I’ve been thinking about at least one post I’ve seen, regarding a certain type of caricaturized villain in movies. A man who is portrayed as flamboyantly un-masculine, and yet instead of hinting that he’s gay, the narrative makes him intensely, worshipfully devoted to his wife or other female love interest.

A lot has been said about why that is. But here’s my take, based on how I perceived these tropes in my own experience of watching movies as I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s.

So, as I see it, the villain characters from old movies that we often see described as “queer-coded”– the sissy, the fop, the dandy– are usually there primarily to show weakness. To be physically, emotionally and morally weak, in the most conspicuous way possible, and thus throw into contrast the “strength” of the manly-man hero.

And homophobia is of course a very large part of why so much of that portrayal is associated with weakness. Gay men and trans women (who were at the time very much lumped together in popular culture, and often considered practically the same thing) represented the opposite of what the manly-man hero was supposed to be.

As a strong man, he was of course supposed to be attracted to women. But at the same time he was supposed to be very much at home in his own masculinity, and never show significant interest in any pastime or entertainment that was considered feminine.

His attraction to the heroine would be based on her looks, and on her virtuous character traits like kindness and loyalty. He could want to protect her, give her gifts, and of course be physically intimate with her. But there was a limit to how much he could have in common with her– how much he could share her interests, how much he could respect her as a person– before he would start to be perceived as a sissy caricature like the villain.

This extreme devotion to a woman, which we saw in villains sometimes, was a sort of heterosexual expression of “weakness,” a different side of what was expressed in gay-coded villains. This devoted wifeguy– hen-pecked, pussy-whipped or whatever he might have been called at the time– was considered weak because he let a woman tell him what to do. His masculinity was undermined not by being attracted to men, but by being so attracted to a woman that he became “weaker” than her.

He had failed to walk that fine line of strong masculinity, where a hero could want a woman, but could never fully be in her world.

We also see a fair number of other male villains with the trappings of queer-coding– in their clothing, interests, mannerisms and so on– who are explicitly interested in women– but come across as objects of ridicule because the women they pursue are not attracted to them. These men have the masculine desire for a woman, but they fail the other masculinity test of being able to get one.

And of course, again, this is deeply intertwined with the queer-coding tropes. The failed pursuer of women doesn’t lack heterosexual experience by choice, but he still lacks it. And the trappings of queer-coding in his mannerisms, clothing, and interests are often implied to be part of the reason women don’t want him.

I’d say it’s not really possible to untangle all the different threads to what makes a stereotypically “weak” male villain. They’re all too interwoven in the culture of filmmaking tropes. Gay-coding is absolutely a part of it– not the only part, but still pretty much inseparable from the others.

Other parts– also pretty much impossible to untangle from it all– include such things as nerdiness, laziness, physical weakness, and pretty much anything that could be viewed as a character flaw in the culture contemporary with a film.

Childishness is another one– as in Disney’s Robin Hood, where Prince John “calls for his mum and sucks his thumb,” or in Spaceballs, when Dark Helmet is caught “playing with dolls.”

Interestingly, although the words “playing with your dolls” are used in that scene, the dolls are not stereotypical girls’ toys; they are action figures closely resembling the Star Wars merchandise marketed to boys at the time. Furthermore, they all represent adult characters, and Helmet is using them to act out an adult scenario (seduction)– which is also explicitly heterosexual (representing what he wants to do with Princess Vespa.)

So even though his activity, on the surface, is explicitly not something that would be expected of an actual child, woman, or gay man– it still carries trappings of those identities, which evoke the same feelings of ridicule that those identities themselves would have evoked in many audience members at the time.

But, to end on the subject of childishness: That whole set of tropes, where a man can fail masculinity by liking a woman too much, reminds me very strongly of a certain phase I’ve seen before in the behavior of very young boys. The phase where all girls are gross and have cooties, and liking girls at all makes you a sissy.

Some filmmakers are still stuck there, and it shows.