By Heather Christie

In the last week or so, two sexual titans have been unleashed onto the big screen: Harry Potter, the powerful heterosexual boy wizard of pseudo-literature, and Bruno, the failed gay fashion journalist who just wants to be famous.

An unlikely sexuality death match, to be sure, but these two infamous adversaries have a lot more at stake than summer box-office bragging rights. Yes friends, HP and Bruno are in fact engaged in a self-perpetuating headlock to see who can most effectively saturate society by—in fact—subverting most effectively its heteronormative-rightwing-religious and otherwise restrictive social structures. Holy sh*t, that was a mouthful. Nothing that Bruno’s practiced jowls couldn’t take, though, I’m sure.

On the surface, both of these movies are pretty disappointing. HP6 couldn’t hold a candle to the well-crafted excitement of the last few installments—though, to be fair, the Globe did indeed dub it a “transitional” movie intended to whet our appetites for the double-feature final episode. Bruno, by contrast, is ludicrously (maybe even lewd-icrously, ha.) over the top; it’s the video equivalent of being beaten to death with a rotting Polish sausage from Christie Pits, spiked all-over with sharpened fingernail clippings. Shoddy filmmaking and lackluster scriptwriting aside, both films play a part in modifying how audience members evaluate and negotiate society’s sexual boundaries.

We all know that J.K. Rowling has been charged with promoting quote-unquote satanic values (*insert eyeball rolling ici) through the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and all who have walked its hallowed halls. But such simple-minded readings apart, Rowling’s world of quidditch and quills hardly lends itself to a queer reading of the wizarding world; despite the ambiguous references to Dumbledore’s homosexuality, the wizarding world seems to be a pretty sexually orthodox one. Especially in HP6, the blossoming of hetero-luv abounds with awkward smooching, broken adolecent hearts, and the uber sexy line from Ginny Weasley: “I can hide up here too, you know.” Uhhh, what does that even mean? Hiding in the closet? Hiding from the public eye? So confused, especially when it comes from the mouth of a fourteen-year-old who never smiles. My hunch is that we’re not really supposed to reading anything but a straight-and-quaint love story into it, though.

It could be argued that Bruno, on the other hand also does queers a disservice because he embodies the worst of all gay stereotypes: materialistic, flippant, nymphomaniacal, way too fashion-forward, and a predator of poor, unsuspecting straight white men. But friends, it’s the oldest trick in the book! Remember Chaucer’s Wife of Bath? She was the literary embodiment of the worst that womankind had to offer: free-thinking, flippant, moneyed, and worst of all, took the view that men were utterly disposable. While there’s much debate as to whether or not Chaucer was being a misogynist or a feminist, I think in Bruno’s (and Sacha Baron Cohen’s) case we can safely say that the movie does in fact do wonders for those closed minds of society. The film has been banned in the Ukraine because it might morally corrupt the country’s good citizens, and the UK is producing a toned-down version of the film for the 18-and-under set, but this editing and censoring only speaks to how powerful the film actually is, even if it isn’t as groundbreaking as say, Borat.

At the end of the day, regardless of whether one likes the movie or not, it pokes fun at the boundaries of a rigidly heteronormative world. Sure it does so in a vulgar, stereotypical, and off-putting way, but the message comes across loud and clear about the lameness of a world where everyone is assumed to be straight. The film ends with—what else—a celebrity love-in song with Snoop Dogg rapping the clumsy if telling line “he’s gay, he’s gay, ok.”

All this is to say that while I wouldn’t suggest seeing HP6 or Bruno for their cinematic quality, they both bring up some really interesting views of society and sexuality during this Wet, Hot, Canadian Summer.