'Duck Butter' Is Full of Queer Sex, But That Doesn't Make It a Queer Film

Miguel Arteta and Alia Shawkat’s new film, Duck Butter, follows the intimate, 24-hour romance of two women who make a pact to throttle themselves into a relationship, no holds barred, despite just having met. But for a movie explicitly centered on a queer romance, it barely feels queer at all—at least in the ways we’re used to. So much so that I walked away questioning what defines a queer narrative altogether.

The pair meet when Naima (Shawkat), an emotionally-withdrawn actress, attends a performance by Sergio (Laia Costa), an impulsive singer-songwriter. Toward the end of the performance, Sergio yells to the crowd to see her not as herself, but “a singer you’d go crazy about.” Someone yells from the audience, “Stevie Knicks!”—and Sergio jumps offstage to kiss the woman, fulfilling some type of celebrity fantasy. Alone in the audience, Naima first raises her sharp eyebrows, skeptical of such spontaneity. As she observes Sergio’s seductive approach and swift kiss with first one stranger, then another, though, her eyebrows soften and her mouth turns to a grin. That’s all the social foreplay the two need; the foundation of romance in this Internet era being, of course, self-projection— whoever you want me to be, I’ll become.

Later, the pair go back to Sergio’s place, at which point the singer-songwriter makes a proposal: “I want to know you, for real. I want 24 hours and I want to come with you every hour…I want to see you taking a shit and getting angry…we can do it. We can fucking skip time.”

And fuck and skip time is exactly what they do. What follows is basically the sped-up arc of a typical relationship—a cycle familiar to anyone who’s had any type of erotic exchange, whether elongated over the course of ten years or whittled down to one week.

Form models fiction here, as the movie was actually made in 24-hours, through which the dialogue was largely improvised. According to MovieMaker, Shawkat and Arteta began the project with a shared desire to unpack turbulent romance, but they originally conceived of the storyline with a heterosexual couple.

Watch: In Bed with Alia Shawkat

That fact offers insight into one of the oddest aspects of the film: The only thing about Duck Butter that reads as queer is the fact that it stars two women who are romantically involved. And, yes, that obviously qualifies it as a queer filmin the most basic sense. But, maybe because the movie wasn’t originally built as a queer romance, its characters’ sexualities are never fully contextualized. That’s to say, the women are never situated in a politically-informed landscape, their queerness is never policed or shamed; none of the tropes of queer stories that we have come to expect as viewers are present beyond the same-sex coupling. Even more importantly, we never witness the women name their queerness—that act of self-identification so crucial to sexuality in an era of identity politics, both on screen and off.

The absence of those familiar queer tropes (unfulfilled longing, society’s deep homophobia, explicit identification) may be exhilarating and important for some, delivering a narrative on queerness that doesn’t need designation and, for once, isn’t defined by experiences of prejudice. While most recent gay films (Disobedience, Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name, Love, Simon) revolve around a closeted or coming-out narrative, Duck Butter gives us the complete opposite: a steamy one-and-a-half hours of actualized queer passion. For some audience members, such naked queer romance will be deeply satisfying; cathartic, even.

And yet, I was left asking: Are we actually at a point where homosexual and heterosexual couples can simply be swapped in storylines without complication? Is it radical and aspirational to offer stories in which queer characters aren't defined by their queerness, in which queerness is just matter-of-fact—or is it disingenuous and out of touch?

I personally left the theater feeling that to simply swap one for the other is to fictionalize a society in which the personal is not political, and in which all the parts of queerness that go beyond the technicalities of who you fuck, somehow no longer matter. Granted, society’s context is limited by the film’s setting within the privacy of the women’s beautiful LA homes. But does liberating queer narratives from being defined by struggle mean that they aren’t collectively defined by anything else—that there is nothing that makes queerness special?

Shawkat and Costa do offer up Blue Is the Warmest Color-level coupling; the romance that follows is hot and hasty, to say the least. But for all of the lesbian sex showcased (on piano bench, inside, outside, inside, with role plays of a first masturbation memory) the kind of gushing, uniquely queer sensuality we saw in Call Me By Your Name, for instance, is notably absent.

I kept wanting, and waiting for, the camera to provide some squirting, sweating, even spitting. I expected the shared lust between Naima and Sergio to manifest in some tangible form of excretion depicting the wetness of female orgasm. To me, that would have signaled an affirming understanding of how sex between two women has a specific texture that differentiates it from the hetero sex we typically see in films.

Instead, though, emotions eclipse eroticism. Toward hour 20 (a blueprint for day 20? Month 20? Year 20? Depends how quickly you move), we watch the two women sit on the edge of a bed, building toward a cathartic moment in which they scream their unsaid opinions about their mothers. “Tell your mom all the shit you wanna make sure she knows,” Sergio instructs, and they do.

At this point, those averse to spoilers may want to stop reading.

In the next 20 minutes of the film, we actually meet Sergio’s mother, which, aptly, draws the 24-hour timeline to an end. Throughout the movie, Sergio has praised her mother (Susannah) for her honesty and openness. But when she arrives, Susannah speaks mostly in Spanish, chastising Sergio and alienating Naima. Her brief use of English is to relay disapproval for Naima’s acting. Then, Susannah goes into her own liberal, free-wheeling approach to sex, uncomfortably over-sharing. “I hope you are enjoying her,” Susannah says to Naima, nodding to the visibly upset Sergio.

The rupture between mother and daughter continues, and it’s here where the film does its most astute work, drawing in themes of untethering and chosen-family-making. After breakfast, Susannah returns inside, having forgotten something, to find Naima and Sergio lying on Naima’s bed; although she calls, “Sergio? Sergio?” and locks eyes with Naima, she doesn’t enter the bedroom, and Naima slowly moves to protect her saddened sweetheart, climbing on top of her, animal-like, marking territory.

Were we to be offered more moments of such charged interpersonal conflict by Shawkat and Arteta, we might come to understand that, in queerness, the personal is always political. Given the setting of domestic intimacy of the 24-hour romance, it may have been a challenge to show that the intimate parts of women’s—and especially queer women’s—lives are shaped by external forces. But I would have preferred if Shawkat and Arteta had made a more explicit effort.

Yes, let’s shed tired queer tropes. But only if making room for new revelations about queerness. Otherwise, is it a queer narrative at all?