Transgender Nostalgia

If you follow the logic of They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, the documentary on Orson Welles and the attempt to make his final film, then the Netflix release of The Other Side of the Wind is a vindication for the embattled auteur. And it may well be, but that’s not what I’m interested in. Nor am I even interested in the particulars of the way that this zombie of a film lurched back to life, interesting though that story undoubtedly is. To me the film raises the issue of memory and the way the past comes back to haunt us.

In our nostalgia-saturated landscape, the era of reboots and remakes and sequels (oh my), there’s almost a ritual quality to revisiting a work of art from one’s childhood, however loosely I use the terms “ritual” or “work of art”. The past exerts a pull on us all, no matter how strongly we might resist being sucked into the current fervor over the retro and the once-great. Like the backward-looking people who want to “Make America Great Again”, the media establishment is constantly resurrecting preexisting properties in an effort to cash in on the desire for a halcyon day now long gone: the familiar is comfortable, even when it’s not.

That’s why two of my favorite remakes are David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, two films that willingly defy their source material and the original property they reference. These films offer only change. Transgender nostalgia is an oxymoron.

Jingle All the Way is one of two films starring Sinbad (the other being First Kid) of which I have a very strong recollection. I particularly remember the sequence in which Arnold Schwarzenegger battles a group of Santas and the finale in which Schwarzenegger becomes Turbo Man in a sequence that I now realize speaks to the way in which Schwarzenegger is pulled by the gravity of his own action hero persona. Just as Tim Allen can’t help but become Santa Claus in another key absentee-father-turned-hero film, The Santa Clause, Schwarzenegger can’t help but become Turbo Man; heaven forbid Schwarzenegger and his son, the future Darth Vader, experience real growth. In the laziest kind of resolution, Schwarzenegger steps into the shoes of his son’s preexisting hero and proves his love by managing to not kill himself and any number of bystanders with a fully-functional superhero-style jetpack. Like a rom-com, Jingle All the Way hinges on flashy gestures and dramatic moments rather than real human development.

Not only does Schwarzenegger fail to show any real progress in terms of work-life balance, his son fails to overcome his rather shallow obsession with Turbo Man and merely comes to appreciate a father who steps into a costume and gifts him the toy he wants. At least the kid can be forgiven for being a kid. But I suppose a film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger teaches his son a lesson about not always getting what you want wouldn’t provide an opportunity for the zany action of Jingle All the Way. Like a silent slapstick comic but without the talent of a Chaplin or Keaton, Schwarzenegger careens through a series of frenetic chases, brawls, and pratfalls; this is the kind of film Fatty Arbuckle might have made in the 1990’s. As a kid the film is a colorful and energetic distraction. As an adult the film is a monument to holiday cynicism and the sheer sensory-assaulting brutality of holiday capitalism and consumerism.

After I watched the Coen Brothers new film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, I wrote this down: “Well, the Coen Brothers have done it again. If by ‘done it’ you mean made the same excellent movie for the fourth of fifth time.” As pop culture continues its massive feedback loop, I can’t help but be disappointed that filmmakers like the Coens or Wes Anderson have failed to evolve significantly.

It’s a bit like re-watching the James Bond series, whose surface-level shifts over the years belie the fact that Bond hasn’t really changed since Dr. No. The “Bond film” is the essence of the cinema as a repeatable phenomenon. When I watch James Bond, I can’t help but think of Laurie Penny’s assertion that watching the films is “like having your forebrain slowly and laboriously beaten to death by a wilting erection wrapped in a copy of the Patriot Act”. The Bond film is the ultimate film series in more ways than one. When the sun burns out and humanity ceases to exist, there will still somehow be another actor chosen to replace James Bond.

I suppose that The Other Side of the Wind is ahead of its time, to the extent I am obliged to say so. The constant, almost hostile presence of cameras and recording equipment has certainly proven only truer as time progresses. I also perhaps have an obligation to refer to The Other Side of the Wind as a key film of the Trump era for its portrayal of a flailing masculinity adrift in a rapidly changing landscape. Like James Bond, Jake Hannaford is an artifact from (we hope, at least) another time, somehow given life again. In contrast to its might-have-been-contemporary Network, which forecasts a bleak future ruled by hollow televisuality, The Other Side of the Wind projects a bleak past ruled by a deep, self-destructive white masculinity. How violent is nostalgia?

