The shame of Uncle Ugo (Luca 2021)

Queerness and the darkness of the deep closet

Luca is a queer film - don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Disney will say it’s about friendship, but we all know. So when you view the film through a queer lens, you read expressions of queerness through a range of eccentric characters. Of course there’s Luca - young, naïve and idealistic. All he wants is to experiment with life on the surface, to break free from the confines of the sheltered life his parents have subjected him to - a life with purpose, yes, but a life that is unfulfilled, lonely, and predictable. Sound familiar? Then there’s Alberto, who is slightly more accustomed to life on the surface. His confidence helps Luca cross the threshold into surface-dwelling, and allows him to thrive in his curiosity, without judgment. Let me translate all of this into gay - when Luca and Alberto cross the threshold by literally becoming fish out of water, they finally get to explore the fullness of their queer existence. And my God is it joyful. Their motivation - winning a Vespa - may seem trivial, but what of trivial follies? Here we have queer characters exploring their freedom to be.

… And then there’s Ugo, Luca’s creepy uncle from the deep, voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen. One look at him is enough to haunt your dreams for a lifetime, with those glowing oversized eyes, pointed teeth and the broadest, most vacant smile I have ever seen. When I see Ugo, my first instinct is to gouge my eyes out, yes, but on closer inspection, I feel an immense sadness for him. If Luca is a queer kid who managed to get away from a toxic lifestyle and thrive, Ugo is the complete opposite. Ugo is a queer individual who was forced even further into the toxicity, so much so that it turned him from sea monster to sea monster. Hear me out.

In The Velvet Rage, Alan Downs notes the lengths some queer people go to in order to hide their queerness. Some marry into straight relationships and live unhappy lives until they reach a breaking point, which manifests in cheating, divorce, depression and even suicide. Others lean heavily into traditionally masculine endeavours, such as sport, in order to dispel any notion of queerness from the minds of onlookers. Others, like me, dive deep into religion in order to hide their queerness - someone so religious surely can’t be gay! Nonetheless, the unifying factor for all of these expressions (or anti-expressions) of queerness is that of shame. Shame is what queer individuals carry around with them every day that they live a closeted life - the shame of hurting the people they love, the shame of knowing that they are different, the shame of being on the periphery. Luca’s parents burden him with this shame when they threaten him with a lifetime in the deep with Ugo. So Luca has to make a choice - live in shame at the bottom of the ocean, allowing the unnatural environment of hiding himself to deform him in ways beyond just physical appearance, or to break free and leave his family behind.

Shame is incredibly powerful. A queer reading of Luca makes me guess that uncle Ugo is burdened with shame, and unlike Luca, he chose to live a closeted life, and the consequences of this are clear. Ugo comes across as deranged, living off whale carcasses, the literal scraps of the ocean floor, while the people who get to be their authentic selves flourish. His physical health is compromised by his living conditions, and his connection to his family, too, is threatened by his physiology, which is adapted to the extremities of the deep. Breaking free from this lifestyle is now impossible, and he’s forced to find joy in whatever he can to keep himself alive - hence his obsession with whale carcasses.

In the film Boy Erased, Jared (Lucas Hedges) is so consumed by the shame of being gay, as the son of a pastor (Russell Crowe), that he attends conversion therapy (which really doesn’t deserve to be called therapy at all). We watch as systematically, queer individuals are broken down one by one, through literal methods of torture, until they submit to an ideology that is harmful to them, which ultimately results in one of the attendees committing suicide. Jared eventually manages to leave the camp, with the help of his mother. He comes out, and ends up having a wonderful life being his authentic self, and, spoiler, ultimately makes some sort of peace with his father. Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton), however, runs the camp, and he represents a character who has chosen a life in the deep, allowing this shame to fester into a self-loathing that fuels his torturing of young, vulnerable people. It would be wrong to say that Ugo is anything like Victor Sykes in how they would treat vulnerable people, but Ugo offers Luca a path to safety in order to still exist in the world that he knows, albeit a safety consumed by shame.

Of course, the more obvious reading of queerness in Luca is in the fact that Luca and Alberto must hide themselves from a town of people who have developed a culture around slaying sea monsters. This aspect of queerness existing in a hostile world allows the viewer to become sympathetic towards Luca’s mother, who is justified in her fear of Luca going to the surface. If Luca’s going to the surface is his crossing the threshold into a life of queerness, this life is only really authentic when his true identity as a sea monster is revealed to the town. All the uninhibited experimentation with Alberto, diving between land and sea, without judgment, allows Luca to gain a newfound confidence, however in a world where revealing yourself puts you in danger, the impetus to remain hidden and perform a palatable and safe identity is strong. The difference between Luca performing humanity on the surface and Ugo performing deep ocean living is that Luca’s performance is driven by fear, while Ugo’s is driven by shame. Where Luca is endangered by external forces, Ugo’s sense of shame is internal. Luca chooses to endure the constant threat of being discovered in order to escape a lifetime of shame in the deep, and thus the film draws the conclusion that even Luca’s dangerous flirting with queerness in a hostile environment is better than a lifetime of eternal shame at the bottom of the ocean.