For the 20th anniversary of spy picture D.E.B.S., Drew Burnett Gregory looks at how the film’s subversive take on rom-com and espionage thriller tropes were misunderstood upon release yet endure for the queer community today.
This article contains spoilers for ‘D.E.B.S.’
Angela Robinson made her spy spoof gay rom-com D.E.B.S. the year after Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle hit theaters. As Roger Ebert noted in his 1.5-star review, Robinson’s lesbian spin on hot girls with guns felt like a direct response to that revitalized franchise. But D.E.B.S. wasn’t just a queering of the recent Charlie’s Angels films—or other new female action franchises like Lara Croft and Resident Evil—it was a satire. And it wasn’t just a satire of these recent films but a satire of something else that happened in 2003: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
By the time D.E.B.S. was released, the rebellious spirit of ’90s queer cinema was over. The celebration of queer criminality found in films ranging from Set It Off to Wild Things to the entire New Queer Cinema movement had given way to a decade more conservative in its politics and its respectability. Movies with sapphic elements could now win Oscars, but only if figures as complex as Frida Kahlo and Aileen Wuornos were reduced to biopic tropes. The gay rights movement was pushing toward progress with prominent gay cop characters on prestige TV hits Six Feet Under and The Wire and a gay cop love interest on Will & Grace, the pinnacle of gay respectability media. The message was clear: gay people are not criminals. We can even be law enforcers.
Other lesbian rom-coms of the era, such as Saving Face and Imagine Me & You, likewise didn’t receive the praise they deserved, but the dismissal of D.E.B.S. feels unique in its ire. With the film’s bending of genres, commitment to camp and its take on the post-9/11 police state, there was more for straight male viewers to miss beyond the power of a lesbian happy ending. Twenty years later, Robinson’s feature is celebrated for its comedy and its romance, but there’s more to reveal in the depths—and limits—of its political satire.
D.E.B.S. opens with a montage explaining that the US government has hidden an aptitude test in the SAT to determine students’ ability to lie, cheat, fight and kill. Those who score well on this secret test are invited to the D.E.B.S. (Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength), a secret paramilitary academy where the girls are turned into plaid skirt-wearing super spies.
After this intro, the first image we see is one of suburban Americana: a boy on a paper route. He throws the latest edition at one of many identical houses, only for it to hit a force field. This is the house of our main squad of D.E.B.S.: tough leader Max (Meagan Goode), naive Janet (Jill Ritchie), sex-crazed cigarette smoking Dominique (Devon Aoki with the best-worst French accent) and Amy (Sara Foster), star student of the academy who wishes she could just go to art school.
When we first meet Amy, she’s breaking up with her boyfriend, Bobby (Geoff Stults), who works for the Department of Homeland Security. On paper, he’s her perfect All-American match, but she simply doesn’t love him. Maybe something is missing with Bobby, or maybe something is missing with Bobby’s entire gender. In other words, maybe it’s because her breakfast order is a tofu scramble with a peach smoothie. As she eats this confessional meal, Mr. Phipps (their very own Bosley played by Michael Clarke Duncan) gives them their next mission: observing supervillain Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), an arms-dealing diamond thief who tried to blow up Australia.
C.W. Scott writes that D.E.B.S. is a “lesbian spy movie that puts lesbianing first and spying second.” This also means putting the rom-com genre first and the spy genre second. That becomes clear when we meet Lucy and learn that her meetup with Russian assassin and Ernst Lubitsch reference Ninotchka (Jessica Cauffiel with another iconic bad accent) is actually a blind date. Change a few spy-specifics and Lucy’s conversations with her friend/main henchman Scud (Jimmi Simpson) would sound like your average lesbian processing session. “You’re trying to drown yourself in your little schemes to take over the world,” he tells her. “But you need to get over it already. You were dumped.”
