Death Becomes Her at 30: How a Meryl Streep-Goldie Hawn comedy found new life as a queer cornerstone

When Death Becomes Her hit theaters in 1992, the commercial and critical response was decidedly lukewarm. Audiences got a laugh out of Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as bickering rivals who consume a magic potion that makes them immortally youthful. Academy Award voters were impressed enough to hand an Oscar to its cutting-edge special effects, which could create a gaping hole in the middle of Hawn’s torso or cause Streep’s head to squish or swivel every which way. But many critics were dismissive of Robert Zemeckis’ follow-up to Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Back To The Future trilogy, asserting that those effects upstaged any emotional stakes or deeper meanings.

Yet 30 years later, the film has found an afterlife in a community inclined to see meaning where those critics could not. LGBTQ film buffs, particularly gay men and drag queens, have turned Death Becomes Her into a cornerstone of queer culture. There’s an easy, surface-level explanation that the movie is shown at midnight screenings every Pride month: Who among us diva-worshippers can resist Streep, Hawn, and Isabella Rossellini giving their goofiest yet most glamorous performances? (There’s even Bruce Willis, gamely playing against type as a nerdy-cute plastic surgeon.) But now a warning: as drag impresario, filmmaker, and self-proclaimed cult leader Joshua Grannell a.k.a Peaches Christ explains, there are more sinister, subconscious reasons this film has entrenched itself in the queer canon.

Grannell is more than just an expert on macabre comedies like this one; he’s even adapted the film into one of his live stage parodies, Drag Becomes Her, featuring RuPaul’s Drag Race stars Jerick Hoffer, a.k.a. Jinkx Monsoon, and Benjamin Putnam, a.k.a. Ben DeLaCreme. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Death Becomes Her, The A.V. Club asked Grannell why the film seems to have taken a potion of immortality, in a conversation that spanned definitions of cult, camp, and queerness itself.

Joshua Grannell: I think one of the most obvious reasons is because it is essentially a Universal monster movie, which we love. Queer people love horror and we love monsters. We identify with monsters, we always have. Frankenstein was directed by [James Whale], a gay man. And Mary Shelley was queer. There’s this just rich history of queerness attached to monster movies. But then they make this really overtly queer by casting two of our favorite icons of all time: the great actress Meryl Streep and the great, iconic comedy legend Goldie Hawn, and make it all about transformative beauty and magic with relationship to glamor. And it ultimately being about our desire to stay young? Let’s face it, gay men especially have this issue. It’s actually a real issue. It’s a real darkness in our community where we don’t talk a lot about the ageism that exists among us. And it’s a real thing.

So I think Death Becomes Her taps into so many fears and so many dark places. But we also, as queer people, love to laugh at our own darkness. We love to make fun of dark shit, you know? It’s how we survive so much bullshit and abuse. I think this movie is dark. It’s a gothic horror movie presented as a comedy. And it’s delicious, it’s camp, it’s genius as far as its performances go. Oh, and of course, there’s Isabella Rossellini, another bona fide queer icon who’s giving one of the great comedic performances of all time. She’s much like Meryl Streep, these are people that aren’t known necessarily for comedy. And Bruce Willis, for that matter! Goldie Hawn, of course, is known for comedy, but all four of them step up to the plate and give, I mean, some of the best comedy performances ever. On top of that, you’ve got the fabulous Gothic Hollywood set, incredible costuming, and then the fantastic, ahead-of-their-time special effects. The creativity is just insane, and I think all of that speaks to queers.

AVC: It’s a beautiful idea that we as queer people want to laugh at our darkness. How consciously would you say that happens? Has Death Becomes Her become an LGBTQ favorite because it’s funny and fun on the surface, but sneakily resonant underneath?

JG: Well, it’s interesting that you say that, because I think in building a career around loving and celebrating and making movies, I often didn’t analyze any of this shit. You know, I just celebrated midnight movies and programmed the movies we loved. It wasn’t until recently that something called “queer horror” was a thing. And now I’m being asked to be in documentaries and to go to universities and talk about queer horror. And everyone’s talking about my film, All About Evil, being this early example of overt queer horror. And I’m like, Wait, I wasn’t aware of any of this! This is just stuff I love, I just made a movie that I wanted to make.

