Turning Red and Seeing Red

There's this very weird moment in Domee Shi's new movie Turning Red. It's early in the film around minute four. The four main girls are all staring at Devon, the 17-year-old convenience store clerk, and Meilin's three friends swoon over Devon, but Meilin says he's gross, makes a barf face, and then says besides he looks like a hobo. And then she does that homophobic broken wrist thing (a gesture that has been reworked and recoded by queer communities on TikTok) that means Is he... you know...? I guess I wouldn't have noticed this except that she says the word hobo, which sounds a hell of a lot like homo. And who calls someone else a hobo anyway? Coupled with the gesture, it sticks out very weirdly.

Now, Meilin does make a limp wrist gesture earlier in the movie, to be fair. When she first gets on the bus (near the two-minute mark) she says I don't mean to brag, but... and makes that broken-wrist gesture. It is, here, designed to indicate a kind of pretentiousness, I guess. Meilin imagines herself a grown up even though she's plainly not, and she's putting on airs.

But what in the world is this hobo thing doing there? It puzzled me the entire film. It feels like a strange, homophobic moment that the filmmakers just let sit there. It's made doubly weird since the entire plot of Turning Red is a kind of large-scale queer allegory. It's about the messiness of puberty, about choosing your friends and your desires over those of your family. And then the film's big lesson is about how we all have messy parts of ourselves that we hide or don't want to admit to – you know, like sexual interests that feel abnormal – but that we need to learn to incorporate them into our subjectivities.