This is the primary joke—and joy!—of D.E.B.S. The rom-com beats are hit well with an added jolt of humor that they take place within life and death scenarios. When Amy and Lucy first meet, they bump into each other—literally—in classic rom-com fashion. They apologize like they’re two awkward girls outside a high school math class, before realizing who they’ve bumped into and pulling out their guns. Amy begins reading Lucy her Miranda rights like her good little cop self, as Lucy looks on incredulous. When Lucy suggests Amy be the first to lower her gun, Amy retorts, “You’re the criminal and I’m the cop, so I think I’m technically more trustworthy.” Lucy fires back, “Except I was minding my own business on a stupid blind date when you guys decided to rain shit on me.” This meet-cute ends with Lucy asking Amy to let her get away with a teasing dare. “Come on,” Lucy says. “Haven’t you ever done anything you’re not supposed to?”
With the adoption of the Hays Code in the 1930s, queerness was almost always equated to criminality for decades of American cinema. Just look at the lesbian vampire trope—dating back on-screen to Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and in literature to Carmilla (1872)—where heterosexual women have to resist seduction by sapphic predators. D.E.B.S. is not the punk reclamation of the aforementioned ’90s queer cinema nor is it your standard ’00s and beyond portrayal of the palatable lesbian cop. Instead, it manages to do both at the same time.
Throughout the film, Amy is torn between her attraction to this supervillain and the pressure to maintain her role as star student for the state. The people in Amy’s life—especially her squad and D.E.B.S. leader Ms. Petrie (Holland Taylor)—treat Amy’s betrayal less like a cop getting into terrorism (the non-state sanctioned kind) and more like a teen girl getting into lesbianism. To quote Janet, “You violated the prime directive plus HELLO it’s a girl!”
While there’s a version of D.E.B.S. where Amy embraces a life of crime along with her queerness, Robinson is more interested in the very mid-’00s insistence that queerness is misunderstood rather than deliciously evil. The more we learn about Lucy, the less bad she really seems. Most of her murders turn out to have been accidental deaths and the arms dealing is left unexplored while the harmless diamond-thieving and bank robbing is centered. Again and again, Amy says that Lucy isn’t at all what she expected, meaning she’s not at all what Amy was brainwashed to believe. She might as well be any closeted girl meeting a real-life lesbian for the first time. Meanwhile, Robinson shows the D.E.B.S. and other government agencies to be stupid, callous and unprincipled. After all, the D.E.B.S. test isn’t measuring heroism but the ability to lie, cheat, fight and kill. Bobby, of the recently created Department of Homeland Security, is shown to be especially inept as he repeatedly attempts to gift Amy jewelry stolen in various drug busts by his government agent dad.
In retrospect, Lucy’s turn toward “good” can feel like the most disappointing aspect of the film. To quote AL, “Lucy Diamond said ACAB except for this one she’s pretty 🥺.” The one redeeming quality of the sequence where Lucy gives back her stolen money is it’s not driven by ethics—it’s driven by love. As Scud says earlier in the film, “Love is harder than crime,” but Lucy is doing everything she can to win Amy back. The return of stolen goods is placed alongside projecting a message into the sky. Lucy will hold up any proverbial boom box, including these gestures toward lawfulness.
In the end, the state is not forgiving, and there’s a limit to how much Lucy can do to be accepted into Amy’s world. She’s still gay, after all. Ultimately, it’s Amy who must leave behind her life and Lucy. The rest of her squad covers for her, but the film still concludes with her and Lucy on the run. It’s not the rogue lawlessness of Corky and Violet driving away at the end of Bound, but given the culture of the mid-2000s, it’s pretty close.
Twenty years later, D.E.B.S. is one of the most beloved lesbian films of its era. Like Jennifer’s Body, it’s now obvious that this wasn’t a failed attempt at getting young men off but a successful attempt at connecting with young women. Those ing decades have also revealed the achievements and limitations of the project of queer assimilation. Gay marriage was legalized and (some) queer people were able to achieve far more acceptance in mainstream life. But basic rights for trans people are under attack, queer people of color are still frequently harassed by the police, and we all live under an inhumane justice system. Maybe if D.E.B.S. finally gets the sequel it deserved years ago, Lucy and Amy should stop compromising. Maybe they should just blow shit up.