So it is interesting, now as an older queer person, analyzing these things, showing up in these documentaries and being asked questions I’ve never been asked before. I’m actually able to step back and look at these things and go, Oh, my God, Death Becomes Her could easily be a story about gay men and their value in the world being attached to their attractiveness, and how connected we are to women in Hollywood in that regard. I mean, I don’t particularly care for the Real Housewives bullshit, but it’s very popular among gay men, you know? But there is this real dark side—in San Francisco, not as much lately, but there was a time living here where it was very normal for adult film actors to end up taking their own lives. Often because they had reached a certain age and they didn’t have value anymore in our community. That’s a reality. There is a real, dark issue of ageism in relation to attractiveness and vanity that we don’t talk about. And Death Becomes Her is essentially a mirror for us.

AVC: And here I thought this would be a celebration of all the joyful, campy ways Death Becomes Her resonates. To connect the queer community, particularly gay men, to Hollywood icons desperate for youthful beauty is legitimately dark.

JG: I think there’s a relatable strife there. You know, when you look at the way straight men are allowed to grow old and be successful in Hollywood, it is not the same for women and it’s really not the same for the gay community. Straight men, by and large, can grow old, look old, get wrinkly, be saggy, and still get leading roles in movies. Women aren’t afforded that. I mean, people make fun of Joan Rivers for having all that plastic surgery. And it’s like, well, fuck you, because if she looked like the little old lady that she should’ve been because of her age, she wouldn’t have been asked or allowed to do a red carpet. So for us, I think there’s this connective tissue there. We also love comedians and Hollywood actresses, we appreciate their struggle.

AVC: Was this film’s queerness intentional, or is it all in the eye of the beholder? Did its cast and creators expect it would speak to the gay community like it has—and in considering its legacy, does that matter?

JG: That’s a really good question, because I think there are these—what we should assume are heterosexual men just because they are married to women or whatever. Robert Zemeckis, I’m assuming, is heterosexual. He definitely comes off as straight to me. I’m not that queer person who’s like, “Oh, he must be queer to have made Death Becomes Her.” I think someone like Ken Russell is the same way; when you watch The Devil or Tommy or his movies, it’s like, Wow, a straight guy made these movies. Brian De Palma! Another guy making movies that I think are so queer, Carrie or Phantom Of The Paradise or Dressed To Kill. I do think there are these directors who are just inherently hip and cool and aren’t afraid to go there.

Robert Zemeckis wasn’t afraid to make a movie about this struggle, to turn vanity among women into a monster movie. Well, they’re monsters, but they’re also likable, lovable—we are rooting for the monsters. He walks the line perfectly between camp and real pathology, real drama. And it’s so queer. He’s just one of those confident filmmakers who obviously was successful enough to get the kind of budget it would take to make that movie. I wonder if having Bruce Willis in it was actually what locked in the budget, ironically. And I give him a ton of credit for that movie. In fact, I think it’s his best performance ever. The way he plays the sort of straight man—no pun intended—against those two women, he’s so generous and so good at what he’s doing. And I think when the movie came out, much like all great cult movies, it was queer people who immediately loved it. But the world didn’t love it, it wasn’t some huge phenomenon. It was queer people who kept it alive and showed it to their friends. And now it’s considered a cult classic.

AVC: It is interesting how time is an important ingredient in a successful cult classic. I mean, here we are doing a feature on this film’s anniversary—there’s a nostalgia factor, right?

JG: Right. And considering the technology and the special effects, it’s one of those movies that’s both very much of its era, but also very classic and timeless; it aged really well. You watch it today and it’s still so effective, those performances, the way it’s shot is gorgeous. I think straight people can make good queer content and people might be annoyed at me for saying that. But I do think some straight people really get it.

AVC: How did your stage adaptation Drag Becomes Her come about?

JG: So Jinkx Monsoon is my drag daughter, and she has informed a lot of my productions. Our first was me going to her and saying, “Hey, let’s do Grey Gardens.” And it was her who pushed me to do Hocus Pocus [parody Hocum Pokem]—I didn’t grow up with Hocus Pocus, I’m a little bit older—but rewatching it, I was able to go, Oh, this is three women doing drag, as witches. This is camp, this is like Elvira: Mistress Of The Dark. But what really happened was I wanted to make the perfect showcase for Jinkx and [Ben DeLaCreme], who’s also queer family for me, and thought about a movie we all three fucking love. We all three love, love, love Death Becomes Her. And so when I approached them about doing it, immediately they both said yes. And DeLa actually wrote all of the parody song lyrics, while I wrote the script. And like in all my shows, we play a mash-up of our own drag characters, which of course are part fantasy and part reality…with the characters from the movie.

