Breaking Down the Homophobia Problem with Netflix's "Behind Her Eyes"

For the last couple of weeks, since its premiere in February, Netflix has repeatedly recommended the new series Behind Her Eyes to me. Billed as a psychological thriller revolving around a single mother who gets involved in the lives of a mysterious married couple, the six-episode series sounded right up my street. When I first watched episode one the other day, I wasn't sure it would live up to the hype Netflix had seemingly created around it. Then, as I watched the second episode (and the third, and the fourth, in a rapidly developing binge), I became hooked. Yet even while I kept speeding through the episodes, excited to find out what mind-blowing twists would be revealed next, I started to grow uneasy. I had a sense of foreboding, and not the kind the series wanted me to have, surrounding its representation of its one gay character. Having now finished the series, I am sad to say that Behind Her Eyes ultimately resorted to harmful homophobic tropes in its plot, albeit not the ones you might initially expect.

[WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW]

Behind Her Eyes is a series that is largely driven by twists and mystery, so be aware that if you haven't watched the whole thing yet and you still decide to read this, the story may well lose a lot of its punch. Up until the final episode confirmed my worst gay fears about the show, I might have warned you more strongly, but now I can't bring myself to recommend it like I would have. So I now have no qualms about giving you a detailed rundown of the plot, spoilers included. If you've already seen the series and so don't need my explanation, feel free to skip to the asterisks below.

As I mentioned before, Behind Her Eyes focuses on Louise, a young single mother to an adorable son named Adam. One night, she hits it off with a handsome but painfully uncharismatic stranger at a bar, only to discover the next day that not only is this man (Dr David Ferguson) married, he's also the new psychiatrist at the clinic where she works as a receptionist. In spite of these minor obstacles, the two begin having an affair. Meanwhile, Louise strikes up a friendship with David's wife, Adele, who she literally bumps into on the street on the way home from her son's school. While Louise is drawn to and enjoys the company of both husband and wife, she soon begins to suspect something darker is going on. David and Adele's relationship seems full of paranoia and jealousy, with David actively controlling Adele by confiscating her phone and bank card, monitoring her location, and prescribing her drugs in spite of her protestations. 

We begin to learn more about Adele's backstory when she gives Louise a journal that supposedly belonged to her old friend Rob, a gay, working-class Glaswegian boy who she met during their stay at a rehabilitation clinic. Rob was in rehab for heroin addiction; Adele was there to recover from the trauma of a fire on her family estate, a fire which killed her parents and which she only escaped from at the last minute thanks to the help of David, her then-boyfriend. Adele gives Louise the journal to help with her night terrors, a condition which Rob also suffered from. With the help of the journal, Louise learns how to lucid dream her way out of her night terrors, becoming able to change her nightmares into whatever imaginary scenario she wants. We soon discover that Adele is able to use a similar technique to astral project, allowing her soul to temporarily leave her body and travel through the world in her sleep.

Around the same time, Louise's curiosity about Rob leads her to discover that he disappeared after visiting Adele's estate post-rehab. Adele says she believes David killed him, and it's clear from their interactions that she does indeed know a secret which David is afraid of people finding out. Flashbacks reveal that Adele is lying: David had nothing to do with Rob's death. What really happened is that Rob tricked Adele into swapping bodies during an astral projection outing, which Rob then took advantage of to force his original body into a heroin overdose. The result is that Adele's soul died in Rob's body, leaving Rob in possession of Adele's. Rob!Adele (as I will now be referring to Rob-in-Adele's-body) effectively took over Adele's life from this point onwards. He gains her wealth, her beauty, and her fiancé, all while retaining the ability to astral project which he learnt from Adele. This ability is put to use to spy on David throughout their marriage, allowing him to (among other things) witness David's affair with Louise first-hand. 

The climax of the film comes when Rob!Adele - through a convoluted scheme with another overdose and a house fire - gets Louise to astral project into Adele's dying body, while he takes control of Louise's. Louise's soul dies in Adele's body, leaving Rob now in the body of Louise. Rob!Louise continues Louise's relationship with David, becoming his new wife. The series ends firmly in horror territory with them driving off on their honeymoon, a miserable Adam in the backseat. 

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Some of you reading might not immediately see the homophobic (and indeed transphobic) problems with this storyline, so I would like to explain. But first, let's talk a bit about perspective, a topic Behind Her Eyes incorporates so extensively. As a queer person, I always view media from a queer perspective. As someone who also knows a bit about tropes in media, I'm especially sensitive to depictions of queer characters that fall into LGBT-phobic clichés or stereotypes. 

