Caden Mark Gardner on the Representation of Trans in Cinema

 

A film that centers on a transgender person or storyline enters the culture like any other movie. The difference lies in the discourse around it. A pervasive disregard for the realities of trans experience beyond the screen is evident in how criticism of such films is written, in how moviegoers view them, and even in how they’re made. Trans bodies have long been depicted in cinema in the most salacious and deviant contexts, and this has been met without much protest from the mainstream society that absorbs those images. Trans people in movies are written and talked about as if they were abstract concepts, anomalies. For years, it’s been clear that very little attention is being paid (by filmmakers, critics, or marketers) to the ways in which a trans audience might see and react to these attempts at putting their lives in front of the camera, and the cisgender majority continues to control the conversation. But a robust dialogue about these films has existed for decades within the trans community—it’s just gone unnoticed by the general public.
 
There is a false presumption that little trans history exists on record, that the trans experience is some neat trend of the present. Part of that is willful ignorance; another factor is that the archive of transgender lives is largely made up of works never meant to be consumed by the masses. The internet has been key in counteracting inaccurate narratives by bringing about a sea change for transgender archives and bridging the digital and the pre-internet worlds. There are numerous collections of trans history—including the largest in the world, the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada; the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; the ONE Archives Foundation at the University of Southern California; and the National Transgender Library & Archive at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor—each with its own repositories of letters, diaries, magazines, photographs, do-it-yourself zines, newspaper clippings, and audio. There are also several nonprofits and individuals with their own holdings and projects.
 
What has been most crucial in recent years is the integration of these archives for research purposes. Central to that effort is the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA), an initiative that started at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and will soon relocate to Boston’s Northeastern University. In the past, trying to uncover what was available in individual archives often proved to be a tall order for trans researchers. The DTA brings together collections from around the world, centralizing a marginalized community’s scattered histories within a single search engine. It has created an incredible opportunity to investigate, whether as a researcher or as an amateur, how trans communities of the past wrote about and expressed their experiences, and also how they responded to the moments when mainstream society looked back at them.
 
Some of the most valuable and insightful access points to trans history found on the DTA are magazines published in the latter half of the twentieth century. Exclusively transgender publications date back to the pre-Stonewall 1960s. Virginia Prince, a trans woman from Southern California who led a support group, self-published Transvestia magazine starting in 1960, and it was one of the earliest and most popular of these publications. Prince and others in her generation belonged to a wave of trans pioneers who emerged after Christine Jorgensen, a transgender American woman, gained global attention for her gender confirmation surgery in 1952.
 
These American trans publications of the 1960s and ’70s—self-published magazines and newsletters that are estimated to number around two dozen—were juggling an array of functions, responding to the needs of an eager readership looking for community and a better sense of what was out there, and who else was out there. Very early on, these publications were aware of how the outside world saw them, and those bigoted views meant that the majority were available exclusively in adult bookstores. Still, most of the publications could not be dismissed or labeled as smut, although there was certainly a cis male readership who also bought them because of fetishistic, prurient fascination.
 
 
Contained within their pages was medical news, as trans surgeries were beginning to take place in the United States; for example, Dr. Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon, published in 1966, gave readers official scientific affirmation that “sex changes” were happening domestically and were not just available to those Americans, like Jorgensen, who were willing and able to travel abroad. There were also bulletins on other issues that concerned the community; sections in which readers could communicate with pen pals; “Dear Abby”–like advice columns; and photo shoots depicting everyone from anonymous trans women to internationally known French entertainers like Bambi and Coccinelle.
 
Also featured were spaces to talk about movies. Films with trans people or cross-dressers had the community on notice and generated consistent coverage. Just the mere presence of a trans character, however brief, could provoke a review or an editor’s note. There was commentary about Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 Funeral Parade of Roses (in the publication DRAG: A Magazine About the Transvestite) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 In a Year with 13 Moons (in Les Girls) upon their release in the U.S., and a few publications collected lists and tracked relevant films, offering guidebooks with short capsules. The scarcity of trans images inspired some publications to promote Super 8 reels of known trans performers for purchase.

 
Many of the publications operated in secret out of self-protection—one newsletter was irreverently titled Ssshhh!—in light of the fact that Virginia Prince had at one point been arrested for publishing Transvestia. The legal and professional risks of being outed for their trans identities had led many writers to forgo bylines or take on pseudonyms. There were also many trans people who never identified with the queer community at large and who created publications that distanced themselves from the social and political conflicts that concerned the movement at the time. Some of that attitude resulted in exclusionary, predominantly white publications and groups that splintered these communities for several decades. Prince herself, unfortunately, was one of the publishers guilty of this practice. Her hostility toward certain segments of the trans and cross-dressing communities led to those whom she marginalized building their own publications and support groups.
 
Still, a constant in these different, sometimes estranged corners of the trans community was an interest in trans film images. Their prevalence in these magazines stemmed from a yearning shared by editors and readers. In letters to the editor, trans readers regularly mentioned that watching certain films helped them begin to realize their identities, even if the trans characters in those movies often ended up as villains or corpses by the end—as in Richard Rush’s buddy-cop film Freebie and the Bean, in which a character simply named “Transvestite” in the credits suffers a brutal death. While outrage over that scene got some mainstream media attention, it was the gay community’s response that was centered. Trans magazines, on the other hand, shared much more nuanced perspectives, including fascinating anecdotes that expressed viewers’ conflicted identification with that character and with the actor, Marilyn Monroe impersonator Christopher Morley. It’s clear from these publications that, for some trans viewers, the movie transcended whatever intent the filmmakers originally had.
 
But this kind of reclamation was certainly not the only response to transphobia on-screen. These magazines also cast a more critical eye on how mass-produced trans images had an impact on them. As the seventies gave way to the eighties, there was increased concern and immediate skepticism about Hollywood’s attempts to tell trans stories—understandably, as the community had been burned many times over, and not just by widely distributed feature films. In one case, a production team for a project called Vera had held tryouts in Los Angeles and New York City, promising to make a romance movie with a trans woman lead. These filmed auditions and casting calls (that included former child star Danny Bonaduce reading for the male romantic lead) turned out to be a scam, and the project came to light when DRAG, Female Mimics International, and Les Girls did their due diligence and investigated it. Over the course of multiple issues, Les Girls exposed the production company, which had planned to use the footage they’d gathered to make an unauthorized documentary that fortunately never came to be. In an editorial for a 1981 issue focused on the whole affair, editor-in-chief M. B. West spoke directly to the people behind Vera: “If, indeed, you have exploited them [trans women], we challenge you to step forward and demonstrate at least half the courage the transsexual community as a whole has shown!”
 

The trans community became a lot more organized and less fractured in the eighties and nineties. In 1987, the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE), a trans nonprofit of unprecedented scale, was established for the explicit purpose of countering widespread intolerance and ignorance, and, among other things, it took control of the magazine Transgender Tapestry. Language started to change, with “transgender” and “the gender community” becoming more commonly used terms. Trans men gained more prominence and were directly involved in publications that had previously been exclusive to trans feminine writers and subjects (trans male multimillionaire Reid Erickson’s Erickson Education Newsletter, which dated back to the sixties and centered on trans health, was one of the few publications that had targeted trans men before this time). Alongside Transgender Tapestry, a slew of publications emerged in this period—including Chrysalis Quarterly, TransSisters, Cross-Talk, and Rupert Raj’s Metamorphosis newsletter—that focused less on covering pageants and balls and more on conferences and educational, health, and political programs. Along with this heightened social awareness, these publications doubled down on probing and studying the cultural history that had led to prejudice and misperceptions.

 
Part of that project was building an awareness of trans film history. The late trans activist Lou Sullivan’s 1985 handbook Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual included a list of films from a wide range of periods with broad categories for the on-screen trans masculine: women in male disguise (Barbra Streisand’s Yentl); a gender-queer, androgynous female lead (Sylvia Scarlett); and a woman playing a man’s role (Eva Mattes as a thinly veiled version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in A Man Like Eva). Availability of trans cinema was a major issue, one that was directly tackled in the reviews of a writer named Laurie Ann, who had a column in LadyLike magazine in the 1990s. Having spent years searching for titles at her nearest video store, she wrote on movies such as Bob Clark’s She-Man: A Story of Fixation (1967), Doris Wishman’s documentary Let Me Die a Woman (1977), and Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (1963). Her pieces on these older films were the works of a scavenger; they never immediately dismiss their subjects, regardless of their flaws or their disparate genres, which run the gamut from exploitation to educational film to art house. Instead, the reviews place the films within their cultural moment and a broad lineage of trans cinema. Reviewers like Allen were talking directly to a trans audience catching up on its own past, putting together a puzzle riddled with missing pieces.
 

The 1990s were an inflection point in the mainstreaming of trans cinema, with trans characters popping up in major hits like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; The Crying Game; and M. Butterfly, as well as in successful nonfiction titles like Paris Is Burning. It may seem shocking now, but a film like To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, a road movie about drag queens with no trans characters represented, received considerable coverage from multiple trans magazines and was even publicized with a still of Patrick Swayze on the cover on Transgender Tapestry. Alongside these hits, there were smaller movies that the trans magazines touted as “game changers” and officially cosigned as being especially forward-thinking—one that comes to mind is the much-forgotten British film Different for Girls, by Richard Spence, which was so popular in the community at the time that Tapestry collected half a dozen reviews by trans people praising it.
 
Representation had increased to such a degree that the publication Cross-Talk started a regular film review column, written by Diane Chaplin. This surge inspired excitement about the possibilities of trans cinema becoming more widely seen, as films with trans subjects were premiering at film festivals and garnering awards. There was also still a lot of incisive critique rooted in years of harmful depictions. Prominently featured in trans publications, these concerns in some cases began to make their way into the mainstream, as when writers and scholars outside of trans circles started to cite the “Psycho trope,” which frames a cross-dressing man as a villain who murders women while in his feminine identity.
 
There did exist some community skepticism about this cultural shift turning into anything long-lasting. In 1995, in the newsletter Girl Talk, Melanie Yarborough expressed an urge to make the most of the nineties moment while also acknowledging it was something potentially tenuous:
 
                ““I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade. But think ahead to the future. If the conservative trend in this country becomes more pronounced, the half-open closet door could be slammed shut to sexual minorities. Will the 1990s be nothing more than a short-lived moment of openness which we’ll wistfully look back on years from now when we have to meet back in private again? We can take advantage of this burst of creativity to develop outreach, resources, and activities. When Wong Foo ends, we don’t have to all go back to the closets. But what do we do when Hollywood gets tired of us?”
 
Yarborough’s commentary was more than fair. For several decades there had been a cyclical trend in which trans stories made the news and became fodder for Hollywood films but never led to any forward political momentum, leaving most trans people still living discreetly on the margins. Could a film really change things for the community? At the time, a “good,” forward-thinking movie would invariably still be outnumbered by films filled with both malicious and casual transphobia. And there was still an unspoken issue: these stories were not in the hands of the community, and it was unthinkable that an out trans person would have enough authority to work on a widely distributed film. The trans experience has long been tied to the struggle to gain autonomy over one’s body and life, making this phenomenon of trans stories being controlled by outsiders a problematic and unsustainable one.
 
Online spaces have done a significant service in making transgender communities more accessible and reachable to those questioning their gender identity and those outside of the community. This has helped open more people up to an awareness of trans identities across boundaries of economics, age, and geography. But in this digital era, physical trans publications and newsletters have become incredibly antiquated forms of media. Trans identities have also become broader in their conceptualizations and experiences, and public attention and interest have increased along with the broader community visibility. But it’s because of democratic digital spaces like the DTA that younger trans generations are now able to trace a longer history, and to see the continuity and lineage of trans experiences and perspectives.
 
Given the way the trans image keeps being discarded, forgotten, erased, or in some cases actively suppressed, there is untold damage that will take years to undo, particularly due to how incurious the cis mainstream is about trans experiences. That makes discovering and centering the trans voices of the past—many of whom are still alive—all the more necessary. These people, their art, and their artifacts have always been around, and thanks to the DTA, their history has been gathered in one place for the rest of the world to finally discover.
 
From the Margins: What the Archives Show Us About Trans Cinema and Audiences. By   Caden Mark Gardner.  The Criterion Collection, January 27, 2021.

There is a difference between making a film of sociopolitical and cultural value and making a film about important sociopolitical and cultural matters. In some cases the latter may beget the former, but it is not a given. Sam Feder’s new documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, unfortunately, is a film on an important topic, but it’s scattered, unrefined, and incoherent in execution. While announcing itself as a definitive look at the histories of trans lives in film and television, the film is at best incomplete, an exploration that rarely engages beyond the most surface-level discussions about trans representation. The film lacks the narrative through line of both trans history and any in-depth analysis of the trans image onscreen. For a film claiming to be about trans film history, Disclosure omits a wealth of notable trans-centered films, filmmakers, and performers; however, based on how most of the films are discussed in the documentary, there is reason to doubt that their inclusion would have been fruitful or satisfactory. The film presents the trans film image strictly in terms of visibility, rather than sorting through the aesthetics and politics of how the trans film image has been represented on-screen throughout film history.

 
Aesthetics, down to the basics in how a film is cut, how a character is lit, how a camera is angled toward the trans character—how a trans body is presented through the eyes of a non-trans filmmaker—have been heavily weaponized against trans people. Often, they have been represented as villainous, unstable, lecherous outcasts, or just plain subhuman abnormalities. Even the most well-intentioned films about transness are not immune to this, unconsciously falling into the patterned, deeply ingrained behavior of filming trans bodies with an unmistakably clinical or even leering gaze. Disclosure seems uneasy with probing some of the more egregious instances of aesthetics used against the trans body; only one talking head in the doc, the great trans scholar Susan Stryker, explicitly discusses these issues in a critical way.
 
Feder’s film is more preoccupied with trans representation within mass-market entertainment. This feels insufficient, because it must be remembered that, even as the real world has evolved, trans viewers and artists have not waited idly by for media companies to throw them crumbs of positive representation. It would be more beneficial for these viewers and artists to pursue the legacy of trans film image-making, mining film history, perhaps finding work worthy to be reclaimed or reconsidered. Legacies are essential, and we should know how media representations are in dialogue with the international cinematic history of transness. If filmmakers are privy to that dialogue, they can create a truer trans film image, informed by their own lived-in experiences and stories. Disclosure might leave viewers wondering about other films that have represented trans lives throughout history: the titles discussed below are just a starting point.
 