AVC: That element of mashing up a drag persona with a character you’re parodying is such an intrinsic part of your work. Do you think of it as a reclamation? You take a piece of culture that is queer canon, or considered “queer-coded,” and make it more explicitly part of the queer community?

JG: That’s exactly what I do. “You’ve loved this movie in all these ways. Now I’m going to take it in and make a version of it that’s overtly queer.” I mean, this show opens and it’s Jinkx Monsoon 40 years in the future, doing this tired off-Broadway show—she does [Streep’s] “I See Me” number and the audience goes nuts. But this Jinkx, her drag career is all washed up. And she and DeLa [mashed up with Goldie Hawn’s character] have been estranged for years and years. And the audience loves it because it is a reclamation.

I mean, when people had been asking me to [parody] Legally Blonde for a while, and I kept looking at that movie going, “Is it cult?” It’s not very transgressive. It’s a good comedy, it’s funny, but I don’t know if I could do this. And then, my other drag daughter is Bob the Drag Queen. And Bob and I were talking about doing different movies—and oh, God, Bob wanted me to do The Color Purple. And I’m like, that is not for me to do. It’s fabulous, we love it, but it doesn’t need a drag comedy made about it. So she said, “I also love Legally Blonde.” And I said, “Oh, my God, you play the Reese Witherspoon character.” So in my universe, Bob the Drag Queen can be Elle Woods. We called the show Legally Black and we wrote it to be a reclamation of that story, about Bob the Drag Queen going to Harvard.

To me, that’s queerness: saying we can do whatever the fuck we want. I mean, Bob played the Kathy Najimy character with me and Jinkx in Hocus Pocus. And, you know, there were idiots who were like, “Wait, how can Bob play that character?” And we’re like, “Hello, it’s drag. We can do whatever we want.”

AVC: I love this notion of considering the criteria for what’s a cult classic and what isn’t. Two related questions: One, how do you define cult? But two, and much trickier, how do you define camp?

JG: [Laughs] The cult question is easier for me because I have a podcast called Midnight Mass where we talk about cult movies all the time. My definition for cult has definitely evolved over the years, but I really think if a movie has a rabid fan base of people that just worship it like it’s their religion, if you can have a screening of a movie and people dressed up as characters come out to the movie, to me, that’s cult. It used to be that my idea of cult was that it had to be lesser known, a movie that was only shown at midnight. And it had to be very easily transgressive. But now I realize even Harry Potter, for better or worse, has a cult element.

But as far as camp, as you can imagine, people’s definitions completely vary. You’ve got people who still adhere to the Sontag version of what camp is. I tend to think camp is basically drag. It’s this thing where you know it when you see it. It’s hard to define, hard to pin down. It’s a taste. It’s a sense of comedy. It’s a sense of style. It’s kind of something that people either get or they don’t, you know? They use the word camp a lot in the U.K. and England, way more than we do in the United States. “Oh, darling, that’s camp.” But here, often we use it to be dismissive of something. Especially in the film world and art world, I think because of homophobia, the word camp has actually been used in a dismissive way.

AVC: Do you feel like optimistic about the state of queer culture, especially as it relates to the proverbial mainstream?

JG: I do. But also, I’m one of those bitter, old, punk queens who never fought for this stuff to be mainstream. Maybe I’m part of the problem! [Laughs] I’ve been successful, and now I’m kind of looking at things going, “Oh, my God, I liked it better when people hated us.” The things that I was doing in the early part of my career, the stuff that I really loved—John Waters and horror movies and drag—they were pretty underground. They weren’t very mainstream, they were niche things. And all those things have become pretty popular. And part of me loves it and I’m obviously benefiting from it, career-wise. But then another part of me actually, really did like it when it was more underground and punk rock. There was a time where the audience for a drag show was as interesting as the people on stage. And that time has passed. The audience is just very mainstream now. Drag is kind of the pumpkin spice latte of gay culture, you know?

AVC: Wow, thank you for that perfect zinger of a pull quote. Lastly, we love asking everyone for their favorite filmmaker. If you had to pick one dream collaborator, who would it be?

JG: Oh, my favorite, favorite, favorite filmmaker—John Waters and I grew up in Maryland. And the discovery of John Waters completely changed my life, for real. And the fact that John kind of embraced me, 15 years ago he did a show of mine and has stayed my friend—it’s weird for me to say, but we’re actually really friends. He came to the set of All About Evil and had lunch with me and Natasha Lyonne. So I had that dream come true because truly, John Waters has been everything to me. And then beyond John—no, I won’t even go there because I’ll just start listing people! [Laughs] John Waters, that’s it.