Transgender Cinema

Rebecca Bell-Metereau

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813597331
• eBook ISBN: 9780813597355
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Transgender Cinema gives readers the big picture of how trans people have been depicted on screen. Beginning with a history of trans tropes in classic Hollywood cinema, from comic drag scenes in Chaplin's The Masquerader to Garbo's androgynous Queen Christina, and from psycho killer queers to The Rocky Horror Picture Show 's outrageous queen, it examines a plethora of trans portrayals that subsequently emerged from varied media outlets, including documentary films, television serials, and world cinema. Along the way, it analyzes milestones in trans representation, like The Crying Game, Boys Don't Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and A Fantastic Woman.As it traces the evolution of trans people onscreen, Transgender Cinema also considers the ongoing controversies sparked by these movies and series both within LGBTQ communities and beyond. Ultimately it reveals how film and television have shaped not only how the general public sees trans people, but also how trans people see themselves.

1

TRANS TROPES

Transgender people have always existed, but societies have had a variety of ways to depict and express the experience of these individuals throughout the ages. Developments in film and medicine at the beginning of the twentieth century created new modes of expressing, altering, and thinking about gender identity. Before medical science began its attempts to alter sex characteristics, films depicted and documented examples of transgender people. Although these depictions tended to fall into two categories—comic or pathological—there were exceptions to these broad classifications. Charlie Chaplin often took advantage of his large dark eyes, playing female characters who sometimes looked surprisingly feminine, particularly in The Masquerader (1914), A Busy Day (1914), and A Woman (1915). Some sort of pandemonium and disruption usually ensued with the presence of a female Chaplin, but the actor often blended elements of humanity and seriousness into his comedy, pointing to social foibles and inequalities.

People have commented throughout the decades on the androgynous quality of Chaplin. In fact, in a YouTube video arguing that Charlie Chaplin was actually a woman, the narrator takes a bioanthropological approach to the physical features of Chaplin, attempting to prove by physical analysis that he was actually a “she” (Humanity). In the video’s opening, the narrator notes a coincidental correlation that the last castrato (person castrated in order to sing as a soprano and not have masculine sex characteristics) died in 1890, a year after Chaplin was born. The speaker in this video offers photographs of Chaplin and analyzes the physical details characteristic of masculine physiognomy. He notes the absence of an Adam’s apple or brow ridge and points to the bulbous forehead and narrow shoulders in relation to the hips, all common characteristics of female anatomy. One could make counterarguments, for example, the fact that when Chaplin speaks for the first time on film, playing a Hitler look-alike in The Great Dictator (1940), his voice does not sound like a woman’s voice. In addition, his daughter, Geraldine Chaplin, bears a strong resemblance to Charlie, as do several others of the eleven children he claimed to have fathered from three different wives. Regardless of whether one accepts far-fetched claims about Chaplin’s hidden female gender, it must be acknowledged that Chaplin’s cross-dressing performances and persona constitute a memorable facet of this legendary artist’s androgynous persona, one that helped open the door for transgender presence in film from its beginnings.

After the serial queens of early western films, such as Pearl White, Helen Holmes, Ann Little, Ruth Roland, and Marin Sais, pushed gender boundaries by doing their own stunts and wearing masculine cowboy gear, two European stars arrived on American screens, standing out as androgynous icons. Greta Garbo was famous for her sultry voice and iconic role in Queen Christina (1933), playing a woman who was raised as a man, for all practical purposes: “In keeping with her upbringing, she has a manservant who helps her on with her pants and boots and combs her hair as she reads Molière. When her father advises her that she will die an old maid, she quickly replies, ‘I shall die a bachelor!’ ” (Bell-Metereau 75). During the first third of the film, she maintains this masculine persona, through clothing, voice, and gesture, but we see her transform into a more traditionally staid feminine role as she falls in love with the Spanish ambassador, Antonio (John Gilbert): “It is in repose, not in movement, that she first reveals to Antonio that obvious outline of her breast beneath her thin shirt. She is still dressed as a man, but there is gentleness of expression—her head lowered and her body angled at three-quarters profile, one knee demurely bent in, in the classic pose combining feminine modesty and seductiveness” (Bell-Metereau 75–76). Enthralled by love, Christina succumbs to tradition and becomes more passive, exhibiting more emotion and fragility, but by the end of the film, with the loss of her male lover, she regains toughness and returns to the stoic and gender-nonconforming persona exhibited in the film’s opening.