And now that I’ve seen Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, I finally feel like we have an answer to that question: if Tarantino is to be believed, very. Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are relics of the past with fading careers under their belts. The film, set in 1969, neatly avoids the tectonic shifts happening in film that gave birth to the New Hollywood (Easy Rider, a clear bellwether of the movement, was released the year Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood takes place) and focuses on the dying Old Hollywood, represented by Rick and Cliff. Cliff Booth nostalgizes over the time he beat up Bruce Lee and Marvin Schwarz holds “a Rick Dalton fucking film festival”. The past is king; it even manages to stop the Manson Family from murdering Sharon Tate et al. Rick and Cliff represent the sort of violence that built America upon the bodies of African and Indigenous populations (it’s no coincidence that one of the films that Rick works on in Italy is an overtly racist Western). The youthful, hippie Manson Family is no match for old-school white male violence.

The most disappointing movie I’ve seen all year has to be the Breaking Bad movie El Camino. For a film that theoretically takes place following the climax of the series, it sure looks backwards a lot. I wanted to see Jesse’s life after Breaking Bad, but what we got was a hell of a lot of Jesse’s life during the series. Been there, done that. What’s next?

Well, next is Parasite, that rare film that is actually as good as (in fact, better than) the mainstream cinema establishment thinks it is (it’s a bit disheartening to hear my family talk about Parasite the same way they talked about Green Book). Parasite looks relentlessly forward: its protagonists can’t afford not to. The past emerges almost exclusively as a painful entity that threatens the carefully constructed, tenuous present. Nothing says this better than the large sedimentary rock that appears throughout the film; the layers and layers of history amount to little more than extra weight with which to be bludgeoned. It’s a useful reminder of the way the past is used against marginalized communities, be they the working-class family of Parasite or even female ghostbusters who are told not to “ruin” what was not that great a pair of movies to begin with.

One of the pieces of writing that has struck me the most lately is a recent article in Film Comment by Michael Koresky called “Not Buying It”. According to Koresky (who also writes the must-read column Queer & Now & Then, in which he explores queer film history), “Parasite won’t beget more movies that are like Parasite, just more movies that are Parasite—a remake miniseries is in the works; after all, it’s already been tested.” Sad, but unfortunately true. One thing that Koresky’s Queer & Now & Then column has taught me is to look to the past not for validation of my existing beliefs but to find ideas and expressions I never previously dreamt of. Excavating film from a queer perspective is a bit like discovering one’s own queerness for the first time repeatedly.

For a film that literally excavates cinema, look no further than Dawson City: Frozen Time. I first saw the film a couple of years ago, but my interest was renewed when MUBI put the film on their 30-day rotating streaming platform. Told in large part through the films literally unearthed from beneath a small town, Dawson City uses the past to tell both its own past and the future. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.

Since I began this piece in 2019, movie theaters have closed due to COVID-19. I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, except that despite knowing it’s the right decision, I can’t stop myself from selfishly missing cinema and specifically my local art house theaters. The last thing I saw in a theater was a four-film 35mm Film Day marathon at the Sie in Denver, after which I wrote a piece I called ‘Loose Change‘. The takeaway of the day was that I needed to rethink my behavior patterns:

if Scott Pilgrim is a sucker punch to the face, then Buffalo ’66 is like a hard blow to the groin, in the best way. If I’m inspired to change my lonely ways, it may be because of characters like Gallo’s Billy Brown, a character so ruined by self-hate and self-pity that he barely understands how to interact with the rest of the world. I don’t ever want that to be me: blistering with a sense of entitlement over the things the world never seems to give out. That’s not how the world works

The memory of 35mm Film Day keeps me smiling in hard times, but the thought of the future — of myself, of cinema, of cinema writing, of this site, even the future of progressive U.S. politics despite Sanders’ loss in the primary — that keeps me actually moving forward.