It is true that the trans image on film has been historically and predominantly compromised. After Christine Jorgensen’s sexual-reassignment surgery in 1952 made international headlines—The New York Daily News said on its cover, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty”—and rewrote the possibilities for countless people, several books and films were made in reaction, not explicit adaptations of Jorgensen’s own story (although her memoir was later adapted into a film in 1970) but works inspired by the phenomenon of sexual reassignment. Most of these were low-budget B-movies and exploitation films, portrayals amounting to just “man in a dress” narratives, ranging from Ed Wood to William Castle, still largely seen as more crude than artistically engaging. In Disclosure some, but not all, of these films are briefly shown in montage with no deeper commentary. Yet there were many pre-Stonewall films that tapped into the subcultures of cross-dressers and trans people who were medically and socially transitioning. Some of these works were educational, sideshow, or infotainment nonfiction, like Queens at Heart (available as an extra in Kino Lorber’s restoration of Frank Simon’s documentary The Queen) or the Nikolai Ursin short Behind Every Good Man. These films are an outsider’s look, featuring their subjects directly addressing how they see themselves in the world, with a “walk a mile in her shoes” kind of perspective.
 

 

Throughout the sixties, underground cinema presented trans women and cross-dressing as some of the ultimate markers of transgression—from Paul Morrissey’s films in the U.S. to Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses in Japan. Matsumoto’s film is a gender variation on Oedipus Rex, a nonlinear assemblage of slapstick comedy, comic-strip text boxes, and psychedelia that recalls Kenneth Anger and Jonas Mekas, and features fourth-wall-breaking documentary testimonials of Japanese “gay boys,” who live as women and discuss their characters onscreen and whether or not their lives as represented match their own. The film is audacious especially for its time, and has proven accessible to many viewers who later discovered the film. New York trans activist and editor of the trans quarterly DRAG, Bebe Scarpinato (also known as Bebe Scarpie), wrote of Funeral Parade of Roses in 1973, “What remains uncanny although the setting is in a different culture, [is that] some scenes easily could have taken place in a New York bar.”
 
Despite the activism of Post-Stonewall gay liberation, trans people often felt like they were getting the short shrift despite marching and participating in the movement. Tensions in gay and trans coexistences are brought to the fore in 1971’s Some of My Best Friends Are… Directed by Mervyn Nelson, this film, set during Christmastime at the Blue Jay, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, is noteworthy for who is playing the trans woman. Candy Darling is forever known as a Warhol Superstar, but in the films Warhol produced with Paul Morrissey, she was always playing a cis woman, not a trans role; along with Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn, such casting was seen as having ulterior motives in mocking cis femininity and radical feminism. Darling’s character here, named Karen, is demure, opposed to the assured glamor of her Warhol/Morrissey roles. She makes small talk with men but is guarded, highly cognizant of how she is seen and what surrounds her. This film is an ensemble piece, but Darling’s Karen is granted more rigorous attention than anyone else. Her aspiration of having her femininity embraced through the love of a man is manifest in a dream dance sequence: her brown wig becomes blonde; she’s wearing a beautiful, red dress; and her voiceover goes into daydreams of ecstasy. However, the pendulum swings back into a hard, brutal reality when Karen is confronted by bar patrons who don’t believe she belongs. This results in a long, painful scene where Karen is beat up and her wig is removed, her natural, shorter hair revealed. It is a shocking moment, but there’s a metatextual aspect: Darling, giving so much for this small movie, had never appeared without a wig as a performer. She abruptly leaves the bar to no fanfare, after being dead-named by even the bar patrons who defended her. The film continues without her. This type of scene would today be a common trope of onscreen trans violence, but there is something particularly disquieting in how it’s shown here: how a subculture of outsiders can themselves be non-inclusive. Sometimes showing a truthful trans image is painful but necessary in acknowledging an existence that for too long has been associated with violence, ignorance, and exclusion.
 

 
Images of trans-inclusive spaces have existed for decades in pageant culture, cabarets, and ballrooms. German director Rosa von Praunheim’s City of Lost Souls (1983) follows two American expats, trans punk singer Jayne County and black trans performer Angie Stardust (who was thrown out of the American drag circuit for taking hormones) as they try to carve out life in West Berlin in the greasy spoon Hamburger Queen. It is a hybrid of musical performance, fictionalized tableaux, candid testimonials from Stardust on coming to terms with her gender identity, and pointed Reagan era sociopolitical commentary. It is not a fantasy “island of misfit toys” scenario, but a dialectical exploration. The Berlin Wall appears in one scene and County sings of her love of Karl Marx in another. Praunheim has for decades dedicated a film career to covering the full spectrum of LGBTQ culture (he would also make a documentary on the American trans political action group Transsexual Menace, criminally unavailable), and with his high-concept combinations of satire, punk, cabaret, Western kitsch, Marxism, and outsider art, City of Lost Souls feels foundational for John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the broader, more consumable version of a gender variant image. City of Lost Souls ends in a utopian euphoria as the ensemble sings County’s penned title track at the Hamburger Queen’s storefront with German onlookers greeting the performers with wide smiles and wonder.
 
 
The trans image in the age of television and the daytime talk show gave rise to a high volume of transness as spectacle, revelation, and occasional confrontation. In Robert Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, a glamorous wealthy woman with big red hair by the name of Joanne (Karen Black) reveals to a group of women that she is a trans woman and a former member of their small Texas town’s fan club, the “Disciples of James Dean.” Kathy Bates’s Stella Mae exclaims, “I’ve seen things like you on TV!” When pressed about what to tell other people about her transition, Joanne curtly responds, “Just tell them I’m a freak. They know what that is.” The film, and play on which it is based, flows in and out of past and present, with Joanne’s identity prior to transition, Joe (played by Mark Patton), appearing in flashbacks twenty years earlier. What starts as a contrast of a male and female identity begins to coalesce as one identity. Ed Graczyk’s script can trip over itself at points, but Joanne holds firm in her femininity and womanhood even when facing personal rejection. The film shows that Joanne’s reckoning of her past can never be removed from her life story, and her acknowledgement of that is reflected in the way Altman composed the set, of two identical spaces, separated by mirrors, with the characters in the past and present played by the same actors—save Black and Patton. The mirror image concept turns out not to be a trap for the trans image, but a breakthrough. Similar to how trans women function in a matriarchy alongside cis women in Pedro Almodóvar films, Joanne is able to sing and dance along with Cher and Sandy Dennis to The McGuire Sisters’ “Sincerely,” and she is finally referred to as “Miss” by her biggest adversary, the bigoted religious zealot Mona: an earned victory.

 Trans masculinity remains underexplored as a subject. That Boys Don’t Cry is still in 2020 centered as a sort of urtext to trans masculine images is, to put it bluntly, ridiculous. Boys Don’t Cry was seen as a sun-setting film for New Queer Cinema, when the movement had officially graduated from being at the center of censorship and art grant controversies to winning Academy Awards. Two trans men who tried out for the Brandon Teena role that won Hilary Swank an Oscar, Harry Dodge and Silas Howard, made the buddy crime movie By Hook or By Crook (2001). The film is barely known in mainstream culture, despite the fact it was made by and starred two still active trans male artists. The film—in which two trans men find each other by chance in the middle of nowhere and become partners in crime—feels like a long exhalation, with Howard and Dodge’s characters both remarking that they had never before been able to talk to anyone who shared their experiences. The film portrays trans men affectionately as gender outlaws, much like earlier New Queer cinema films portrayed gay and lesbian characters as sexual outlaws. By Hook or By Crook functions on its own as a portrayal of trans masculine brotherhood, but it also functions in contrast and critique in the way that Dodge and Howard film their own bodies versus how cis directors shoot trans bodies. There are no intrusive, probing shots of their differences or presentation. These characters already know who they are even when much of the outside world did not.
 
 
Documentation of transness in adolescence has manifested in reality television and YouTube self-documentation, but had already existed in experimental cinema. Sadie Benning’s 1998 film Flat Is Beautiful is a bildungsroman and thinly veiled memoir of the filmmaker’s gender questioning and trans non-binary identity that they would later disclose. The film’s lead character, Taylor—a most gender-neutral name—adorns a paper mask, grapples with their gender identity. They love Madonna and the Milwaukee Brewers in equal measure, and in a world of gender difference, Taylor finds themself fluidly exploring the in-between of the binary, seeking to carve out an identity of their own creation that preexists a term or category apparent to them. Like many of their experimental shorts, Benning shot Flat Is Beautiful with a Fisher-Price PXL 2000, a toy camera that creates a pixelated, black-and-white image. Using “pixelvision,” marketed and intended for young children, to tell Taylor’s story predicts how the next generations of queer, trans, and non-binary youths would search, question, and use the Internet and video diaries to claim their own authorship.
 
The proclivity to use the trans film image as a signifier of social progress has been predominantly seen in documentary nonfiction. Frederick Wiseman’s 2015 In Jackson Heights is largely spoken about for how it focuses on multiculturalism as a melting pot threatened by gentrification. But hidden within that film is a nuanced representation of the differences between cis gay and trans lives. Wiseman shows how during a time of LGBTQ Pride, white cis gay men can be visible and present their identity in parades, while trans women of color are shown decrying harassment from local police forces. Wiseman also presents scenes in which trans people grapple with their everyday realities in group therapy sessions. Documenting this side of the trans image, people who vary in age and race but share a similar socioeconomic class, shows a perceptive understanding of the trans experience. Contrast that with Wiseman’s earlier Hospital (1970), which features an especially upsetting scene in which a black cross-dresser—who appears to be under tons of sedatives—coolly states that they are “not a normal human being” and openly opines of identifying as a woman, while a doctor diagnoses them as a schizophrenic and unsuccessfully attempts to prevent the patient from getting placed in a mental ward. Times have changed in how the trans image is discerned and perceived, but the trans image is still heavily ensnared in several political debates that center their livelihood.
 
In our current sociopolitical moment, transness is often tied to debates about sex work, homelessness, policing, and incarceration, and these issues disproportionately affect trans women of color. Sean Baker’s 2015 film Tangerine presents a day in the life of two trans sex workers of color. The absence of discussion about Tangerine in Disclosure, despite its wordless ending being briefly shown, remains perhaps one of the most inexplicable of Feder’s choices. Is this exclusion a matter of respectability politics? The film is about Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez), just out of prison, who explodes when learning that her boyfriend is dating a cis woman and the chaos that unravels from her wrath on Christmas Day. Mya Taylor (as Sin-Dee’s best friend, Alexandra, the first trans woman who won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Support Supporting Female) and Rodriguez provided a contrast to a Hollywood that continues to push cis male actors playing trans women as costume (perhaps none as shamelessly as Eddie Redmayne’s absolutely wretched performance in The Danish Girl as Lili Elbe, the first sexual-reassignment surgery patient, who becomes a ham-fisted martyr through Tom Hooper’s misguided direction). Tangerine is a kinetic shot in the arm. Here, the trans image jumped from celluloid to digital to an iPhone 5s; these bodies are in constant motion, trans women doing the best they can to survive in their day-to-day lives. Even if their images cannot entirely approximate the entire trans experience, several truths lie in Taylor and Rodriguez’s performances.
 
Discussions about the trans image onscreen cannot just be reduced to the task of avoiding harmful or stereotypical representation. But Disclosure seems content to stay in that terrain. The film barely presents a historical or critical framework even as it asserts itself to be a thorough investigation. There’s a lack of imagination in a film that expects a trans viewer might prefer to tread only in the territory of commercial, contemporary films that feature recognizable faces. The trans image can be found in so many places and, despite everything trans people have been led to believe, this includes an entire history of cinema.
 
Disclosure and Pursuing the Trans Film Image. By Caden Mark Gardner. Reverse Shot,  June 19, 2020.

 

Adam has the right to exist—but I do not think it is a good or successful film. Adam has the right to exist—but I would have preferred a few other, better trans-related works of literature chosen to be adapted by major independent film producer James Schamus.  Adam has the right to exist—but it is not a film I would implore people to see. In fact, I might even encourage people to skip it. Not out of protest or the symbolism that is ascribed to power in purchasing a movie ticket in support of LGBTQ-related films, but because I do not think this film is worth rallying around or against. As a film, it should and ought to be treated equally like the idealized notion of purchasing a movie ticket: seeing something worth seeing. Adam is not worthless or easily disposable as a whole enterprise, although I find what is most interesting about it is in what is not there or just obliquely there, and that absence heavily overshadows what is on-screen. Adam has the right to exist—but to have that as the heart of its public relations push is incredibly depressing.  The discourse and discourse economy regarding Adam quickly—if unsurprisingly—moved into the realm of free speech and censorship.  On one side, there is cancel culture, ruthless hashtags, accusatory Twitter threads, and so-called social justice warriors. On the other side, there are those involved with the film, other artists (including many trans artists), those who like the movie, those who have cancel culture fatigue or anxiety, or those who did not even like the movie but are supporting it on the basis of Adam has the right to exist. 

 The film’s premise is about a cisgender male teenager getting confused for being a trans man by a cis queer woman, and hijinks and romance ensue. At its core, Adam is a provocation. The fact that Ariel Schrag, the book’s author, also wrote the screenplay does not assuage skeptics of the book. But the film’s supporters counter that having trans man Rhys Ernst direct the film should assuage skeptics and attract viewers.  Adam the film is, in fact, less provocative on-screen, which many of the film’s champions will boast of as a grace note. Another interpretation, and mine, is that it is sanitized. As a piece of writing, Adam the book had existed to be edgy, but in adaptation had its edges sandpapered down and as a result, has turned into something that looks and feels surprisingly generic. But what remains at the center of this film in premise is still there and what provoked the initial negative reactions to the book in 2014 are now returning along with a broader known understanding of trans visibility in media. Again, the supporters of the film will say Adam engages with that understanding and is simply reflecting the film's 2006 time period. To watch the film is to support a trans filmmaker, LGBTQ-related stories, and a diverse cast of newcomers that do include non-binary and trans people. To not watch would be to allow the film industry (in the most general definition of the term) choose to make less films on trans subject matter, risking throwing out the baby with the bathwater with trans-related films of which are still far too few.

