PITCH PERFECT 3 A Ca-Queerbaits Its Audience

Pitch Perfect 3 is a damn good movie, and because the racist and anti-Semitic jokes have been completely excised from the narrative, it’s the best in the Pitch Perfect franchise. That’s a bit like winning a footrace against a bunch of drunk sloths, but it’s worth mentioning nevertheless. Directed by Trish Sie and written by Kay Cannon again alongside Mike White, Pitch Perfect 3 takes the Barden Bellas international. They embark on a USO tour and compete against other bands for the privilege to open for DJ Khaled. (Congratulations, he plays himself.)

Unfortunately, despite being the series’ best and funniest installment, Pitch Perfect 3 is also its least queer. Sure, Beca (Anna Kendrick) is still sexually confused, the group still stays together in close quarters, and there’s still a bit of romantic tension between Beca and her best friend, Chloe (Brittany Snow). But this time around, their relationship feels more cynically engineered, as if it’s convenient that Kendrick and Snow might want to make out only because that’ll help Pitch Perfect 3 sell tickets. The marketing team, too, jumped on this relationship when promoting the film, including some Instagram ads that alluded to a Bechloe kiss.

Entertainment magazines speculated about how much queer content would be in the third installment, questions exacerbated by actors and creatives implying that the third film would be gay to the umpteenth degree. The series has a devoted following on Tumblr, where Pitch Perfect stans salivated at the thought of seeing the culmination of all their Bechloe dreams. Did they get what they wanted? Not really, but fandom is all about adjusting your expectations. Based on the embarrassment of Bechloe music videos on YouTube and cringy Bechloe memes that can be found via a simple Google search, the Pitch Perfect’s fanbase wasn’t deterred.

Taking Stock: Where’s The Queer Stuff?

Beca and her roommate, Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson, basically the star of the series at this point), canoodle on their bed. There’s no romance there; just a normal best-friend nonsexual embrace in bed when Beca’s feeling stressed.

When the now-graduated Bellas reunite to see Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) lead the current group in a performance, Chloe remarks about how different this generation of Bellas seems — “They all definitely have boyfriends.” Beca properly flashes her a weird look. Is Chloe upset that they’re in relationships, or is she upset that they’re definitely straight? The film spends no further time on this.

When the girls meet the sexually questionably named band Evermoist, helmed by Calamity (the gender-fluid Ruby Rose), Chloe and Calamity stare each other down in the ensuing riff-off. It’s some very sexual eye contact, not helped at all by the Lenny Kravitz song they’re singing at the tine. Later, while Evermoist performs, Beca says nervously, “OK, so they’re pretty and polished and sexy and — I don’t know. I was just listing stuff, and now I’m sad.”

The Bellas perform “Cheap Thrills” wearing sailor costumes, referencing every seaman musical from South Pacific to On the Town. Later, they don G.I. Jane–reminiscent soldier outfits to perform “I Don’t Like It, I Love It,” the costuming claiming historically male-dominated groups for women and indulging in a bit of gender-bending imagery.

The final song, “Freedom! ’90,” which features lyrics like, “There’s something deep inside of me/ There’s someone I forgot to be,” is definitely a coming-out song. As for who’s coming out, it’s nobody. Are you surprised? It’s a complete fluke. The song’s there to pay lip service to the series’ big bi storyline, but the film can’t go anywhere with it. That’s the last scene of the movie. And there’s probably not going to be a sequel. To rub salt in the wound, in several scenes that play over the end credits, Chloe and Beca both shack up with hot guys.

Paint It Straight

Beca has a new forgettable man in Theo (Guy Burnet), a music producer who works with DJ Khaled. Fat Amy flirts relentlessly with the male soldiers the Bellas are paired with. Even Lilly (Hana Mae Lee), the mouse-voiced Asian-American member of the group, gets a boyfriend.

But the most out-of-left-field relationship is between Chloe and an American soldier named Chicago (Matt Lanter). The most sexually ambiguous character from the previous two movies is suddenly given a guy to fall in love with by the film’s end. Cannon and White continue to not take same-sex relationships seriously, instead taking shelter under the safety blanket of sexual ambiguity pretending they’re writing game-changing characters, when in reality, their queer characters wind up with boring dudes, just like the women at the end of literally every other high school comedy movie. Nobody clarifies their feelings toward one another, there’s no serious reckoning with Beca and Chloe’s relationship, and we’re left with three movies of romantic build-up for some randos to whisk the two off.

