Cinema of Multiplicity: Films by Vera Drew, Jane Schoenbrun, Paul B. Preciado
The People's Joker, I Saw the TV Glow, and Orlando make new waves in trans storytelling.
To be trans has been, historically, to find oneself in other places and to project oneself where one does not belong, at least not in any conventional sense.
Susan Stryker notably brought this to the fore in the nineties in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix”, a pillar of early trans studies, in which the author draws a particular literary parallel: "I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Stryker’s speech-turned-essay alludes to the ways in which trans people are vilified and seen as monsters.
The People’s Joker, like Frankenstein’s monster itself, is the work of a mad scientist: an alchemical concoction that transmutes and transfigures one thing into another, one after another. The process of transformation is on full display. The film is a joyful, anarchic ode to life outside the boundaries: of gender, of humor, of style, of intellectual property rights.
Like Stryker, director-star Vera Drew is self-positioned within a preexisting text — the DC Comics universe, and more specifically Batman and his rogue’s gallery — as a character conventionally presented as a villain or a monster. The People’s Joker tracks a transition as a comic book origin story, reminding viewers that being trans is not so different from more widely accepted forms of pop-cultural change.
Pop culture and identification is also key to Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film, I Saw the TV Glow, in which two teenagers find themselves blurring the lines between life and the show-within-the-film The Pink Opaque. As two young television viewers bond over their love of a particular show, one of them begins to suspect that their lives are illusory and that the truth lies within the screen. One of the points of I Saw the TV Glow is that identity bleeds and slips across boundaries, whether of gender or of a television screen, a more-permeable-than-ever membrane separating two (or more) parts of a person’s identity.
The idea that a movement across identities is possible owes in many ways to the nature of trans identity itself: being trans means accepting that there is little that is immutable, particularly in terms of the self. For The People’s Joker, a more literal trans coming-of-age story, identity is as fluid as it is for the denizens of DC comics: you may start somewhere, but you’ll most likely end up somewhere else entirely. For I Saw the TV Glow, fixed identity is a false conceit, and reality is dependent on what side of the screen you’re on.
I Saw the TV Glow is Schoenbrun’s follow-up to We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, in which a young girl named Casey engages in an online role-playing game, the World’s Fair Challenge, and films the results for the world to see. It is a descent, of sorts, but also an ascent, an entrance into a strange liminal space and an analogue to a trans experience as a process of slow-burn change. The glow of computer screens and the flicker of YouTube videos accompany Casey as she uploads herself to those same venues, mapping herself onto them.
Meanwhile, Paul B. Preciado pins trans experiences onto Virginia Woolf’s classic 1928 novel in Orlando, My Political Biography. Compared to Sally Potter’s straightforward 1992 film adaptation, Preciado’s film is a prismatic mixture of adaptation and documentary that puts multiple performers in the title role. Identity, as a fluid concept, also resists its reduction to any one self. As a collage of modern trans experiences, Orlando is an exercise in identity beyond singularity.
All of these films recognize the power inherent in our media intake — whether books, movies, or television — to shape our identities, our lives, our selves. In turn, they offer new ways of viewing and new ways of perceiving and hence radical redefinitions of transgender cinema. Beyond simply representing transgender characters, the films understand the complex relationship between transgender figures and the media landscape that has shaped trans representation for decades, usually beyond the control of trans people ourselves. As directors like Vera Drew, Jane Schoenbrun, and Paul B. Preciado offer a new promise of being on screen and in life, the world expands around us.
The promise is that of a radical cinema of multiplicity, one that truly has space for all bodies and all ways of being.