This Could Be the Place: Queer Acceptance in Lars and the Real Girl

In our engagement with Lars and the Real Girl (LRG), we encourage a reading of the film that emphasizes how it playfully and performatively reproduces and, in the process, undoes norms of temporality and collectivity. In particular, LRG queers normative understandings of public culture, identity, and community in three primary ways. First, the film queers typical understandings of time, challenging the presumed distinctions between past, present, and future. Second, LRG forwards a prosthetic understanding of identity, asserting that all identities are relationally contingent and therefore queering the subject-object binary. Finally, the film envisions queer kinship structures that not only critique hegemonic gender norms but also call attention to the performativity of gendered identities. Ultimately, we deploy LRG to respond to those who advocate antirelationality as the properly queer way of moving through space and time.