i think people are overreacting about cmbyn. i didn't like the movie, but it's not nearly as awful as all the claims around it.
I had an opportunity to see this movie a couple weeks ago for free, with the movie and theater benefiting in absolutely no way, so I did. And I was struck by how much worse it was than I was expecting.
Because the thing is, when you watch this movie without a lens of romantic wish-fulfillment, it becomes excruciatingly obvious that this story is supposed to be about a predatory relationship. Like, it’s 100% intentional. I haven’t read the source material, but my guess would be the author originally wrote it specifically as an “exploration” (or something, idk you know how str8 men are) of a predatory relationship. which would explain why he’s brought up the age gap a lot in interviews as an important feature of the relationship he wanted to depict, and also why he made it a gay couple– since he’s straight and probably figured that was more believable because hey, gays are all predators right?
And yet!! Adults preying on teenage minors is SO COMMON and SO ACCEPTABLE in our society that apparently nobody even fucking realizes that! I mean, I’m not surprised that Hollywood decided this was a-ok, considering that place has always been rife with child predators and the sexual exploitation of young people, but the fact that regular people read this book and watch this movie and don’t come away thinking “wow it’s good that Elio got out of that” but instead are like “omg what an amazing love story” is like. wild. like did we watch the same movie or are y’all just that brainwashed into thinking a 17yo is an emotionally mature, fully grown adult.
Throughout the whole movie, everything that happens in the relationship is on Oliver’s terms alone. Their non-romantic hanging out, their initial fooling around, their eventual sexual relationship, all of it. It’s Oliver telling Elio to do something with him and Elio, like a puppy dog, doing so, even when Oliver’s behavior is invasive (bursting into Elio’s room while he’s in his underwear and insisting he come swimming even though Elio says he doesn’t like it) or manipulative (acting like he’s going down on Elio and then slamming the door in his face). Whenever Elio tries to take control or assert his agency somehow— kissing Oliver first, or asking Oliver to meet him somewhere— Oliver pushes him away, and Elio is visibly hurt. It’s a classic emotional manipulation tactic and I don’t understand how you could POSSIBLY find it romantic. It made my stomach churn.
And then, of course, there’s the peach scene. For context, Elio masturbates with a peach (think grapefruit technique) and then leaves the peach, now covered in semen, next to his bed while he takes a nap. Oliver wakes him up and sees the peach, and then when Elio starts berating himself for being attracted to Oliver (“I’m sick aren’t I?”), Oliver responds with “I’ll show you sick” and starts eating the peach, which makes Elio really upset. He grapples with Oliver and repeatedly yells at him to stop, saying things like “why are you doing this to me?!” while Oliver pins him to the mattress. Elio says “stop it you’re hurting me!” and Oliver responds, in classic sexual predator form, “then don’t fight it!” If not for the fact that they aren’t touching each other in a sexual way, it would come across as super rapey (which, I mean, it kinda does anyway). Oliver is doing a sexual thing and when Elio tells him to stop, that he’s hurting him, Oliver flips the blame around onto Elio for “fighting it.”
And then at the end of the summer when Oliver has had his fill, he just drops him. He doesn’t even tell Elio until after he’s gone that he’s actually been engaged (to a woman) this whole time. There’s this weird scene between Elio and his father where the dad intimates that he knows the true nature of the relationship Elio and Oliver had, and gives this long spiel about how they were Such Good Friends and “that kind of love is special” and blablabla, which struck me as really out of place because? that’s not what their relationship was like. At All. it feels like something out of a totally different movie, like they’re trying to infuse the movie with a meaning that just wasn’t there. It’s also, y’know, interesting that Elio’s fear of his parents’ reaction to finding out he’s bi was used as the justification for keeping his involvement with Oliver so covert— and their communication so threadbare— for the whole movie, until suddenly that isn’t necessary to the plot anymore and instead we need a third party to give a percipient analysis of the events of the movie. Had Elio felt comfortable mentioning the relationship to his family, they might’ve actually been involved and his emotional support system wouldn’t have had to be solely manipulative, boundary-overstepping Oliver. But that’s so much less romantic right?
Anyways yeah, the bottom line is it’s actually way more openly predatory than I was expecting and tbh people have every right to be concerned about how normalized that is, to the point that viewers are supposed to see and have been seeing it as romantic. It’s especially concerning because so many young mlm feel like they should be pursuing older men/allowing older men to pursue them, partly because those are often the most visible (and forward) “potential partners,” and partly because young gay and bi kids go looking for someone with the emotional maturity to be able to provide pseudoparental guidance, and older mlm seemingly have both those things. it reinforces a narrative that ultimately encourages vulnerable young men to get into exploitative relationships with men much older than them, which can do lasting damage to their sense of self and sexuality— which is visible in the book that cmbyn is adapted from, when Elio is shown still grappling with his short-lived relationship with Oliver many years later. inch er esting that they didn’t include that in the movie……..
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