  The publicity and discussion around the film between these two sides has swallowed any criticism that could be made of it whole. In the short-run, this not very good or well-acted film will have exposure that so many LGBTQ films wish to receive. It will be fascinating to measure the amount of attention Adam will get compared to Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli’s wonderful and truly radical feature film So Pretty that premiered earlier this year in Berlin, a trans film by a trans writer-director about queer utopian radicals in New York City.  It is doubtful So Pretty will be getting reviews in the same spaces as Adam and it is an open question if it will be in the same theaters, which is a shame because that film is truly a work of art and snapshot of our comment moment that should stand the test of time. Adam the film was always going to be a touchy object and it has smartly played into not just openly discussing the controversies but inviting the sympathies of people who sought to defend this film against the intangible threat of the internet. In this algorithmic and aggregates-obsessed view of democratized criticism in popular culture, Adam’s ratings on something like the website Goodreads were in the tank, as were averages on Letterboxd and IMDb for the film.  And social media did, in fact, play a role and was a tool for at least one film’s cancellation in 2019. Anybody who wrote a word about free speech in the spirited pieces on Adam should also, if they have not already, re-route their attention towards what has become of Craig Zobel’s human hunting horror satire film, The Hunt. #CancelAdam and #BoycottAdam are small potatoes compared to a major studio like Universal Studios folding when President Trump used Twitter—when he is not using his power in the executive branch to try to rollback rights of trans people in all walks of life—to question releasing The Hunt in this mass shooting climate, but also when conservative outrage began to spark from the film’s trailers on social media. The film’s release date was canceled by Universal less than a day after Trump’s tweet.  Adam did not and was never going to suffer that same fate for its content and anybody insisting that was a real threat were being naive.  Of course there was attempted sabotage, but sabotage led by people who have been built up like paper tigers. Such comparisons to previous controversial LGBTQ films that provoked protests and controversy, such as the organized boycotts and pickets by full-time activists of the National Gay Task Force of William Friedkin’s Cruising, are reaching and offensive to the memory of such past protests. Adam is enjoying being a model of all publicity being good publicity.

 No trans film critic who gave a positive review of Adam and in doing so mounted a spirited defense of it either separately or within their reviews should be questioned or portrayed as biased for why they were positive. But such positive reviews could have been much better served in writing about the film’s aesthetics, performances, and narrative plotting. Of course the controversy should be acknowledged, but that controversy (as it is by no definition an actual boycott) was clearly ineffective at its aims and if this film is going to have value in years down the line, there needs to be a reason for why it is a film that should be remembered rather than recalling how the film faced negativity on social media. This is when the potential long-term precedent comes into focus.  The future around covering films like Adam and such controversies related to the trans community and trans films released poses a much trickier outlook for those who are trans film critics.  This cannot and should not happen again in the next cycle of a trans-related media. But it probably will, due to the structures of published film criticism that put into question what is out there for those who are a trans film critic in this current media and film culture.

 When Robin Wood wrote the essay “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic” for Film Comment in 1978, he was pushing back on the notions that his coming out as gay was considered trivial in critical spaces (including a critique from Sight & Sound) and that asserting his gay identity in his film criticism would break some code of the “objectivity” ideal because that disclosure of sexuality in his work was considered writing too personally. Wood’s response was that what he did in his personal life was a key facet for his work and how he saw art. “... I believe there will always be a close connection between critical theory, critical practice, and personal life; and it seems important that the critic should be aware of the personal bias that must inevitably affect his choice of theoretical position, and prepared to foreground it in his work.” Wood continued, “I don’t believe that any theory exists in a vacuum or as truth. Every theory is the product of the needs of particular people within a particular culture at a particular stage of its development, and can only properly be understood within its context.  Our gravitation, as human individuals within, and determined by, our culture, towards one or the other of the available critical positions, will depend on our personal needs, on the way we wish to lead our lives, on the sort of society we would like to build, on the particularities of our involvement in the social progress.” Wood’s important and foundational essay still resonates to any film critic of a minority group.  Being a trans film critic does inform all of your criticism, not just the social issues LGBTQ doc or biopic on a trans person.  Some of the strongest recent works of trans film criticism have often been found in the allegory, visually and textually, be it Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin or Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis: Evangelion rather than A Fantastic Woman or The Danish Girl. That is closer to many of the earliest queer film critical writing of subtext and allegory be it from Parker Tyler or eventually Wood himself, as he later expounds in that same essay in talking about sex, sexuality, and gender within Hawks and Renoir. Wood in his essay also noted what gay liberation, a major force for activism at the time, meant to him on ideological grounds. This led to finding Godard’s Tout Va Bien more agreeable for him politically than Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends, despite the former’s absence of queerness and the latter still regarded as one of the strongest entries in queer film canon. That mindset certainly does not apply to all gay film critics, but Wood never sought to make generalizations but a singular statement of being a gay film critic and where he stood with that self-distinction. How one trans film critic sees the world versus another obviously will yield different ways of seeing film and what trans visibility in film means to them. One trans film critic may have interests in the whole history of trans film visibility, be it in exploitation, non-fiction, or underground cinema. Another trans film critic may find no redeeming value among the overall damaging history of the trans image on film, preferring to champion the current offerings of trans films by trans filmmakers for trans viewers. Both should, along with any critic in-between those examples, be allowed to exist and prosper. It is not an either/or proposition, so as long as the writing is there.

 In today’s political climate, it seems especially important to think of how one critic sees the world and what they want to see in the world being reflected through their film criticism. This should not be confused with social advocacy, which is a different role than the critic. To go back to Wood, he was every much as suspicious of certain gay film critics at the time of his essay who exclusively focused on gay films in what was, for him, a near propagandist and gatekeeping way to view art.  The critic should not be gatekeeping nor carrying the water of brands and studios for their rainbow capitalism (or rather, pink, white, and blue capitalism) by regurgitating press notes and advocating that inclusion automatically equals good representation or good art.  Of course seeing yourself can be incredibly beneficial for the trans film viewer, but reading somebody who shares your experience and how they see a film and the world of that film also holds weight. Often that exists in the negative critique, finding the film image of trans people disagreeable or even offensive and so the trans film critic is far more reliable than the other critics in finding no truth, sincerity, or good intentions in those images.  The trans subject can often feel like an abstract object in terms of not just how a trans character or experience is filmed, but also in how the non-trans critic writes about that trans character or filmed trans experience. Often, it can read as though these critics are forgetting this same group of people they saw on the silver screen exists outside of the movie and may, in fact, be reading their reviews. A trans film critic will bring a little more trust for the trans film viewer. But something like Adam reveals some complications to that. While it enjoys solid but not great aggregate scores, and with some of its loudest praises being from trans film critics, there is no consensus of the film within the community. Some think it is great, some think it applies the “trans lens” or “trans gaze” into a filmmaking framework, some think it rehabilitates the book it was adapted from, and others think this was a text not worth saving and find very little value in it. There can be a fruitful dialogue in what this film brings as adaptation or what it deals with on the topic of transness and trans masculinity that could be so much more than the monolithic summation of, what the trans community thinks or what trans film critics have to say. But due to the fact it is an indie film and the discourse of it was so controversy-focused, Adam discourse left the station after its first official opening weekend. That is the state of affairs for most non-tentpole films.

 To be a trans film critic is to face the fact that when you are published, your voice will often be characterized as invaluable in terms of perspective when given the platform to write. But so often the trans critic struggles to find where their voices are even valued.  There are trans people who are full-time, jack of all trades culture writers, most of whom belong to LGBTQ publications, and after that, it drops off.  Of course, some of the best writers out there are in film criticism as a side hustle or they have a side hustle in addition to their writing. But as a result of the current structures of sites and publications, there are only few voices of a minority group and that itself is not always going to yield a more diverse set of opinions and perspectives from that minority group. This might read obvious but it continues to persist. The trans film critics who review a trans film for a major site or publication will often, always be a very small sample size. Some other reviews from trans film critics will pop up on Medium, a blog post, a Patreon page, or on Letterboxd. One looks at Kelley Dong’s excellent review on Alita: Battle Angel and sees that some of the best writing found on the film cited in that piece came from trans critics who did not have the platforms beyond their own sites. Those reviews will not usually be weighted in the aggregate nor have the exposure level as those being published on a major site which is unfortunate as, although not always, there can be good writing found on those sites by trans film critics.

 When New York Magazine and Vulture published a series of essays around the 20th anniversary of The Matrix, only one essay was commissioned from a trans perspective. That essay by Andrea Long Chu, although in actuality it was a book except, was about the long history of how trans community viewed The Matrix as a trans allegory as though this was common public knowledge, when it is still a concept that has been gaining momentum in film circles outside of the trans film critical sphere. While going over the significant visual signifiers of these allegories, Long Chu ultimately concluded that a trans allegory is far too limited and uninteresting.  There are many trans film critics and trans scholars who disagree, particularly in the case of The Matrix series. If anything, more dialogues of the trans-allegorical in The Matrix than any film centering a more direct trans film image have resulted in more fruitful film criticism, with Alita: Battle Angel as one notable example. This is not to criticize a critic like Long Chu, who is a good writer and critic, getting what was essentially the lone “a trans perspective on The Matrix” spot. That was out of her control and no trans critic or trans film critic should be burdened to speak for one group or community. What is the issue here is that there is still this import of bylines for a lot of contemporary culture criticism, despite how often it is a crap shoot and incredibly arbitrary in who gets to have their voices be chosen. That is the reality. Will that change? And how? In any case, the onus of that should not be on the trans film critic in what are editorial concerns, but that does not mean they cannot be critical of those instances of tokenism or outright exclusion.

The trans community is small and with that can be tight-knit. The shared experiences and relationship to moving images and art, particularly in art forms that have misrepresented the community for so many decades, is the type of mutual understanding that can form a bond among that community.  Trans filmmakers who have been making films on the trans experience have also been put in some unenviable positions of having their projects made, produced, and get the platforms and with the burden of being able to create art and images can withstand the scrutiny of their own community. Their struggles to be seen outside of LGBTQ-related film festivals is a continued struggle and that remains a point of contention when something as risible as Lukas Dhont’s trans ballerina film Girl gets to be at major festivals and gain Netflix distribution. That film and its initial positive reception is a major indictment of the type of trans art that gets major festival play and how festivals often are absent of trans film critics who, by and large, hated Dhont’s film and individually offered fascinating perspectives in their scathing critiques.  So then it is easy to find moments of solidarity between trans filmmakers and trans film critics in the struggle to make their work in their disciplines visible and be able to occupy spaces of film culture that is often is missing them. In fact, friendships may be struck between the trans film critic and the trans filmmaker who connect through these all too common struggles.  Perhaps why the hashtag protests of Adam struck a chord within the community is because many trans artists—but not all—and certain—but not all—trans film critics so often use hashtags to connect community-wide. These hashtags can be PSA calls to action and tools of solidarity in terms of getting out trans positivity by retweeting, favoriting, and sharing hashtags like #TransIsBeautiful, #TransformationTuesday, and #GirlsLikeUs. These are not all activist in nature and can function in a way to promote visibility when platforms are not otherwise there for the art or artist. So seeing those tools go in another direction to undermine trans-related art is perhaps dispiriting to those who use it and that they perhaps overestimate the power of a hashtag, especially when it is used in some activist sense, as a result.

 In this way, the lines between critics and artists within the trans community are a huge gray area. Ideally, stronger lines and boundaries between those two groups need to be more enforced. However, it is not as though that practice has yielded many benefits for either side. The lack of structures for the trans filmmaker (or broadly, the trans artist) and the trans film critic often gives way to more elastic roles in art, which is not necessarily a bad thing. There is the fact that many trans film critics do aspire to be trans filmmakers and that some of the strongest critical works on transness can come from trans art such as Jordy Rosenberg’s reclamation of alternative queer history by way of a speculative fiction novel, Confessions of the Fox.  However, those are the exceptions and not the norm.  Trans film and trans film criticism can interact and be in a dialogue with one another, but it needs to acknowledge that criticism is not there to exist as echo chambers, accepting all films as lodestars of the trans experience, that all representation is good representation, or to exist as soundboards of only praise to that art. 
 In the end, the trans film critic should have their writing be evocative of their tastes and perspectives that reach far beyond a few films of their community that come out each year. That a trans film critic should always be mindful that their perspective is of a singular perspective rather than a complete testament of an entire community and that their background can include certain blindspots, be it due to privilege or something else tied to their perspective. A white trans man may not always understand the nuances of the trans experience for the trans woman of color and vice versa.  Not to mention that this extremely North American-centric perspective is also just one perspective of the varying trans experiences around the globe. However, these perspectives can all exist by being honest through their criticism while being in dialogue in what they see in what film culture has to offer them and be critical of what that film culture is lacking. And perhaps it is healthy to acknowledge that film culture may not always be receptive to these criticisms or open to these discerning eyes and voices, and, may in fact, be pretty flippant over any of these suggestions and criticisms. But nevertheless, there are many good trans film critics around and deserve to be read for what they see in a film’s image, as what they see individually is more valuable and beneficial to film culture than perhaps film culture at this point even realizes.
 

"Adam"; or, What Are The Responsibilities of a Trans Film Critic? By Caden Mark Gardner. MUBI, September 11, 2019. 

Body Talk is an ongoing series of conversations between Willow Maclay and I about Transgender Cinema as we prepare to write a book on the subject called Corpses, Fools, & Monsters: An Examination of Transgender Cinema.  Part I conversation that was on Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs is available here, Part II was on Robert Altman’s Come Back To The 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean here, Part III on Boys Don’t Cry is here, Part IV was on Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece, Under The Skin here, Part V was on the groundbreaking Jennie Livingston documentary Paris Is Burning here, Part VI on the sub-genre of body horror here, and Part VII on cis actors in trans roles here. This piece is cross-posted on Willow’s site Curtsies and Hand Grenades.
 
Willow Maclay: If I were ever in a situation where I had to start dating again I would fear for my life, because I’m perceived as a cisgender woman by society at large, but I am not one. I’m an actual living late plot twist, and if someone wanted to murder me for this reason they likely wouldn’t face jail time. I would have it coming, because I was a liar. I was scary. I pushed him too far by saying I was something that, let’s be real, no one considers you are, unless you’ve had surgery, and I haven’t had surgery. That’s still some time away, and it could always be pushed back again, so I live as a late act twist that never had to be revealed, because I’ve been fortunate enough to fall in love with a man who loved me for me, and wasn’t threatened by the inbetween-ness of my genitals.
 
This is not the case for most people. I am not the majority, and I am lucky.
 
In a larger cultural sense it all started with Psycho (1960). It was the late act reveal that a character wasn’t who they were supposed to be, and it was the demonic femininity of men in dresses and lace that became the lasting image. Yes, she was stabbed in the shower and the music pierced us all, but the killer behind the blade was a man who thought he was a woman, and genre filmmaking have been milking this for all its worth ever since.
 
This doesn’t happen in real life, but the closest image we have to the manic tranny with a blade between her legs is that of actual transgender women. We are the broken and the damned and worse than that, we might just be psychotic. We might just kill you. There are more instances of trans woman appearing as murderers in movies than there are good films featuring actual trans women in meaty, acceptable, dense roles that approach their humanity with something resembling respect for the difficulty it takes to be trans. The murderer has persisted. We haven’t.
 
In this segment of Body Talk we’re going to be discussing that plot device. Caden, when did you first see a movie that used this narrative trope?
 
