Great thought, but for those unaware, Kate Mulgrew’s gorgeous tux from The Killing Game was 100% a reference to Dietrich’s suit in Blonde Venus (1932) with Cary Grant, a pre-Code film directed by Josef von Sternberg. It’s hard to tell in Killing Game, but Mulgrew’s lapels are also sequined. So is the stripe in the trousers. It is basically a replica of Dietrich’s suit, no question.
Okay, so I have a PhD in queer fashion and media. So this is something I happen to know a lot about. So let me explain a few things.
For starters, You cannot get a more explicitly queer-coded woman than Marlene Dietrich.
Cary Grant (another closeted Queer in Hollywood) is also in Blonde Venus, and although their chemistry is great, their romance is unbelievable because it’s very clear that they are both absolutely queer. Hattie McDaniel appears in this film, another Queer in Hollywood (and the first Black person ever to win an Oscar). In both Blonde Venus and Morocco (1930), Dietrich flirts with both men and women. Dietrich was considered a Drag King in her day. She famously proclaimed, ‘I am a gentleman at heart.’
Dietrich often refused to wear trousers, and openly declared that she had plenty of women lovers. She is an iconic staple for queer sexuality even today. She famously kissed a woman in Morocco whilst wearing a tuxedo- with an audience watching and cheering. She then kisses a man, the audience applauds, and she exits. This scene (below) was added at Dietrich’s own behest. The scene was extremely controversial, and they had to defend it against the censors for months.
This very scene is one of the many reasons The Hays Code was enacted (rules from a super-Catholic man who bribed his way into Hollywood and forced the religious ideologies onto the screen), and this scene was one that The Hays Code often pointed to as ‘immoral’ and ‘perverted’ and ‘sexually explicit.’ You can thank the Hays Code for the split beds Lucy and Ricky had, for rules that a kiss must not last longer than a certain amount of time, that, absolutely, NO queer ANYTHING could be acknowledged to exist. Everything had to be subtext, and that’s why so many old black and white films feel really queer.
But Dietrich openly proclaimed herself queer, dressed in men’s clothing, kissed women on screen- and became a Queer icon not just in fashion, but in sexuality, decadence, and identity. The so-called famous ’Dietrich’s Sewing Circle’ (of which Hattie McDaniel was a member) was essentially every Queer woman in Hollywood who all had affairs with each other. Books have been written on this. Here’s a brief article about one of those books that goes through some of the basics.
Okay, Queer Fashion Film Academic, what’s your point?
The point is that by wearing a duplicate of a Dietrich suit- one where she openly flirted with women, no less–Janeway is 100% coded as queer in The Killing Game.
Especially with that tuxedo scene and the way she’s talking to Seven. In fact, most of the scenes in those episodes where she is talking to Seven, you will notice that Mulgrew plays Janeway with a bite- her eyes linger on Seven just a bit longer, her body language is just a bit more open and fierce than usual.
Even in Paris, for a woman to wear what Mulgrew/Janeway is clearly coding herself as a Queer person through that specific outfit. She is wearing a giant billboard that says I AM QUEER.
By putting Kate Mulgrew in a replica of a Dietrich 1940s tuxedo, Janeway is visually coded as queer through replication and imitation of one of the most Queer icons in cinematic history. That suit is too famous, too iconic, too specifically loaded with subtext and text of queerness through Dietrich.
I am convinced that the costume department 100% knew what they were doing, and part of me wonders if Kate Mulgrew herself had pushed for that suit. Why? Because Kate Mulgrew herself was the one who pushed for Janeway to have a same-sex relationship.
Watch Blonde Venus. Watch Morocco. Then, watch Kate Mulgrew in The Killing Game. She imitates Dietrich’s body-language, her mannerisms, the smirk, in that opening scene. There is no question- Janeway has been possessed by Dietrich’s characters.
Funnily enough, for the rest of those two episodes, Kate Mulgrew is also very clearly imitating another Queer woman through her voice intonation and mannerisms, general fashion and hairstyles: Katharine Hepburn.
Because of her absurd visual and voice similarity to Katharine Hepburn (another Queer in Dietrich’s sewing circle), Mulgrew once played Hepburn in Tea at Five.
Like Dietrich (bisexual), Hepburn was very clearly Queer coded, as she was a lesbian. She was also famous in Hollywood for her male-coded attire, though she preferred regular suits to Dietrich’s tuxedos.
She, like Dietrich, had the same problem whenever they teamed up with Cary Grant- watch Philadelphia Story and tell me that the real ending of that movie is not Hepburn’s character, Grant’s character and Stewart’s character all ending up in a thruple together. The movie makes no sense if that’s not the real ending.
Okay, I’m going off tangent. Here’s your takeaway:
Kate Mulgrew, (because she’s an absurdly amazing talent), is very heavily is influenced in mannerism, voice, accent and appearance by two of the most Queer-Coded women in cinematic history in The Killing Game. Through fashion and performance, she embodies Dietrich’s Blonde Venus and Morocco characters, and through appearance, voice and body language, she gives that image an additional layer of of Hepburn’s fierce, Queer persona.
Conclusion: Arguably throughout all of Voyager, but specifically In The Killing Game, Kathryn Janeway is visibly Queer.
By the way, although she never got credit for it, the person who wrote Blonde Venus was Dietrich herself. Both she and von Sternberg were suspended for several months because the movie was considered too salacious by the Hays code, and it caused production problems for over a year.
That white suit means so much more than you thought.
