Trans Life in Film (Pride pt. V)

Jun 16

Tangerine

Cowboys

Disclosure

For our third week of Pride Month double features, I wanted to explore the way trans life and trans identities are represented on screen. While I’ve reviewed films with trans or gender nonconforming characters on this blog, never before have I sat down to watch films that depicted specifically trans storylines. That is perhaps an oversight on my part, but it’s also due to the fact that as a cis woman, I am well aware that I am not the ideal person to retell or summarize the way trans stories are told. In the interest of having a well-rounded, as-inclusive-as-possible line up of films for Pride Month, I did want to view movies that presented trans characters in meaningful, respectful ways. I’m not sure if the films I’ve chosen specifically do the trans community justice, in fact I know aspects of all of tonight’s films have been rightfully criticized by some trans people. But while these depictions may not be perfect, I believe that they are each, respectively, steps in the right direction. Because I’m having a hard time narrowing my choices down, we’re doing a Triple Feature of Trans Life in Film. We’ll begin with Sean Baker’s 2015 film Tangerine, a movie that, when it was first being circulated, sold itself with the proud fact that it had been shot entirely on an iPhone. This was for experimental and budgetary reasons, according to Sean Baker. This fact was all that I knew about Tangerine, as a budding film nerd who’d just joined Twitter when it premiered, but I never knew the premise. Tangerine follows Alexandra and Sin-dee (Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) two friends, trans women, and sex workers on Christmas Eve. Sin-Dee’s just been let out of jail, and Alexandra just wants to make sure her friends come see her performance that night. When Alexandra reveals to Sin-Dee that her boyfriend/employer has been cheating on her, Sin-Dee makes it her mission to track him and the woman down. The entire film is funny, exhilarating, unexpected, and surprisingly heartwarming for such a chaotic odyssey. It presents the audience with a side of a LA they may not be familiar with, and a perspective they likely never explored previously. I’d been told that Sean Baker’s films offer humanizing, lovable slices of lower class life, but given the fact that Baker is a white, cisgendered male, I proceeded with caution. Surprisingly, Baker was able to capture this story in a thoughtful, charming way. While Baker wrote the script, many of the film’s most iconic lines were unsurprisingly improvised by the two lead actresses. Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez were already friends before filming, and it shows. Their chemistry, their disagreements, felt incredibly real. It all felt incredibly real. Just watching these two stomp down the streets of East LA, gliding past buildings that have since been demolished and/or replaced as the orange sun sets around them, was completely captivating. To see the famous Hamburger Mary’s, and to see actual trans women in trans roles, it made my heart sing. At several points during Tangerine, I clutched my pearls, waiting for something shocking and/or horrifying to be thrown at the protagonists that I’d grown to love, but it never comes. There is only one brief moment, at the very end, that did make my jaw drop, but it lead to a happier, fairly satisfying moment. So often when trans identities are represented on film, the stories are tragic beyond belief, cheaply implemented, and overall flatly characterized. Tangerine offers a different take on trans life—one where trans identities are at the core of the film, but they are not exploited. There is no lesson to be learned, no horrific hardship to overcome (beyond men who cheat), just a wild day in the life of two girlfriends. And I loved pretty much every uninhibited minute of it. A film I have much more complicated feelings about is Anna Kerrigan’s 2020 film Cowboys. Cowboys is a rarity among trans cinema, and in film in general, because it tells the coming out story of a trans man—or in this case, a trans boy. As I thought and then later had confirmed in the third film I watched, trans women are far more likely to be depicted on screen than trans men, so Cowboys is an outlier in an outlier genre. Cowboys follows Joe, a kid coming to terms with their gender identity in rural Montana. Joe is enamored with his father Troy (Steve mf Zahn), who supports him completely. His mother Sally (Jillian Bell randomly) on the other hand, does not support Joe and refuses to accept that her son is who he is. When Troy sees his wife’s inability to accept their child, he and Joe set off on an escape to Canada, where we get to see how happy this kid can be when he’s permitted to be himself. I only watched this film because I was made certain that it had a happy ending, but I completely understand if the premise alone seems terribly sad, because it was still pretty sad. It definitely belongs on my list of Movies That I Loved That I Never Need to See Again, but it was stunning to watch, nonetheless. It was a bit disturbing to see Jillian from Workaholics play a transphobe, I won’t lie, but Steve Zahn provided all of charisma that he could muster (and completely redeemed himself from that bizarre role in that bizarre movie). Sasha Knight, who plays Joe, had instant likability, much like his on-screen dad, and the two seemed like they really could be related. We’re not shown right away that Joe is trans, and while it’s a shame that so many trans narratives are implemented for a big reveal or twist, that was not the case here. It’s representation of trans youth and their parents felt authentic, in its sweetest moments and its most painful moments. And I don’t know much about Montana, but Kerrigan seemed to expertly capture both the gorgeous scenery and the history of outdated thinking within Montana and other rural, red states. While moments of this film were difficult to watch, many of it felt necessary to see—especially for those audience members that have never met a trans person, or who have very narrow ideas about trans life. I promise I won’t stand on my soapbox for too long, because my feet are killing me at this point, but it is so so so important to let children explore and dream and express themselves. The far-right tries to act like children are indoctrinated with trans propaganda that makes them question their gender and sexuality, but in reality, it’s much more simple than any complex, carefully-crafted conspiracy theory. Children know themselves better than we ever give them credit for, and in fact it’s often adults that complicate and confuse things for them. Children have desires and dreams and strong beliefs, and it’s doing our children a disservice by discounting their beliefs and desires and their dreams. Most kids I know, are less brainwashed than their parents, I can tell you that. But I digress. To see a transmasculine storyline that wasn’t an obviously problematic Oscar bait-y attempt to tell a superficially subversive story, was incredible. And to see it presented in a way that was so delicate and considerate, with a Captain Fantastic-like aesthetic, was lovely. It was a bit harrowing at times, but at the end I let out a sigh of relief. The same could not be said for Sam Feder’s 2020 documentary Disclosure, a film that made me even more sympathetic for the trans community, and even more embarrassed for cis people. I hesitate to mention too much about this film, because I believe it is one that every single cisgendered, gender-conforming person needs to see for themselves. Our culture as human beings has for so long depended upon the exploitation and use of trans identities, while simultaneously trying to shame and erase trans identities. That bewildering contrast is brilliantly explored in Disclosure, the first in-depth documentary that I’ve ever seen about trans life on screen. Going over a century of film and television, Disclosure recounts the history of trans representation within media: its indignities, its pleasant surprises, and the way it all has influenced our ideas about trans people. It covers nearly every facet and instance of trans representation (that my likely limited cis mind can imagine), and manages to cover several nuanced positions of trans narratives including, but not limited to: TERFs and their supposed threat of trans people, trans people constantly being cast and written as sex workers, trans people constantly being cast and written as dead bodies, how trans stories can typically never be featured alongside the stories of people of color, how much of the trans identity is tied to surgery, and the everlasting, always frustrating phenomenon that is cis men being cast as trans women. I could go on and on about this movie, how much it opened my eyes, and how beautifully each interviewee spoke, but instead I will encourage anyone who’s reading this to go watch it on Netflix. But maybe make watching Tangerine your priority because they’re taking it off of Netflix at the end of the month, which is the most transphobic thing Netflix has done since giving Dave Chappelle a four show deal. But again, I digress. Trans people have existed for a very long time, and they will continue to exist long after each slimy senator determined to take away their rights drops dead. If you made it this far, why not donate to some organizations that aid trans people in Texas: