Revis­it­ing Ellen DeGeneres’ for­got­ten het­ero rom-com

It’s easy to for­get, at a time when she’s busy voic­ing adorable car­toon fish and lob­bing soft­ball ques­tions at celebri­ties on day­time tele­vi­sion, that Ellen DeGeneres was once con­sid­ered the most dan­ger­ous woman in Amer­i­ca. It wasn’t because of her self-titled sit­com or folksy, inof­fen­sive per­sona. What made DeGeneres such a polar­is­ing fig­ure in the 1990s was her sexuality.

In Amer­i­ca at the tail end of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, a high-pro­file female celebri­ty com­ing out as gay wasn’t just large­ly unheard of, it was a light­ning rod for anger and debate. But around the time she appeared on the cov­er of Time Mag­a­zine in 1997 accom­pa­nied by the cov­er line ​‘Yep, I’m Gay’, DeGeneres was among the count­less tele­vi­sion break­outs of the era being groomed for big-screen star­dom. Her sex­u­al­i­ty had long been a favourite sub­ject of the tabloid press, a point she often know­ing­ly mocked in her sit­com, Ellen, but her cin­e­mat­ic debut kept her firm­ly in the het­ero­nor­ma­tive roman­tic com­e­dy closet.

In 1996’s Mr Wrong, DeGeneres plays a depressed thir­tysome­thing sin­gle­ton com­fort­ably tick­ing off every cliché on the rom-com hero­ine check­list: her par­ents per­pet­u­al­ly med­dle in her dat­ing life; she watch­es sad movies in the dark with only a tub of ice cream for com­pa­ny; and her black best friend is always on-hand with pat roman­tic wis­dom. Poised to res­cue her from this lone­ly white­bread exis­tence is hand­some poet Whit­man (Bill Pull­man). He ini­tial­ly seems heav­en-sent, all moon­light strolls and can­dlelit meet cutes, until he con­fess­es that he hasn’t been entire­ly hon­est with him­self. ​“You know how you always have to present your­self [dif­fer­ent­ly] in front of peo­ple you don’t know?” he asks Martha. ​“You try to make them feel good, but is that good for you? Is that good for your soul?”

It’s here that the film takes on a more intrigu­ing slant, its themes and twists draw­ing a strik­ing par­al­lel with DeGeneres’ own per­son­al life at the time. When Martha encour­ages Whit­man to embrace his true self, it imme­di­ate­ly back­fires on her – he is exposed as a pet­ty crim­i­nal and a lunatic who sets out to effec­tive­ly ruin Martha’s life once she dumps him. Through a bar­rage of slan­der and manip­u­la­tion, Whit­man alien­ates her from her fam­i­ly and leaves her job at a day­time talk show hang­ing by a thread.

Zany as it sounds, it’s just the kind of per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al cri­sis that was soon affect­ing DeGeneres in real­i­ty. Whether it was ​‘explain­ing’ her sex­u­al­i­ty to a baf­fled audi­ence on Oprah’s couch, her hot­ly debat­ed rela­tion­ship with Anne Heche, or head­lin­ing a soon-to-be-axed sit­com intro­duced with a ​“parental advi­so­ry” warn­ing due to her mere pres­ence, DeGeneres spent much of 1997 hav­ing to defend her true self – pre­cise­ly the sort of sin­cere ges­ture Bill Pullman’s Mr Wrong had so forcibly pun­ished her char­ac­ter for a year earlier.

Viewed today, Mr Wrong is a fas­ci­nat­ing rel­ic of a moment in pop­u­lar cul­ture when out­spo­ken LGBT fig­ures were just start­ing to emerge from the fringes of soci­ety. It is a for­get­table mis­fire made inad­ver­tent­ly fas­ci­nat­ing by its off-screen con­text, and remains DeGeneres’ sole live-action star vehi­cle. Yet in hind­sight the film also serves as a fas­ci­nat­ing por­trait of a pub­lic fig­ure in flux. As a come­di­an, a bud­ding media per­son­al­i­ty, and as a trail­blaz­ing spokesper­son for main­stream LGBT visibility.