A Brief History of Staring Into Mirrors

“Each image of the film (each shot or each frame) is reflected by a shard of mirror; one single body, for example, could thus be represented according to its parts, each part needing a shard of mirror. … The arrangement of the fragments of mirror, and not the character of what is reflected in them, is such that this banal spectator can in no way glimpse a reflection of himself: he is thus situated on the site and on the geometric point that render him absolutely invisible.”

—Jean Louis Schefer

1. Remember Sammy Jenkis

I have an affinity for Leonard Shelby, Guy Pearce’s character in Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Like Leonard, I rely on routine to live. I sometimes wonder if Memento is where I cribbed my coping skill to organize the minutiae of my life, the difficult stuff for me to do, in to steady routines. I know this works because when those routines are broken, those activities are more psychically painful and often don’t get done at all. Changes of time and setting disrupt the routine and make it harder for me to think, to collect my thoughts into something recognizable, to focus my energy on a creative task.

At one point Leonard narrates, “we all need mirrors to show us who we are sometimes”. Like Leonard, I need those mirrors more than most. I look at the self-inflicted scars on my arm, reminders, like Leonard’s tattoos, of things (people, places, moments) I feel at risk of forgetting.

What follows is all about mirrors, physical and metaphorical. Like everything I’ve ever written, this is one of those mirrors, too. I’m reminded of Elyn Saks in The Center Cannot Hold, writing “[w]ork is both my solace and my mirror—when I lose track of who I am, it is there on the page, to remind me”. If I dart perhaps too rapidly between the personal and the analytical, then that’s just a consequence of the shape of my mirrors. After all, I have looked for so long to the world around me, movies especially, to figure out who I am, I don’t know how to be me without them, without staring cooly at a row of mirrors and seeing the patterns they form. Patterns, real and imagined, dominate my life. And mirrors illuminate and obscure in equal measure.

2. Shiny Sensuous Surfaces

The experience of seeing The Danish Girl was like a mirror set in deep space, one that reflected an expired image, dead light that showed me a version of myself, a version of being trans, I gave up long ago.

Transgender characters, and transgender people, have for too long been the product of other (cisgender) people’s vision, built up into images that do not represent us. Those images range from medical object (sexological discourse), imposter who metaphorically rapes all women by merely existing (radical feminist discourse the likes of Janice Raymond), object of sexual revulsion, fetish image. Even within the already narrow scope of The Danish Girl‘s narrative, the film is a false image constructed by cisgender people. Borrowing from Casey Plett’s writing about the “Gender Novel”:

Each protagonist is a chosen one, a lone wolf plodding on against adversity. They do no wrong; they remain gentle and stoic in the face of difficulty. Whatever imperfections they show are forgiven, usually by dint of gender trouble. “I felt unusually brave that day, a soldier along in the trenches,” Sydney says, describing a cold trudge to the clinic for chest-reconstruction surgery. This might make for inspiring reading, but it’s odd to spend a few hundred pages with someone who goes through hell and emerges with all the flaws of a Disney hero. The reader scarcely knows anything about the characters’ inner lives.

As Plett herself has discussed with Jonathan Kay, Lili in The Danish Girl fits this model very well, including her (and the film’s) acceptance of her death as no big deal, really, all part of Lili as a “gentle and stoic” “chosen one” “plodding on against adversity”. The film is, to quote Plett again, “the kind of safe, syrupy-tragic movie that cis people are supposed to like and feel good about liking”. The Danish Girl is the Caitlyn Jenner of movies, and Lili is the polite, un-challenging trans woman who bleeds in all the right ways.

The Danish Girl is terrible not just in the story it tells but how it tells it. I can scarcely recall a movie more obsessed with clothing and physical appearance. As a director, Tom Hooper is deeply concerned with visual texture and surface, and this comes through in the loving detail he gives to his environments and the physical presence of the world. But The Danish Girl‘s obsession with its shiny sensuous surfaces bothers me precisely because Hooper doesn’t go any further. In fact, the film might be described as a series of colliding surfaces — feminine/masculine, paint/canvas, skin/clothing — without any cogent analysis of what that really means.

