Why Carol Has One of the Most Vibrant Fandoms of Any Queer FilmLast year, a short film named Carol S
WhyCarol Has One of the Most Vibrant Fandoms of Any Queer Film
Last year, a short film namedCarolSupport Group premiered at San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival, depicting a mutiny at a 12 step meeting for people addicted to Todd Haynes’s 2015 romantic drama. They speak entirely in quotes from the film and clutch martini glasses in a tribute to Carol and Therese’s tentative flirtation over lunch. The group leader is named Florence, after the nosy maid in Carol’s perfect but stifling marital mansion. A woman dressed in the coral lipstick and blonde curls of Cate Blanchett’s Carol stands up and declares “I’m an addict,” dropping her gloves on a chair to attract the attention of the group’s Therese, who wears the now-iconic Santa hat and snaps photos. “Carol has given me life,” the blonde haired troublemaker says, casting off her vow to only watch the film “every other weekend….plus Christmas and New Years” in favor of something that made her feel like nothing else has.
Like the fandom thatCarol itself has gradually gathered, the attendees of CarolSupport Group know their obsession goes far beyond what many would perceive as normal. The short is not only self-aware in its satire about the adoration, but a deceptively sweet tribute to what has made Carol’s life beyond the cinema be so successful — the fierce love of the community it has built. “It looked like everything I wanted in a movie,” says Allison Tate, the director of CarolSupport Group.
Carolruns just shy of two hours, and Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 book The Price of Salt, the novel it’s based on, comes in at a little over 250 pages. But since the film’s moderately successful Christmas release nearly three years ago, and following its subsequent lack of Oscars attention (zero wins from six nominations), its adherents have produced hours of YouTube content and countless fan fictions riffing on that relatively short source material. The post–World War II love story between a young aspiring photographer and a wealthy soon-to-be divorcée has given rise to an online community of Tumblr and Twitter superfans addicted to the story’s happy ending and affirmation of lesbian relationships. After seeing it eight times at the cinema, I wrote just before my sixth, “Every time I settle into my cinema seat, hear the first longing notes, I am utterly transported to another world. It’s a world of understanding, a world of love, a world that feels straight from the depths of my heart, too familiar to actually exist.”
Even Cate Blanchett, who has starred in The Lord of the Ringsseries,Thor: Ragnarok, and Cinderella, says that Carolis the performance people talk about the most. “I’ve been stopped in the supermarket by more people about Carol than I have with any other film,” Blanchett said earlier this year. “If a film doesn’t necessarily linger at the box office, that doesn’t mean it won’t have a reach. There are so many platforms for people to encounter films now that our sense of a film’s success really needs to be a lot more elastic.” What started as a handful of ardent fans of the novel — commonly credited as the first uplifting queer female romance — has grown into a phenomenon, with its own intricate world of memes, jokes, and references.
