7ranssexual

[Here’s a piece I wrote on Tumblr way back in 2016. Enjoy. Images taken from the film in question.]

Here’s a bit of a trans cinema easter egg, courtesy of the opening titles of David Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en. The sequence, designed by Kyle Cooper, is a chaotic, unstable series of images that detail the obsessive work of serial killer John Doe. At once methodical and erratic, it encapsulates the mind of the character and is quite justly considered one of the greatest title sequences of all time. In it, we can glimpse (however briefly) Doe working with pages of a book that deal with transsexuality.

At first I am inclined to be frustrated at the association between trans and a serial killer. Yes, here we go again, trans is monstrous. On one visceral level, that’s how I read these images. And once I’ve read them that way I can’t un-read it.

But what if we look forward instead of backward?

The 90’s were a liminal space in American trans cinema between two major paradigms in representation: the first, of course, is the trans horror monster, the offspring of Psycho’s Norman Bates, films like Homicidal, Private Parts, Deadly Blessing, Dressed To Kill, Sleepaway Camp, Heart Of Midnight, and the trope’s last really iconic image, Buffalo Bill in 1991’s The Silence Of The Lambs. At the end of the 1990’s and the beginning of the 2000’s, outright demonizing of gender variance as the dominant cinematic discourse had given way to a trope that was not overtly transphobic but still maintained the existing hierarchy: the tragic trans person. Tragic trans characters are sympathetic characters who suffer and often die for a variety of narrative purposes, but they usually amount to a pitying gaze on trans as inherently tragic existence. Such depictions were certainly not new, but after Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 Brandon Teena biopic Boys Don’t Cry, the trans victim became the new paradigm, poliferating in films like The Badge, A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story, Soldier’s Girl, Albert Nobbs, Dallas Buyers Club, Powder Blue, and most recently The Danish Girl. The 90’s is a transitional period, one where the old trope is dying off and yet nothing new was quite ready to take its place.

Which brings me back to Se7en. And the idea that blacking out the word “transsexual” and its variants is a kind of violence. Certainly indicative of the kind of mindset that would perpetrate such violence. John Doe’s imagined elimination of trans people is apparent in that single image. I can’t un-read that either.

The opening sequence of Se7en falls right smack in the middle of this transitional period. So it serves well to illustrate the fulcrum of the paradigm shift that was happening at the time. It all depends on how where you contextualize the film in trans cinema history.