Queering the Happily Ever After: Paradoxes of the Cinematic Trope in Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded

Abstract

The 2017 marriage equality referendum was conservative in reach—refuting the entrenched marginalisation of queer existence, a challenge to conflations of happiness (in fact, the ultimate “happily ever after”—marriage) and heteronormativity. The marriage equality debate was an ugly realisation of those discourses of exclusion and prejudice implicated in many Western values, and in Australian national identity broadly. In thinking through these issues, I return to Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Loaded (1995) for its queering of “happily ever after” myths via film referents. Ari’s paradoxical relationship to romantic tenderness is evident in his frequent first-person allusions to various films. A close reading of Loaded and the film’s allusions expose both the operation of exclusion and an individual’s response to that exclusion prior to marriage equality. Loaded invites reflection on these complexities in a call for the universal right to romantic happiness through its deployment of filmic tropes.