Marlene Dietrich presents one of the most indelible images of the classic androgynous femme fatale, but some film scholars argue that Josef von Sternberg played Svengali to Dietrich’s androgynous persona. It was reported that Sternberg once said, “I am Miss Dietrich—Miss Dietrich is me” (Bell-Metereau 104). Sternberg’s fascination with cross-dressing may have come from his jobs as a youth in a millinery shop and lace house in New York: “One can easily imagine the impressionable fifteen-year-old immigrant losing himself in reveries as he would clean the shop, filled with lace, feathers, artificial flowers and fruit, hat forms, manikins, and the lingering perfume of the day’s customers. These erotically charged visual experiences would become the building blocks of Sternberg’s film world” (Bell-Metereau 105). Practically every Sternberg film with Dietrich features her powerful frame draped in masculine clothing and helpless men adorned in bits of female finery, as they are enthralled by her powerful beauty.

Although Laura Mulvey’s work develops the idea that the typical filmic masculine gaze inevitably creates a relationship of male domination, I see a different paradigm, wherein “voyeurism is central to Sternberg’s concept of man’s relationship to woman, for in his schema, to gaze is to worship. Man’s desire to look at woman does not, as many feminists claim, make her a mere object; rather, in Sternberg’s world, it gives her almost unlimited power” (Bell-Metereau 105). Andrew Sarris argues in a similar vein that for Sternberg, “the Girl will possess a mystical authority over the life of the Boy, and it is this authority which marks Sternberg’s attitude toward women long before the debut of Marlene Dietrich” (39).

Dietrich went on to play other androgynous roles without Sternberg, and “after his 1935 farewell film with Dietrich (The Devil Is a Woman), the director continued to create films of sexual reversal, if not celebrating androgyny, exploring it with all the thoroughness and morbid curiosity of a child examining a squashed bug” (Bell-Metereau 106). In his final film, The Saga of Anatahan (1953), Sternberg incorporates the idea of organic unity in male and female relationships: twelve Japanese sailors chant to the singular “Queen Bee,” among them, “ ‘You and I, like an egg—you, egg yellow, I egg white—I embrace you!’ This chant indicates the symbiotic aspect of the combination as well as the centrality of the female figure, the yolk that consumes the white as it grows” (Bell-Metereau 106–7).

With World War II, films in the United States grappled with changing gender roles, and Cary Grant dresses as an extremely uncomfortable WAC to follow his new bride to America in Howard Hawks’s I Was a Male War Bride (1949). This agonized representation of sex-role reversal contrasts with Billy Wilder’s groundbreaking Some Like It Hot (1959), appearing only a decade later. Jack Lemmon plays a cross-dressing member of an all-girl band, Daphne, who engages in a romance with a millionaire named Osgood (Joe E. Brown). The film is famous for its ending, in which Daphne confesses that he cannot marry Osgood because he is actually a man, to which Osgood replies, “Nobody’s perfect.” Although this is a comedy, filled with exaggeration and caricature, it is tantalizing in its open ending, hinting at the possibility of gender-nonconforming marriage. The end of the 1950s paved the way for a number of portrayals of psychotic transgender characters, the most infamous being the schizophrenic Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1959). Although the film depicts a monstrous character, he is portrayed with such subtlety and charm by Perkins that he was never able to escape the persona created by the film.

While Hitchcock’s Psycho endures in the pantheon of classic cross-dressing psychological thrillers, William Castle’s Homicidal (1961) stands out as a somewhat neglected homage to Psycho, with many of its psychological subtleties unrecognized. As David Sanjek observes, Castle’s most famous film (perhaps aside from cheesy cult favorite The Tingler [1959]) was Homicidal, precisely because it offers hints at a backstory of the abuse and torture that produces the character of Warren/Emily, a psychopathic transvestite: few trash films, whether produced within or outside the Hollywood system, treat their characters, and particularly their “monsters,” as anything more or less than cardboard figures with little substance other than the function they serve in a rudimentary narrative. Even less frequently do trash filmmakers induce sympathy or pity for their characters. Homicidal is an exception to the rule and the only film that Castle produced that not only scares one’s pants off but also brings a tear to one’s eye for the fate of the “monster” (Sanjek 248). In spite of such praise, Sanjek also argues that, unlike Psycho, Castle’s Homicidal lacks “a sense of the desolate core of American life” (260). The film’s allusions to sex-change procedures in Denmark suggest the possibility of surgical sex alteration, but the director leaves the question open-ended. Ultimately, Castle is not necessarily progressive in his depiction of such operations, but the mere mention of the Scandinavian treatment was daring. The film’s conclusion follows Robin Wood’s claim that horror films offer a binary of the repressed other in the monster, viewing the project of horror films as “the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, . . . an object of horror, a matter for terror,” with a “ ‘happy ending’ (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression” (201). Audiences felt sympathy and sometimes covert admiration for the characters in both Psycho and Homicidal, a pattern later repeated in Anthony Hopkins’s description of a cannibalistic figure who wants to literally crawl inside his mother’s skin in Silence of the Lambs.