Caden Gardner: We’ve talked about this in the previous installment of Body Talk that primarily dealt with cis actors in trans roles. That conversation also spilled over into cheap third act reveals of characters who, ‘Are not what they appear to be’. Some of that ranged from The Crying Game to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. These characters are not murderers, but unstable and in the latter’s case a villain, with the comedic effect of the reveal played for gross-out laughs and showing how normalized the trope had become. I remember the ongoing gag in the Austin Powers series of removing a wig from a character who appeared to be a woman with Austin exclaiming, ‘It’s a man, baby!’ So I saw the jokes first, how situationally, the panic and anxiety was normalized by the status quo and how the ugly stereotypes within those fears became the punchline. Then I got into the fear and panic at the heart of earlier films than those comedies.
 
Now I had seen Psycho but I always found Norman Bates an incredibly sympathetic, tic-filled, ball of anxiety. Anthony Perkins gave Norman depth, layers, and even humanity, where you can retroactively, after the twist, realize how at war he is with himself. Hitchcock allowed you to root for him when he was covering up Marion Crane’s murder by sinking the car. I had seen Gus van Sant’s Psycho remake which sexualized Norman’s voyeurism. Van Sant opted for a shot for shot remake so the contemporary knowledge of this twist informs everything Norman does, and after so many Psycho knock-offs where transness is at the forefront and tied explicitly to the twist it becomes an entirely different experience, and not a better one. To move away from Psycho, slightly, one such example of this trope that I came to know very early in my life was Robert Hiltzik’s 1983 slasher Sleepaway Camp.
 
I’d like you to get into that, but before I do, Willow, as I think you eloquently stated your position on that film and twist in Cleo a few years back.
 
WM: I similarly don’t have many problems with Psycho, even if I think the last ten minutes is an unnecessary and ultimately clumsy act of explanation. What separates Psycho from many of the films we are going to be discussing in this installment of Body Talk is that it is not fundamentally hinged upon the twist ending. There’s a lot going on in Psycho and cinephiles, at least, remember much much more than Norman’s cross-dressing and murdering. The craft in that movie is maybe the zenith of Alfred Hitchcock’s career. If one wants to argue that Hitchcock was a master of control then Psycho is the last movie where that is easily apparent. I find his period after Psycho fascinating, because he loses grip of his movies, but that’s another conversation. Psycho is a totem for a reason and I love it, even if it unintentionally spawned many poorer copy-cat films.
 
One of these is Sleepaway Camp , which you brought up. I’ve seen that movie a half-dozen times for one reason or another. The only movie I outright hate that holds that distinction. I wrote about it for Cleo Journal, but the gist of my problem with Sleepaway Camp is that it intentionally makes the reveal horrific and the movie only works as a late act plot twist. Everything beforehand is slop to say the least. If it weren’t for the fact that these filmmakers wanted to show a girl with a dick the movie wouldn’t be remembered. One could argue that final scene is useful in pointing out how cisgender people view transgender bodies. I don’t think that’s a bad idea, but I think it’s a cynical one, that doesn’t carry as much weight when placed against the brunt of that characters struggles to deal with her own body. Angela isn’t trans, but her body is how cis people perceive transgender bodies and the co-signing this film has for the horror of the onlookers is damning. It’s a horrifying image to have Angela slack jawed, completely nude, caught in mid-scream, heaving like a demon. It is even worse that those onlookers react with total disgust of her body. They don’t find her murders horrific, but she has a dick? That’s the scariest shit ever. There’s no covering that up and reclaiming the image. It’s the only image people talk about with Sleepaway Camp, because the movie is otherwise shit. It’s canonized, because of that image. An image that doesn’t have the cultural staying power of Buffalo Bill tucking in his genitals, but it is nevertheless synonymous with the phrase “chick with a dick”. Being one myself, I can tell you, it’s not all that tantalizing. It’s boring, mentally arduous on a personal level, and tucked away all of the time, but that doesn’t sell. Flaccid never does.
 

 

CG:  Sleepaway Camp makes Angela (Felissa Rose) a timid creature (and I do mean creature, the film is too trashy and low-brow for any humanity in anybody, but especially her) that then becomes a dehumanized monster by the end. It dates back to her crazy aunt that the audience gets doses of through flashback. Angela is forced-femmed (for lack of a better word) by that aunt, her history rooted in a trauma to a horrific accident that claims members of her family, that includes her sister, the real Angela, that is shown in the flashback that begins the film. So Angela is living as a woman and being socialized as a young feminine girl. This was not her choice or inherently innate to her. She never outright states that she saw herself as a woman. I recall that people treat Sleepaway Camp’s twist as a surprise but the film does leave clues that honestly have the subtleties of anvils. Angela is confronted by girl bullies for her timidity, sniffing her out like she has something to hide from the get-go. She doesn’t go swimming, she doesn’t take her clothes off, and she does not shower in the presence of others. As if saying to the audience “What’s up with that?” and these bullies will not quit trying to figure her out. What is disturbing about this film for me is that it emboldens the suspicions of those wretched characters by having that twist with Angela exist. The film, unintentionally, almost predicts gender gatekeepers who want to harass any ‘not normal-looking’ person who goes to their preferred bathroom or dressing room of fucking Target in Anytown, USA that can then extend into law with not so enforceable anti-trans bathroom bills and ordinances in those areas of the country. I think there could have been many films where the version would be to humanize Angela, or give her depth, a sense of who she is or how she relates to her body in being socialized female when she has this whole history about her. But she lives by the twist and dies by the twist in that image that is haunting not for the body count she leaves, but in how the film can treat that character type, thinly drawn mind you, with such animosity and inhumanity.
 
People can be quick to dismiss any concerns about this film as, ‘It’s only a movie’ or ‘It’s just a cheap slasher’, but for me we have gone through a lot of genre films that explore the body and gender in fascinating ways and also see how even when seeing real monsters like Jame Gumb in The Silence of The Lambs, that there can be moments of humanity in seeing pain and confusion and not just a cheap twist, thrills, and kills.
 
WM: As a diehard fan of the genre I’m typically more forgiving of horror films for being uncaring, but I think Sleepaway Camp is merciless in a way that isn’t fun to watch at all. I’ve heard better things about the sequels, in that, they have a sense of humour about the subject matter, but I haven’t watched any of them to date. I know Laura Jane Grace (Against Me!) is a big fan of Sleepaway Camp, but I don’t see the value in reclaiming it unless you take up an entire fuck the world attitude, which I wouldn’t begrudge any trans person for having, but that isn’t me. Moreso than being offended, I find the entire affair just catastrophically boring, even for the relatively conservative structure behind slasher films. My main issue with Sleepaway Camp, beyond the obvious, is that if they were going to go with that ending why not lean all the way into it and make it so completely offensive all the way through, negating the twist, and basking in the glow of being a fucked up movie instead of half-assing it by sweeping the big reveal under the rug? It’s just annoying, and it’s not the only movie of this type to exist. In a larger cultural sense though, it’s probably the most famous example in the horror genre of this trope outside of Psycho. Sleepaway Camp definitely has more cultural staying power than something like Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, which annoys me all the more, because at least Dressed to Kill has the common decency to be well made. De Palma, as much as he annoys me sometimes, was never asleep behind the wheel. He always directed something 100%, but Sleepaway Camp? It’s barely a movie, but in the horror community it has been canonized. Their opinion being that It’s worth getting through the slog, because you’ll get to the girl with the dick. The only image in the movie.
 
CG: The early 1980s Slashers, basically Friday The 13th (speaking of a Psycho rehash) and after, had a habit of being in conversation with the genre by responding to one movie’s ridiculousness- be it kills or twists- and outdoing it. Resulting horror films were in conversation with Friday the 13th , because it was a huge success, and even Friday the 13th itself was in conversation with Psycho and Halloween (1978). They took the twists and the formula and embellished it in their own mold, but the results, were as you state, half-baked and cheap. I probably do read like a moralist, I actually do love a lot of the horror films from that era, even some that are well, not exactly expertly made cinema and have a nihilist streak about humanity, but I find the canonization of that film to be a mistake in taste. I am sure some of the appeal is the sleaziness and trash, the lowbrow of it all that horror nerds can embrace in ways cineastes and more mainstream audiences do not.
 
This brings up Brian De Palma. His cinema is sleazy and trashy, but well-done in a way where his commanding scope and playfulness in artifice gave him a lot of respectability (his fans ranged from Pauline Kael to Quentin Tarantino) and currency that still endures today with a lot of cinephiles and film critics in our age-group. He recently had a birthday which on social media seems to give an opportunity for cinephiles that I follow to rank his films. Unsurprisingly, even if I am left quite disappointed, Dressed To Kill seemed to come up frequently as a favorite of people who profess their love of De Palma. I always have an impulse whenever I see it come up in conversation to explore why people like it and reconcile that with the fact that it is definitively a transphobic film.
 
To be clear, I do not want to #CancelBrianDePalma or act like there’s a moral failing on the part of these people, some of whom I do consider good friends, for liking the movie or finding something to like in the film. I have curiously heard people who have written books that feature Dressed To Kill, state that it is not about transness but goodness. But I bring you this: from the maestro himself who was informed entirely about the film’s transwoman killer from real-life trans woman Nancy Hunt whose story from Phil Donahue he places into the narrative of his film. It is an unsubtle wink and clue of the twist that still angers me upon reflection.
 
WM: I’ll start by being very upfront that Brian De Palma and I have a complicated relationship as filmmaker and viewer. I adore some of his films and consider them to be all time favourites, like Carrie, which we’ve both praised, and Blow-Out, which is without a doubt one of the best films of the 1980s. My issues with De Palma, and these issues are only mine, is that I’m annoyed by his treatment of women. I get frustrated that, without fail, especially in this period, they seem to be killed in exceedingly gruesome ways after their sexual usefulness has been wrung dry. De Palma’s a very horny director, which is fine, but I don’t get a huge thrill out of watching him have an obvious hard-on for the women in his movies. Does this make me a prude? Probably. Does it make me a hypocrite, because I love Dario Argento, who does basically the same things? Also probably. We’re made of contradictions. I’m allowed to have mine, but with Dressed to Kill it is a different issue entirely, and that’s one where I think he runs into this gigantic problem of mixing the absurdity of the late act plot twist in Psycho with real life problems transgender people have. Psycho is not a relatable target in any estimation, but Dressed to Kill certainly is for two reasons. First the inclusion of Nancy Hunt and also due to the discussion of sex reassignment surgery which is a mirroring scene explaining transness, poorly I might add, that is an homage to Psycho’s transvestite explanation. Norman was never a transvestite in Psycho, but Robert Elliott is canonically transgender and De Palma uses that as a crutch for his worst tendencies as a director towards things like castration anxiety, the femme fatale and domination.

 The problem is that all of these autuerist tics are only noticeable in the form if you’ve seen half a dozen Brian De Palma movies, but if you’re coming to Dressed to Kill as a new viewer it just looks like a blanket “psycho tranny killed women because she couldn’t be one herself” story. I’m not saying movies have to reflect reality and every movie about a trans character has to be nice. Far from it; what I am saying is that it becomes a problem when something that works on an individual level becomes a pattern, and the murderous tranny is definitely a pattern. I have much less problems with these movies compared to the issues I have with the trope. I think Dressed to Kill, in particular, is a really well made film, but when you’ve seen this story more than a dozen times it becomes boring, and it doesn’t really do transgender people any favours in real life that our entire cinematic language hinges on a late act twist.
 
Did I ever tell you the story of when I came out for the first time on a film forum back in 2011? Well, one person commented, and I’m still friends with this person, “what a twist!”. If that isn’t transness at the intersection of movies I don’t know what is, and the shame of it all is that we could be a lot more if given additional narrative space. 
 

CG:  You never told me about that! I felt similarly that when I came out online- and I admit to being pretty guarded about my online anonymity for a very long time- that there were days of reverberations where some responses were akin to it being a twist ending. Not all gave this commentary of ‘I didn’t have a clue’ or ‘I didn’t see that coming’, but many did see it as a narrative of sorts, as though I had planted and stunted this as a plot thread when in actuality, I was in a very bad place mentally. I felt helpless and it felt was necessary that I come out because it was an election year and one side was absolutely more hostile and transphobic than the other (hint: it wasn’t the Democrats). I have mixed feelings about how I went about it- but that was mostly because I was also in an alcoholic fog and my nerves and mode of behaviors operated differently then as opposed to now, which hey, now I actually am open, out, and have a lot more control because I am transitioning and not trapped in hostility, shame, and the closet.
 
Now back to Dressed To Kill, I looked back on the way the film was seen then and now, constantly feeling disappointed that nobody who seems to want to champion the film can really ever confront ‘the twist’. It can often just be mentioned in a sentence, admitting to trans woman serial killer as ‘cartoonishly stigmatizing’ as The New Republic did a few years back but at the same time declare that critics should surrender their prudish sides and embrace DePalma’s ‘pure cinema’. Or you can talk around it, in the name of spoilers I suppose, and just use catch-all phrases as ‘sleazy’ or ‘bizarre’ in the twists the film has. Some do not so much dismiss the transphobia but label it as pulp treatment of something real. Then you have a little more problematic readings, some of which I think unconsciously white-wash the transphobia of the maker, by labeling Robert Elliott/Bobbi as schizophrenic and pretending that was DePalma’s intention when he admits he crafted and was inspired by trans women and then linking it to Jekyll & Hyde ‘two sides’ of a person who switches upon sexual stimulation. Now, of course DePalma’s knowledge of transness is off as he only sees the surface but he made a deliberate choice to insert Nancy Hunt’s own image in his movie. He uses clips but if you look up Nancy Hunt, you would also know that she similarly rejects trans as trauma and trans as pathology, viewing the mental health community as hostile towards trans people rather than helpful to her and many people in her position. Hunt lives forever in certain transgender archives but she is used ghoulishly in a film where the director laughs and chuckles like the Keith Gordon character about the idea of a trans woman.
 
Keith Phipps, to his credit, did confront the transphobia of the film when Dressed To Kill was released on the popular arthouse label The Criterion Collection. But he appears to be an anomaly to cinephiles and critics that probably do not really see the problem of the movie in the way that you and I do. As far as De Palma himself, it perhaps comes off like I hate him. I hate this film, although I find it revealing in ways that he may have not intended, even beyond the transphobia. But I like a lot of his work and quite a bit of it is built within his sense of cinematic language and artifice. However, as Kam Austin Collins succinctly put it in his Letterboxd log, you may love that Museum of Modern Art set-piece, the split diopters, and unreal quality of the moviemaking of fake outs upon fake outs but, “The transphobia is real”.

