Meta: Queer Afterlives (BM: "San Junipero")-- DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: death, spirituality, toxicity, ableism, euthanasia, homophobia, bury your gays, unreality

 

I personally believe BM is at its best in the hopepunk episodes, where despite how bleak and disturbing the presented technologies can be, there is room for joy, love, and growth: for happy (well, happier) endings. There are six I would consider to be in this vein (“San Junipero”, “USS Callister”, “Hang the DJ”, “Black Museum”, “Striking Vipers”, “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too”), so this theme will return. What’s interesting to me is that so many of these are also the queer-centric episodes, which both subverts the commonly tragic tone of queer stories especially in horror and embraces the queer possibility so central to sci-fi as a genre. For example, I think the way “San Junipero” deconstructs the bury your gays trope takes queer joy seriously and reimagines the afterlife as a space of queer hope and possibility instead of the common assumption of queer doom after death.

Spoiler alert: Yorkie and Kelly are dying, and San Junipero, the town they meet in, is an experimental virtual reality populated by a mix of dead, dying, and living people. This is revealed to the audience about halfway through the episode—the characters all already know since they chose to be there. Until then, the distinctly period aesthetics are supposed to disorient the viewer in time, and even at the end we don’t get a clear answer about when exactly is supposed to be the present. We are primed to see San Junipero as an afterlife by subtle clues that Yorkie’s avoiding a tragic backstory involving a car accident. She recoils at the image of a car crashing in a video game, she quickly changes the song in her dress-up montage at the lyric “girlfriend in a coma”, and she freaks out (though tbf who wouldn’t) when Kelly almost crashes the Jeep. But until we learn what that’s all about, we follow the blossoming romance between Yorkie and Kelly, who meet at Tucker’s, a bar, in 1987. After they have sex, Yorkie tries to find her without success until one of Kelly’s former trysts, Wes, tells her to check different times, cluing us into the non-linear time of San Junipero. One week after 1987 it’s 1980, a week later it’s 1996, and a week after that it’s 2002, all indicated by the iconic fashions, music, games, and technology of those years. When Kelly proposes, the fashions are 2010s but would make sense in several earlier decades.

Meanwhile, we come to know that Yorkie and Kelly are from a future time, where “folks are way less uptight than they used to be” about queer people, though they both didn’t act on their same-sex attractions until entering San Junipero. We know Kelly died at 73 the same year Yorkie died at 61, but their aged bodies meet in meatspace in some unspecified futuristic time. If we assume Yorkie crashed in 1987, then it’s likely the late 2020s-early 2030s (hence her confusion at how the 2000s appeal to Kelly), but the show is purposefully vague about the timeline to emphasize how their love transcends time and is made possible by a virtual approximation of these time periods and not the queer realities of those periods themselves, which would have often (but not always) been more hostile.

Regardless of the actual time, Yorkie’s backstory is familiar ground for queer narratives. Sometime in the past, when she was 21, she came out to her parents, fled when they freaked out, and got into a car wreck that left her quadriplegic. At the mercy of her family for 40 years, she convinces an orderly at her facility Greg to marry her so he can consent to euthanasia for her. However, instead of simply dying, her consciousness will be uploaded to San Junipero. This is presented as a way for Yorkie to live the life she couldn’t because of her condition. She is very sheltered and self-conscious about queer expression when she first arrives during her trial period (access to San Junipero is controlled to prevent too frequent immersion from causing living users to dissociate). With the help of Kelly, she comes out of her shell and is able to enjoy San Junipero once she moves there full-time. Instead of a tragic ending where Yorkie dies violently and alone, “San Junipero” lets her be happy and gay for as long as she wants (residents can delete themselves when they get bored, similar to The Good Place).

But San Junipero isn’t simply a paradise, though it isn’t a nefarious dystopia either like it might be in any other episode of BM. Instead, it is a place on Earth (I’m sorry I had to that song’s been stuck in my head for weeks) with strengths and drawbacks, and it raises its own ethical and spiritual questions about the nature of death, loyalty/fidelity, hedonism, ableism, and relationality. In the mythos of BM, San Junipero functions on the same technology as cookies, which are virtual clones imprinted from someone's brain patterns. The rights and realities of cookies feature prominently in many BM episodes, but here they’re presented as afterlife avatars because the meatsuit is assumed to be either dead or on its way to dead. We’re meant to read San Junipero not as a place for the living but a literal “city of the dead” (Roach), or as Kelly puts it, “uploaded to the cloud: sounds like Heaven”. Kelly and Yorkie estimate that 80-85% of those in San Junipero at any given time are ‘full-timers’ or ‘locals’, which marks it as a place of death and commemoration, though unlike cemeteries, which Roach notes are “for the living” (xi), that 15-20% of living occupants indicate that here the dead, living, and soon-to-die mingle freely outside the strictures of linear time. This allows for the possibility that people who lived centuries apart could encounter each other in the same time—they are “inter(in)animate,” such that “the liveness of one or deadness of the other is ultimately neither decidable nor relevant” (Schneider 7).

