Body Talk: Conversations on Transgender Cinema with Caden Gardner: Part Five

Body Talk is an ongoing series of transcribed conversations on Transgender Cinema as we prepare to write a book on the subject. This part is on Jennie Livingston's seminal documentary, Paris is Burning.

 

WILLOW MACLAY : "God, please just let us celebrate while we're here. Let us dance and open up the world to one another." That's what I wrote in my letterboxd blurb hours after having first watched Paris is Burning in 2014, and after revisiting the film a few days ago, in 2018, not much has changed. To watch Paris is Burning as a transgender person is completely overwhelming. It's the cinematic equivalent of someone dying of thirst suddenly having a waterfall dropped on top of them. Underneath the cracks, hidden in a back alley, on an abandoned street away from the eyes of the world there's life, bristling and bursting with pride, beauty, vanity and love for one another. Our brothers and sisters and everyone else inbetween can grasp at something that's real. A reality where we can exist, and not press up against the limitations of flesh, but grab hold of a dream and christen it as us. In this building, a true safe space, where dance, music, sex and identity collide into one we're the stars of the universe without the undue burden of a racist, sexist, transphobic society that wishes to plunge us and everyone like us back down into the earth. The Ball Culture in Paris is Burning is an overpowering experience, because it's like an alternate reality where we can flourish on our own terms and gives dignity to the transgender body as not only something valid, but something beautiful while also not bullshitting us about the struggle it takes to merely make it to your next day as a trans person. You and I are cloaked in an armour of whiteness which gives us distance to the folks in this movie while also protecting us from a lot of the danger and difficulties present in this movie that's made up almost entirely of LGBT persons of colour, but their struggles, happiness and desires are lateral to our own. We want what they want. There's a unifying theme in being trans that connects all of us through dysphoria and desire, and Paris is Burning understands this by presenting that idea as a matter of objective fact while letting QTPOC hold the frame and own the film, and thus their story. I think Paris is Burning is to this day the greatest film ever made about transness, and I'm curious if you feel the same way Caden. 

 

CADEN GARDNER: Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning was one of those docs that I always heard about, but its currency and legacy was more in the words than the images, and despite its popularity and box office success it's shamefully not on home video. I knew a little about Ballroom culture and I obviously knew about drag, but I had no idea how much it intersected as this mosaic of time and place with Paris Is Burning, particularly about trans people. I saw it around college and was floored. We see these matriarchal houses (the leaders of the houses, regardless of sex and gender are referred to as ‘Mother’) of performers thriving at the ballrooms and many have dreams that expand far beyond the ballroom floor. We see Octavia St. Laurent and Venus Xtravaganza talk about what they want as trans women. They talk about gaining superstardom or even just security like many women of their time wanted, while they also share their struggles with the limitations of their body and social status. They both lay on bedrooms when talking to Livingston, formally this is like a shot/reverse shot, and in their testimonials, they are literally laying down in the place of dreams, but when we see them on the streets and on the ballroom floor, they have star quality. You cannot teach that.

Even if their lives as trans women of color (and in Venus’ case as a sex worker) are far different from my experience as you said, they want what you want and what I want. One of the first things Venus talks about is getting gender affirming surgery and talking about her current differences, but saying it so matter of fact, without shame. Non-fiction films are the rare outlets for trans people to have control of their narrative and their voice in ways fictional films cannot and have not allowed. There has never been a fictional film about transness like Paris is Burning and for me it is the gold standard, the North Star in a lot of ways to transness on film. The effortless simplicity of merely letting these trans women talk, and, of course why wouldn’t Livingston do that? After all, she is talking to stars. 

 WM: I was a little bit older than college age coming around to this film the first time. I had been out a couple years up to that point, but I admittedly didn't know a lot about transgender history and I hadn't seen much in the way of LGBT cinema. I was under the same roof as my parents and if they ever caught me watching a movie like Paris is Burning there would have been consequences. That didn't mean I didn't sneak around and watch things like the HBO series, Six Feet Under or even something like Brokeback Mountain, but transness? Forget about it. I don't even think I learned about the film until I saw fellow, transgender film critic, Alice Stoehr write about it on letterboxd and that's when it sort of entered into my headspace. I haven't seen anything quite like it since. There have certainly been a lot of films to follow in its footsteps like The Aggressives, Kiki and the more recent, Shakedown, but Paris is Burning is certainly the first of these observational documentaries about trans people to truly leave an imprint on cinema. There's pre-stonewall documentaries floating around like The Queen, but that film never made nearly 4 million dollars at the box office and formally doesn't approach Paris is Burning in terms of pure craft. You can certainly see the visual and structural influence that followed.

Paris is Burning shines brighter than all the rest, because its heart is in truly cinematic images, and it's not merely Livingston's touch which brings this out, but the trans women and drag queens themselves. These people are bigger than life and damn sure wanted viewers to know it. Their hearts are in the movies, like there's that scene where house mother Dorian Corey talks about how the balls begged for participants to model themselves after movie stars like Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe and for a later generation that shifted to the models that graced the pages of fashion magazines like Vogue. So there was already an innate cinematic quality to the bodies on screen (which is bittersweet considering cinema doesn't recognize these bodies as valid), but Livingston sprinkled in a lot of other little formal wrinkles which makes the film feel different from your standard documentary. Frederick Wiseman's name is in the thank you credits so his observational techniques seem like they mattered to Livingston, but even when she does things like talking heads segments there's a lived in quality surrounding the people when they're discussing their lives, because we see them sewing while they talk, or sitting on the beach, or smoking in their den. It's vastly different from the fussy, empty rooms and uptight interview segments you normally see in documentary filmmaking, so even when the film goes for more traditional storytelling elements seen in the documentary film Livingston does something different, and she hardly deserves all the credit because she isn't the one sewing, making up their face or decorating their living room. It's life in every corner of the frame, and that's the touch of the trans people and drag queens who were interviewed, not hers. 

CG: The testimonials are so essential and there is not a single patronizing moment from Livingston in how she employs formal qualities. Most documentaries on trans folks are guilty of partaking in that very thing, even if they are doing us a solid in presenting our lives (I’m talking about Southern Comfort and which, you know, that title still makes me eye-roll despite how much I love who the subject is). There is that moment where Octavia St. Laurent is walking among the Ford Models and we get Eileen Ford herself talking about womanhood and trying to reconcile that with the feminist movement and how Octavia’s presence on the periphery of that scene just shows how much there is to go and how much consideration still needs to be paid to let her and others in to the world where they are as valid as any supermodel for Ford Models. Livingston says nothing beyond getting that footage. Octavia is not listening in on that interview by the TV journalist and Eileen Ford, she’s just there to meet and greet her idols. But the moment is still so perfect. Octavia’s difference is invisible and there whether she was trans or cis, she passes in a way that flies completely under the radar. It's a complicated, daring image of differences that we know as an audience and as she knows, but the public doesn't, and isn't her invisibility among a crowd of women something of an end goal in our own wants and desires? Some cis people get so confident that they can pick all trans people out of a line-up, but Octavia flies in the face of that. I think Livingston does understand that and that was why she kept that footage and in that presentation in that particular way. 