 
WM: I love Kam (read him at Vanity Fair). For my money he’s the best working film critic right now, and he’s absolutely right. Dressed to Kill does have an unreal quality of moviemaking that lays on top of this pretty vile center. Isn’t it frustrating that Brian De Palma may have more natural talent as a director than maybe anyone who has ever stepped behind the camera and he mostly uses it to worry about his dick? As far as just pure fucking cinema there are few directors with more skill or have made movies that are as luxurious to watch as De Palma. However, more often than not he almost always does something that creates distance in my ability to fully appreciate his works, and that’s most readily apparent in Dressed to Kill, which is a movie I championed before I came out, but afterwards was hesitant towards showering praise upon. I could more easily ignore the shitty political nature of the movie before I came out, because I was foolish enough to think that wasn’t me, but now I just find it annoying. I’m not even offended by its clumsy handling of gender politics, I just find it dull. Like, by the end it’s, “oh this is obviously a riff on Psycho. I don’t give a shit”. De Palma was like his dad, Alfred Hitchcock, in his ability to completely control all aspects of technical filmmaking, but De Palma’s career is without the same barriers Hitchcock had which negated some of Alfred’s worst tendencies toward women. As a stanch supporter of Marnie, I’d be wary of calling this a bad thing, but it certainly makes me wonder what Brian De Palma could have done in a system where some of his decisions were checked a little more often, because Dressed to Kill is almost embarrassingly a copycat of things better than that movie: Psycho, and giallo plotting. Even the films best scene: the elevator murder is lifted almost directly from the climax of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, even down to the outfit Bobbi is wearing.
 
CG: “Isn’t it frustrating that Brian De Palma may have more natural talent as a director than maybe anyone who has ever stepped behind the camera and he mostly uses it to worry about his dick?” That is a pretty inescapable route to take for even his admirers, as the Jake Paltrow-Noah Baumbach documentary on De Palma shows (and I would recommend watching in relation to some of his films and again, De Palma’s unconscious revelations and confessions about his own relationships to his work, other films, and his personal life). When Pauline Kael, notoriously anti-Hitchcock but pro-De Palma, gave a write-up on Dressed To Kill, she wrote that De Palma has a self-awareness that makes his films have a vein of humor due to how open De Palma is open about his id, “What makes it funny is that it’s permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts. De Palma has perfected a near-surreal poetic voyeurism—the stylized expression of a blissfully dirty mind,” believing that Dressed To Kill is a great example about the inherent voyeuristic nature of movies. And I get that appeal and how uninhibited De Palma is, but it is also why I find Dressed To Kill narrow. He was in therapy at the time, but seems to hate psychological readings of the sexual stimulation of a beautiful woman when aimed at himself or his characters.. And of course this male gaze has a certain preferred image of a woman. It is a cisgender woman, not women like Nancy Hunt as he clearly does not consider trans women to be women at all. The uninhibited nature of his work that exists in Body Double, such as the ‘Relax’ sequence, does feel more genuine and not as isolating as opposed to Dressed To Kill where the authorial voice of the film finds people like myself to be disgusting and something to laugh at, or consequentially, nightmare fuel. Dressed to Kill notoriously opens with an insert of a naked woman in the shower that is supposed to be Angie Dickinson’s character- but is so obviously not and De Palma knows it- and if that’s what turns the guy on, then good for him, but he clearly sees trans women as men clothed head to toe in wigs passing through and absolutely not wanting to explore anything beyond the surface. It always frustrates me that when a bad boy director is celebrated for liberation and rebellion , but ends up showing there are actually lines drawn in what they find acceptable and that the ideas of other kinds of people existing beyond their ideal, coveted image of femininity go ‘too far’ for them.
 
While De Palma’s biggest fans that I know are straight men, I do know plenty of queer people and cis women who also think he’s great, but this film was enough to keep me at a distance. What’s not to like about De Palma?’ was something I’ve heard. Hell, when I read a recent piece on Dressed To Kill it said verbatim, ‘If you don’t like this [Dressed To Kill], then you don’t like movies.’ I know that people often are in the mood to rehabilitate Dressed To Kill as, like William Friedkin’s serial killer film Cruising, it had protests and vocal dissenters for the movie at the time (not for the transphobia to be clear, but for the violence against women in the film— at the hands of the transgender serial killer). It was a film that in De Palma’s own words did good business. Yes, it got Razzie nominations (I mean, so did Kubrick’s The Shining) but I think the canonization and reclamation of Dressed To Kill for the canon missed more points of view along the way in terms of looking at it now and its cultural significance. But it is a lot more attractive to treat the film as an object of buried treasure or hidden gem which Dressed To Kill is treated as than it is to listen to a dissenting opinion.
 
 
WM: I know plenty of trans women who love Dressed to Kill, as well as Sleepaway Camp, and I find no problem with this even if I have my own issues with these movies, but I would genuinely love to hear what it is about those two in particular that speaks to them. Maybe it’s a level of honesty from cisgender voices of how we’re actually viewed without the semblance of political correctness bearing tolerance of our own gender? Or it could be as simple as thinking Dressed to Kill has stellar camerawork and Sleepaway Camp is too goofy to take seriously, and again, these are good enough reasons to like a film, but I have larger culturally specific reasons why these movies in particular rub me the wrong way. One major issue I have with Brian De Palma protesting to psychological readings of his movies is that if we were to push away at these things then I’m unsure what depth De Palma has other than as a sexual charlatan or his admittedly, fantastic camera work, which again, is fine, but I find that lacking in girth. De Palma is most interesting to me when I’m trying to figure out how he feels about women in his movies, because that’s absolutely his central hang-up. The Fuck and Kill mentality. Marriage never really comes into the equation. I can see on some level why cisgender women like De Palma’s women and his eroticism, because it’s brutish, tough, and these women are generally arsenic and don’t give a fuck and there’s definitely something appealing in that, but his treatment of transgender women is completely fucking different. We’re the great American nightmare. The total destruction of the male body. The malleability of our flesh into that of a woman’s is horrifying to him or at least perversely interesting, which might be more honest than not, but when I watch Dressed to Kill I get the sense that he finds bodies like mine absolutely disgusting (disclaimer: I’m closer to Michelle Pfeiffer than Michael Caine, sorry Brian).
 
Part of me wonders if Brian De Palma could potentially have bedded a trans woman by mistake and then felt his heterosexuality capsize as a result. I don’t think that’s an insane thing to think, no? Pure speculation on my part, but he has this strange mixture of self-hatred and lust when talking about or engaging with transness. In the cinema of De Palma if the body of a woman is the ultimate act of cinematic ecstasy then the body of a trans woman is the total destruction of orgasm. A trans woman is castration, and therein lies his greatest anxieties. Dressed to Kill is fascinating for these reasons. It’s the kind of movie you could talk about all day in the context of De Palma’s work. Where it’s more boring is in the greater landscape of trap narratives in movies where it’s mostly the same old thing.
 
CG: Yes, we are not seeking to bury and ban Dressed To Kill, but the film’s significance is tied to a trope that, as we noted, involves revelation or a twist that’s tied to transness in this negative way. And I totally get your speculation on the root of where this came from (De Palma insists it was just from seeing Nancy Hunt he also grew up in a New York City where the Warhol Superstars were in the same film underground he started in the late 1960s, I find it unbelievable if he did not find himself in the same space- if by pure incident- with cross-dressers or trans women at some factory party to watch independent films), as I often speculate why does there exist moments in movies where a pickup of a trans woman for sex leads to a shocking revelation and male outburst for being ‘tricked’ (think Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting). Even on a more intellectual level, I wonder what is Jesse Singal’s deal (and I am not alone) over his obsession with trans women in his writing. But to get back to our mining through this narrative, I want to return to Psycho as the genesis even if it is not dealing with cross-dressing or gender dysphoria. We have of course talked about the riffs and knock-offs but what is fascinating is how quickly the knock-offs also produced the connection of this reveal to the villain or killer ‘not being who we think they are’ as far their gender and done so in genre-film, B-movie fashion.
 
WM: There are so many throwaway scenes of cis men fucking trans women and throwing a fit that give absolutely nothing back to the movie it would be impossible to count them all. This goes doubly for throwaway scenes where cis guys clock a trans woman and make fun of her. This even happens in Zodiac (2007) of all things, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why that scene in particular exists. Is it to reaffirm we’re in San Fransisco and cops are jerks? Seems pretty fucking basic considering Fincher, but that scene has also stuck out to me as a microcosm of  issues of transness depicted on screen, and in a larger macro level when that scene is pulled out to its fullest length that’s when you get things like Dressed to Kill. I don’t think cis people get how fucking exhausting that is and how much you have to reconcile to watch movies and realize that these things are just going to happen. Or even, god’s inferior child, Television. For example, There is not a sitcom that exists that won’t take a jab at trans people, and we don’t even worry about these things, because there’s bigger fish to fry with our own issues. Like our passports being denied and the living hell that is the current government of the United States.
 

 
CG:  William Castle’s 1961 Psycho knock-off Homicidal is a doozy and laughably trashy in its twists and turns. Its killer is a double-role for Jean Arless (a pseudonym for Hal Ashby’s wife Joan Marshall) who plays Warren and Emily. So the twist is that the audience sees Emily commit murders and she notably, despite being described as Warren’s fiancee, is never in the same room as her groom-to-be. In the dialed-up, pure William Castle, 3rd act Emily is revealed as Warren, complete with a classic wig removal. Then, much like that awful psychologist explaining it all in Psycho, we get an explanation. Warren was socialized male but- and this is where it really gets crazy- he was biologically born female. His father wanted a son and his mother insisted to keep up the stunt (that apparently worked in ways that are a little unclear— I don’t think Castle and company thought all of this through but complaining about plot-holes from William Castle is just barking up the wrong tree) that included the county clerk marking the birth certificate male. I think there was far more work done to Warren in this ‘forced masc’ tale as we get an allusion to Christine Jorgensen’s sex-change operation by the line, “Then Helga took Warren to Denmark. What happened there, we don’t know”, as the American Jorgensen in the 1950s got her operation in Denmark (similarly, Ed Wood’s 1953 film Glen or Glenda was inspired and marketed as being connected to Jorgensen’s story that caught global public attention). Warren became Emily, fully living, socializing, and possibly getting the medical assistance in hormones and operations but returns home to collect inheritance money, having to return to Warren, a life full of trauma, confusion, and haunted by ghosts and figures of her past. The film is silly and as I speak to the characterization of Warren/Emily deeply problematic, but I see this as necessary to point to the fact that the evolution of the Psycho narrative is more than just Ed Gein (who also inspired The Silence of The Lambs). Clearly, this narrative has been a point of entry into some of the biggest tropes and misconceptions about transgender characters.
 
WM: I find William Castle’s capitalist urges really earnest. He was a the filmmaker equivalent of a big tent ring leader of the wackiest carnival that ever came to home and there’s something appealing about that kind of salesman. It’s hard to be offended by someone who made The Tingler and whose sole interest in life seemed to be scaring teenagers right at the point where they started to make out during his terrible movies. Homicidal isn’t really any different than the other movies he made, but of interest to us, because of some gender fucker-y. Earlier in this installment of Body Talk I said I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with Sleepaway Camp if it knew how to lean into the absurdity of its source material. Well, this is exactly what I’m referring to when I say lean into your batshit insane idea. So, it’s more fun than harmful. It’s difficult to raise your pitchforks over something this silly, but let’s get into something that is silly on paper, but isn’t in execution.
 
Caden I want to know what you think of Sion Sono’s Strange Circus, because it flips the gender on the opposite spectrum of this typical trope, which more directly effects you.
 
CG: I’m admittedly not well-versed on Sion Sono’s cinema and Strange Circus was, to my knowledge, the first film of his that I’ve watched. It is fascinating as it does go back to you mentioning the exhaustion of viewing media as a trans person, where these movies constantly clock or misgender their characters. The character, Yuji (Issei Ishida) is gender fluid but believed to be male assigned at birth assistant to our protagonist. Yuji is constantly peppered with uncomfortable questions about his ‘asexual’ appearance. For a film that is full of sex, rape, and trauma, Yuji at first appears like a sissy stereotype for his long hair (in being trans male, it is admittedly difficult to ‘pass’ with long hair, although Yuji’s hair veers close to David Bowie in Labyrinth) and lanky physical appearance. Basically, Sono’s rude, invasive characters who quiz Yuji about his look are proven right with Yuji admitting that he was actually a female assigned at birth and that his traumas and mental illness inform his identity which to that point, then becomes synonymous with his trans identity. How predictable, how boring.
 

 

What is disappointing is Sono desperately wants to be among the misfits and outsiders, with Strange Circus having a kind of cabaret pretension, as this is where the film starts and ends, the film’s named after this club of cross-dressers and drag queens. The extremity that Sono likes to fashion that he is doing though, much like De Palma’s limited uninhibitedness in Dressed To Kill, falls short with the ‘tranny as killer’ trope. Yuji is unstable and in a circle of rebels with piercings and body modifications that symbolize their identity that are remarkable changes in their physical appearance, when Yuji reveals to them his ‘secret’ these exhibitionists are now shown mouth agape. Hypocrites. Yuji is seen as going ‘too far’. I’m reminded of Dressed To Kill of the lead character being haunted by Yuji in her dreams much like Robert Elliott/Bobbi haunts Nancy Allen. It is the flip side, so this is to say, trans men, although not as frequently, also take it on the chin in the trap narrative, which for every banal shot taken at androgyny and transness in something like a square family sitcom the trap narrative also finds its way into certified “cool” film directors like De Palma or Sono.
 
WM: So many of Sono’s films seem desperate to me, and while I like some of them, like Love Exposure and Suicide Club, I find his tics really aggressively on the nose. He’s working in a similar mode as Takashi Miike where he tries to follow these outsiders and misfits, but fails to capitalize on his freaks. Miike on the other hand sympathizes, pointing to a cultural reason for “why” these characters are outcasts, and emphasizes their own humanity, even if they turn out to be evil characters. Miike makes sure his characters are heard, even if they’re wrong. Sono on the other hand just points and asks the audience to “look”. Strange Circus is the worst film of his I’ve seen, because it so desperately wants to be trangressive and taboo in a really intellectual way, but what does it have to say about gender at all really? I can’t think of anything, even in the context of Japan’s more easygoing nature towards drag queens and cross-dressing in their entertainment. In Japan these representations are typically played for laughs, but like a trojan horse they emphasize the faults and struggles these characters face, which honestly gives them more depth. That’s key in genre cinema anywhere on any subject you want to tackle, but with Sono I typically don’t see depth and that is never worse than in Strange Circus. I don’t get why anyone would want to check out this movie when Visitor Q exists. That film is complicated, uncomfortable, formally daring but has guts in what it’s actually trying to convey about gender, family units and violence. The only new wrinkle in Strange Circus is that the gender of the typical trap trope is reversed, which is maybe meta, but it’s certainly thin.
 