Femininity is the real star of the film, and particularly because this femininity appears on a body designated “male” and therefore “man” and therefore “masculine”, it provokes what Julia Serano calls effemimania, “an obsession with ‘male femininity'”. Femininity, masculinity’s mysterious Other, becomes all the more entrancing when it appears on a body that has not been sanctioned for it. The spectacle of feminization — what Rani Baker calls the film’s “frilly forced femme fantasy” — which structures The Danish Girl completely, is a particular way of seeing trans women. Hence the film’s repeated use of clothing as a signifier of both gender and identity, to separate the rigidly compartmentalized Lili and Einar. Two people, one body, each a mirror image of the other.

3. Eye/Me

There are consistent ways that movies have of seeing the trans body, beyond — or rather consonant with — the movements of the narrative itself. While the narrative may present stereotypical images of trans people by way of character actions — for example, the portrayal of trans people as murderers or victims — this is distinct from the specific structures of looking that enable these representations in the first place. So while it is crucial to discuss the “frilly forced femme fantasy” of The Danish Girl and the larger cultural narratives it is intertwined with, it is worth examining the mechanisms behind the narrative.

Films typically strive for a legible visual economy: the communication of information in the most concise, visual way possible. That’s why visual motifs are so prominent; once one works, it is repeated and it develops into a recognizable piece of cinema, the cinematic equivalent of a word. Let’s take Transamerica as an example. The trope of the trans woman applying make-up constitutes such a motif at the level of the image, that is, in the content of the frame rather than the way the image is presented. The depiction of a trans woman applying make-up through fragmented close-ups constitutes a motif on the level of form, the way the content of the image is presented. When these images come as out introduction to the character, they work on a third tenet, structure: the placement of an image or event in a particular narrative pattern. All three concern us here, as they are inextricable from one another and without clear boundaries; together they comprise the way the body is imaged. What I am trying to emphasize is form: the specific parts of cinematic speech that speak the trans body.

In matters of gender, from a cisnormative cultural perspective, the visual takes supremacy. There are a number of ways that people will attempt to reinforce the sex/gender binary — genetics, chromosomes, life experiences, reproductive capacity — but the visual, the sight of the genitals, is the first way a human being is sexed and gendered and it retains its influence going forward. As we grow, the visual realm encompasses secondary sex characteristics as well, but the principle remains. Cinema typically uses the sight of the body as the focal point in determining gender. (The rare exception to the visual rule in cinema is instances where a trans character is outed by their voice or by the touch of another character. In these cases, sound and touch offers the proof that the visual cannot.) This makes cinema an ideal medium for constructing conceptions of gendered bodies, and trans bodies particularly.

Films that depict trans characters almost invariably, in doing so, define what trans is. Perhaps it is genitals, perhaps it is clothing, perhaps it is behavior, but whatever. In doing so, they remind the audience not just what trans is but what cis is, too. To quote Patricia Hill Collins, “individuals who stand at the margins of society clarify its boundaries”^†; trans people are thus depicted in a way that suggests where the boundaries of gender lie. Trans people, when depicted, allow cis people to depict themselves as well, by looking at trans people and seeing someone clearly outside norms. This depiction of cis people comes not particularly as the depiction not of cis bodies (because, really, cis bodies are too normalized to even be imaged as cis bodies) but rather through spectatorship itself. The cisgender audience sees itself seeing the trans person. The audience of The Danish Girl sees itself seeing Lili. This is what the spectacle of feminization does: it allows normality to be drawn in the negative space of the trans image.

The Danish Girl is, quite transparently in fact, all about looking, and gendered looking at that. This is stated outright by Gerda, who doesn’t know what subtext is and directly addresses her male portrait-model’s discomfort at the reversal of the male-looking/woman-looked-at dynamic. This is an expression of the idea that looking is a form of power, while being looked at is a form of subjugation. Lili is a painter before her transition, and is painted during and after. So her transition as framed by the film, from male to female (to scarf flowing in the wind, which is insulting but at least a step up from a plastic bag) involves transition from bearer of the look to object of the look. What’s more, it is Gerda’s own look that creates Lili, and sets her transition in motion, suggesting a rigidly binary and heterosexist gender framework whereby Gerda’s adoption of the male power of the gaze feminizes Einar, turning him into Lili.

