[Pride 2020] "I always thought the only alien in this high school was me" - Navigating Identity In The Faculty

You don’t need me to tell you that the ‘90s were noxious for the queer community. America was still living the aftereffects of the wave of conservatism that came with The Reagan Era the decade before, and fear rooted in the AIDS crisis had people digging their heels deeper into their homophobia. Queer representation has pretty much always aligned itself with the monstrous in horror, but if you were to browse the aisles of Blockbuster in the ‘90s, you’d be even more hard pressed than usual to find positive representation in mainstream new releases. Instead, you’d be much more likely to find our community represented as serial killers (The Silence of the Lambs, if you choose to ignore Hannibal Lecter’s arguments) and lethal lesbians (Heavenly Creatures, Fun), and sociopathic bisexual women (Basic Instinct, Butterfly Kiss, Poison Ivy).

But the ‘90s were also special for the teen horror cycle that flourished in a decade that some people (definitely not me!) otherwise consider a dry-spell for horror movies. Teen screams were a staple for the ‘90s in the way that slasher franchises had been for the decade before. Revisiting ‘90s teen movies these days usually means sitting through the discomfort of slurs slung around as insults and depictions that weren't much better than what the rest of the horror genre was dishing out. A queer reading of Billy and Stu in Scream (1996) feels especially uncomfy when you know that school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold would get a similar treatment by media in just a few years.

The Faculty hit theaters in time for the holidays in 1998, and gave us Stokely Mitchell, played by Clea DuVall, easily one of the most obviously queer-coded protagonists in teen horror since Jesse Walsh in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Tara and Willow wouldn’t kiss on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for another three years, so Stokely was pretty much the first relatable maybe-lesbian I got to see on-screen.

And let me tell you: Stokely is a confusing introduction to your own identity.

I don’t remember exactly when I first watched The Faculty, but in 1998 I was a pre-teen with absolutely no self-awareness. I had been already been offered the label “lesbian” for years at this point, thanks to bullies who generously chanted it at me while cornering me in the school yard or jabbed it my way whenever I was in some way weird or uncool in their eyes, but it wouldn’t occur to me that the label was actually mine to cherish and wear for another decade or so. What I did know was that I was drawn to angry, racoon-eyed Stokely. Maybe it’s because I was also a weirdly greasy-haired kid who preferred to be left alone to read. Maybe it’s because I was going through a brief phase where I would only wear black, navy blue, and charcoal gray. Maybe I just had a fledgling crush on Clea DuVall.

The characters in The Faculty, like characters in most teen movies, are relegated to easy-to-read high school archetypes, with wants and desires that we, as the teen audience, should understand as parallel to our own adolescent wants and desires. Stereotypical jock Stan (Shawn Hatosy) just wants his peers to see him working hard and earning his grades (even if it means failing) instead of coasting on his athletic prowess; drug-dealer-with-a-heart-of-gold-and-a-bad-haircut Zeke  (Josh Hartnett) is disillusioned and craves people who will be present in his life, not to mention a better outlet for his unsung genius; nerdy, tiny Casey (Elijah Wood) wants to find community and for the pretty girl (Jordana Brewster) to notice him.

Goth-ish sci-fi nerd Stokely keeps up the pretense that she’s a lesbian as a social barrier so people will leave her alone. I don’t know how she possibly thought that a lesbian identity would make her anything other than a target for verbal abuse or worse, and, being high school in the ‘90s, this is exactly what she becomes.

What secret desire is Stokely actually protecting? She clings to an angry lesbian persona so no one will suspect that she’s harbouring a secret crush on Stan. Yep, the star quarterback.

To reiterate: the jock is secretly academic, the drug dealer is secretly sweet, the nerd is secretly cool, and the lesbian is secretly…straight?

Uh. Sure. Fine. Whatever.

As a teen movie, The Faculty really fumbles its messaging. It seems to be trying to make some sort of statement about navigating identity and where it balances out our teenaged cravings to simultaneously find a sense of belonging among our peers and to establish ourselves as individuals. In a telling conversation, Marybeth (Laura Harris) asks Stokely if she’s tired of being an outsider, implying that Stokely can never belong while identifying as the school lesbian.

The monster of the movie is an alien invader that enforces its rule through conformity: it’s a parasite that turns its hosts into placid, cleaned-up versions of themselves, suddenly very concerned with hydration, but otherwise content and “normal,” if a little Stepford-y. Our ragtag group of heroes have no common thread among them except a class schedule and Tommy Hilfiger-sponsored wardrobes. Their victory over the aliens promises that they can each hold onto their individuality and continue to be themselves. In Stokely’s sci-fi books, the humans don’t win. The aliens always get their way and impose their will upon the heroes, turning them into pod people, into puppet versions of themselves.

But in The Faculty, the humans are victorious, right? The alien is defeated, crushed under bleachers and jammed in the eye with a pen full of crushed caffeine pills. Slugs escape from the infected teens and shrivel away. Things can go back to normal.

And the epilogue serves up “normal” in excess: our heroes take their victory as new freedom to conform more closely to the status quo.

For Stokely, conformity means a clichéd heteronormative relationship with quarterback Stan, featuring a freshly scrubbed face and a sweet pastel purple sweater set. In the cardigan-ed vein of Ally Sheedy’s Allison in The Breakfast Club, she’s suddenly transformed into someone more accessible to the straight male gaze, and become someone wholly unfamiliar to me. Even if it was presaged earlier in the film, it still feels like a major betrayal to her character. I was mad about it when I first saw it, and I’m mad about it now.

If a happy ending meant becoming someone unrecognizable, what could it mean for me?

I often joke that Stokely was a formative character for me as a pre-teen lesbian, but it’s a joke that always tastes a little bitter, no matter how much I adore her (or rather, the initial grimy, tough-but-secretly-soft-and-lonely, acid retort-spitting version of her).

I like to think that beyond the end credits Stokely leaves Herrington, Ohio, goes to college and sheds her compulsory heterosexuality. She realizes that she can find a community with better people. People who won’t shame her for her identity and who will keep up with her encyclopedic genre knowledge. Maybe I’m projecting, but hey — isn’t that part of why we need positive representation in the first place?

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