While the sailor and soldier costumes, the emphasis on platonic female love and the alluring members of Evermoist give the impression that this is a more queer world than that of the first two Pitch Perfect films, these elements are reduced to window dressings while the plot really focuses on women’s developing relationships with men. Thankfully, these subplots don’t occupy as much time as they did in Pitch Perfect 2, but they’re still glaringly straight inclusions in a series that always tried to market itself as queer-friendly.

When the film gets explicitly gay, these scenes suffer from the same homophobia that plagued the second installment. The saving grace here is that there are fewer gay scenes. In Pitch Perfect 2, Chloe’s admission to Beca that she’s open to sexually experimenting caused Beca to call her weird and shift away from her. That movie championed a message against queer confessions, against coming out, because of the negative ways friends would react to it. That line of thinking continues here.

In Pitch Perfect 3 resolution, Chloe reconciles with the Bellas’ forthcoming break-up. They’re going off to better (and hopefully more inclusive) things. “I am inside all of you,” she says, trying to be sincere, “and it feels so good.” Naturally, the Bellas are uncomfortable, turning yet another gay Chloe line into a joke.

Another big gay scene — possibly the biggest and gayest of the film entire — comes when Chloe and Beca spot Theo in a casino, Chloe pushes Beca up against a wall, out of sight, telling her to hide. The joke is that she pushes her by her breasts, like Indiana Jones does to that statue in Temple of Doom. It’s so tedious to watch scene after scene of this stuff where the queer contact is a joke that the characters then point out in disgust.

It’s lazily incorporated into the movie, too — why are they hiding? Is it because Theo was just about to tell them about DJ Khaled’s latest album, Grateful? I’d hide too. As for the boob-grabbing moment, it doesn’t turn into anything except an opportunity for Chloe to feel up Beca, and Aubrey (Anna Camp) immediately asks incredulously what’s going on.

Any LGBTQ+ person buying a ticket for the movie hoping to see some proper representation and a satisfying Bechloe payoff would have been sorely disappointed. It’s a heteronormative movie in queer clothing, akin to seeing Liberace in a grey three-piece suit reading aloud The Old Man and the Sea.

This didn’t stop the marketing teams from leaning heavily into Bechloe, with Instagram ads showing the two about to kiss before encouraging the viewer to swipe up for more. Articles written before the film’s release openly speculated about the potential relationship, with major stars and creatives giving interviews that made it seem as though the romance would actually happen.

This is queerbaiting — the luring in of a queer audience on promises of LGBTQ+ content. It’s nothing new, and Pitch Perfect 3 isn’t the only movie responsible. The same year Pitch Perfect 3 was released, Atomic Blonde was being heavily marketed with sexual scenes between Charlize Theron and Sofia Boutella, and I’m sure we all remember how much hype was generated about the first “exclusively gay moment” in a Disney film for Beauty and the Beast. This marketing gimmick hasn’t gone away, either, with the most recent offender being the television series Killing Eve.

Conclusion

The Pitch Perfect series rarely follows through on promises of queer relationships. It treats its lesbian characters as predators and its sexually ambiguous ones as jokes. By virtue of sanding down all of the offensive jokes from the previous films, Pitch Perfect 3 is the best of these a cappella stories, but despite making its world more queer, the films themselves are still stuck in the past. Pitch Perfect had the perfect opportunity to use a-queer-pella to pave the way for future gay characters onscreen, but it didn’t. The series jokes about how embarrassing it is to be queer and refuses to take LGBTQ+ people and relationships seriously, and it’s horrendously disappointing.

The series features enough inclusion and subtext to merit its place in LGBTQ+ film canon, but more scenes and choices detract from the series than not. LGBTQ+ fans want good stories about queer people, not the cop-out nonsense of Pitch Perfect 3 or wishy-washy garbage like Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2. We’ve got our tickets for the long way ’round, now give us a Kirk-and-Spock kiss and a same-sex love interest for Captain Marvel, you cowards.

What’s the most infuriating case of queerbaiting you’ve seen? Maybe it’s Killing Eve, maybe the Beauty and the Beast remake got under your skin, or maybe Ariana Grande’s “Break Up With Your Girlfriend” has you feeling some type of way. Post your thoughts in the comments below.