An Obscure Lesbian Classic
“Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain” — A ‘90s Movie through WLW Spectacles
In 1995, Universal Pictures and Buena Vista Visual Effects released Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain starring two infamous actors from the 1990s. The film tells the story of Beth (played by Christina Ricci, The Addams Family & Casper) and Jody (played by Anna Chlumsky, My Girl), two girls from different social classes who live with single mothers, embarking on an adventure inspired by a legendary woman called Molly Morgan. And, in the process, unequivocally indict not only domestic abuse, but the system of law enforcement that enables it.
A feature that I was only able to find out about on a post on Tumblr, discussing its “blatant lesbian subtext” — a plot device that would only have been understandable in the ‘90s, since the aftermath of the film production code prohibiting explicit queer characters.
SPOILERS AHEAD
I’ve watched a number of ‘80s & ‘90s films over the years. Mostly due to the influence of my Step Mum who introduced me to all of the films she watched while she was growing up around that time. The Goonies being one of her favourites. As much as I loved the films from my childhood, there was something about that time period of movies. They felt much less sanitised and sheltered like family films today. For example, they could have kids swear, talk about sex, drugs and domestic abuse etc, like it was no big deal. I liked nearly all of them. Willow and Drop Dead Fred were two particular films from that era that I watched countless times. Along with My Girl, although I had my issues with it.
My Girl introduced me to Anna Chlumsky, whom I absolutely loved in that role. She brought such a unique and boisterous energy to her character Vada. And considering this was her first role, at such a young age, I thought she was pretty impressive. She was also one of the only Tomboy characters I had growing up. So when tragedy struck in the plot and she looses her male best friend, the audience sees her at the end of the movie ‘prettied up’ wearing a dress — I remember feeling a little out of place.
Now regardless of how small that gesture is, a lot of films and TV Shows from that era — 1980s to early 2000’s — tended to have that. The masculine presenting female undergoing a makeover of sorts to make her look “prettier”or maybe gain a boyfriend figure. One of the many examples of this is in Charlotte’s Web where the main girl gets a crush on a boy and starts dressing more feminine, as a sign she’s ‘growing up’ and moving on. Ultimately there’s nothing wrong with that, Its just around that time (I was 12/13 when I first watched My Girl) a lot of people were telling me that my masculinity was just a phase and it was something I would inevitably grow out of.
I even had a bet with my Cousin when I was 9 or 10, betting £5.00 that I would turn girly after the first few months of high school. Now when I reached that age, and almost four months past of high school, I reminded her of the bet “You owe me £5.00” because I never forgot it. And she replied “Wait a year. You’ll turn girly then.” A whole three years went by. I finished high school. And I realised that all those people including my cousin weren’t right at all. They were just rude.
I feel all of this can be applied to my queerness as well, which I promptly shoved underneath a corner the moment I entered middle school because everyone around me was developing crushes and going out on ‘dates’. And of course, I had no representation or knowledge that that identity even existed, up until high school. It really would have helped, since some of the crushes I had, I thought at the time I was performing the ‘impossible’. Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain is the closest film I’ve seen to manage to capture that “feeling” from my queer childhood.
“Ten years old, I was settled in the butter-saturated dark of a movie theatre, eagerly watching Christina Ricci — in her oft-overlooked turn in 1995’s Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain. I was watching her, or rather her character, fall in love.”
As much as Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain heavily advertises itself as an Action Packed Adventure Story for all the family where ‘Two girls journey to retrieve gold in the mountain and discover the real treasure was the power of friendship’ the adventure aspect ironically acts as a backdrop in favour of focusing on the relationship between the two female leads. The main trials of this movie aren’t ‘Where is the Gold?’ ‘How do we get there?’ or ‘What’s standing in the way of the mission?’ It’s ‘How can this budding relationship survive when the whole world is trying to tear it apart?’
The two girls meet twice in a typical meet-cute way, with Beth spying Jody — unaware of their class difference — in “slow motion” across the street, to Beth nearly running Jody over with her bike which leads to a romantic coded ‘bad first impression’ between the two.