Knowing this, you can imagine how Rob immediately caught my eye when his sexual orientation was revealed. My mind began spinning the roulette of gay clichés, wondering which one he might fit into. My first thought was that he was your classic gay best friend, perhaps not as offensively camp as your usual type but still a gay male character who exists solely to further the character development of a straight female one. Then, as flashbacks with Rob began to take on a more foreboding tone, I began to suspect he might be of the Bury Your Gays variety: a queer character is killed off with significantly more ease than a straight one because they're simply seen as more disposable. In the end, Rob turned out to be a perverse but equally cliched twist on both of these. He was a Depraved Homosexual, an evil gay whose sexuality seems to coincide with a total lack of morality (almost as if being gay were seen as immoral and thus serves as shorthand for showing us a character is fundamentally wicked - funny that).

Now I would like to stress that Rob simply being evil and gay at the same time doesn't make him a homophobic cliché (although if all your villains are gay and/or queer-coded then that's still a problem, but we can talk about that another time). The problem with Rob's character is that his evilness is specifically connected to his sexuality, with our anxiety over his potential to commit harm being tied to societal anxiety about queer people. His villainy is built on and supported by homophobia.

To show you what I mean by that, let's first look at Rob's relationship with Adele. For all he claims to love her, his actions are ultimately motivated by extreme jealousy towards her. In contrast to Adele, who is a heterosexual girl from a wealthy family with a loving boyfriend, Rob is gay, poor, and lonely. It's heavily implied that his depressing home life is the primary reason he uses heroin, even going so far as to say he'd rather stay in rehab with Adele than go back to live with his sister as he was before. He never mentions having any friends besides Adele, and the closest thing he has to a love life is exchanging sexual favours with a nurse for drugs. He even seems jealous of Adele's beauty, mentioning it frequently and saying he'd happily trade his life for hers. Thanks to combined astral projection and body snatching, that is exactly what he is able to do.

Pictured: Rob and Adele, Rob reaching desperately for a non-homophobic storyline

The way that Rob's motivations are presented here is extremely concerning as well as frustrating. A gay character being defined almost entirely by their relationship to straight people was always going to be dodgy, but having that definition come in the form of his being violently jealous of them is... a choice, at best. Rob's fascination with and eventual replacement of Adele brings to mind the idea that gay people are really just straight people trapped in the "wrong" body, secretly wishing they could be the gender that would make their attractions heterosexual. While this idea of queer people having the psyche of the "wrong gender" has previously been used in early gay rights movements (such as in the use of the term Uranian or Urning to describe gay men), it's now rightfully seen as outdated and offensive.

Rob's interactions with David are possibly even more worrying, seeing as they feed directly into the idea of predatory gays. From when he first meets David, it's clear that Rob is attracted to him. The feeling is not mutual, however, as David is straight and in love with Adele. Rob shows a blatant disregard for David's consent in this situation, even before he takes possession of Adele's body. He uses his astral projection to spy on David and Adele having sex, then does the same later on with David and Louise. The fact that he has sex with David in Adele's body is equally creepy, since David thinks he is consenting to sex with Adele rather than Rob. 

For those who aren't explicitly familiar with it, the predatory gay stereotype is based on the idea that gay people are such sexual deviants that they are willing to disregard consent if it means they get to have sex with the people they want. We are all just roaming would-be perpetrators of sexual assault, unable to control ourselves around people of the same gender. It is this idea which makes straight people afraid of sharing changing rooms or other same-gender spaces with queer people, having queer people near their children, or going into situations where the majority of people are gay and the same gender as them. Straight people think that gay people simply can't keep their hands to themselves and often believe that they, as heterosexuals, are somehow especially desirable targets for such perverts. It is, I hope it goes without saying, an enormously prevalent and harmful stereotype. It also appears to be the main basis of Rob's characterisation in Behind Her Eyes.

If I said that gay people are predatory, morally bankrupt people who destroy traditional (straight) families and can't be trusted around children, you could rightfully accuse me of peddling homophobic stereotypes. If I said that about Rob, the only gay character in Behind Her Eyes, I'd simply be describing him accurately. Therein lies the problem.

So Rob is a gay man who envies straight women and lusts after straight men, to the point of using manipulation and deceit to get what he wants. Clearly the depiction of Rob leaves a lot to be desired, but I would argue that when viewed from a thematic perspective, the homophobic implications of Behind Her Eyes get even darker.

