skye riley? more like GAY riley- an analysis
so, i’m a very hyperfixated autistic lesbian with a weird gender and that definitely influenced how i thought of and perceived skye’s dialogue and actions as a character. regardless, i feel like my analysis is pretty okay. i’ve spent at least the past month thinking about smile 2 and i never miss a chance to drive home how important it is that a character can be read as queer in a canonical sense. maybe this is just me being that one friend that too woke but that is what i do best! i want to talk about it. :3
i think the people i’ve seen drawing and talking about skye in a more “queer” way are mostly just…headcanoning with no reason behind it. now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. it’s a thing i do pretty often. there is, after all, a beautiful kind of fun in being able to see yourself or your community in a character you love. with this analysis, what i want to do is give some insight as to why i personally have taken to the idea of skye riley as a queer coded character. i want to take note of skye’s traits, dialogue, inspirations, etc. i want to show that media can be interpreted in different ways and that my own interpretation is just one of many that can be seen in skye riley and smile 2 as a whole. here, i’m giving my headcanons reasons- citing my sources, i guess. so here’s what’s up.
to start with, the most obvious example, i would say, of skye’s queerness is her relationship with the character named gemma, her ex-best friend. to me, their relationship is just like…super gay. there’s really no other way to describe it. gemma is the person that’s emotionally closest to skye throughout the entire movie. skye values her relationship with gemma over her relationships with quite literally anyone and everyone else. skye has no pictures of herself with anyone else but gemma in her apartment, she has no other contacts with an emoji in their name (excluding those for business reasons), and she feels incredibly comfortable hugging and kissing gemma; things that all may seem small but, really, show how close skye considers gemma to be. she doesn’t give anyone the grace or consideration she gives gemma. skye hurts the most when she realises that the gemma she’d been interacting with wasn’t real. she wants gemma back in her life more than anyone else she’d lost. she cares about gemma the most, she thinks about gemma the most, and she loves gemma the most. skye doesn’t show any desire to have paul, her dead ex-boyfriend, back in her life. no- she only shows guilt over the car crash that she caused and that killed him. in all of her interactions with paul, at least with the visions of him she has in her head, she doesn’t like him, let alone love him. she had no passion nor intimacy with him and the movie is clear about that. she doesn’t want him back, she just wishes what happened hadn’t happened. she just feels an immense amount of guilt over her actions that night. truly, we see that she pays very little attention to the men in her life which is a mindset i think a lot of lesbians (including myself) have.
not only that but gemma and paul have some parallels as well. i don’t think many people notice how gemma and paul both haunt the narrative of the movie- meaning that they themselves are barely present but they have quite a large effect on the story and/or the story’s characters. skye lost gemma and paul at similar times- in fact, skye’s falling out with gemma occurred only around two weeks before the car crash that killed paul. both gemma and paul were people that skye kept close to her and they were also people that skye hadn’t seen in at least a year during the time when the movie took place. let’s not forget that the gemma we see skye interact with in the movie isn’t real. we only see the real gemma having a real interaction with skye once- twice if you count their text messages. i cannot hammer it in enough that the gemma we see in the movie is not real. and once you really understand that, you also begin to understand the difference between how skye viewed gemma and how skye viewed paul. now. the curse uses skye’s grief against her, generating hallucinations of both paul and gemma to manipulate her. what’s the difference between these two hallucinations? only one speaks. when skye begins to see paul, she sees him bloodied and bruised, a reminder of his death. but he remains silent. the entity doesn’t bother trying to give skye hope when it comes to paul. but when it comes to gemma…it’s a much different story. the fake gemma is more than skye’s memories of their fight. the fake gemma is made up of skye’s memories and thoughts about gemma as a whole. the fake gemma speaks directly to skye and gives her everything she wants. it makes skye think that gemma has forgiven her with no questions asked and that gemma believes skye when she says that something isn’t right. given that the entity is like a parasite, relying on only its hosts thoughts, emotions, and memories to generate these hallucinations, what we can gather from fake gemma vs. fake paul is that, ultimately, skye valued her relationship with gemma far more than she did her relationship with paul. in the present, she told the fake gemma that she loved her and meant it about the real gemma. in the past, she’d told the real paul that she hated him and meant it about the real paul. i find it telling that the movie chooses to show us the ways in which gemma is similar to paul, someone skye supposedly loved romantically, and when we see the ways they’re different in their relationship with skye, we see that it’s mainly about how much more willing skye was to love gemma the way she was supposed to have loved paul.