The Danish Girl is only one film, but it fits a larger pattern, reflects with an uncanny lack of self-awareness, the cis-dominated tropes and landscapes that birthed it. The presentation of the trans person as a construct of other people’s vision cuts close to the bone, remembering how much of my identity as a young closeted trans kid to a tentatively out trans adult was influenced by other people’s perception, by how other people saw trans people. Artificial trans entities in cinema and other discourses, particularly Sean Young in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, influenced me so much at one time that looking back, I don’t really remember being an actual person. My madness compounds the sense of unreality that I struggle to escape to this day, but nonetheless, I look back and, well, I realize I didn’t actually exist. I was only a construction of other people’s visions. I’m still trying to get their eyes off me.

Transgender people, in The Danish Girl, exist inherently as objects of the look. They exist to be looked at but also because they are looked at, appearing only under someone else’s eyes, specifically the eyes of cisgender people. Gerda creates Lili by seeing her, as does the audience. In one scene, Einar undresses in front of a mirror, tucks his penis, and holds a dress in front of his body; this is intercut with Gerda sketching a portrait of Lili. “What you draw, I become”, Lili says of Gerda. When you combine this with the prominence of the classic “feminization montage”, it becomes clear that Lili is the object of others’ creation: Gerda by painting, and Dr. Warnekros by medical and surgical transition. There is no possibility of an active subject position in this framework. Incorrect though it may be, it does serves as a potent metaphor for the trans person in most conventional cinematic representations: a constructed entity made by the camera eye, existing only to be looked at, like Bree Osborne in Transamerica (see “The Look, Interrupted” for an analysis of this scene). This is one reason it is crucial that trans people play trans roles, so that transgender identities (in the most inclusive sense) are not seen as constructs akin to the sets and props.

4. How Do You Look?

When I described the gaze on trans women as an interruption of the look, I also used the phrase “cisgender gaze”, a term I’ve come to regret. Not just for its all-too-easy equation to the concept of the male gaze, which is useful but nonetheless simplifies dynamics of looking relations. Not just because the term “cisgender gaze” risks reducing the matter to a binary opposition of cis and trans. But, like male gaze, the term cis gaze erases the possibility of transgender spectators engaging in so-called oppositional viewing practices. I much prefer the more descriptive “interrupted look” and “to-be-defined-ness”^† to describe the way trans bodies are looked at rather than the assignation that is “the cis gaze”; after all, the apparatus cannot itself be cisgender, merely motivated by the values and standards of a cisnormative culture. The apparatus — which finds trans people in violation of visual codes adjusts itself to re-place them within a more “comprehensible” (read: cisnormative) framework — is a product of its context but it cannot be said to be synonymous with it.

Cis people are bearers of the look, this much is true. When Fergus sees Dil naked for the first time in The Crying Game, it is his cis perspective that creates his shock and revulsion, a perspective that the audience is meant to share. But what of the moment when Jame Gumb dances in solitude in front of the camera in The Silence Of The Lambs? The camera, the diegetic observer, belongs to Gumb, a trans woman. The sequence might be defined, in the most literal sense, as a trans gaze. But the sequence nonetheless belongs to a pattern of exploitative visual imaging of trans people. That the look belongs to Gumb does not necessarily mean the film subverts the dominant representational norms.

Defining the apparatus as cis only further alienates trans cinematic viewership, ignoring that trans people watching these films remain trans even as the apparatus takes on cisnormative forms.

Recognizing that cinema’s way of looking does not really belong to anyone, or at least that there are distinctions between a cis/trans gaze and a cisnormative/trans-inclusive gaze, we can continue to ask the question, how would cinema look if it changed its way of seeing trans people, if trans people ceased to carry the burden of to-be-defined-ness? Would it be a new, as-yet-unthought way of seeing, or would it simply constitute a lack of existing exploitative visual practices? What would it look like to strip the camera’s gaze of its power to Other trans people?

The transgender rom-com Boy Meets Girl gives us conventional cinematic language reappropriated while nonetheless left intact. It’s a step in the right direction regarding freeing the camera from the conventions of seeing trans people.

First, trans woman Ricky as a young girl defends herself against a flasher by flashing him back, surprising the man with a revelation of her genitals. It’s exactly the same dynamic as provides the shocking twist in The Crying Game (except the audience of Boy Meets Girl is not placed in the POV of the flasher), used as a form of empowerment and defense. Ricky is taking conventional perceptions of the trans body and using them for her advantage, while the film gives Ricky power visual power: the camera switches from a perspective emphasizing the flasher as subject to one where Ricky becomes the looking subject even as she submits herself to being looked at. In this case, being looked at within the frame (both for the flasher and Ricky) is conflated with the power of the look.