This unique interinanimate space raises new ethical questions that Kelly and Yorkie are forced to navigate. The most pressing is who gets to afterlive in San Junipero—and who doesn’t? In order to end up in San Junipero, someone would have to a) know they’re about to die and b) be uploaded to the cloud shortly before death. Those who face sudden death or those who don’t have financial or technological access cannot move to San Junipero. Similar to Butler’s concern with livable lives—“whose lives count as lives, and […] what makes for a grievable life?” (17-18)—San Junipero and other VR technologies allow for different lives than meatspace does, lives that might be more fulfilling to some people. For example, Yorkie’s immobility and inability to communicate verbally mean that this assistive technology allows her to participate in ways she is unable to otherwise, and she values this technology deeply for restoring to her something she feels robbed of. Kelly, conversely, has no need for this technology, using it because she can. To be sure, the disability politics of this are fraught, and especially here in Canada, there is a great deal of heated debate about MAiD and euthanasia for disabled people considering the lack of other social supports for staying alive and disabled and the eugenicist underpinnings of the initiative to push MAiD instead of aid, not to mention the assumption that disabled lives aren’t worth living. I’m bracketing that for now to talk about the stakes of fictional and virtual worlds for those who can only thrive or live in these spaces, what I’ve referred to elsewhere as Other Fairies:

After all, the ghosts of our (straight cis) ancestors get funerals, genealogies, canons. Our queer ancestors get theatre. Who are our queer ancestors? I believe that they are those banished from the churchyard or the cemetery, from the record books and the family trees, condemned to return only onstage. They are the cyclical re-performance of the Turnerian breach, the traumatic memory, they are the ghosts who suffered the damnatio memoriae of a love that could not speak its name and thus was never archived. They are “fairies” in that other sense. They must belong to other families, imagined ones, mythical ones, not ours. Their traffic is the stage, not the cemetery. Queerness is simultaneously banished from and contained within the stage/screen. But their very inadmittance requires an explosion of discourse. Even as we other fairies are expelled from the dead city gates, we are not so easily forgotten. (Publius 65, emphasis in original)

This plays out rather literally with San Junipero because it is an actual afterlife. Yorkie gets to thrive in San Junipero in ways the straight world could never let her. Kelly, meanwhile, struggles deeply with whether or not to remain there. Kelly was previously married to Richard for 49 years, and they had a daughter named Alison who died at 39, before the technology existed to preserve her. Because Alison did not have the same opportunity, Richard refused to join San Junipero and died naturally. Kelly, who’s bisexual, is torn between her straight marriage and her gay marriage, between the cemetery where her het family is and the program where her queer family is. Ultimately, this decision bifurcates her, with her meatsuit joining her husband and daughter in the cemetery and her consciousness joining Yorkie in San Junipero.

That said, I want to avoid implying a complete separation between meatsuit and avatar, although that is ultimately their fate when they die. Before that, Yorkie and Kelly blur the boundaries between meatspace and cyberspace. The reason Kelly initially likes Yorkie is her authenticity—in a place where you can look like anything you want, Yorkie still wears glasses even if she doesn’t need them. Yorkie’s fantasy avatar still has (some of) her disabilities because they are important to her. Meanwhile, Kelly comes to visit Yorkie in meatspace and meets Greg, convincing him to let her marry Yorkie instead. Thus it is not the case that Kelly’s straight in one reality and queer in another, as she’s legally bisexual in meatspace. But San Junipero allows her to explore parts of herself that she has always known were there but that were moot because she was in love with Richard. San Junipero is not (simply) a place of escape but an extension of themselves.

That said, the elements of escapism are what draws Kelly to San Junipero and underpin her fights with Yorkie. From the get-go, Kelly has seen San Junipero as a fun, no-consequences adventure before she eventually dies and is returned to the earth completely. She sleeps around and avoids attachments, which could feed into the bi slut stereotype but we later learn she was faithful to her husband for almost half a century and this is her finally letting loose and having a heau phase (and honestly good for her). However, she meets Yorkie and develops feelings: “In the time I’ve been here, I said I wouldn’t…I don’t know, do feelings. You freaked me out. I don’t want to like anyone. So you’ve been just, totally fucking inconvenient.” Unlike Wes and her other one-night-stands, Kelly feels a responsibility to Yorkie:

Yorkie: It’s not about who ‘owes’ who, it’s about manners! You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what this means.
Kelly: ‘This’ means fun. Or it should. And this…this is not fun, okay? This is not fun.
Yorkie: So you don’t feel bad? Maybe you should feel bad. Or at least feel something.

Kelly comes to realize that her actions in San Junipero still have ethical weight and are still real, albeit digital. Instead of an impermanent playground where nothing matters, San Junipero is some people’s home, where they live their lives because it’s the only place they still are alive. She has no desire to join them, as this isn’t her vision of what an afterlife should be: “You wanna spend forever somewhere nothing matters? End up like Wes? All those lost fucks at the Quagmire trying anything to feel something?” However, because she has entangled herself with Yorkie, she does stay, driving off together without crashing. Of course, San Junipero isn’t actually forever: like all technology and as a “place on Earth”, it will eventually be subject to archival deterioration, shorts, and ultimately deletion. But until then, they get to party like it’s 1980 1996 2002 1987.

 

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Routledge, 2004.

Publius, Xavia. “We Other Fairies.” Intonations, vol. 1, no. 1, 2021, pp. 61-82.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Columbia UP, 1996.

Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Routledge, 2011.