Towards the end of the series, the tone shifts from that of a thriller to an outright horror story. It is important to note that horror stories frequently express anxieties that the audience can relate to, often societal anxieties, so that the story has greater power to disturb. Perhaps the greatest horror of Behind Her Eyes is the idea that you can never truly know someone, that a person who you love could really be somebody completely different to the person you thought they were. In Behind Her Eyes, this conflict leads to the destruction of a marriage (via Adele) and a family (via Louise). Somehow, the writers thought it was a good idea to make the destroyer of these two great institutions of heterosexual normalcy a gay character - the only gay character, at that. The hidden menace of the homosexual infiltrates pure straight life and corrupts it for their benefit... it's so blatantly problematic, it sounds almost as if they took inspiration from retro anti-gay propaganda.

Yet for all its implicit homophobia, Behind Her Eyes gives surprisingly little attention to Rob's identity as a gay man. The word "gay" is never even used, as far as I can remember. We only assume that Rob is gay based on references to his sex life - the first time he reveals his sexuality, it's when he declares himself to "prefer cock". All other mentions are similarly oblique and/or coarsely sexual. More than any other aspect of it, I thought that perhaps the isolation and loneliness which can come with being gay might at least come up, given how well it seems to fit into Rob's motivations for what he does. So why didn't they mention it?

My theory is that while devoting more attention to Rob and his LGBT+ identity would have possibly made the role less homophobic (simply in that it would make him a more multi-dimensional character whose sexuality goes beyond background casual sex), it would also have made the homophobia that was still part of his storyline more apparent. I imagine the writers were trying to create a character whose sexuality was incidental to their characterisation - if they drew more attention to his gayness, then it might seem like they were going out of their way to make the gay character the villain, thus making them more vulnerable to accusations of homophobia. Being homophobic is fine, of course, as long as you don't get called out on it.

But if Rob's character was indeed meant to be incidentally gay, why was he a man at all? Why didn't they make his role into that of a straight woman? I can think of very little that would have to change, plot-wise, for that to work. The female Rob would still be friends with Adele and be attracted to David. She could still come from a poor background, perhaps be less conventionally good-looking, and want to steal Adele's life from her. So why would the writers make the conscious choice to make this body-stealing villain not a straight woman but a gay man?

I can think of only one good reason why: Rob being male and gay is part of the horror. If you think I'm being uncharitable, remember what I said before about horror and social norms. Deviation from gender norms is commonly used in media to disturb, shock, or unnerve, such as in the case of the Unsettling Gender Reveal, the Creepy Crossdresser, or the Sissy Villain (read the TV Tropes pages for those if you don't know what I'm talking about). The Rob reveal is used similarly, to prompt viewers to say not only "Can you imagine if your wife was secretly someone else?" but "Can you imagine if your wife was secretly a gay man?"

This is what really drags the whole storyline over to transphobia as well as homophobia, as the horror the series is designed to evoke so strongly mirrors the fears bigots have about trans people: that they are deceitful and will "trick" cisgender, heterosexual people into sleeping with them. As a trope, this fits into Unsettling Gender Reveal, but it also recalls something known in real life as the "trans panic defence". This is a legal defence, based on the "gay panic defence", which a defendant can use to justify violence against a trans person if they had been sexually active with them before finding out they were trans. The idea behind it is basically that finding out that someone you've been with was not assigned the gender at birth which you expected can be so shocking that it can send someone into temporary insanity. It has been used, both in court and outside of it, to get away with violence against trans people (especially trans women of colour) time and time again.

I don't mention this to suggest that Rob is a transgender woman. I do not believe the writers intended him to be read in that way, nor did I interpret the series that way. However, intent isn't everything. Whether or not the writers intended it as such, Rob's queerness is fundamental to his villainy. In the anxiety he creates, we can see reflected societal anxieties about gender and sexuality, about the threat that gay and trans people pose to social norms. The story might be solidly fictional, but the real-world implications are not. 

Once again, I have no doubt that everyone involved with the production of the show will claim that it was not meant to be homophobic and that Rob's sexuality and gender were purely incidental. Yet on every level, the plot and Rob's involvement in it seem intensely problematic as well as cliched. The story's horror is propped up on homophobic stereotypes of predatory and dangerous LGBT+ people. If those involved in the creation of this show want to claim some part in the success of it, then they also need to claim responsibility for the harmful tropes it exploits.