furthermore, she’s also surprisingly gender non conforming in a sense. in the movie, it’s not as obvious as her disregard for men but in my opinion, it’s shown through her costuming and some of her dialogue. to me, her most interesting line in this case is what she says after she finds her dressing room trashed. she argues with her mom and says, “i am not in the headspace to put on a fucking dress and play dancing monkey in front of a room full of strangers!” and i’ve not really seen anyone talk about this line even though i think it’s actually very telling about how skye perceives her own identity. consider what it means to skye to “play dancing monkey.” using what we know about her, i would say that playing dancing monkey means being inauthentic solely to entertain others, something that skye finds stifling. she does not want to be used. with her wording, she compares herself to an animal. now, i think that’s something of a different conversation but the takeaway in this case is that skye does not want to be someone she’s not or do things she hates in order to please others. and what is it that she specifically says here? that she’s not in the headspace to put on a dress and play dancing monkey. and so, i want to point out that she specifically says that she has to be in the right headspace to put on a dress- that is, to perform femininity and to be a spectacle. this line shows us that femininity is not generally something skye enjoys expressing for herself. rather, it’s something she has to psych herself up for and that doesn’t come incredibly naturally to her. and that brings me to what does seem to come naturally to skye.
when skye has control over her own image- that is, her own makeup, her hair, and her outfits, she often chooses to dress in clothes that give her a bulkier silhouette and are less form-fitting. she chooses to wear little to no makeup. there’s never a moment when skye chooses to wear a dress or wear noticeable makeup if she’s not under scrutiny. she chooses to be androgynous and with that one line we looked at earlier, we see that it’s about more than just physical comfort.
i also want to talk about one of her most glaring traits that indicate her queer gender identity: her hair. i’ve seen other people talk about skye hypothetically liking women and one of the main responses i’ve seen was “just because her hair is short?” combined with a type of facetious tone. and while i’ve surprisingly never had that response to my endless weird gender skyeposting, i want to say that yeah, skye’s hair is part of her queerness…but not in the way you might think. no, i don’t think that skye is gay because she has short hair. but…i do think her hair is part of a queer reading of skye as a character. hair is kind of a big thing in this movie. skye goes through a big hair transformation: from long and black to short and blonde. skye tugs at her hair when she’s anxious and as her anxiety worsens, she pulls more and more of it out. hair is important. and in the cultural context of the movie’s production, skye being a woman with short hair is kind of just…inherently queer. by cutting her hair short, skye defies a patriarchal beauty standard. by that metric, skye inherently becomes a little bit more queer. as far as we know, skye wasn’t told by anyone to cut her hair short. she very well could have kept it much longer but she didn’t. she chose to go through with this radical change. so not only is the cutting of hair typically symbolic of letting go, something skye was desperate to do, but her new hairstyle can also be seen as her effort to be a little more masculine while keeping her safe enough to not arouse any real suspicion.
so no. i don’t think skye having short hair makes her gay but i do think that her hair being short is definitely supplemental to her being read as queer.
it’s also not at all lost on me how common it is for queer celebrities to struggle with their sexuality/gender identity, how common it is for there to be stories about it, and how often closeted queer celebrities turn to poor coping mechanisms like drug abuse. skye’s character and story is so deeply rooted in the pressures of the music industry and how they can affect a person. her struggle with inauthenticity and feeling stifled by an image she’s been forced into but doesn’t enjoy is one that a lot of queer people know and can relate to heavily. while i’m sure smile 2 wasn’t written with a queer skye riley in mind, skye’s story and its themes can surely feel so familiar to queer fans. not only that but a very important part of skye’s character is the fact that she feels that there is something deeply wrong with her. she’s surrounded by people who don’t see her, don’t understand her, and make no effort to do so which leads to her always feeling out of place and like she is broken on a fundamental level. she has nobody on her side and, as a queer person in a cisheteronormative society, that is often how it feels when you have no support system. skye is a person who is under constant scrutiny and pressure to conform to what the people around her want from her without considering what she might want for herself. she goes on a short rant in which she essentially calls herself a “deeply broken person” and expresses that she’d thought success would fix the things that were wrong with her before coming to find that that just wasn’t the case. and guess what: so many celebrities who came out later in life express feelings of entrapment by their industry. so many queer people express feelings of somehow being “wrong” just for existing as queer. i know that as a queer person that struggles with mental illness, i feel incredibly seen by the character of skye riley. i feel like that’s the best part.
i would say, broadly, that smile 2 is really a story of poor mental health that’s been left to marinate too long. it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of not asking for help and having no support. but it’s also a story of feeling trapped by the expectations of others. i think there’s something a little beautiful in that, as odd as that sounds. like i said, skye’s story can certainly feel incredibly relatable to queer fans when watching the movie through the lens of a queer reading. the movie’s themes aren’t exclusive to queer people and queer characters but they certainly can be meaningful in that way.
it personally makes me really happy to know that i can say that skye riley, this character i love, is queer and have genuine textual reasons for why i think that. it somehow feels so right. and i hope with with this analysis, i’ve made my reasons clear.
basically, i love skye riley a lot. and if you’ve gotten this far, i’m sure you do too. thanks for reading :-)