 WM: Desire is so important. Octavia wants to be like any other model. Any other woman, but also something more extraordinary. My own desire is enough to confirm my feelings of gender. It didn't matter so much if I didn't ovulate, because my desire to be a woman was so overpowering that I gave up everything to become myself or a version of myself that I wanted to see brought into existence. To remake my body in my own image. That's what Venus is talking about when she references wanting to have vaginoplasty, and when those words are spoken aloud in this movie it is really overpowering. It's like you said earlier, this is not comparable in narrative filmmaking where putting that desire to image has probably never been achieved. The documentary realism of films like Paris is Burning open up about innate desires and needs and gives their characters room to speak about "why" this is important to them. It's a rather low bar to clear to merely state "I want to fix my body", but the light behind her eyes when she's resting on her bed and the dream of knowing that this is what she's aiming for is undeniable. The sad matter of fact is that being trans is also a constant struggle of not getting what you want, and sometimes we have absolutely no control over that whatsoever. And that's Venus's story. She's only one of many LGBT persons of colour in this movie, and I like that Livingston gives you the full scope. Not everyone in this movie is trans, but the gay drag queens, the butch lesbians, and the gay men vogue all alongside each other, because ultimately we're the only other people we've got. The only people that really really care about us are us. And I wish we'd be wise enough to try and mend whatever problems we've had as a community that have divided us over the years, especially between drag queens and trans women, because in this movie they have each others back in a way that only family can. 

 

CG: Paris Is Burning reflected the late 1980s New York ballroom scene that was in-between the bankrupt, sleazy New York and the Giuliani-era 1990s clean-up and Disney-fication of Times Square. It’s a real snapshot of a time and it is really fascinating to look at people in that period who are both informed by their surrounding culture but also seeking out this scene because they are not getting their fill from the outside world. Paris is Burning was shot amid the AIDS crisis and it is acknowledged in the film multiple times (notably, Venus mentions that a man recoils at her when he finds out she has a penis and immediately just assumes she has AIDS). The viewer is seeing an underground sub-culture and the sub-cultures within that sub-culture deal with an American presidential administration that ignored the AIDS crisis for long as they could and a culture at large that was getting increasingly more conservative with the rise of evangelical Christianity. We see people maligned by society, a lot of them running away from hostile situations, to New York and finding their tribe in Houses. These matriarchal Houses, of performers, artists, and models that we see are also support systems of elders, friends, brothers, sisters, teachers, and students of the scene. But there is always reality lingering, such as Angie Xtravaganza, the Mother of the House of Xtrvaganza, reflecting on Venus’ murder (she had to identify her corpse). Angie’s reaction is fascinating, and our friend Carol Grant noted it in her Letterboxd review, that she is not crying, histrionic, or in any high key. She is very solemn and resigned all while being so eloquent and missing somebody important in her life. But death is the reality of her daughters in the House of Xtrvaganza and to any trans woman in New York. Being transgender involves a lot of risk and a lot of danger. It's a game of survival, and the deck is stacked in particular against transgender people who are not white. Not every one leaves the ballroom with a breakout. In fact, many of the performers and figures featured in Paris is Burning are dead. I remember somebody on Twitter noting this fact that most of the people in Paris Is Burning are dead and how their own reaction was shock but so were the responses to it. And part of me wanted to just say, ‘And why are you people surprised?’ Trans people get targeted all of the time, and are at a much higher risk for violence, and to bring back up the AIDS crisis, QTPOC were at the low-end of the totem pole for an era that already dehumanized, shunned, and were ashamed of people with AIDS. 

 

WM: It's vitally important to look at Paris is Burning from the perspective of a specific time period, and also of our own history as transgender people. In all the discussion that there has been recently about a transgender moment or with some level of exposure being put on our lives there's been a near total neglect of what came before, and even trans people are not great in honouring history in our pursuit to keep our language and ideas on gender updated. But we've almost always been around, and likewise so has the ball culture in various forms throughout history. Morgan Page is something of a modern day transgender historian and her podcast on the subject, "One From the Vaults", is necessary listening for anyone with a passing interest in transgender history. We're oftentimes taken from this life too early for reasons that are as wide ranging as transphobic violence, suicide or AIDS, and we need to do better to honour our history and those who came before us. Paris is Burning is essential in this regard, because these images last. I think about Venus Xtravaganza twirling her hair by a boombox and and a Carmen frolicking on a beach before stating "I AM MY OWN CREATION!" so frequently. That's eternity, and that's what cinema can offer, and what it so rarely has for people like us.

I almost believe that documentary is the only way to directly address transness in cinema. When filmmakers have tried to directly make movies about transness they have more often than not failed. Something like The Danish Girl ignores dysphoria for fetishization, TransAmerica is a family carnival, and even recently, A Fantastic Woman is an exercise in sympathy via punishment. Even when transgender people make their own films it is oftentimes too soft a presentation of what is essentially a hard life. It can be good, but there has to be a flipside otherwise the film is dishonest. Where are the moments of "I AM MY OWN CREATION!"? I'm not sure there are any, but I think of the ingenuity of the trans people in Frederick Wiseman's, "In Jackson Heights", and the sensuality of the trans women in "Hookers on Davie", and the vibrancy of everyone at the ball in "Paris is Burning", and those people stick out to me. If we're going to have a new transgender cinema and a new language in live action then we have to learn to apply these images and characters to narrative filmmaking. 

CG: I love that moment with Carmen and Brooke at the beach singing that verse from ‘I Am What I Am’/’We Are What We Are’ from La Cage Aux Folles. That musical and A Chorus Line were really the first Broadway musicals to center around gay characters that made their sexuality part of the identity, and in La Cage’s case, drag queens are at the center of the story. It’s so spur of the moment and something you can absolutely imagine them doing off-camera to each other, and that's what's fictional films. Sure, there is always some level of artificiality in fictional filmmaking but most trans movies rooted in original storytelling are missing the part you bring up. Something that feels like it does not have to be about respectability, martyrdom, polemic, or an object of fascination for cis viewers with only a surface level interest in our lives. For cis viewers the fascination is the trans part and nothing more. Venus, Octavia, and Angie are fascinating to me because they have so much confidence, dreams, philosophies, insights, and self-worth that you can form a full person for each of them. All of the subjects in Paris Is Burning are that way. Even the MC at the Ballroom contests with just his diction and mic work is amazing. You feel like you are hearing all of their stories and learning something without it feeling like homework.

There is an anthropological quality a la Wiseman in dropping in on a world from the outside- yet still maintaining a populist streak in feeling open, educational only in this is not using academia for validation of these subjects and lives. I think an LGBTQ person from that world would have made a different type of documentary in that respect, and who is to say how different or better, worse that would have been. Livingston does not really check her privilege in the documentary, prefers invisibility, but she has no interest in making subjects of this documentary people reacting to her subjects which I think other documentarians trip up on that when dealing with similar subject matter. Who would want to hear cops or the Johns or the gawkers who get their heads turned or the Giuliani types that made political promises to ‘clean up’ Manhattan and Times Square from these ‘freaks’ or, my favorite moral panic term, ‘sodomites’. No need to dignify or check in on the outside world, as if anything, they more than have had their time in the culture and places of power. 

