our hero, Bellerophon, we created a monster – Chimera.” It’s in these opening shots that we see the first hints of coding: a dark, sterile lab where death is born…with a rainbow? There’s no logical reason for this to happen. A little grade 1 science here, but rainbows form when light is refracted, reflected, and dispersed through, typically, water. You don’t get rainbows through straight sheets of glass such as windows. This placement is specific and deliberate. But it could be a fluke…right?When Nekhorvich leaves his lab, infected with the virus, he walks outside to a group of children dancing and singing “Ring A Ring ‘O Roses”, ashes ashes and all. For those who may not know, the nursery rhyme has a long history of being connected to the Bubonic Plague, though this is mostly just an urban legend. However, it’s a concept deeply ingrained in the public consciousness, often simply with the association of death. The fact that these kids are all in grey formalwear is both ominous and confusing. But the fact that there are couples walking all around them, and every pairing is same-sex? Well, now, isn’t this telling.  We then meet Nyah (Thandie Newton), Hunt’s love interest for the next hour and a half – a unique step in and of itself when you consider a fast love affair on the job is distinctly out of character for Hunt, and he never does it again in the entire franchise. But Nyah is special, because she’s the “beard” ex of our villain, Ambrose, and he wants her back at all costs. Ambrose’s right hand man, Hugh Stamp (Richard Roxburgh), isn’t pleased with Nyah’s return. They try to play it off as base-level suspicion, but Hugh is coded as the gay jealous lover from top to bottom. The framing, thanks to Top Gun director of photography Jeffrey Kimball, positions Hugh unequivocally as the jealous lover watching from afar. Hugh and Ambrose even have a quarrel the morning after her arrival that ends with some very suggestive framing. Ambrose holds Hugh down, standing behind him, in order to snip the tip of his finger off in a disciplinarian move that vividly suggests pleasurable sodomy. What was that? Oh, sorry. I thought I heard a volleyball match going on in the background. Perhaps you’re familiar with the harmful notion of “the homosexual agenda”, a term coined by the Christian right in the 1980s to condemn the normalization and social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people and lifestyles. It purports that gay folks infiltrate regular society by passing as straight in order to seem less threatening and, therefore, worthy of acceptance. It’s antiquated and pure homophobic fear mongering. But in 2000, it was something plenty of folks bought into. Hell, it still is. And what M:I 2 was doing at the time was coding Chimera, our destructive chemical weapon, as the homosexual or gay agenda. So in the process of coding the villains, Ambrose and Hugh, as gay, the heroes, Nyah and Hunt, as straight, and Chimera as the gay agenda, Woo successfully coded homosexuality in its entirety as a violent threat to mankind.From the very beginning, M:I 2 not only posits that queerness in general is an aberration, but that it’s synthesized. We watch as Chimera is created in a lab, a manufactured foil to the heterosexual Bellerophon. The very name itself, Chimera, stems from the creature from Greek mythology comprised of a lion’s head with the body of a goat and a snake for a tail. It’s an abomination. Bellerophon, on the other hand, was often regarded as one of the greatest heroes of all time and portrayed as the perfect specimen of a man who slays the Chimera. On top of the mythological elements, M:I 2 reinforces the grossly false ideology that has put queer lives in danger for decades while damaging the public perception of queerness: that queerness is itself an abomination, and an active choice implying its fabrication. The film presents imagery that suggests that the fight for normalizing gay culture, the fight for queer equality and rights for the LGBTQ+ community is tantamount to fighting for the world’s destruction. In the process of coding its queer villains and heteronormative heroes – the personifications of both Chimera and Bellerophon, respectively – Woo managed to code the entire LGBTQ+ community and queerness itself as not only villainous but threatening to the heterosexual norm, procreation, and the sanctity of life itself. Remember that heavily-coded opening scene? With children singing a nursery rhyme linked to the plague that decimated between 25-60% of the entire European population while same-sex “pairings” (READ: couples) walked around them? The end of the film steers as hard as possible in the other direction. Hunt and Nyah see one another across a sunlit field full – and I mean FULL – of children happily playing in the sun surrounded straight couples and families. They meet. They kiss. And they walk off into a living recreation of Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte, here positioned as the heteronormative future. Life returned to the status quo, where marriage is between a man and a woman, and children can run free unafraid of that dreaded gay agenda out to corrupt them.