Single-White Female Themes

Anyone who says they aren’t worried about letting strangers into their home is lying, but what happens when you open the door for a stranger and invite them in? The film, Single White Female, personifies the worst case scenario for a young, single woman who lives alone in the city and is looking for a new roommate. Although this thriller is fairly entertaining and seemingly harmless, the film provides a representation of LGB individuals that follows age-old themes of painting gay individuals as dangerous. Hedy, the antagonist, is portrayed as a man-hating, obsessive, and unstable killer. Problematically, she is also gay. This portrayal allows for a harmful parallel to be made between Hedy’s psychosis and her sexuality that perpetuate negative

By creating an image of Hedy as sexually attracted to Allie, a narrative begins to form that looks similar to the anti-gay assumption that same-sex love is unnatural and must accordingly be destructive. Hedy’s creepy obsession with Allie is portrayed through her process of becoming Allie. She buys the same clothes as her, gets the same haircut, and pretends to be her. This depiction paints a picture of the perceived threat of LGB individuals to heterosexuals. One perceived threat of same-sex attraction is the risk it poses to interrupting heterosexual relationships. As Paulin identifies in her piece which examines the queer representation in Single White Female, “Hedy's ultimate threat—as the woman who refuses reproductive sexuality herself, conclusively disrupts the film's heterosexual couple, and single-mindedly pursues her jouissance—is identical to the threat of gay sex, and hence the inestimable importance of her defeat.” (63). In other words, the LGB threat is the possibility of derailing the goal of the heterosexual population to find a mate and reproduce. It’s the rejection of heterosexual sex, and therefore reproduction, that calls for the villanizing and necessary death of Hedy. In light of Hedy’s perceived transgression of being non-heterosexual, her character must parallel this by being evil and