Queer Anachronism in Our Flag Means Death
We need to talk about anachronism and queerness in Our Flag Means Death. One of the funniest parts of OFMD is the creative use of anachronism. Instead of dutifully following historical accuracy like many other period pieces, OFMD plays into campy anachronism for the sake of the joke. In the year 1717, Oluwande wears Crocs on the beach. Roach hits Izzy with a deli sandwich. Stede reads his crew Pinocchio, a story not written for another 150 years. OFMD far from invented comedic anachronism, (Monty Python, A Knightâs Tale, etc. have also fully committed to the bit) but OFMD has unleashed anachronism on a far more powerful frontier: queer imagination. By releasing itself from the chains of âbut that didnât really happen,â OFMD creates space for queerness yet unseen in period pieces, especially comedies. Queer people have always used fiction as a method to represent stories lost to the ages (think Portrait of a Lady on Fire), but OFMD takes queer representation to a completely different stage by committing to the anachronism and fully imaging alternative ways of being.
Jim obviously represents the real historical phenomenon of people assigned female at birth dressing and living as men on pirate ships, but instead of deliberating over how these people might possibly identify today, OFMD imagines a world where Jim uses they/them pronouns, and no one blinks an eye. In this queer playground of a world before modern transphobia but with addition of modern trans identities, Jim allows the audience a peek at what the world could look like. Jim has a romance, a revenge plot, a tragic backstory, all completely distinct from their identity as a nonbinary person. The creation of nonbinary identity as a non-issue is so funny, but it is also radical. The radical potential of imagining nonbinary people outside of transpobia cannot be overstated, and we need to talk about it.
Stedeâs reconciliation with Mary turns the tragic marriage trope on its head. Instead of marriage ending a queer episode in oneâs life, as it often did in reality and often does in fiction (again, Portrait of a Lady on Fire) or alternatively, falling into the misogynistic trope of the evil wife, standing between a queer love story, Stede and Mary speak openly about their respective lovers. Throughout the entire show, when faced with queerness, the show dares to ask: why not? Oluwande is literally in Crocs, so why wouldnât we imagine queer liberation that includes wives not as stand-ins, but as allies and accomplices in the creation of queerness? Breaking the rules of history and television and narrative, we imagine a world where a gay man can conspire with this wife of arranged marriage to fake his death so they both live happily ever after.
Knowing (as we do from David Jenkinsâ tweet where he told everyone to follow the writers) that at least 4 of the 13 writers on OFMD are nonbinary people of color, it invokes the queer of color perspective on scenes that anachronistically look at race as well as sexuality. During my personal favorite scene of the show, A British Navy officer tells Frenchie to be âquiet, slaveâ and to stop his âuppityâ behavior, and he gets a knife through his hand as a result. In any other show, the fact that the Black members of the crew had to pretend to be servants to trick the Navy would likely have been an unfortunate necessity (if there were any Black pirates included to begin with!) but OFMD treats that racism as a reason to blow up the entire ruse and just start killing people. Because why not? Why imagine a world full of fanciful pirates and gay romances if they still have to bow to racism? And the next time they meet the aristocracy, the trope is flipped further, with Olu pretending to be a king in a trick that ends with all the other servants/enslaved people on the ship riding off into the sunset while their supposed masters die on a ship in a blaze. I wonât get into the INCREDIBLE indigenous representation in Episode 2, since much of that is actually not anachronistic and rather correcting historical falsehoods, the depictions of race in OFMD are delightfully anachronistic and intrinsically queer.
Honestly, OFMD can only be understood as the result of finally giving QPOC a seat at the table, and that is why itâs been the top ranked show for five weeks, and #RenewOurFlagMeansDeath has been trending on twitter for just as long. I am so grateful to have a show that allows queerness to play and thrive in whimsical, but also serious and heart-wrenching, settings.
