You Are Society: A Tribute to Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Author’s Note: I wrote this piece and had it rejected by a site in 2018, the year Ed Wood’s opus Glen or Glenda turned 65. On the off-chance that it might have merit despite its rejection from a site I very much admire (but which will remain nameless), I have posted it here for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.

“But then the movies are an extension of life and should be treated as such, or so goes the thoughts of many writers who have and are dealing with the subject. In censoring movies, it is felt that there is little difference than if the censoring was being levied upon one’s life itself.” [1]

—Ed Wood, A Study in the Motivation of Censorship, Sex, & the Movies, Book 1

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Transgender cinema did not begin in 1953, the year of Glen Or Glenda‘s release, just like trans people did not just spontaneously begin to exist in 1952, the year Christine Jorgensen made headlines as a trans woman, precipitating Glen or Glenda. But as a direct response to Jorgensen’s fame and driven by director Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s own experiences, Glen Or Glenda is a watershed moment in transgender cinema: one of the first films to deal openly with reality-based transgender subject matter. On the 65th anniversary of Glen or Glenda, it is worth revisiting both the film and its maker.

My primary source on the life and work of Wood is Rudolph Grey’s fantastic oral history Nightmare of Ecstasy, which chronicles Wood’s life and work in detail [2]. Grey’s book takes a mythic approach, painting Wood as nothing if not larger-than-life. Born in 1924 in Poughkeepsie, NY, Wood served in the Marines and saw combat in the Pacific theater of WWII before finding his way to Hollywood, where he began to write and direct films (and at least one play).

His first feature film, Glen or Glenda (also known as I Changed My Sex and I Led Two Lives, among other title variations), was released in 1953, and he continued writing and directing films — most famously Plan 9 From Outer Space, released in 1959 — until his final film, The Only House, in 1971. Wood worked fast and rough, getting the shot however he could, making films on comparatively shoestring budgets (Glen or Glenda cost $26,000) that he put together tooth and claw (such as agreeing to be baptized to get money for what was then called Grave Robbers From Outer Space, or overselling shares in another film). Far outside of the mainstream in the realm of underground and exploitation cinema, Wood’s work encompasses a range of genres — horror and science fiction (Plan 9 from Outer Space, Bride of The Monster, Night of the Ghouls), crime (The Violent Years, Jailbait), social issue drama (Glen Or Glenda, The Violent Years), and sexploitation (The Sinister Urge, Take It Out In Trade) — and showcases a love of classic Hollywood cinema, such as the horror films of Wood’s friend and collaborator Bela Lugosi.

Wood was also a prolific writer of fiction. He wrote numerous short stories (some of which were compiled into the 2014 anthology Blood Splatters Quickly) and novels, many of which deal with transgender subjects. His first novel, Black Lace Drag (1963, reissued as Killer In Drag), features a transvestite named Glen/Glenda who works as a hired killer and must go on the run; the 1967 sequel Death of a Transvestite follows up with Glenda as she faces execution for her crimes. A glance at the titles of his fiction works as catalogued by Grey — Night Time Lez; Sex Museum; Young, Black, and Gay; To Make A Homo; The Death of a Transvestite Hooker; and TV Lust, among others — is suggestive of their content. And if the stories included in Blood Splatters Quickly can be considered indicative of the rest of his fiction, then he mined taboo and delicate subjects in gleefully distasteful and offensive ways (and more brashly, explicitly, and repeatedly than in his most famous films): at best a purveyor of purple prose and sensationally lurid depictions of sex and death, at worst racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic. Wood also published multiple non-fiction books, ostensible studies of movie censorship which amount to little more than excuses for dirty pictures.

Wood died in 1978, at 54 years old, of heart failure. In 1980, Harry and Michael Medved’s book The Golden Turkey Awards named him The Worst Director of All Time and Plan 9 From Outer Space the Worst Film of All Time [3].