During the 1960s and 1970s, avant-garde artists had their share of raucous and X-rated fun with gender, beginning with Jack Smith’s underground experimental film Flaming Creatures (1963). Opening at New York’s Bleecker Street Cinema, the film tested obscenity laws, with a number of venues avoiding exhibition, while one suffered a police raid for showing the short film. In 1964, police stormed into a screening by Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, and Florence Karpf, seizing the print and charging violation of the obscenity law in New York. This action prompted Susan Sontag and Mekas to flood the media with statements and essays arguing for freedom of expression and the artistic merits of the film, thus ironically catapulting the film to notoriety and cult status far beyond anyone’s expectations. Smith’s work appears to be randomly structured, opening with hand-lettered title and cast pages, a fuzzy shot of a long-haired woman, random shots of a flaccid penis, and a hilarious advertisement for lipstick, jumping to a graphic orgy scene and finally concluding with an orgasmic earthquake. Cloudy black-and-white visuals, scratchy melodramatic orchestral accompaniment, and references to Ali Baba recall the era of early film. In a campy ad scene, actors in drag do a fake commercial that asks the question, “Is there lipstick that doesn’t come off when you suck cocks?”

The controversy over this film continued for years, with critical reception ranging from complete dismissal of the artistic merit to Sontag declaring the film a “rare modern work of art: it is about joy and innocence” (229). Groups that encountered interference with exhibition of the film included the University of New Mexico, the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, and the University of Notre Dame, which erupted in the school’s first violent conflict between students and police in 1969. The state supreme court of New York reversed the conviction of the exhibitors, and eventually in the 1990s, major institutions began exhibiting the work. Fifty years after the original arrests, the prosecutor issued an apology to Mekas for his misguided attitudes toward censorship.

Even more famous but much less controversial for including transgender actors, Andy Warhol cultivated Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling, who starred in the art films Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), and Women in Revolt (1972). Woodlawn, a Puerto Rican actress, was also known as Holly in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” Reaching larger audiences, quirky films such as Myra Breckenridge (1970) and La Cage aux Folles (1978) drew art-house viewers. Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), based on the successful musical, built a cult following for repeat midnight showings, in which the audience came in drag, singing, dancing, reciting lines, and playing with props such as newspaper hats and water pistols. Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982), aimed at popular audiences, garnered Academy Awards and prompted the lead actor, Dustin Hoffman, to admit that—like many women—he also wanted to be beautiful. Although these films all reflect growing shifts in public attitudes, it is not until the 1990s that real changes occurred in a large number of serious mainstream films.

If films of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s generally presented shallow or distorted portrayals of transgender characters as comic, psychotic, scary, or pitiful, the 1990s witnessed an explosion of more nuanced portraits. The decade offers a pivotal transformation in the depiction of transgender protagonists and LGBTQ pioneers. Some of these pioneers have popped up in unexpected places, including the late twentieth-century Harlem drag scene, the early twentieth-century literary scene, and the arrival in the West from Japan of the form of anime. Three outstanding examples reflect these trends: Jennifer Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991), Sally Potter’s Orlando, and the anime series Sailor Moon (1992).

Livingston broke new ground in the documentary Paris Is Burning, but not without controversy. The director spent seven years getting to know the African American and Hispanic participants in drag balls in Harlem and understanding the social structure surrounding these entertainments. The expected drag categories include gender-bending clothing, but Livingston also documents expanded concepts of drag with categories such as “Town and Country,” “Military,” or “Executive.” Participants’ discussions of these categories reflect a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which we all are “in drag” in one form or another, presenting an identity through clothing and body modifications. Most of the contestants belong to a “House,” such as LaBeija, Extravaganza, or Pendavis, run by a “legendary” head of the household, many of whom call themselves “mothers” to their younger followers. Livingston’s film offers an intimate glimpse into a world where participants open up to her and share their dreams and fears.