WM: Right. I think one of the most beautiful things about Paris is Burning is that Livingston doesn't chase leads in the way a lot of documentaries about LGBTQ people do. She doesn't go ask the parents of the performers questions like "when did you know your child was different? etc, etc". Most films about transgender people are obsessed with details like that, and it's purely a cisgender curiosity. One of the more interesting formal qualities are the instances where one character is out in public, outside of the safe space of a ball and Livingston catches in frame an onlooker. She never lingers on the images of cisgender heterosexual, white people looking in, but makes sure to point out in the image that their presence still condenses the world into their mold. And that's even present in the Dorian Corey testimonial we mentioned earlier where she discussed dressing up like Marlene Dietrich. Beauty, and an accepted idea of what is womanhood by the public at large is white and cisgender. It effects everything. You need look no further than Madonna taking Vogue from everyone here and turning it into her thing. Culture is shifting slowly and slightly in this regard where there is more people to look at as a model of hope whether that be cis black women like Beyonce and Rihanna or in the transgender scope of things with women like Carmen Carerra and Laverne Cox. There are more images appearing, even if it is slower than we'd all like. 

 

CG: It is fascinating again how the legacy of the film, not so much the film itself but the testimonials of those figures from that scene, hit mainstream culture. It wasn't images but in language, terminology, and, of course, dancing. Those who refer to voguing or even the terms shade, realness, reading, etc. would have no idea where it came from first. I heard the term ‘throwing shade’ recently on one of the most red meat, masculine, straight cis male platforms there is: sports talk radio. Perhaps that accelerated with RuPaul’s Drag Race and how internet culture, and especially in memes, have run with those terms. Fragments in Paris Is Burning have probably been seen by millions in GIF form in all likelihood. It is a little frustrating in that sense, as Livingston presented and those performers gave so many memorable moments of movement and in words, but people are sharing images of Drag Queens and trans women without name or credit of who they are and what work they’re sourcing. Twitter now just has a GIF search engine where getting a GIF from Paris Is Burning does not even mean you have to type in Paris Is Burning. At risk of sounding overly serious, I do find that a problem as far as losing history. People have their own ways to discover transgender identity and drag, but just having things unattributed can lead to a lot of future confusion and even people getting history flat out wrong. One of my problems with even the way this film is shown is that it is often in college classrooms and instead instructors wanting to mine through more of this underground, hear more of these people, learn more about their ways of life, they just would rather give the class reading material of bell hooks and Judith Butler coming from different sides of this film. I have a liberal arts degree but I think making this film part of academia misses the point of who Paris is Burning is about and who it is for. It's for people like those two young gay street kids with infectious smiles despite being in an almost modern Dickensian situation. Ultimately, the film wants its audience to be as open as its subjects are. I think that is what true populist art is. Paris Is Burning’s audience is mostly white liberal students and academics when it should be broader and the broad audience are getting fragments of Paris Is Burning without even knowing it. And that is frustrating, as you mention how seeing images of trans people or people in a scene can be validating and even life-saving for any person, anywhere. I think there is slightly more visibility but it still comes with certain gawking and fascination as a cultural object than a three-dimensional person. That’s no knock on women like Laverne Cox or Janet Mock, but more about the dominant society’s slow-footedness.

WM: I think you can chart your original point of the film being populist art and needing to be taken out of the classrooms and out of gender studies courses to my original experience of not having heard about the film until I was already out. The thing about art about outsiders and minority groups is that it usually ends up out of our reach, and with the death of the video store and homogenization of streaming options with Netflix's near monopoly it gets even dicier, unless you're torrenting your own history. To give you an idea of my own personal experiences with movie theaters I'd have to take you to small town rural Kentucky where there's just as many churches as people living there. I'm only barely exaggerating. But the cinema that I grew up with had 4 screens and was strictly limited to whatever Bruce Willis, Johnny Depp or Arnold Schwarzeneggar was blowing up that week. When I grew up and had access to a car I was still 4 + hours away from any independent cinema and growing up poor meant that wasn't an option. Now that I've grown up and moved to Newfoundland to both chase my dreams and live with the man I love I find myself in a similar tricky position with cinema where there just isn't that much to offer. If I'm going to a rep screening it's probably for something like Michael Mann's HEAT. It's not going to be a film starring the Chelsea Girls y'know? But I think we need to ask ourselves questions about access to movies and how these are shown. Paris is Burning and movies about LGBT people need to be shown EVERYWHERE. We've seen the kind of impact something as nice and easygoing as Love, Simon has had in mainstream cinemas recently, but there's got to be more, and in the case of trans people where we are not even close to being a mainstream commodity for studio filmmaking a movie like Paris is Burning becomes even more vital and important. Watching something like Paris is Burning is so overwhelmingly life-affirming, even when it is depressing, that it would likely be an important moment for anybody who was questioning their gender. There's more to cinema than relatability but there's sheer fucking power in seeing someone saying something and you immediately recognize yourself in the image. It makes it seem like we actually can make it out here on our own. We don't have to die by our own hand, because we came into life under difficult circumstances. 

 

Love, Simon has me thinking about mainstream progress, and what that even means and how it's hijacked by some level of conformity. For LGBTQ people progress has always been slow and when it has come it's been breadcrumbs. Even if we look at this in terms of cinema trans people certainly existed as long as cinema has, but in the 100 plus years people have been making movies there just hasn't been that much we can gravitate towards that isn't in some way rooted in societies fears over transgender people. We can even see this in Paris. Venus is killed because she's transgender, because she has a non normative body in the eyes of cisgender society and I find that tragic beyond words, because that fear of being expunged by some random person in society is real for us. The only real problem I have with Paris is Burning is that it ends on her death, because even in the negative moments of the film and the unfortunate circumstances of life there was always this affirmative, positive, glowing quality surrounding everything. I think if a trans person makes the movie it probably ends with a glow rather than an obituary. But even with that complaint and the controversy surrounding the payment issues and later fame (and I side with the performers on this, not Livingston) I think this is the best movie about transness ever made. It functionally shows us, warts and all, as a people, how we come together as family and survive and live the best we can, even when we know society would watch us die and turn a blind eye to our bodies. They always have. 

CG: Even though I grew up in a blue state, where marriage equality was law before SCOTUS, and not in a place hostile with people transitioning in its laws a la North Carolina, I grew up around people who didn't erase LGBTQ lives, but barely acknowledge them. I only had Jerry Springer type-shows, reality shows, and an occasional National Geographic special to see trans people, and that is itself a mixed bag. The cliffnotes version of my high school is Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon but for the Trump era. I was queer and disassociating. It was mostly a blur with very little worth holding onto.

My high school was full of people who made AIDS jokes on the regular, were hostile towards gay men, and in health class, transness was never spoken about and homosexual sexual activity was not even touched, despite there being an after school special that my health class watched about AIDS with Harvey Fucking Fierstein in a supporting role about how straight can get HIV/AIDS too! The closest gay bar was a 30 minute drive on a good night, and most of the queens there were just the same tired lip-sync act of ‘And I’m Telling You’ from Dreamgirls (the only difference being if the queen chose Jennifer Holliday or Jennifer Hudson) complete a dramatic, “cathartic” wig removal finale. With the exception of me seeing a Todd Haynes film in a theater as far as watching ‘a gay movie’, I mostly used the internet and TV to check out New Queer Cinema of the recent past with Gregg Araki and even kitsch pastiche like Charles Busch filling my interest. I look back at what stuff I used to get my fill with mixed feelings because I wonder if my liking of the things were because I was that desperate for anything to validate my experience (I am afraid to revisit Hedwig & The Angry Inch). But as noted in the Boys Don’t Cry Body Talk, I still feel like I am searching for myself on-screen that is not covered with dread and an air of tragedy. It took me more than half of my life to discover that something like By Hook Or By Crook existed, a true indie, that was hiding in plain sight with the internet. It is one of those films that I wished I watched as a teenager. 