5. Mirrors

Nothing says “this character is trans” like a mirror. Mirrors are ubiquitous in films about trans people, specifically mirrors that usually naked or partly naked trans people stand in front of, looking at themselves. Mirrors are a structuring force in our visual language, particularly when it comes to trans people, for whom mirrors become sites of identity and self. In my experience as a trans person I can attest to the power of the mirror, that object which, whether it bears truths or falsehoods, can come to dominate one’s own sense of perception. The ubiquity of trans characters and mirrors, though, suggests other dynamics.

In a sense, the trans person is allowed to be looker and looked-at because they exist in a non-binary gender space. This is well illustrated in the first Lili scene of The Danish Girl (a film which cannot be accused of neglecting the mirror trope), when Einar wears stockings and ballet shoes, holding a dress to his chest, effectively splitting the character: Einar above, Lili below. So, Einar can look at Lili, and he does, in a POV shot in which he stares at his feminized legs, a self-look not unlike a mirror. Later we see the obligatory nude mirror scene, where Einar strips down and tucks his genitals, and then holds a dress up to his body. It’s another crucial scene in the creation of Lili (doubly so for being intercut with Gerda drawing Lili). The third prominent mirror scene features Lili watching an exotic dancer through a pane of glass, mirroring the dancer’s movements. Taken together, these three scenes (not to mention the multiple other times Lili looks into a mirror in relation to her gender) suggest that, as far as mainstream (read: cisgender-controlled) cinema is concerned, there is a transgender gaze: the self-gaze, looking into a mirror.

In Boys Don’t Cry, Brandon Teena dresses himself in front of a mirror and the audience: a reminder of the work he has to do to be stealth in the repressive milieu, but also potentially a argument on the artificiality of transgender identities. It also exposes Brandon far more physically than any other character in the film. A surface that the camera pierces, paralleling the violation of Brandon by John and Tom later in the film. I’m sure many will balk at the comparison between the two acts, but like John and Tom seeking to violently force Brandon into a binary, genital-essentialist mode through visible evidence, the audience is given visible evidence of Brandon. The similarity of the visual presentation of Brandon’s body for the audience’s perusal is masked by Brandon’s self-gaze (what’s more, the audience has already seen Brandon’s body, and thus can be at least partly absolved of complicity in curiosity and desire to look when John and Tom forcibly strip Brandon).

Films like Soldier’s Girl, I Shot Andy Warhol, Transamerica, The Tenant, Victim, and Beautiful Boxer each use mirrors to show trans women reflecting on their bodies and selves. Gumb’s camera in The Silence Of The Lambs functions much like a mirror, the vehicle for Gumb’s self-look. The reveal of Orlando’s change of sex in Orlando occurs in a mirror. The reveal of a trans woman’s penis to a cis man in Dude, Where’s My Car? takes place in a room full of mirrors, compounding the protagonist’s trans panic as he attempts to look away. The mirrors in this latter example become the ultimate site(s) of transgender revelation and the sign of the excess of the trans body.

The ubiquity of the mirror shot suggests that one of the only ways that trans people are allowed to look in our culture is at themselves, unsurprisingly since they are already positioned as objects of the gaze. The self-look, the mirror look, traps trans people in a loop, a closed visual system.

In I Want What I Want, trans woman Wendy stabs herself in the genitals with the shards of a mirror. In M. Butterfly, René slits his throat with a mirror. In these instances, the mirror becomes a site of pain and anguish. The mirror, the self-look, comes to represent something neither character can stand: an existence outside of gender norms. René dies; Wendy is cured of gender variance when she undergoes bottom surgery, enabling her to exist within the conventions of gender.

By contrast, Marina in A Fantastic Woman uses the mirror to take control of her own image. In a film that teases the audience with the question posed frequently to Marina — have you had The Surgery? — the film ultimately leaves the question unanswered by cutting to a shot of Marina naked with a mirror covering her genitalia and reflecting her face instead. This subversion is far too uncommon.