Funnily enough, this actually attracts Jody to Beth as the next time the audience sees her, she teasingly throws berries at Beth from up at tree and starts reciting lines from Winnie the Pooh which to her surprise, Beth follows up. The two girls that are with Beth tell her that Jody is ‘trashy’ and befriending her would be dangerous. So right off the bat, their friendship is star crossed, and the adventure to find ‘gold in the mountain’ could be seen as the two girls fleeing from a society that doesn’t accept them. The two are even separated at one point by their parents, in which Beth declares in a romantic styled speech “You can keep us apart for the rest of our lives but nothing you say will ever change the way I feel about her.”
The film presents Jody as incredibly butch and androgynous. The first glimpse Beth has of her, she‘s framed as a ‘male’ fighting with another boy. It felt like the filmmakers were trying to persuade the audience into viewing most of Jody and Beth’s scenes on the same level as a casual viewer would with a boy and a girl. Plus the fact that the typical coding for lesbian relationships is “butch and femme” kind of added to that.
The queer coding of this movie even is suggested through the flashbacks of Molly Morgan, the legendary woman whom Jody worships throughout the movie, that is described as independent and strong willed — even disguising herself as a boy.
Throughout Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain, the audience sees Beth learn to be more outspoken and Jody learn to open up, due to the others influence. And given that the film is narrated by an older version of Beth, it’s suggested that the relationship that these two girls form in this film is long lasting.
As many audience members correctly pointed out in past years, there are hardly any films where there’s just two girls “hanging out together.” This is still somewhat rare, where two females are both the protagonists and they don’t have a petty back and fourth or no focus on any romantic interests. It’s just about them and their relationship. My honest opinion on this is, I consider the real crisis to be male and female friendships, where two people of the opposite sex seemingly can’t go five minutes on screen or in any piece of media without something romantic implied. But the latter still remains true.
“From a really young age, girls are exposed to media that frames deep steadfast relationships between girls as immature like they are secondary to the marriage that you’re going to have with a dude. So your’e taught really early on to view the real relationships you have with other women as secondary to a hypothetical one that you are bound to have in the future: this inevitable husband figure is going to come and supersede the girlfriends you have in importance.” — Sweating over this super weird part of When Marnie Was There for 20 minutes
And while that does add to the incipient queerness of this movie, the absence of ‘shoehorned male love interests’ — which is rare for a ‘90s film — since there’s a part in the film where Beth abandons two boys to go to hug Jody. Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain reads, quite overtly to me at times, as a coming of age queer romance, which is something I’ve never seen in a family film before. Whenever I have seen Women Loving Women representation, It always consists of teenagers or adults. And while the representation of lesbian young love is getting better, since the release of My First Summer; I still have yet to see a lesbian relationship that isn’t sexualised in some way or isn’t aimed at an older audience. Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain is the closest I’ve seen of “Puppy Love” in a Lesbian Relationship, especially when the target audience is families.
The way society portrays queerness, from my personal experience at at young age, is that it’s something you will outgrow in order to mature into an adult. Another ‘90s classic Boy Meets World had a storyline similar to this, where one of the main conflict’s in the main protagonists (Cory and Shawn) relationship was the inevitability of them both growing up/getting girlfriends and their “friendship” never being the same afterwards.
Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain surprisingly does the opposite. It allows its two young female protagonists to grow without the concept of leaving their queer childhood behind and gaining an inevitable “husband figure”.
For instance, they allow Jody to become more vulnerable without conforming to society’s view of femininity. She’s allowed to keep her masculinity and her girlfriend instead of the narrative straight washing her and alluding to male interest in the future in order for her to “mature”.
“At its base, Gold Diggers is a pleasant but unremarkable film in which two white girls, one deeply impoverished, search for legendary gold, surmounting some not inconsiderable obstacles — a vicious subplot of domestic abuse is woven into the narrative — and cultivating a keen friendship along the way. It was the friendship that enchanted me; it seemed more remarkable, and more rare, than buried treasure.” — LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT: ON CHRISTINA RICCI AND QUEER ’90S NOSTALGIA
On its own (as stated above) Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain doesn’t stand out that much from the golden ‘90s era of movies. The title in itself has not aged well at all. As an action/adventure film, The Goonies surpasses the movie naturally by many audience members. But as a queer romance? It remains one of the most memorable and beloved films from the ‘90s and something I wished I’d watched when I was younger — instead of most of the straight washed family friendly content I was subjected to.
Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain DVD is Available to Purchase on Amazon.