WM: I feel like to I'm still looking for a single movie where I feel seen in a way that feels validating rather than fatalistic. I think, because of my past history with childhood sexual abuse and my upbringing as a transgender person I gravitate towards films where the main character dies in some form or fashion or is shattered by a traumatic event. I like severe art because my mental health is fucked and sometimes that can be the only thing that feels like an antidote to a poison that runs through my veins, because of things in the past I had no control over. I write poems to Laura Palmer and bury myself in the body of the alien from Under the Skin, because at one point in my life their fate felt inevitable, and those characters and movies certainly help me, but I do wonder how I'd respond to a trans woman version of Cher Horowitz (Clueless) me on my best day, the brighter side of my life. I have no way of knowing, because no such film exists, and I'm not expecting to see something that feels real and magical in the way my life sometimes is now. It's something I'm tired of waiting for, and I know other trans women are too. I'm tired of watching the movie about transphobia or the movie about transition. What I want to see is a movie about a transgender person. Person being the important word. 

 

CG: I honestly do not know how a mainstream trans story by Hollywood would look like. And I am morbidly curious about the reaction. I think about Paris Is Burning with Willi Ninja, how his voguing got associated- many still decry co-opted- with Madonna and her dancers (many of whom were from that ballroom scene) with ‘Vogue’. Even the mainstream, polished version of that scrappy but glamorous sub-culture, now with the avatar of one of the biggest pop stars in the world making this underground dance (that had been a staple in black and Hispanic parts of New York City for decades before) her signature, had a lot of the mainstream in a culture war. There was panic and foaming at the mouth. Madonna’s dancers had to face off against pastors for making out, talking frank about sex, and their scandalizing dancing from the Blonde Ambition Tour and the documentary Truth or Dare. That seems to still be how the media operates, which does concern me. 

WM: Things haven't really changed that much since then either. There's definitely been some drawback to our increased visibility. The murder rate is up, new legislation seems to be introduced almost daily to keep trans people out of bathrooms and sexual assault centers. The two of us specialize in understanding media and art, but as trans people we have to learn about things like legislation. Within the United States government things like employment protection, legislation and basic human rights are things we're always lagging behind compared to our cis counterparts. I don't think cisgender people take us seriously most of the time. They want to be seen as progressive and forward thinking, but won't actually take the time to listen or care about us, and that goes for cis gays as well. We struggle to find our place in the world and it can feel downright debilitating to feel like you're out here on your own, and this is coming from a small town girl who didn't have anybody. I was branded the queer of my school almost immediately and it was unbelievably hard at times just to even gather the courage to go to school. I didn't see a way out for myself, but if I had seen Paris is Burning when I was fourteen or fifteen it would have been nothing short of life-changing, and that's why I think we have to do better at getting this movie out there to younger people. So they can see themselves, create their own stars, and maybe they won't feel so alone in the world, because if there's anything Paris is Burning is about: its family. 

 

CG: I feel like cis people view trans people in the media as something where it is a ‘gotta hear both sides’ attitude of half-brained dialectic that they can’t quit. If I have to see another trans woman have to sit next to right wing transphobic chode Ben Shapiro for another debate about trans people in public life or in popular culture, I am changing the channel. However, I am suspecting that will be the case if there is a mainstream trans film that comes up in the near future. Will it be worth fighting over? Will it be worth the price of admission? We can hope, but the current mainstream Hollywood that is still shaking off some decades-long trans panic but I still think we are stuck in objects of fascination and gawking phase at the moment.

People are probably wondering what we could be complaining about given the progress and gains that our cis allies see. Those people love to retweet our stuff share another trans person’s point of view to show they are woke about us. I want to think they are trying but it can be awkward, as though we are supposed to instruct them and tell them not to just see things at a surface level and that there has to be more done, primarily in understanding us. There are also those who seem to think that one experience made visible represents our own community. My eyes roll out of my head in people thinking that Caitlyn Jenner (editor's note: she's the worst!) represents the trans community at large or that Dave Chappelle ignores statistics of violence against trans women of color taking transness as a vanity act just for rich white people, which is the exact opposite of Paris is Burning. And then there are the people who cannot stop telling you how much they love Transparent and are surprised you don’t love it as much as they do. Bless their hearts.

Paris Is Burning remains a monument. That scene, as it was in the late 80s, has disappeared and so have the most of the people in it. But it is a vibrant document of a time in a city where there was a congregation of people putting on a performance while also getting to experiment and be themselves, carving out any space they can to be real. 

ADDITIONAL READING//VIEWING

My essay on A Fantastic Woman for Nashville City Scene

“I Am What I Am”original cast recording

 “We Are What WeAre” Tony Awards 

 Octavia’s last known interview published. 

The cast of Paris Is Burning on Joan Rivers

On the Controversy surrounding the film

Malcolm McLaren’s‘Deep In Vogue’ that has Willi Ninja in a starring role

Body Talk: Conversations on Transgender Cinema with Caden Gardner: Part Four

Body Talk is an ongoing series of conversations between Caden Gardner and I about Transgender Cinema as we prepare to write a book on the subject. The fourth installment is on Jonathan Glazer's Science-Fiction film, Under the Skin (2013).

Willow Maclay: There was something in the air with Jonathan Glazer's, "Under the Skin". When the film initially premiered it had a kind of aura around it that I was drawn to in the still images and the words film critics had written. It felt like a film that I was going to respond towards strongly, but I had no real inclination of what I was truly in for when I watched the film for the first time. What I saw was a film that so fundamentally understood the plight I was going through having recently come out as a trans woman that it was staggering. The fact that everything I connected to was incidental didn't matter. Jonathan Glazer didn't intend to make one of the best films ever made about transness, but he did, and the proof is in the fact that its become a talking point for transgender film obsessives. We claimed it. It's our film, but you've sometimes got to do that when there's nothing there in the first place. We'll get to my essay on the film in a moment, but first I wanted to ask when you came to the film and what did you initially think of it upon viewing? Did you have an epiphany like I did? Did it unsheathe something primal and real at your core?

Caden Gardner: I had the privilege of seeing Under The Skin’s North American premiere at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival. It was my first time at TIFF. I had heard about the initial reception at the Venice Film Festival's world premiere of the film. It was polarizing. There were boos, and word spread that the festival’s main slate jury had a lot of skeptics towards the film (per director Pablo Larrain, who stated he was a lonely dissenter in loving the film and later paid it forward by hiring Under The Skin’s composer Mica Levi to compose an equally unique aural nightmare for his biopic, Jackie). Under the Skin received no festival prizes from Venice. The stills and clips that were going around the Internet for that movie helped me retain my optimism. I dug Sexy Beast and thought Birth was a masterpiece. Jonathan Glazer returns with a film starring Scarlett ‘ScarJo’ Johansson in that black wig and she’s playing an alien? I’m in! Early reviews had compared it to Lynne Ramsay, particularly to Morvern Callar, and Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth. But to actually see the film, with my mother sitting next to me no less, was quite a disarming experience. I was sucked in from the moment ScarJo undresses a corpse and sets as alien siren for these scores of men who follow her to their dooms. We’ll get into the specifics of the film, but I surrendered to this film and felt seen by it in ways that felt like a trans experience. It was quite difficult to bottle that up at the time, being closeted and all, in trying to articulate my excitement and love of the movie. My mother hated the movie and she seemed perplexed why I liked it and what made me so attached to this movie that to her was a creepy, cruel art house exercise. My mother is not a plebe and frankly, she has a few people in film criticism that would agree with her. But to go back to the trans community claiming Under The Skin based on its allegorical and metaphorical ties to transness, for me it was all there from watching it the very first time. We are aliens. We observe so much behavior that other people just do not pay as much mind to. This film is not purposely coded in the way people read queer movies or movies with gay subtext. So it is quite something that so many of us, without any review to present or read it as such when it was released, all read this film as being about our experiences and embracing it as such. Not because it is a positive representation or a cis-friendly character- ScarJo’s alien is an accessory to many men dying and meets her own doom- but because it captures something that feels so similar to the innate nature of being trans and feeling apart of yourself reconciling the inner with the outer.

 WM: To see that film during its North American premiere must have been special. I remember it getting a rather cool reception with the exception of the handful of critic friends I had at the time who all seemed to love it to varying degrees. For me, I didn't end up seeing the movie until the summer of 2014. I watched it on my second day in Philadelphia after moving away from home. Philadelphia is where I fled to become to myself. I was out as a trans woman since late 2011, but I didn't start presenting until I moved to Philly. Watching this movie in my bad makeup , loose fitting bra and low cut blouse was something almost ethereal. Here was this character coming into life as an adult and constructing herself with her perception of femininity, not as something passed down, but something observed. I was doing the same thing. It's not a pretty portrait, but being trans isn't peaches and cream and being a woman isn't either. It left a huge impact on me in a way that I couldn't quite put together into words, until I started talking to my friend Erin about it and I realized that this film affected me so deeply, because it was symbolic of everything I was going through at the time. I obviously wasn't tantalizing men into their deaths, but I was struggling with my body, ramming up against the limitations forced on me after going through a puberty built on testosterone and wanting to reverse all of it. So, I wrote my friend Sara Elizabeth about an essay idea I had on the film for her website The Vulgar Cinema. I had begun writing for that website under her tutelage and I had published essays on John Carpenter and Johnnie To, but this would be something different. What followed was one of the hardest essays I've ever had to write, and she was there with me the entire way. It received plaudits from websites like Slant Magazine, Indiewire and RogerEbert.com. It kickstarted my writing career and the rest is history. I put into words why this trans allegorical science fiction movie moved me and I couldn't have done with without Erin and Sara Elizabeth. They were very important in making that happen. Ever since, the piece has become synonymous with my name following me around everywhere I write, and I don't mind, because I feel like after I wrote that piece it was impossible to talk about Under the Skin without paying mind to its place in something resembling a transgender canon. To this day it's the most meaningful essay I've ever written, even if I think I've published better work since.

CG:  I had been mentioning that there was this movie Under The Skin playing in theaters to my friends that I had brief reunions with after college. They were the few people who knew I was trans and knew how deeply unhappy I was in keeping up the appearance of having to dress up in feminine clothing to present as female and how much I hated the abusive, toxic work environment I was in. I would have been miserable there without being trans but the added twist of not feeling quite in place, in a way alien, and disassociating, often isolated in a poorly lit office, answering a phone that never rang, and doing errands in the backwoods counties in Upstate New York felt like purgatory and that I had made a terrible mistake in my life. I had a skeleton of a plan on how to keep saving money to begin my process and give me a monetary safety net if shit hit the fan, but I had also begun drinking heavily to self-medicate because of how unhappy I was and going into some dark places as a result. I only had movies but even my job was cutting in to any time I had on new releases. I actually did not see Under The Skin in theaters after TIFF, but I kept telling people about it. To get back to my friends, because they knew I was trans, I was able to tell them exactly why I saw the film as a trans film. They found that fascinating and found me persuasive in my interpretation. Still, even when I had more freedom and an outlet to express these opinions on social media, I was mum about this point on Under The Skin. Mainly because for many years people did not know my identity, I did not disclose I was trans for a very long time and was seen as an enigma (I can say this because somebody who I met in real life, and is quite lovely, did once casually refer to my online presence as enigmatic and I have no hard feelings over that). So when I read your piece on Under The Skin, I felt so excited and happy that somebody else got it and it was somebody like me who understood. We had been following each other long enough that I felt comfortable dropping into your mentions and thanking you for writing it. I also felt comfortable enough that at that time I could disclose to you that I was trans. This movie is for more than one reason why we are doing this series and the book, it was, and forgive me for speaking for both of us, what connected us beyond just being people similar interests in film. It was much deeper than that.

WM:  I remember when you came out to me shortly after I published the piece. We had already become fast friends over on the more LGBT version of film twitter (by far the best version of film twitter), but after you came out to me we had a deeper understanding of one another. You were one of the first trans guys I was ever friends with, and I was rooting for you to get to a point where you could disclose and transition from afar. I'm proud of you for getting there Caden. Let's dive into the content of the film. 

WM cont: The very first sequences in the movie are set in this blindingly white room with this feminine figure (Johannson) undressing another woman and taking her identity. The camera holds on this girl for a bit and you can visibly see her crying and if you look at the alien in contrast she's devoid of reaction. Putting on these clothes and leaving this woman stranded in this white place is of no concern to her. It separates her from the human, but I also think there's something interesting going on in this first scene where she's learning external gender immediately through clothing and look. Shortly after that scene the alien goes to a mall and buys makeup, boots, a fur lined coat and a basic pink top. These are not the same clothes worn by the girl so she's already cultivating a "style". This is not dissimilar from early out trans women going to a dead end thrift store and trying to find themselves on the discount rack, but this film is deeper than merely presenting gender as something constructed (though that does have a part in everything) it's also something felt. Scattered throughout this sequence in the mall, there's a montage of women applying makeup and talking with one another, and because we see everything through the alien's point of view we are supposed to interpret these images and these women through her eyes, and there's something lost in these images. She's fundamentally at odds with these normal women, and she knows she's different. The film brilliantly drives this home with a cut to the alien applying her makeup in the van. She bought everything and got out. She didn't linger. She retreated into a solitary action. Her femininity is internal and external but stripped of communion, because she's afraid of being seen as something she's not. This works on both a transgender spectrum and Glazer's intended effect of alienation from humans. I love it and that's only the tip of the iceberg and the first instance of something on a transgender spectrum happening in the film.