CG: I thought a lot about the cultural context in Japan with Strange Circus and just found that I got a lot more out of twisted Oedipus Rex snapshot of ‘gay boy’ culture in Japan from Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 masterpiece Funeral Parade of Roses as far as transness, and outsider narratives go. I similarly feel like I’ve only scratched the surface with Miike but I definitely agree with you that I sense he gives his characters a better chance for the audience to understand and even empathize with their extremities and peculiarities. It really can make a difference as far as saying ‘pay attention’ to the audience rather than insist on the audience give a gawking ‘look’ when it comes to portraying trans people in film.
 
 
And to go back to misfits vein that Sono strives for but falls into the trap narrative trope, I think about Tetsuro Takeuchi’s Wild Zero where a character is revealed to be trans and while the male protagonist becomes incredibly anxious and put off initially about this revelation Takeuchi has the film’s Greek Chorus, the J-rock band Guitar Wolf, tell the lead character Ace that love has “no boundaries, nationalities, or genders” and that he should get over that hang-up and follow his heart, which has him be in love with the trans woman, Tobio. Wild Zero does not really subvert the trap narrative (the body reveal happens), it confronts the anxieties around initial stigma in being trans and in love and falling in love with a somebody trans and then just goes with it in a pretty sweet if simplistic way amid the backdrop of an apocalyptic zombie invasion (there are just bigger fish to fry!). I dig Wild Zero for many reasons but it being a respite to the trap narrative goes a long way for me.
 
WM: I think with films like Wild Zero, various work from Takashi Miike, and even aspects of Homicidal we can see an “other side of the coin” effect with how to handle transness and typical tropes in genre cinema. Whereas some of the other films we’ve discussed like Sleepaway Campand Dressed to Kill fail in various ways. I don’t think the intention we ever had here is to say that genre cinema is bad from a moral perspective, but that it needs to be smarter about applied tropes. I think there is a good film to be made about the trap narrative in genre cinema by subverting it and shifting the positional power therein but I haven’t seen one that quite fits what I’d want yet. I don’t need an empowerment movie necessarily, but one that understands the game, and by and large these directors who work primarily in genre cinema that we’ve discussed thus far, struggle with these things, and it comes back to needing more trans people involved in cinema. When our perspective gets heard. maybe then the narrative will shift from the trans woman who is a trap and in turn a murderer to the trans woman whose trans status is revealed and more likely to be killed, because that’s the reality underneath the trans trope. We’re the ones that suffer both in cinematic representation and in reality where we face the danger of being killed just for being trans. That’s what cinema has to learn.
 

 

Body Talk with Willow Maclay: Conversations on Transgender Cinema Part VIII. By Caden Mark Gardner.  Daffy Duck in Hollywood, September 22, 2018.

 

WILLOW MACLAY : Caden, it was about three weeks ago when news dropped that Scarlett Johansson was going to play Dante “Tex” Gill in a movie about his life entitled, “Rub and Tug” and for the most part cisgender people seemed surprised that there was a controversy. This is just the latest example of a cisgender actor playing a transgender person in a movie through outdated cross-gender casting, but the major difference here is that Scarlett actually stepped down from the role, but the film sadly, doesn’t seem to be going forward. I’ll admit that I was dubious of Rupert Sanders being allowed to make anything that could be considered a motion picture again, but it’s frustrating that this movie has just proven that for mainstream Hollywood it’s either cis actors playing trans characters or nothing at all. Typically, it’s cis men playing trans women, the legacy of which has been nothing short of damning, but this would have realistically been the first mainstream film about a trans man since Boys Don’t Cry, which we’ve already crucified. Rub and Tug likely would’ve been compromised under any circumstances due to Sanders complete lack of talent, but I want to hear your thoughts on this issue, and later in this discussion we’ll get into the history of cisgender actors playing transgender characters.
 
CADEN GARDNER: The Rub & Tug press release initially seemed to be dubious about Dante “Tex” Gill’s life story being a trans one. Tex Gill identified as a man, It appeared that those working on the film saw it as an Albert Nobbs situation where a cis woman disguises herself as a man for societal reasons rather than the root cause of gender dysphoria. There was an instant ferocity in the internet blowback after the film was announced, to which Johansson foolishly said: “Tell them that they can be directed to Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment”. This statement is essentially a defence built around the status quo of cis actors in these roles, and the ways in which they’ve been accepted by prestigious film and television voting boards. It is interesting that Johansson never mentioned an instance of a trans man role. She only brings up Huffman, a cis woman playing a trans woman, and Tambor and Leto, cis men, both playing trans women. It was incredibly tone-deaf. Johansson and her people definitely were leaning on the fact that Hollywood has given permission for her and other cis actors to take these roles like masks and costumes and bypass hiring a trans actor for the role. Honestly, when I got wind of Lukas Dhont’s Award winning film at Cannes, Girl, I found myself slightly taken aback by that film being cis actor in a trans role. I thought we were past this. I thought A Fantastic Woman and Tangerine were signifiers: films that got critical plaudits and made noise on the Hollywood industry radar. I thought that cross-gender casting was becoming something of the past and that we were going to be getting more trans stories as played with trans actors. I felt so naïve to have thought that. So when this announcement happened, I was hurt by the news of the casting , but even moreso by how Johansson handled our criticism. I wanted the project to sink once she made that statement and frankly, I am glad it is gone. Then of course, through this whole controversy, I heard from cis people who seemed confused, as you said, by why this would be controversy. It was after all, ‘just acting’, according to them. I had many arguments over this casting dating back to Girl mostly on the conceit of casting and this continued with Rub & Tug, going from trans women as the target of this mis-casting to trans men. It was exhausting, and frankly, I felt even less heard and understood (Editor’s note: Take a look at how many trans women, including myself, who were asked to cover this issue compared to trans men). I felt many cis people, consciously or not, showed their true colors in reacting to this debacle. They seem mad that I wanted this project to sink given the circumstances. I’ll just repeat for this piece my reasons that I restated over and over: I do not know a trans man, myself included, who wants their life story as portrayed by a woman. I do not know a trans woman that wants their life story portrayed by a man.

I do not think this is at all difficult to understand but what I am noticing is the power of telling stories on the screen, be it television and film, is that cis people do not want to abdicate a sliver of control. They are interested in our stories but on their terms. This was just another case. It died, but I doubt it will be the last time.

 
WM: You nailed it with that last paragraph. I, similarly, thought we were past this with the release of bothTangerine and A Fantastic Woman. I don’t like AFW, but that’s not because of Daniela Vega, who is excellent, but because the film is only interested in her oppression through redemption. I thought there would be a shift where we slowly chipped away at preconceptions of transness on screen, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in mainstream Hollywood. Television is a little bit different, and we’ll get to that later, but when there’s money on the line they only want big money stars. I found that to be an awkward excuse as well, where cis people would say things like “it can’t get made unless it has a big star attached and there are no trans stars that an average person wants to watch” I saw that excuse a lot and it was mildly humorous because they pointed out the problem without realizing it. There are no trans stars and the reason for that is they won’t fucking cast people like us. You can’t become a star if you’re not even given the chance to compete. There has to be a starting point, somewhere, in mainstream movies. We’re still waiting for that to happen. I was asked by the CBC to be a guest on their film program for Q Radio on this very topic, and there was 100s of comments in my mentions afterwards like “I guess superheroes can only play superheroes” or whatever, but if they had actually taken the time to listen to me they would have known my reasoning that I’ll repeat now: “if you would find it ridiculous for Colin Firth to play the Queen of England in cross-gender casting or any other man playing a woman, why make an exception for transgender people? If it’s because you don’t actually see us as who we are then that’s a problem you have to fix.” Cis people know in their heart of hearts if they REALLY consider us as who we say we are, and this whole ordeal has pointed me in the direction of a lot of people who don’t see us as the gender we are, but the one we were assigned at birth. Hollywood thinks that way.
 
 
CG: Yeah, and cis people really gave us no solution when they essentially asked us to wait our turn. When is that happening? What exactly is your idea of progress for our community? They do not answer because they do not know or they do not care. When there is this opportunity available to tell a trans story, why should we not speak out and protest this when there are actors in our community who could play Tex Gill? Again, they will just say it is acting, and then mention things like ‘I don’t need an actor having cancer to play a character with cancer’ because I totally like my gender dysphoria compared to a deadly disease, truly. There are no trans stars but there can be if given the opportunity. I would rather see some Hollywood player, be it a major Hollywood producer, or an actor, actress, or director with cachet push to tell these stories. If it means, loading the cast with known names but in the service of also raising the profile of the trans actor at the center with their story being told, I can support that. Instead it is more or less stuff like the ScarJo controversy and something similarly with her Avengers co-star Mark Ruffalo producing an independent film called Anything about a trans woman sex worker played by…. Matt Bomer. Ruffalo assured us he “got woke” when pushback to his film’s casting led him to watch one trans web series, but the casting and movie still happened. It is just so ridiculous but I suppose I should be thrilled that people were aware about the controversy and pushing back, but it also just seemed like this was people attuned to ScarJo stepping into shit once more in their eyes rather than just focusing on the casting problem itself. At least that was how I saw it and why I fear this will still happen again in the future.
 
It’s really rare for Hollywood to tell a transgender story or even feature a transgender character. They need to recalibrate. All of these performances are going to look offensive in one hundred years. The industry is having another kind of identity crisis with their current filmmaking models. There exist only two modes and no in-betweens. You have the big studio action tentpoles for the spring and summer and the others are prestige films, the so-called “Oscar bait” dramas that give the studios their air of respectability in the fall and winter. It’s there where we see transgender stories. This decade we have seen a wave of prestige films that included trans people as a major part of the narrative, if not the very center of the film. But, as you mentioned, these films were the compromised versions of a trans story. I am talking about The Danish Girl and Dallas Buyer’s Club and the performances given by Eddie Redmayne and Jared Leto. I should be unsurprised that people seem to think that the culture at large- or rather, the extremely narrow and privileged sect of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences- rewarding these performances was a signifier of the supposed quality and authenticity in these performances, but they were deeply surprised to find out that trans people hated these performances.

 
WM: I think there’s this notion that we should be happy we’re served a meal, even if it’s fried dog shit. That’s what it feels like to me when these movies come out. They cloak themselves in respectability politics or messages and position themselves as important movies for our cause, but any lasting positive impact almost never happens. Images inform culture and if the only image of trans womanhood is a guy in drag then that’s all we’re going to be, but my body flies in the direct face of these notions. I have the hormone levels of a cis woman, breasts that grew from my body through estrogen, same as any cis woman, a pair of XX chromosomes, because I’m intersex, no Adam’s apple to speak of and if I may be vain for a moment, absolutely killer legs. But even if I didn’t pass and didn’t have these things I still wouldn’t have a body like Eddie Redmayne’s or Jared Leto’s. My body is different. Our bodies are different. Trans women aren’t built like cis men and Trans men aren’t built like cis women, but I think some cis people are a little surprised by that truth, and have been very slow to learn. We’re still getting articles about the shock and awe of trans women being able to breast feed for example, when we’ve been doing this for a long time.
 
I want to get into the nuts and bolts of these performances and why they don’t work. Let’s start with Eddie Redmayne, who plays trans woman, Lili Elbe. Redmayne plays her like an alcoholic with sensory disorder and a paraphilia for things like stockings and lingerie. Redmayne’s conception of womanhood is ORGASMIC, with heaving exterior moans and blurred vision. A trans woman if she were on the verge of climax at the very notion of womanhood. Like a fictionmania fetish story made real, and Tom Hooper directs it with cinematic form that feels like dried semen on hosery. It’s a gross movie, and Redmayne’s gigantic expressive acting shutters any way to understand the interior of Elbe’s life or who she was as a person. The portrait of Elbe is one of an insane fetishist who died reaching for the perfect orgasm to meet her fetish of surface level womanhood. It’s telling that the final image of the movie restructures her as a piece of fabric that gets blown away in the wind. I suppose one could argue that is a happy ending if you’re sadistic and only watch these movies out of sheer exhibitionist curiosity, but in truth it’s offensive. I’m not sure any actor could have saved this movie as it was conceived, but the end product is maybe the worst possible depiction of transness I’ve ever seen and Redmayne’s performance somehow tops Leto’s mid-crucifixion martyr with a death wish and a perfect bikini wax in the equally bad, but somehow not as awful, Dallas Buyer’s Club.
 
CG: Redmayne’s idea of gender dysphoria is so indicating and contorting in ways that feels like a bad 1960s sci-fi TV serial. The trembling his character has in reaching down below her waist, particularly in that scene where Lili goes to a peep show and mimics the cis women performer, is so laughable and infuriating all at once. The film treats the character’s male presentation and female presentation like two separate identities and womanhood for Lili in this film is getting an uncomfortable proposition from Ben Whishaw (Editor’s note: Poor Ben Whishaw) or wearing an androgynous pantsuit out in the park trailed by two gawking men straight out of a Tex Avery cartoon. Then there is the central relationship of Lili and her wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander) where the triggering moment that sets this whole “journey” in motion is Gerda making Lili pose with a dress for her painting. I should note that even if the casting was done better, The Danish Girl is a truly reductive portrait of two famous artists. The film manages to trivialize their relationship and turn these two real-life Bohemians into neurotic messes who want to play house, but a very constrained conservative one. There are several bedroom scenes of Lili assuming more femininity with Gerda, and is treated like a fetish object. Again, back to the 60s sci-fi TV camp that is happening with this performance, Redmayne treats contact with the dress like a mad scientist who gets exposed to his deadly formula that now spreads disease through the body. It is all so preformative and exaggerated, dialed up into something that by the end renders Lili Elbe as someone so glum and upsetting in a really reductive, useless way. She’s Icarus flying too closely to the sun, but that’s most films about trans people made by cis filmmakers.
 
