One of my favorite, albeit dated, movies of all time is Johnathan Lynn’s 1985 masterpiece Clue. It’s also a movie that thrives when thought about within the context of Angels In America. Angels is an undeniably campy play, with angels who give you orgasms, ghostly confrontations, witty comedy juxtaposed against incredibly serious subject matter, and more. But it is camp with a purpose. Camp in Angels is used as a form of societal critique, all the seemingly bizarre happenings happen for the purpose of telling a gripping story and scathing critique of the AIDS crisis, mixing in political and religious critiques as well. Once one understands this, one can understand Clue in a different light as well. One would think that Clue is a traditional family comedy movie. It is a film adaptation of the classic board game. But, set during the height of McCarthyism, Clue pokes fun at Cold War terror, with its entire cast being blackmail victims forced to solve an increasing number of murders. When we look past the ridiculous antics which early reviewers criticized as leading the film nowhere, we see meaning.
But Clue is not just about McCarthyism or comedy or how boring the board game is, it’s about deconstructing media as a whole. It famously released in theaters with three separate endings, seemingly jokingly. However this encourages one to not only re-watch the film but to analyze its insane premise, pick it apart, and put it back together. Over time, you begin to see things which may or may not even be there. It’s a movie which is both wholly unserious and obsessed with itself. Ultimately, Clue is whatever you want it to be.
Much like Angels, critically analyzing its camp instead of simply laughing at it builds the film up, the absurd board game format of the movie exists to mirror the absurdity of McCarthyism much like Angels uses actual angels as a way of critiquing religion and politics during the aid crisis. Why does this matter? Because Clue and Angels are a deconstruction of how artists smuggle queerness into media, of how we pick up on queerness: through innuendo, clever tricks, and camp. Much of the, primarily older, media that we understand as queer today is understood as such because we bothered to pick them apart. Clue and Angels in America encourage and remind us to ask to interpret, to ask why.
(it has been a while since I’ve seen Clue and though I always knew it had a lot to say these two sources were very helpful in getting me up to speed,)
Herring, Kyle. 9/17/2013. “Not Just a Red Herring – The Political Subtext of Clue”. theretroset.com
Vaughn, Joy. 8/29/2025. “Communism Is, Was, and Will Always Be A Red Herring” https://vaughnjoy.substack.com/p/communism-is-was-and-will-always
While I have never seen the movie, I was in my high school theater’s production of Clue last year. I agree with your sentence, “Clue is whatever you want it to be.” There are quite a few potential endings to the murders, leaving it entirely up to the audience to interpret what truly happened. This is similar to the concept of Auntie Po in The Legend of Auntie Po because she is whatever the characters want her to be: for Mei she’s a masculine Chinese role model, for Henry she’s a feminine black woman, and for Bee she’s a made-up story.
This is a really interesting point about the importance of analysis, often over-analysis, for detecting queer themes and characters. While Angels in America does not require as much searching for queer themes as other more subtly queer-coded media, the same instinct of in-depth analysis makes for an even more enriching viewer experience of Angels. I wonder if the tendency to over-interpret older queer-coded media has accustomed queer audiences to delve deeper into works like Angels in America, and how that has potentially guided our analysis of Angels as “camp” compared to older works like Clue.