 CG: The mall scene is so important in Under The Skin. What I find fascinating, as the most stylish aspects of the film have become so iconic and been directly lifted by other works (Stranger Things among the most notable and frankly the closest to being plagiarism) is the film itself balances that style and science fiction other worldliness with a very cinema verite, documentary style in the film as observation of alien versus human behavior. The point of view can often shift between Glazer looking at the Alien but also capture her own point of view and observances, that do become a little interchangeable. She serves as our prism throughout the film. When she looks around the mall and browses as she sees all of these women as consumers, she is cultivating a style, not just simply ‘passing’, and keying in on visual detail, but finding an image that suits her. An image that coincides with her role as a siren-like figure of desire. There is also the way she talks. One of the first sounds we hear from Johansson’s character is her enunciating, teaching herself to speak in this one language to fit into her surroundings. Johansson, an American, gives her an Alien a posh British accent. She was in Scotland. Now you can say, that is simply a lot more possible for Johansson to do as an actress than a Scottish one, but it feels like a choice that the Alien chose because she liked it. And it is an alluring one, an exotic one but not too exotic, something that can draw the men as a means of seduction. 

I do think about how often the voice, when we transition, is among the first and most crucial tools to pass. For me, being on T meant my voice went down decibels, plural, and even I had to catch up to that. It helped me pass and studying my own voice, something that even before I transitioned I always pitched at a lower key, had me do the enunciating, vocal exercises not dissimilar to ScarJo’s alien. But to return to her voice and how it plays into her initial primary function in the movie, the film starts at predator and prey. It is quite fascinating how the gaze works, as it starts as something subversive and ends with what we normally find to be the cruel reality. That montage of the Alien looking at the men she passes around town is fascinating. It’s detached yet it has a purpose of somebody scanning and searching to find ‘the right one’, in the Alien’s case, a man to collect. She is in a van, she has the power, so often we hear those horror stories of evil men in vans, but it is a posh woman in fur driving around town looking for a place to go while offering men a ride. I would say ScarJo’s Alien is not all-knowing in the gender dynamics or of the world she sees, we often see her picking up things afterward and feeling the impact and ramifications of her actions (I am talking about that infamous baby by the beach scene), but she knows how to do her job. She flirts with these men, asking non-probing, simple questions to reel them in. I have to think she observed women doing this to men and in settings where the power was not as imbalanced as it was favorably to her in the van, but again, she is taking cues and cultivating a modus operandi that also reveals itself to be very much the human identity of her own than a cold function.

WM:  Your comments about the opening sequencing where she is training her voice for Glasgow are fascinating in the context of transness, because you're absolutely right about our voice being one of the first things we make ours or try to shift into something closer to what we want. I had the good fortune of my voice never dropping during puberty so my voice has always been in a higher octave, but finding a tone and lilt that felt comfortable to me took time. I'll also openly admit during times of my worst gender dysphoria I'd often to go to fast food joints and order something so I could get gendered correctly because the person hearing my voice assumed I was a cisgender woman. I got mercilessly mocked because of my voice growing up, but it's been a blessing later in life.  I haven't had to do much work, but I can remember training it even as a child and trying to speak like a woman in an old Hollywood movie in front of a mirror with my hair up in a towel. I wanted to be Lauren Bacall. Ironically, my voice never ended up as deep as hers. 

Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944)

WM Cont: I think there's a lot of interesting material regarding her predatory instincts as it pertains to this plot in relation to the gender dynamics. That's essentially the linear, direct narrative of the movie, but it's also something significant in the lives of trans people, especially trans women. I learned very quickly how my presence was now more vulnerable after I started presenting and taking hormones, but it was totally an issue of trial and error. I knew it was more dangerous to be out alone or at night by myself, but I didn't learn that firsthand until a guy followed me to a grocery store trying to get in my pants in the entire time. This has been a more frequent occurrence for me now. The essential point I'm trying to make here is that so much of gender is societal, and learned. That's not a new idea, but with transness it's important to state these things from our perspective, because when we do talk about things like sexual assault, cat-calling or male predatory behaviour we're often left out in the cold. Not part of the discussion and it's essential we should be. I've had to learn survival techniques hat I didn't have to worry about previously before I came out. It's unfortunate, but it's true. Under the Skin is one of the more honest films about not only transness, but gender in the public space for this reason. 

When the Alien picks up these men she kills them, but with every new man she ensnares in her dark place she becomes more sympathetic to humans and unsure of what she's doing. Like when she gets blood on her hands after pricking herself on a rose, or more severely the screaming child and the primal need to protect those you love at the beach. But there's one man in particular I find interesting. He's played by the wonderful Adam Pearson, and has a facial disorder that causes him to grow tumors. He's the first man she spares and the first man she connects to, because she can see that he's different too. He's like her. I know you want to talk about this character in particular, so I'll give you the floor with him. I think their moment in the van is one of the only touching moments in the movie.

 CG: We see the Alien become aware of how gendered the dynamics of our world are for her and how her position of power is quite exceptional. She takes in the random cat-call from a car that speeds away, a group of blokes become cavemen-like in harassing her by jumping on her van, and most interestingly she is taken away, by the momentum of these group of women who mistake her for another woman to join them for a party. She immediately becomes ‘one of the girls’ to them. For the Alien things start to click and she is no longer seeing people simply as these figures to take away from but be part of. There is that gorgeous montage of these overlapping shots of woman after woman that Alien sees that than takes on a golden like glow. Glazer inserts a close-up of ScarJo’s Alien that becomes a golden orb. It is really the moment for her when she has embraced womanhood in a way that takes over her narrative and trajectory of the film. 

But something else happens, and you mentioned it. It is when she stops becoming the predator. She sees a man, credited as the Deformed Man, played by Adam Pearson, a non-actor who has a condition where he has tumors all over his face. I remember Jonathan Glazer, looking exhausted when taking in questions at TIFF. When introducing the film, he implored audiences to look at ScarJo as a prism, as that seemed something not quite understood at earlier screenings),  It was agonizing to sit through, like all Q&As, but what I remember was a questioner asking about Adam Pearson’s character, thinking it was CGI or makeup that gave the character that appearance. Glazer answered brusquely that Adam Pearson, like all of the male passengers in the film, were real people, Pearson had a condition and those were not prosthetics. I remember some gasps and a bit of a hush from certain people I was sitting around. Perhaps because it fits so perfectly in the film to have her connect with one of society’s ‘monsters’ and be sympathetic towards him, set him free, and change her ways. What the scene immediately calls to mind is James Whales’ The Bride of Frankenstein with the Monster and the blind man, where judgment and fear is removed for once in this Monster’s reanimated existence. It is not a clean comparison, as both the Deformed Man and the Alien share attributes of both of those figures. The Alien as the outsider like the Monster but also a type of blind justice who is open to a stranger like the blind man, while Deformed Man is an outcast, like the Monster, but has the loneliness, and yearning for connection like the blind man. It's a classic horror scene with the misunderstood “monster” making an appearance and changing the way our lead character sees the world and society.
 