Martyrdom and transness are interlinked in these films and that extends to Jared Leto as Rayon. Where Lili Elbe was a real person, albeit The Danish Girl was speculative fiction by a writer and the adaptation even further twists a lot of facts, Dallas Buyer’s Club made a fictional composite character of Rayon. According to screenwriter Craig Borten, the creation of that character came from research in interviewing trans AIDS activists. And yet, the leaked script that I saw of Dallas Buyer’s Club constantly spoke of Rayon in male pronouns and referred to the character as a cross-dresser. Even if the final product presented a trans woman you have the fact that Rayon is misgendered and deadnamed constantly, even referred by McConaughey’s protagonist as ‘Mr. Man’. You can say that is the product of the time but with the exception of one moment, Rayon almost never pushes back or reacts in a way of hurt in being dehumanized this way. Additionally, the film hardly ever explores her story. We get bedroom décor of T. Rex and glam rock (my kingdom for a Todd Haynes trans movie), assuming that’s her connection to queer life. She frequents gay bars of Texas that are apparently chill with trans women. And what of Rayon’s life? Well, she puts on a full male presentation, an ill-fitting suit, to ask her father for money. Rayon left a charmed life and that moment is treated like a cheap revelation that is only in the service of the central protagonist’s story. Rayon returned to Ray to get her father to give her money from her life insurance policy to pay off her debts with her homophobe turned friend and business partner Ron (Matthew McConaughey). Rayon’s story is treated so superficially: a series of various wigs, cheap makeup, faux fur coats, and mirror shots. Cis people love showing us looking in mirrors, particularly in giving ourselves a pep talk about our looks but it is best to see us completely exposed. Except you know, Redmayne and Leto do not have trans bodies. It is a man in a dress and every mirror shot underlines that over and over. Those mirror shots confirm for me I am watching bullshit. Apparently for cis people it’s revelatory, but in truth, they are looking at something that is not us by their own design. It’s their conception of transness, not our reality.

 
WM: It’s a dissection, piece by piece, an outfit, something to construct rather than something inherent. To show a trans woman with real breasts would be to say that this isn’t an act. Rayon is built, rather than someone who is. And Leto did absolutely nothing to dispel these notions with his waxing comments and general method acting macho swagger of playing woman. A fake woman, but that’s trans women at the movies. These movies aren’t even about trans women. They’re about tragic men who died because they followed a foolish notion that they could become women. These movies for a second don’t treat these characters as women. Not at all. I’m not sure any of the films we are discussing during this series does, but some of our other examples we will get to like Dog Day Afternoon, at least have a current of decency throughout.
 
I want to get to your mirrors comment now, because that’s the resolute language of transness in the cinema as conceived by cis people. It’s a model of vanity, a reflection of who these people “truly” are, and a way in which to try and slam together something resembling a metaphor image, even with no real depth. It isn’t just trans women who get this treatment either. We’ve brought Boys Don’t Cry up before, but the scene where Hillary Swank as Brandon Teena poses in front of full length mirror so we can see the full dimensions of Swank’s body is one of the most dangerous ever put in cinema with regards to transness, because it unravels identity and points a giant fucking arrow in visual language to Swank’s dickless briefs. It’s genitals as destiny, forever and ever amen. On the opposite side of things there’s a scene that is almost identical to Swank’s in Under the Skin, a film we both love, and it has completely different intent. In that scene it’s a realization that the alien’s (Scarlett Johansson) body is hers, warts and all, and how she can find an identity in herself. It isn’t directly saying there’s anything wrong with her body or something is amiss. It’s just hers, bathed in amber lighting as Mica Levi’s music swells to something resembling warmth for the first time in the film. The visual language of that scene is acceptance. The visual language of Boys Don’t Cry, Dallas Buyer’s Club and others is political posturing and genital hysteria.
 
WM: It’s frustrating to say the least. When Dallas Buyer’s Club was initially released I had been out as a trans woman for a couple years, but I was still living at home with my parents. My mom wanted to see the movie, because she was a rabid fan of all things Matthew McConaughey. He’s one of her thirst actors, but her rental of this movie worried me, because I knew there’d be questions afterwards that I’d have to answer. My parents knew I was transgender and here they were watching this movie which co-signed all their anxieties about who I was, and frequently when we’d get into fights my Dad would dangle Rayon in front of me as “that faggot in the movie”. That was their image of transness. These things stick, and I’m not sure cis people 100% realize when that happens. Culturally, when you bring up transness you’re still likely to get comments about Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, and while we both like that movie you cannot deny that the image has stuck.
 
CG: Now to return this discussion on mirrors, Swank’s baggy briefs in Boys Don’t Cry still makes me wince on memory. Most of the rare occurrences of trans men in movies have images like that one. BDC is genesis. The films I bring up in this case are 3 Generations by Gaby Dellal and 52 Tuesdays by Sophie Hyde. Like Boys Don’t Cry these movies are about trans men and are directed by cis women and well, I could definitely tell these were by people outside of my life experiences. The trans men in these movies are, Elle Fanning playing a trans teen in 3 Generations, and Del Herbert-Jane as a trans man who is dealing with transitioning amid having the worst teenage daughter (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) in human existence. The funny thing about these two movies are that they check off every conceivable box of a trans narrative: there are many mirror shots and body shots of these actresses getting masc, by leaning in on the revelation and transitioning as the entire story. Boys Don’t Cry made the choice of a cis woman in a trans man role because Brandon Teena was by reports too poor to go on hormones and these films also have cheats in their fictional narratives in justifying cis actress in a trans man role and keeping her around during the whole damn movie.

 
3 Generations makes the entire conflict around Ray (Elle Fanning) getting a consent form signed by both of his parents to start hormones. His mother (Naomi Watts) supports him, but remains conflicted, and his distant father (Tate Donovan) does not whatsoever. Every instance of physical transition happens offscreen. Elle Fanning is so lost in trying to convey maleness, masculinity, and expressing something about having a trans body, and there’s the obligatory mirror shots and a dramatic haircut you’d find in movies of this type.
 
CG contd.: 52 Tuesdays was more infuriating. I will admit that I have an age disconnect to trans men of a certain age, some of whom went through motherhood before transitioning, and that made me wonder if I ever had a chance of liking this movie. However, this film thought it could pull a fast one and had a Deus Ex Masc-hina. They outright refuse to have this character transition, because James (Del Herbert-Jane) has a rare condition. The character stops taking testosterone so you don’t see him develop any more masculine traits that you see and hear early on, like his voice dropping or putting on muscle mass. This is why I hate transition narratives. They never ring true and yes, it is a dramatic experience of changes it is not just the only story or the only form of transition that we do when we come out. Physical transition is just one part of it and despite films keying in on that, they all seem to fail. It never feels real, just contrivances looking from the outside and never feeling that somebody like us has a grip on these narratives. Brandon Teena passed before hormone replacement therapy to the point where he had girlfriends, but we don’t focus on how that happened. That isn’t physical. That’s something else altogether.

 
WM: Oh my god, I love you for coming up with Deus Ex Masc-hina. Can we just use that forever? The thing that always blows my mind about these movies is that these characters have next to nothing in terms of an interior self, and isn’t that supposed to be one of the things an actor looks for in a role? As of late these performances are just gymnastics, showy, masturbatory acting that has no depth whatsoever. It’s like saying “look at my abs, it took so much work!” and Leto has always done this sort of performance. Somehow he’s worse in Chapter 27. Somehow he’s worse in Suicide Squad. The fact that we’ve let him stick around is the greatest sin of the millennial goths who popularized 30 Seconds to Mars in the first place.
 
I admittedly, haven’t seen these movies about trans men, but your description of them sounds painful. One thing that has always bothered me is the logical fallacy of cross gender casting when it comes to trans people. If we absolutely must show the entire transitional process in the movie or have flashbacks then wouldn’t it make the most sense to let the trans actor play the previous version of themselves? Because realistically if a cis man can play a trans woman in a movie then wouldn’t that same line of thinking apply for trans women playing a more masculine version of themselves pre-transition? Because if this is all about transformation then why does it not apply to us? We’re the masters of that shit, aren’t we? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: mainstream transgender depiction is vulture cinema for cisgender actors to make their name. It doesn’t matter if a real life trans person died, a cis person will be there to pick up their mantle and tell it like it is. Barf. And It has only gotten worse in the last 5 years with increased visibility. We’re in the mainstream now, so we can be sold. Not art by us, but art sold to us by cis people. We’re just another demographic, but we don’t watch these movies. We hate these movies. So how do we fix that problem? I honestly don’t think they care. It was better in the 60s, 70s and 80s for trans depiction than it is now in some respects and that’s absurd. In 2018 Candy Darling would not get to play a cis woman in anything, but that happened in the late 60s. Hypothetically, if all things were perfect and there was job equality in the field I wouldn’t have a problem with a cisgender woman playing a transgender woman or a cisgender man playing a transgender man. My issue is when you put a man in front of me and call him a woman. Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining. That’s when you lose me in this day and age.
 
CG: It raises the question (and I think we know the answer) that Hollywood has no clue what the difference is at all between somebody trans versus some dude who puts on a dress to play trans. Granted words have changed over time and what people considered cross-dressers, drag queens, and transvestites were and are trans women. I question how the late Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling could have made a mark in culture in transcending the films they were in and rubbing shoulders with A-listers at clubs, but film then has this dead period of nobody from the mainstream or the underground to take their place and follow in their footsteps. Even when the likes of a Mya Taylor come along she and many other trans actresses get pushed aside for men to play these roles, sometimes in the very stories of these figures. Stephen Dorff played Candy Darling in I Shot Andy Warhol, which is still wild to me. Given Candy’s whole relationship to hormone replacement therapy that casting is something I doubt she would have given approval.
 
WM: Stephen Dorff playing Candy has always bothered me. In a piece I wrote on Women in Revolt I talked bout this a little bit, but every single cinematic portrait of her has characterized her as a man, and she detested that completely. It’s even more tragic if you consider the lyrics to the Velvet Underground song “Candy Says”, specifically the stanza that asks “I’d like to know completely, what others so discretely talk about, what do you think I’d see if I could walk away from me?“. The answer to that question in terms of Hollywood is that they saw her as a man at worst and a drag queen at best. That’s the real truth of the matter at hand: to cross-gender cast in these roles is to cosign societal notions that our gender is fake. We aren’t who we say we are.

 
CG: It does become clear that it seems the rare ways for a trans movie to get what it is doing right is not just hire a trans consultant or a trans coach, but also have creative pull, beyond the role of a consultant. The Danish Girl and TransAmerica had trans consultants, but spare me if you think those films are about our community. For me Tangerine worked because the actresses had some say. Even if there is well-meaning intent in telling a trans story, having us absent leaves some major probability that things will be amiss and just flat-out wrong. This can even happen when telling a true story like Dog Day Afternoon, a film that I love, and still a film where I do find it admirable on certain levels for even engaging with a trans love story, and having a character talk about having gender dysphoria. But you know, screenwriter Frank Pierson and director Sidney Lumet preferred going with Chris Sarandon for the trans role (John Waters player and trans woman Elizabeth Coffey did try out for the part but did not get it, supposedly for being seen as too feminine) and they saw the character as being closer to transvestite than transsexual despite well, the whole plot of the bank robbery being set in motion was to pay for the character’s sex change. Despite all of this I feel like that is a product of the time and that it was still significant and important that the details of the story were not completely white washed even if some of it in hindsight is now awkwardly presented. I am also not the biggest fan of Chris Sarandon’s whole body language in the film, constantly clutching his robe, although the character’s major tell-off about Pacino’s character whining that ‘he’s dying’ when he is the architect of his problems and the problems of others showed the movie wanting its audience to side with the trans character. That’s powerful. Sure, when her trans status is revealed a cop tries and fails to hold back a laugh, it is still a product of its time in many ways. My trans therapist told me that many trans people, himself included, in that time could see that film, while having some healthy criticisms of the performance, presenting their life experience on screen without animus.
 
 
WM: I really want to dive into Dog Day Afternoon now, because I think it’s the only film we’re talking about in this segment that we actually both love a lot. Despite loving that film, I do have some criticisms. I, too, am not particularly fond of Chris Sarandon’s robe clutching, woman on the verge of collapse at any given second neurotic wife. I don’t love that, and think that Elizabeth Coffey would have likely been better in the role, because she would have cut through what little bullshit there is in that film. I find it depressing that Coffey was turned down because she was too pretty, and that, if anything, should be our obvious entry point into the image of trans women in mainstream cinema. Coffey isn’t the only trans actor who has run into the “you’re too pretty to be trans” problem. They don’t want a pretty trans woman, because they see us as men and if we appear like any other woman on screen that disrupts the narrative, even if that is the truth. That’s where they keep us at a distance.
 
All this being said, I think Dog Day Afternoon is a near masterpiece, Sarandon’s wonky body language and the frustrating 5 o’ clock shadow aside. It’s a shook up 2 litter bottle of pop ready to burst at any second and its centre is a man (Al Pacino) who is going to any lengths to get surgery for the woman he loves, because the world has fucked them over and it costs too much for any poor person to afford. That’s real. I appreciate Lumet including the title card for Elizabeth Eden stating she’s “now a woman”. The language is old, but the sentiment is there, and it is a happy ending in cinematic terms.
I do think there’s a scene in the movie that honestly mirrors our experiences with trans casting and it’s with John Cazale’s character insisting he isn’t a homosexual when that is announced on TV. He protests, but there it is on TV, something he asserts is wrong, but that is now the narrative. With us, we can look at the screen and say “that’s not us” with cross-gender casting, we can look like cis people, and in Candy Darling’s case look like a fucking supermodel and they’re still going to run back into the arms of the men in dresses trope.
 
CG: Lumet’s direction to Sarandon, after going through many bad casting auditions for the character of Leon (the character’s name in the movie. The real life woman was Elizabeth Eden) saw the character as a full-blown neurotic, tragic Tennessee Williams heroine(Editor’s note: Tennessee Williams cast Candy Darling as the lead in one of his play, Small Craft). Lumet wanted the character played as an exasperated housewife. The results are Chris Sarandon being closer to sitcom matriarchs like Edith Bunker or Weezy Jefferson, but I think Lumet’s note was not a bad one.You do still feel these two- Pacino and Sarandon’s characters- have a very domesticated relationship and they are not playing dress up, it is real and so are their arguments, miscommunications, and doomed quality. It is normative but does not strive for, ‘They’re just like us!’ type of pleading to the audience. Lumet and Pierson were extremely aware of the need to still be delicate in telling this story that had the potential to not be taken seriously. Lumet was furious about how audience test-screenings took the relationship and the images of the “gay” wedding in the film’s newscast segments. But they were showing these two people getting married and one of them has committed this crime on behalf of the other, even if she did not want him to do this for her. Those were the facts of the case and they were put on-screen, that while still imperfect, are at the center of a truly excellent film.
 
And I love that the title card at the end of the movie as you said, places the real Elizabeth Eden in a much better place, especially compared to everyone else in the movie. She has moved on, her romantic partner went to jail, Sonny’s ex-wife, who he does not care about at all, are in the welfare system to raise her children. You come off with the impression that the ‘freak’ that some characters and even some of the audience previously snickered at by the end has her life together much more together than one expects or is conditioned to assume with trans characters, based on so many tropes. And a lot of those tropes that you and I have seen came after Dog Day Afternoon.

