We Are Family: The Universal Experience of Watching ‘The Birdcage’
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Vicki Rakowski
What’s your family’s standard go-to holiday movie? White Christmas? It’s a Wonderful Life? Love, Actually?
My family’s is The Birdcage.
I cannot exactly figure out how this came to be. But it occurred to us after a few years that for the last few Christmases or Thanksgivings, we had watched The Birdcage instead of, say, Miracle on 34th Street. And we just kept going with it.
There were a lot of really special things about this film that are no less special today as it creeps toward its 30th anniversary. It was Nathan Lane’s big film breakthrough, and the first time we saw so much of Calista Flockheart and Hank Azaria. It was the first movie Elaine May and Mike Nichols worked on together. Then there’s the fact that when the movie debuted, it was one of the most mainstream pieces of media to portray gay characters as the main attraction at the time.
Hijinks and a whole lot more
The Birdcage is based on the French play La Cage aux Folles, a farce that debuted in 1973 and was popular enough to be made into a film version 1978 (it received two sequels!). In 1996, Robin Williams (Armand) starred alongside Lane (Albert) as a gay couple who own and perform in a nightclub called The Birdcage.
Their son Val (Armand’s biological child he had from a one-night stand 20 years earlier, whom Albert has lovingly raised) comes home with a surprise. He’s engaged to a young woman and wants to bring her to meet his family. There’s only one hitch: her father is an ultra-conservative senator who has co-founded the Coalition for Moral Order, and Val now needs to whip up an imaginary family with a traditional mother and father, hiding Albert away. Hijinks ensue.
Actually, so many things ensue.
Albert’s dramatics laced with his very real hurt at not being accepted by Val and Armand. Val’s frenetic desire to please his beloved’s family enough so that their marriage can move forward. Armand’s conflicted feelings about “passing” while trying to give his son what he wants. The Senator’s almost narrow worldview, and how it sometimes borders on naive. It all culminates in a hysterical dinner party that Armand describes as being like “riding a psychotic horse towards a burning stable”. Everything falls apart and then comes back together again, but much, much better this time.
Seeing the “other” in another way
I cannot speak to this movie from the perspective of a person who is a member of the LGBTQ community, only from who I am now, and who I was when I first saw it.
In 1996, I don’t know that my family knew any out gay people, with the exception of one or two colleagues in the adults’ lives. I don’t think anybody had negative or positive feelings about gay people. I had a friend or two who was in the process of coming to terms with their sexual identity and the world, and by the end of high school a couple of years later they would come out. Their experiences were hard-fought, and in many ways they didn’t have anybody to look to because they were blazing a trail themselves. That’s a lot to ask of a kid. And they met that ask with bravery.
Around that same time, the mainstream media began showing gay people as something more than a joke, as people who experienced the same human emotions and pitfalls as anybody else. These TV shows and movies showed me something new as an average middle-class suburban kid. And it would have been new to my extended family too. I won’t say the media got it right all the time, nor that they didn’t resort to broad strokes that left a lot of people out. But it was the beginning of normalizing something that had felt “other” for too long. There was never a reason for it to feel other.
We are family (and humanity)
Something about The Birdcage just tickled me and my extended family. As relatives we obviously share a lot of the same experiences, viewpoints, and characteristics, but we also absolutely do not share several others.
Yet something about this movie worked enough for all of us that year after year, we’d sit around after stuffing ourselves full of my mother’s excellent cooking and watch as the opening notes of “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge played over the movie’s opening shots of South Beach, Florida, and drag queens performing to an enthusiastic audience. This ritual, among others, was our own kind of communion.
What movies like The Birdcage began to do was show the humanity of gay characters to a mainstream audience. The realization that gay people’s humanity looks pretty much like everybody else’s humanity is one of those idiotic lessons that we needed to learn back then.
And sadly, it seems like it’s one we need to learn again now.
Stories can save lives
When you marginalize or attack an entire group of people, you can only do it by removing their humanity. You can only harm or hurt a person if you forget they’re pretty much just like you. They have thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams, the same way you do. Prizing your own humanity and worldview over somebody else’s is a one-way ticket to the collapse of society. I regret to say that things feel really bleak right now for this very reason.
It’s Pride Month. The Human Rights Campaign has just declared a National State of Emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans. More than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been signed into law this year alone. The hatred and intolerance toward people we perceive as “other” sometimes feels insurmountable.
I have a daughter now who is nearly two years old. I learn more about who she is every day (spoiler alert: she is wonderful). Something interesting that I didn’t expect happened when I had her: I started to see literally every other human on the planet differently.
This feeling started one day when I was changing her. She was only about a week old. I had her tipped forward and sitting up so I could ease her into pajamas. The little bones in her back were so delicate and beautiful. I ran my hands gently over her shoulder blades and thought of how vulnerable she was, and how big and cruel the world can be. And honestly, I wept. I could barely stand the idea of the world being cruel to her. And it will be, the same way it is to us all.
Every person was a baby once. And suddenly, that’s all I could see when I looked at people. Every person has it inside them to be this vulnerable. And we all need love, care, and protection.
The more you choose to see someone’s humanity, the more you see what makes us alike rather than different, the less you are able to hate them. It’s impossible to hate anybody up close.
One of the ways you reduce the gap between yourself and those who are not like you is to get to know other people better. And when you don’t have that option of a real live human, you often have the option of art and stories. Those stories can save lives.
There’s a scene in The Birdcage where Armand has to make some things up to Albert. They’re sitting on a beautiful Art Deco bench in the late afternoon sun as ships pass behind them in the harbor. Armand tells Albert, “There’s only one place in the world I call home and it’s because you’re there.”
I can’t think of a feeling much more universal than that.
Vicki Rakowski is an enthusiastic consumer of all things art and literature, and a library director in the Chicagoland area.