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

  CG cont: But Glazer does not make the scene go down that smoothly, as nothing we have seen before can make us think it is going to be pat. He makes sure Mica Levi’s score plays up the tension by repeating the theme of previous doomed men before him. The audience is made to wonder if the Alien can even fully distinguish why Pearson feels like such an outcast and if the Alien and the enigmatic motorist would be prejudiced or finicky about the which bodies they harvest. Is the flirtation genuine? I think it is. Her Alien does not know, she does not harbor anything he has felt, seen, or heard so many times before, and she wants to know about why Pearson’s Deformed Man walks alone at night. ‘People light me up!’ he says. She asks, ‘Why?’ ‘They’re ignorant’ he curtly responds. He is given a space to be able to tell his story and struggles. I think about how often I have to negotiate in my head the time and places I can even go to do what I want without feeling like I am under a gaze, a target for harassment and other unpleasantness. Pearson is gazed upon with what we have to assume is pity, curiosity, ignorance, and malice. He has to be under the cover of night to do basic functions like going to the store, because he hates being in the gaze that often feel like being in the crosshairs. His condition while not the same does bring to mind John Merrick’s The Elephant Man and the David Lynch film of the same name with that great John Hurt performance. Critic Serge Daney described that film as unique in that, “… it is the monster who is afraid.” Indeed that character is looked upon in a way where he will always be misunderstood and salvation, in finding understanding and also love, remains elusive. Lynch supposes that Merrick’s salvation is found in reconnecting with the spirit of his mother, goodness and love in the afterlife. In a way, Pearson’s character, briefly (as even when she spares him, he does get taken away by the motorist), finds that salvation and bliss. The alien makes sure she can put him in a trance so he can get away, and that is more attentive than how she treated all of the other men. The meeting gives her a switch, as though she grew moral fiber in that interaction. It completely changes the course of the film.

The Elephant Man (1980)

 WM: You bring up gaze and how characters can feel the oppression of gawkers everywhere. People who don't have the common decency to look away and leave the other person alone. We've brought up the cisgender gaze before as something we can recognize in our own lives, but more frequently in that being the lens in which most movies about transgender people are made. I do think that there's a parallel situation that goes on when considering films about transgender people and films about disfigurement, and we've seen that cycle slowly evolve through cinema during the history of transgender characters. We started as freaks, something to shock, a carnivalesque sideshow, a grotesquerie. That same gaze has now evolved into a state of pity with more recent films like A Fantastic Woman. We've yet to get to a point of empathy, understanding or independence and I'm unsure when/if that will happen.  



The film does change course after the scene we discussed above. Right before she frees the man she connected to she stops in a mirror and examines her own face and I've always been struck by that moment. Mirrors in some way shape or form have to play a role in films about transness because we gaze at ourselves in hopes of understanding our bodies or we avoid the gaze entirely so that we don't disrupt an internal image of self. In that specific moment she stops and Glazer holds the camera before pushing in slightly and she's taken aback. It's left vague as to why, but I think in a literal sense it's a mixture of guilt and sympathy for having sent this man, who she felt close towards to that place, while also finally realizing she too possessed a body and it wasn't a normal one. So it's both sympathetic of the man and a moment where she internalizes her own differences as something resembling self-hatred.

WM: 



The film becomes completely obsessed with mirrors after that moment and the alien returns to gaze at her own body again and again, sometimes in approval and other times in disgust, and I'll get to these moments later, but right now. I just want to talk about how the second half of the film is where some latent transness is emphasized by the narrative trajectory and structuring of science fiction and gender. I tweeted not long ago that to find the best films about transness it's better to look towards science fiction and specifically movies about aliens, robots and synthetic beings than to investigate actual films about transgender characters. The argument is essentially that these films ask questions about what it's like to be in a body, which should be the root problem of any film about transness, because the body is everything. These films are internal examinations of understanding human identities through our construction of things like gender, societal norms and disabilities, and they get at central issues rather than external problems. The internal is everything is transgender cinema and the second half of Under the Skin is essentially about one woman's reckoning with her own body's limitations and her internal struggles to come to grips with these things. That's why it initially moved me as a trans woman and why it still floors me to this day.


The other significant piece I've written on transness as a genre of synthetic bodies is on Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. Ironically, Scarlett Johansson's plays the lead in the lesser American remake. There isn't such a colossal connection to transness as there is with Under the Skin present in that movie, but there's certainly signifiers where characters construct bodies ,and thus identities, through technological advancements. You can erase or become anything you want to be. It's a post-humanist idea, but directly in tune with our connections to bodies as something we desire to control rather than be imprisoned within. Hormone replacement therapy and plastic surgery are advancements that would have seemed absurd to consider even one hundred years ago, but here we are, and it is not too foolish to think science could push us even further into bodily modification and cinema, as a result has to consider these things beyond just science fiction. By tapping into science fiction's probing philosophy on human bodies, gender and robotics it can be a gateway toward a more physical transgender cinema. Under the Skin is very likely the best film ever made about this specific topic.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

 CG:  I have long connected to science fiction and body horror because the disconnect with having a human body, feeling like there has been a mistake and an entrapment, and just the disgust that all entails, seemed only present in those films. Even more so than films that I had seen with trans subjects. It is interesting how those works can feel in conversation with contemporary realities be it when there was an AIDS crisis in the 1980s or transgender bodies through the decades. There is this progress but not without misunderstanding. That completely bullshit opinion that pops up among cisgender people that being trans is simply exterior presentation when it is so much beyond surface. It is reconciling your interior feelings and psychological with the help of modern medicine and science. Under The Skin is brilliant in the unique depiction of an Alien who came to Earth and rebelled from her original purpose to become a body in our world, her psychology and mind followed, and developed as she saw the world around her. It takes a mind and a body, they are intertwined and often at war with each other, but then there can be peace found when there is a realization of who we really are.


In the second half she really begins to grapple with her own gender. She examines her full naked body in the mirror, she wants to experience pleasure, and she takes off her furs in a hot pink dress. As noted, the film becomes about how she is seen and her awareness in suddenly being seen after so often feeling like an outsider looking in at the world and playing a role. She then transcends her role to become a person in this world, but Under The Skin presents a lot about the futility of the human instinct (it often goes poorly!) and the cruelty of humanity that can swallow the lightness and kindness that being human affords. The Alien sticks out as a beautiful woman under-dressed in the cold weather that gets patronizing attention from men and also becomes an object of desire. It becomes very animalistic, a film of a black room and a van returns back to heart of nature in a forest for the Alien to meet her end, after becoming the prey from rebuking a man’s sexual advances. That ending knocked me out. I was silent and absolutely needed that Glazer Q&A to recover.


It is not just that I saw a character played by a beautiful actress get destroyed and literally skinned. I saw that character achieve a kind of self-discovery and was on a journey cut short. And perhaps that conclusion can tie up why it felt so close to our community. The feeling that these discoveries of transness and living your truest life do not reach to full realization because of external forces, society and a patriarchal structure that asserts a lot of ignorance about who we are, can cut us down in different ways both as systems and as individuals. We can have full control of our body and have so much self-love of our expression, but there is this lingering threat that permeates our existence. We can become a statistic at any point. The ending hits me in that way because the Alien, despite seeing the growing gender differences that surround her and being part of it, just discovers this too late. It’s something of a dramatic irony. I feel like women in the audience knew but so do trans people, both men and women, at the fact that even if there is a sense of bliss, it can be short-term. An anvil will drop.