 WM: It’s strange to me, that Dog Day Afternoon had little effect in reshaping how we see transgender cinema. There wasn’t a huge call for Hollywood to shift afterward. Where changes did happen to some degree, and DDA had some effect, was in pretty broad interpretations of queer cinema involving gay men. Cruising, I think is a bastard son of DDA in some respects.

 I love that phone call between the two. Lumet just moves back and forth between close-up and for a moment the heist element slips away. It’s just two people talking, like they always have, and sharing a language and rhythm of their own. Pacino is excellent, but if there is an argument to be made for Sarandon it’s in this scene. It gives us a window into their relationship, and “why” he’s doing this for her. They have a rhythm that he and his ex-wife do not. It’s theirs, warts and all, and he wouldn’t be doing this if there wasn’t something between them. Elizabeth Eden sadly passed away from AIDS in the 1980s, and even if Sarandon looks nothing like her she at least gets that note at the end of the movie and Sonny did use his money that he got from the film to pay for her sex change surgery. It’s an epic love story, a total fucking anomaly in cinema with transgender elements and one of the only films with cross-gender casting I’ll go to bat for, even with some minor complaints here and there. I love Dog Day Afternoon, and a lot of it would still even be radical to this day, but Hollywood would never make this movie now. It’s too complicated, messy and real. That, and the fact that Disney controls everything now.

 CG: Dog Day Afternoon would not be made by a major studio today. It would not be made with the level of talent in front of and behind the camera as it did in 1975. That would not happen. I think 1970s America cinema, despite so many of my favourite films coming from that era, were admittedly heavily hetero-masculine. Dog Day Afternoon even feels like an anomaly as far as having one of the biggest stars in an explicit LGBTQ relationship. There may have been international cinema (Fassbinder) and underground cinema with LGBTQ characters getting more attention, but what took over were stuff for the masses that pushed aside that level of visibility for our community. After Jaws and Star Wars, Hollywood became heavily invested in monoculture and as a result were less audacious in telling narratives of characters off the beaten path. Trans figures like Candy Darling (although she passed in 1974), Holly Woodlawn, and even a trans punk rock singer like Jayne County was emerging (who would appear in films, like the incredibly great German queer film, City of Lost Souls) may have had presence in the culture as far as being photographed, subjects of visual art and music, but they were not really breaking out in feature films that were beyond the underground cinema. What can we conclude over why this happened? Well, Hollywood’s ultimate 1970s downer ending was the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was elected and there was conforming to this ideal of the lost nuclear family from decades ago. Hollywood was not Ronald Reagan conservative, but they still had to placate to conservative audiences and a universal culture, but LGBT people were not part of that, and you’d be hard-pressed to say we are today. There were still thriving pockets of culture in the LGBT community at the time- as we see inParis Is Burning– but it was subterranean, not the type of visibility available at your neighborhood multiplex. If you were gay or trans, well, then film treatments of you at that time by Hollywood were pretty retrograde. Afterwards you had the HIV/AIDS crisis and hysteria based on prejudice and ignorance from mainstream society. Not to mention drug epidemics that was met with ineffectual, ‘Just Say No’ campaigns. Warhol Superstar Jackie Curtis died, and so did many like her. To be different then meant the possibility of the world turning their back on you and that also included a lot of visual media. The gap of suddenly having very little visual media looking into the trans experience brought further ignorance and misunderstanding. It is really an indictment on American popular culture that the only times there could be anything remotely close to a trans presence in pop culture was by appearing on Phil Donahue and not really being seen as a person, but as some anthropological subject. “Come see the bearded lady!”

 WM: To chart transgender cinema in Hollywood is difficult, because there are these gigantic gaps where there is nothing. You’d get an occasional film here and there like The World According to Garp (which I like), but Lithgow’s portrayal isn’t the main plot line in that movie or anything. Lithgow took the role with dignity and had no foolish aspirations towards becoming acting royalty through transness, which is appreciated. He is fine in context of the period and the practices of the 1980s. He does not touch Karen Black in 5 and Dime, but who does?

 I like that you mention Phil Donahue, because I think it was around the mid-80s when the trap narrative, or GOTCHA, reveal started popping up in movies, and we’re going to get to that in our next instalment in Body Talk, but it became such an overbearing presentation of transness. It was a trick. You never even had a character like Sarandon’s in DDA who was openly trans from the start but these later examinations of transness in post, and that was popularized to some degree by Psycho, but really came into fruition with The Crying Game whose revel overpowered the rest of the movie in a cultural sense later being spoofed by Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, WWF Monday Night Raw and Family Guy while also giving reason for Jerry Springer’s entire existence. It’s hard to talk about that movie without its cultural placement as THE trap film, but Jaye Davidson isn’t horrendous as Dil. It’s one of the more put together characterizations of a trans woman being played by a cis man. She’s very much her own woman. I just wish a trans woman could have been given the right to make her name off of a movie that was about to be wildly popular, even if its popularity and staying power are dubious in context.

 CG: I love The World According To Garp. What’s significant about that is the film is playing in this wild, quirky key a la Harold & Maude was that everybody from George Roy Hill to Robin Williams to Glenn Close to Lithgow were all so game into adapting the John Irving novel to the big screen. The Irving novel states that Roberta is a trans woman and provides her a biography as an ex-football player whose knowledge of the game gets ignored for her decision to transition and cannot get a job announcing football games. She is not this distrusting character with a secret. She’s open and Irving posits her as somebody the reader the audience should like because, ‘Garp loved her’, in Irving’s own prose. There are so many insane things that happen in the film as far as plot and character arcs that Roberta just is a character among the chaos. As far as Lithgow’s casting, the character is funny but Lithgow does not make Roberta a joke, but a funny character with feelings and ambitions, more than a device for the more central characters and more than a quirky ornament for the film. It’s casting for the time, but given what we have seen about trans military service members it is not unheard of that trans women can come from hyper-masculine environments and sure, I do like to imagine how that casting would have looked like with a real trans woman but Lithgow is pretty good. That said let’s not get this twisted. One good characterization does not open the doors for so many terrible ones before and after, especially after.

 WM: The fact that Roberta even has a dream is note-worthy, because that’s rare in portraits of trans women. In Tangerine, Alexandra (Mya Taylor) wants to become a singer, but beyond her can you think of any other examples? I can’t. In these movies trans women seem to want to just file into line as a stereotype, which is not the case. Yes, I want to be a wife and mother, but I also want to be known as a writer my entire life. I have dreams to keep challenging myself to get better. What does Redmayne’s Lili Elbe want to do in The Danish Girl? She wants to be a girl and sell clothes. She doesn’t have to paint anymore! (p.s. that’s sexist)

 CG: In a culture that birthed Jerry Springer, ‘A chick with a dick’ type of retrograde presentations of transness offricially become a revulsion and a joke. Livelihoods become plot twists, secrets and marks of those individuals being untrustworthy. Even before The Crying Game and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, there was the otherwise very junk food comedy Soapdish that spoofed soap operas with a top of the line ensemble cast. In that movie, the third act includes revealing Cathy Moriarty’s plotting, backstabbing villain to have be a trans woman leading to Garry Marshall’s television executive character to exclaim, ‘She’s a boy’ and Robert Downey Jr.’s character, who was sexually involved with Moriarty’s character being on the verge of vomiting- quite similar to how Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura reacted to finding out Sean Young’s character was previously the vindictive ex-Miami Dolphins place kicker and Stephen Rea’s Fergus in The Crying Game finding out Dil is a trans woman. Gosh, a lot of men throwing up over this type of revelation.

 

The Crying Game’s whole plot takes a while to reveal itself but then takes over the whole movie, and there is no way to talk around it. Then it just became a Miramax (fuck Harvey Weinstein) pushed commercial phenomenon and there was a lot of critical complicity. I found out the twist of this movie before seeing it, and a lot of that film got its mileage from critics like Roger Ebert writing these coy reveals and winking to their readers with a, ‘Trust me. You’ll want to see this and tell your friends to see this but make sure to let them go in cold about that twist’. I cannot really say Neil Jordan’s film transcends that trapping as in the script of the film, it does make the revelation pretty much a conflict for Dil and Fergus and the script does write the scene as a, ‘She is really a man’ type of hushed tone but with an explosive revelation. I think Jaye Davidson gives the character a lot of dignity and depth but feels very at odds with the writing. Dil defends herself from Rea’s simultaneous initial rejection and allured fascination over her. Still, the film does something similar in having Dil in male form and that is when it gets maybe even more infuriating than the genitals reveal. I know of trans people put in that unfortunate position of having to wear clothing of the gender they were assigned at birth even as they identify trans, but here it is taken as a, ‘Well, she can live this double agent type of femme fatale because she’s really only wearing different clothing’. The character loses a lot of power towards the end and even her living, not dying like a martyr, is based on Fergus stopping her from offing herself, and frankly, it getting to that point in the film where Dil is suddenly a shifty, suicidal, mentally unstable person feels so uncharacteristic and an 180 degree switch from the sultry, seductive, confident, independent woman that viewers fir saw. That is not really on Davidson but unfortunate writing built off of several misunderstandings and misrepresentations.
 
WM: The Crying Game is frustrating, because there’s a version of that movie they could have realistically written, and chose not to where the character was this sultry femme fatale. In those terms Dil stands on her own in this characterization, because it’s not like you can point to other examples where trans women played these types of characters. The writing undoes a lot of the good will established earlier on though like you said, and I’m in complete agreement with your other statement that these performances that have existed in the past and are contextually acceptable doesn’t mean that it’s okay to walk back down this path again today. Trans people have always been acting and for transgender cinema to truly feel lived in and authentic we have to actually be here don’t we?
 
I want to shift gears slightly to what film looks like when we are present by talking about a couple movies and a few recent television shows. I have not seen Pose yet, because acquiring FX in Canada is tricky and expensive, but I have watched Sense8, which was spearheaded by The Wachowski sisters and there are transgender actors playing transgender characters. I was really drawn into Jamie Clayton’s character Nomi and wrote about her briefly on Curtsies and Hand Grenades as a kind of revelation to finally see someone with a body and a history like mine on the screen. I cannot undersell the magnitude in which it affected me to see her in that role. I could only describe it as feeling like a blanket. Nomi’s character went through some shit with her parents so she felt real to me, but it was also this realization where I came to grips with the fact that it was possible to no longer be invisible. It had a profound meaning for me similar to Laura Jane Grace coming out and being mentioned on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. These were early moments in my own history as a transgender woman that I’ll never forget. I never realized how important it was to see myself on screen, because it had never happened with me before, but I finally felt that with Jamie Clayton in Sense8 and I think she’s great in the role. A totally perfect fit for The Wachowskis world of underdogs and connected human experiences.
 
CG: Pose is incredibly important remedy for the previously billed- by the mainstream entertainment press and not by the trans community, to be clear- ‘groundbreaking’ television series for trans people, Transparent. Despite that show giving exposure to various kinds of trans actresses, it was always still based on compromise in casting Jeffrey Tambor (editor’s note: Fuck Jeffrey Tambor) as Maura. Pose is unique and remarkable for doing a few things that on paper seem so simple. It centers trans people in front of the camera and that is boosted by the quality of writing and directing by trans people behind the camera (previously mentioned in Body Talk Silas Howard, who directed an episode, while Lady J wrote episodes, and Janet Mock did both). Pose carries a lot of responsibility in covering the 1980s ballroom scene in giving an incredible amount of visibility that most people can only reference Paris Is Burning, if they even saw that at all. And then of course it is carrying the responsibility of opening doors for trans actresses and trans talent in our presence. I knew of Mock, Lady J, and Howard before this show, although that doesn’t mean the entire Pose audience did and I hope that means more opportunities, and I hope this means more talent behind and in front of the camera get to be part of projects in production. I know of a few other shows that have a trans actor or even a trans person on their writing staff, but I would like to see those experiences centered likePose. I do not want Pose to be the only game in town because at some point, it is not going to be on. Then what?

 
CG contd.: I will also note that yes, Sense8 also existed and luckily, despite being short-lived got a proper sendoff recently. The Wachowskis are so earnest and both Lana and Lily definitely used their experiences in their trans identity to inform Jamie Clayton’s character. That whole argument she gets prodded into by a TERF-like figure, calling her a ‘colonizer’ on her gender feels like something that only we usually experience online and off-line in certain spaces. I felt similarly with Pose where multiple characters had anxiety about being misgendered even in supposedly ‘open-minded’ places or feeling the wrath of their family members who harbor disdain for them transitioning. It goes a long way to have characters on-screen and know that what they are doing and saying works because they not only get you, they are you.
 
CG contd.: We are real. I do think sometimes these discussions reveal that they don’t actually see us. We are treated like an abstract concept sometimes and so I thought it was important for our community to put our foot down on the ScarJo matter. I still felt like some people were not convinced and just think we were selfish for protesting this and I also felt like trans men in media still feel under-served. Netflix’s Queer Eye notably had a trans man makeover and while it had its bumps and was imperfect, I really felt like Skyler, the trans man, having his journey and story in plain view on Netflix was a good antidote to a lot of the bullshit that surrounded Rub & Tug. Still, not everybody has Netflix and it is clear that some people still do not get trans stories. It makes sense since they are spoon-fed some terrible, undercooked, inauthentic, and very much harmful narratives about our experiences.
 
WM: I think that’s our most important point. SEE US. LISTEN TO US. It is not incredibly hard. If 50,000 trans people say this casting is fucked maybe we know what we’re talking about? I think you hit the nail on the head by saying that cisgender people sometimes think of us as abstract concepts. There was a poll recently where a high percentage of people said they didn’t know a transgender person firsthand. I find these results unsurprising, but illuminating in how they view us. How can they possibly care if we’re not real? The truth of the matter is that we’re flesh and blood just like everyone else. We have wants and desires and needs. Our place in the world is informed by our experiences that we’ve had with gender, dysphoria and presentation and we have interesting stories to tell about lives that are sorely under-served. It’s hard to imagine a transgender life going into old age, because no such image exists. It’s hard to even exist as a trans person, because there’s little format or structure for how to get there without direct help, because there’s little cultural awareness of our issues. We only exist in the past tense in art. Our unique experiences are going to influence the kind of cinema that gets made about people like us, but Cinema also has a chance to shift the narrative. The ball is in their court on this one and if they continue to play dirty we’re going to speak up. We’ll stop when they start actually listening to us. We’re still waiting….
 
Body Talk Part VII: Conversations on Transgender Cinema with Willow Maclay. By Caden Mark  Gardner.  Daffy Duck in Hollywood, August 3, 2018