"She Hate Me"

But midway through, there's a scene between Mackie and Washington that suggests a smarter movie than the one we've been watching. John, who has never gotten over finding Fatima in bed with that woman, spews his resentment at her for not telling him she was gay. Fatima talks of how she denied her sexuality to herself for years and how she had to find out before she married him. It's one of those irresolvable arguments nursed by years of wounded pride and resentment. John rails against black men on the down low and against the idea of a gay gene. Fatima calls him a homophobe.

What's striking about the scene is that it's directed to be far more sympathetic to Fatima than to John. John, who we've assumed to be speaking for Lee, is presented as a man who can't bring himself to understand the very concept of being gay. The key to the exchange, and I think the thing that has upset some critics about "She Hate Me" more than the plot, is the moment when Fatima tells John that she can't define herself as gay or straight or bisexual solely for the purpose of making him comfortable, that she rejects putting herself into narrow categories.

If you're paying attention to the undercurrents of the scene, or to the undercurrents in the debates over sexual identity, that line can make you gasp.

Somewhere along the way, the idea that sexual identity can be mutable stopped seeming a reasonable assumption of those who favored sexual freedom and started being treated as a tool of those who want to limit sexual freedom. We've all heard the right-wing and the religious right trumpet stories about "reformed" homosexuals as a way of bolstering the notion that if you choose to be gay, you can choose to be straight. And it's easy to see why gay men and lesbians who have built their identity on their sexuality are so opposed to the idea of sexual preference -- as opposed to sexual orientation.

The problem is that those arguments, useful as political tools in arguing for or against gay rights, have next to no value in art, which, at its best, seeks to explore the mystery of human behavior rather than shut it down. (And even politically or socially speaking, insisting that sexual identity -- or sexual relations -- must be fixed and immutable, no matter what ideology that's coming from, is an intrinsically repressive notion.)

As "She Hate Me" goes on, the characters of Fatima and Alex become fuller, more human -- not because becoming pregnant changes them and makes them more like "women" but because, the movie suggests, John is finally able to see them as human beings. The critics who have argued that the end of the film says that lesbians will always feel incomplete without a man and will sacrifice their independence to have one in their lives are naively expecting fictional characters to act in ways that fall within their own political comfort zone. (Similar nonsense was at work in the reviews of Mike Hodges' "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," the story of a London gangster who goes after the man who raped his brother. Critics derided the hero's quest to redeem his brother's masculinity as homophobic -- as if a macho London gangster should be expected to share the values of liberal critics, some of whom talked as if rejecting male-on-male rape were the same as rejecting gay sex.)

Next Page: The preachy side of Lee

• View blog reactions