WM:

You mention the mirror scene very briefly above and I think that moment coupled with a sex scene directly afterward are immensely important to the narrative argument I make for a transgender allegory. Previously, almost everything in this movie is overcast, drained of colour and stricken with a lack of vibrancy. Maybe that's inherent to Glasgow, as much of Lynne Ramsay's films look the same. This is probably why so many compared it to her work, but that lack of colour is contrasted by this one scene where the alien stands in front of a mirror observing her body. She observes her soft curves, the natural curve her back makes and the supple warmth of her skin. This scene is lit through a space heater and it makes the room pop with this creamy golden red colour. It's so startlingly different from the colours previously in the movie that it emphasizes the importance of this scene. Mica Levi's score swells for the first time too instead of piercing the viewer. All in all this is a warm moment. At this point in the film she accepts her body. She embraces her womanhood and becomes herself. What I love about this scene is that it's immediately followed by a reminder that her body isn't capable of giving her that peace of mind due to a failed sexual encounter with a man (Dave Acton) she's been staying with recently. During this sex scene he tries to penetrate her, but something is wrong. We're not given much context here whether her vagina rejects the penis, like her body rejected the cake, or if her genitals were merely for show rather than function. She takes this lamp and peers down between her legs and when she raises her head back up she has a look of grief on her face. That look of grief has stuck with me in a major way ever since first viewing the movie. Her body will not allow her to do what she wants it to do, and furthermore she's locked out of a sexual encounter that she wanted to experience. She can't have pleasure. She can't have kids. None of this is possible.


I know exactly what this feels like. The warmth in her face beforehand scrubbed clean of anything but a hollow realization that she isn't who she thinks she is ruins me in a way I'm all too familiar with. Being a pre-operative transgender woman means that my body is complicated and stuck in a mode I'm uncomfortable with 24/7. The mental and psychological toll of having genitals you reject entirely is mammoth. If I'm not tucked 24/7 my dysphoria is unbearable to the point where doing anything other than lying in bed is impossible. Sex is tricky, and something I have to navigate with total mental control lest I fall down into my own personal hell. I desperately want the right genitals. I want nothing more in my life. The fact that I have to wait at least another year is psychologically damaging and on worse days devastating to my own personal well being. The fact that Under the Skin is the only movie I've ever seen that has justly replicated this feeling is something I hold onto when things become overwhelming. I don't take that lightly. After this scene she retreats into herself, removing herself from the outside world and hibernating in a forest so she can be alone. She lies down and turns herself off, because there's nothing else to do. To me, this is gender dysphoria.

CG:  In Lynne Ramsay's films she has characters in her worlds on the periphery looking out serving as prisms for the audience, but these characters are themselves black sheep. Something has happened to them, be it a trauma that has changed the course of their life, carrying the weight of withholding information that they cannot really articulate out to the world, or feeling at loss with what is normal, unable to reconnect despite wanting to return because their differences disturbed their flow of life. Her critics may say her films are just ciphers, given she often adapts books, that is an incredible easy criticism, but I think that is a mistake (just like I think critics of Under The Skin made similar mistakes with simply not exploring what else there is to the Alien than deliberate blankness that changes halfway through the film). Ramsay presents her protagonists as alien, which is why I get beyond the setting in Scotland there were immediate comparisons drawn with Glazer’s very liberal treatment Michel Faber’s novel (I did read the novel, it is quite different, more a work of action than a mood as there are literal explosives at the center of the book’s plot). Under The Skin’s Alien is a character who we know to be different from the very start; she wants to become part of the world, but the differences, that the audiences immediately see and can assume what makes her different are felt in these very dramatic ways by her because she is denied pleasure by her alien body.

I remember that sex scene not happening with my audience. There were some chuckles. Not because the scene lent itself to comedy but along with the cake scene, her limitations and differences take on a visceral effect in rejecting. It is quite disruptive for that character and for the audience. Her Alien is still, observant, and also performing in a rhythmic, routine way for much of the course of the film and wants those changes. The audience’s viewing experience also changes because her rhythms as a character were our viewing rhythms. So for the viewer to see this makes those scenes have their own oft-center quality because suddenly we see this character have these swift recognition's of her differences from humans that I am not sure she had anticipated or had full knowledge of as she experienced them. It is quite devastating in that way.

But you, myself, and other transgender people know of those differences as far as our sex and pleasure being quite different than cisgender people’s pleasure, even as our images of pleasure are still very much dominated by the cis heteronormative imagery of love, sex, and relationships. Being rejected can have a loaded effect on me, as I can only speak for myself in this case, where I am left wondering were I a cisgender man would this have happened.That can put me in a state of dysphoria in feeling at a disadvantage and having what I desire feel out of reach due to those differences. This is not to say I nor other trans man cannot and do not experience pleasure in our own ways, because we absolutely do, but it can feel elusive in finding the people who do see you and your body as desirable. I also am counting my clock to get the corrective surgeries that I can get but also am weighing what is medically possible for me. It can be exhausting and to quote our previous film Come Back To The 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, ‘time is such a nebulous state to wait for’.

WM: Time does a number on you when you're a trans person. We've mentioned this briefly before, but it's complicated to come into a realization and finally attempt to fix yourself twenty, thirty, forty years into your life, and not feel like you've lost those years in a fog of dysphoria, disassociation and bankruptcy. Even when you do come to that realization it can take many more years before hormone replacement therapy has done its job and you've gone through the major setbacks of correcting government identification or waiting patiently for wait lists on things like corrective surgeries. It's all a lot to take in especially considering you're not guaranteed anything in life. It's one reason why I'm considering bypassing the wait list altogether and starting a gofundme for sex reassignment surgery, because I'm at a point where I'm done waiting. I'm almost twenty seven years old and I want to say I lived the majority of my life with the body I should have always had. I don't think cisgender people actually fully consider how difficult living like that must be. It's a hell, even when you're doing as best as you can. If they could truly comprehend the nightmare it is to be in a body that's fundamentally at odds with your mental state we would have far less barriers and more medical options. These surgeries wouldn't be called "cosmetic", but rather "life-saving". It takes a toll on us.


It's one reason why I reject this notion that films about transgender people or films working in an allegorical sense about trans people need to be respectable, nice and politically correct in all facets of our day to day lives. That would ignore the fact that we're all pretty fucked up by the circumstances of our own lives. None of us get out of this unscathed or without baggage. That's got to be present. Not all art about transgender people has to be severe, but it has to be part of the equation, because we don't lead easy lives. It's one reason why I react strongly to films like Under the Skin, because she doesn't get a happy ending. She's burned alive, because a man can't deal with who she is, and that has fucking happened to transgender women before. Watching our rights slowly get stripped away by a federal government in the States doesn't feel awesome either. If I'm living my day to day life hearing Trump appointed a guy who may take away an easier way to self identify on something like passports then I'm not going to want to dance when I get home that day. I process tragedy, small and large, through nightmare imagery. I can't physically bring myself to engage with feel good art when I feel bad, and when you're transgender more often than not bad vibes will pop up. I need the darkness so I can navigate my own complicated feelings and mental health in a healthy way that isn't destructive. I cannot watch a film about transness and see a perfect life, because I know it's bullshit. You can call me a self-hating transgender person, but I think we all are to some degree. It'd be impossible not to be given the society we live in. It'd be so much easier if we weren't different, and that's why I think I like movies about people who are monsters, because I am one too.

Additional Reading
An Interview with Adam Pearson 

This Is What It's Like to get Picked Up by Scarlett Johansson