With the success of Paris Is Burning, Livingston was accused of various forms of exploitation. bell hooks argues that “what viewers witness is not black men longing to impersonate or even to become like ‘real’ black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized vision of femininity that is white” (148). Livingston was also accused of exploiting and co-opting black experience. She found herself in a bind, with regard to compensating her subjects: a journalistic ethic would forbid her from paying interviewees, while a humanitarian ethic would dictate compensation to people who have low or no income. She was sued for $40 million by one participant, although the film only grossed $3,779,620 in the United States. The subjects dropped their claims when attorneys showed signed releases and awarded about $55,000 to thirteen participants (Green).

When the renowned novelist Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando—the fanciful tale of an Elizabethan aristocrat who miraculously survives for several centuries and transforms into a woman along the way—she had no idea that the central character would become a transgender movie icon. Woolf was suspicious of cinema, and as one of the first to write about film adaptations of literature, she claimed that cinema “largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim” (350). The director Sally Potter recognized the rich cinematic possibilities for Woolf’s novel and cast a lanky Tilda Swinton as the ambiguously gendered lead in Orlando, a 1992 art-house film that continues to delight lovers of Woolf, androgyny, and quirky satires about English literature and society. Swinton had stage experience with trans roles, playing a woman who impersonates a male in Manfred Karge’s 1988 translation of Bertolt Brecht’s Man to Man, a World War II piece about a woman who disguises herself as a man in order to take over her dead husband’s job. Swinton also played Mozart in the stage production of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri. Slim, square-shouldered, fair-haired, and almost six feet tall, Swinton was a natural fit for the role of Orlando. Like the fictional character, Swinton studied English literature and came from an ancient aristocratic family.

The scholars Sara Villa and Sharon Ouditt observe significant connections between the novel and Potter’s film adaptation. In spite of Woolf’s use of the negative vampire image for film adaptation, she makes self-conscious use of photographs, cinematic devices, and imagery in her novel, as if foretelling the decline of the novel as the dominant narrative genre. Some transgender critics claim that Woolf’s original novel has no legitimate place in the canon of trans literature, because it presents a figure who has no previous desire to change genders, goes through no transition phase, and seems relatively untroubled in her posttransition life as a female. Chris Coffman argues, however, that despite these differences, contemporary readers should “read Orlando’s interrogation of desire, gender, and embodiment as productively aligned with contemporary feminist and transgender politics.”

The background to the novel is a relevant footnote to the film, starting with a dedication to Woolf’s beloved Vita Sackville-West. This aristocratic connection sets the stage for an allegory of the declining fortunes of the Sackville-West family and of many other noble families in England. Woolf critiques the precarious position of female heirs in the British primogeniture system of inherited titles and property, passed exclusively through male lines. On a more powerful and personal level, people familiar with Woolf’s intimate relationship with Sackville-West immediately recognized a resemblance between Orlando and Woolf’s friend, whose son, Nigel Nicolson, calls the novel “the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which [Woolf] explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her” (203). If the novel was Woolf’s love letter to Sackville-West, Sally Potter’s film adaptation was her love letter to Woolf and her powerful trans character. Updating the narrative, Potter still uses self-conscious shots in which Swinton gazes directly into the camera, not unlike Woolf’s frequent direct addresses to her readers.

The recurring criticism of films depicting LGBTQ characters with the use of straight or nontransgender actors goes back to Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), which features Terrence Stamp playing an aging drag queen on tour in Australia. The film enjoyed widespread international popularity on its release and has since become a lasting cult classic. Although it may be argued that Stamp has no way of relating authentically to the character, this assumes that a straight or nontransgender actor has no sense of vanity or desire to be beautiful. The strategies used in this film demonstrate how identification may be achieved through a combination of intelligent direction and technical effects.

Given that movies convey a large amount of information in an incredibly condensed space, lighting keys (like genres or formulaic narratives) provide t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Trans Tropes
• 2. Breaking Boundaries in the New Millennium
• 3. New Platforms and New Voices
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Selected Filmography
• Index
• About the Author