In Appreciation of Celestial Lesbianism
By Cleo Helscher
Looking for a campy lesbian sci-fi film to leave you stupified by your own incessant laughter? I certainly wasn’t, and yet it found me. When I first stumbled upon Madeleine Onlnek’s low-budget, 2011 film entitled Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same on a lesbian movies list, I had no idea what to expect. I figured it was best to be ready for anything and I thought I was, but this film still managed to confuse, entice, and, frankly, fulfill me. The film deliciously plays into the humor of its low-budget attempts at sci-fi, channeling its 50s B-movie predecessors to create a rich intertextual collage that adds greatly to the film’s comedy. This collage itself only constitutes one layer of Codependent’s humor which employs parody, absurdity, mundanity, and distinctly lesbian social references.
Try on for size its two-minute-long scene which revolves entirely around a discussion about donut preferences—with the perfectly silly lines: “I’m not comfortable with Boston Cream donuts [...] when you bite in it, and the cream, it just comes like shooting on your face” and “well, you don’t take a huge, aggressive bite. You nibble and let the cream come to you”—or its absurd dating show segment in which an alien participates to send a message to their fellow alien, who they know watches the show each night, which gives us this incredible image.
Perhaps you’ll most like the scene in which two aliens stand paralyzed in emotion staring at a revolving pastry case, finding the meaning of life and love in the flowing movements of a rotating cheesecake, its “poetic indifference.” And who could forget the odd exchange where a federal agent—later revealed to be an alien—asks his partner if his wife, Debbie, is a transman. His partner, confused but not quite angry, clarifies the question multiple times: “what kind of question is that,” he asks. “I don’t even know where you’re coming from with that.” To which his alien partner responds, “I’m coming from... asking you that question”—wondrously odd and awkward dialogue that makes me laugh aloud each and every time.
The film’s primary romance grows between Jane and Zoinx, which delighted me in its general sweetness and even more so in its proving my ages-long hypothesis that lonely lesbians can actually be more socially awkward than a literal space alien—call comes from inside the house, of course. Simply put, this film is a treat—and it’s a free one.