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The convention for discussions of Wood is to dissect the films he is most famous for — Plan 9, Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster — for their myriad flaws and continuity errors. Plan 9 is an “inept, berserk picture”, says Danny Peary [4]; the Medveds sarcastically suggest Wood “suffered for his originality and his refusal to accept cinematic convention” [5]; Jason Stiver ascribes to Glen or Glenda “nonsensical pseudo avant garde storytelling” [6]. Instead, I want to focus on what Wood does well and what Glen or Glenda means in the context of transgender cinema more broadly.

Glen Or Glenda was Wood’s first feature film, and putting aside reputations to the contrary, the film illustrates Wood’s storytelling talent. The film mainly tells the story of two people: Glen/Glenda (played by Wood himself, under the pseudonym Daniel Davis), a cross-dresser whose cross-dressing interferes with his relationship with his girlfriend, and Anne, a transsexual woman whose much shorter story reads like a textbook transition narrative, the perfect trans story, if you’re a gatekeeper.

Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Glen Or Glenda is structured as a series of nested stories: first we see God, played by Bela Lugosi as a Mad Scientist, followed by a conversation between a police inspector and a doctor in which the doctor provides the two principle stories. This series of frame stories emphasizes the fractured and incomplete nature of trans-spectrum people in the eyes of a society which knows us only as a collection of different external discourses. Rhona Berenstein, in her discussion of “spectatorship-as-drag”, suggests that “instead of revealing an inner core … unmasking reveals more layers of drag” [7].

In Glen or Glenda, the stories themselves are like layers of drag which are peeled back to reveal something: perhaps “truth” at the hands of medical authority, or perhaps just another layer of drag, further subjectivity and performance that resists the idea of objective truth. This reading hinges on how much weight we put into the doctor’s sympathetic but medicalizing and homogenizing stories, particularly of Anne, whose story appears to have either been selected by the doctor for fitting the gatekeeping mold of the “real” transgender woman or to have been a performance by Anne in the first place to get through the gatekeeping process. If the film appears to place a great deal of confidence in the medical establishment to dissect and define trans bodies and lives, its own structure and a close reading by those who understand trans history undermines this confidence. Glen or Glenda, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Wood’s most personal film: he’s quoted secondhand in Nightmare of Ecstasy saying “if you want to know me, see Glen or Glenda, that’s me, that’s my story. No question.” [8]

Glen or Glenda, though likely not widely seen upon its release, is a kind of ur-film for transgender cinema: it predicts the trans-themed exploitation (or transploitation) films of the late 1960’s and 1970’s — among the earliest films willing to tackle trans issues, however problematically — in both style and content. In its use of horror imagery, the film also predicts the ways in which trans people would be made into the objects of horror, most famously The Silence of the Lambs, and the film features a transgender Frankenstein comparison that foresees other similar comparisons, both negative (Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology) and positive (Susan Stryker’s seminal essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein), to say nothing of transgender Frankenstein films like Victim and The Skin I Live In.

To contrast the horror treatment, the film’s opening disclaimer — which ends on the phrase “you are society — JUDGE YE NOT” — is indicative of more liberal attitudes towards transgender subject matter even as the films themselves are more exploitative (The Danish Girl, anyone?). Transgender films since Glen or Glenda have continued to be fascinated with the medicalization of trans life and transition, often without Wood’s subtle critiques of the system. Even as a product of its time, Glen or Glenda outdoes many modern films made about trans people by expressing something from a real transgender perspective.

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So why is Wood considered the worst director of all time? Certainly there’s no accounting for taste, but really, the question gets to the heart of Wood’s career and works like Glen Or Glenda. Wood was an exploitation auteur and as such would hold no interest or negative interest to what Rudolph Grey calls “the jackals of bourgeois sensibility” on the basis of subject matter, style, and production value alone. Indeed, Wood’s films were decidedly low art, in a way that makes it difficult to judge it fairly next to, say, Orson Welles, who worked with bigger budgets, more time, and less taboo subject matter.

But to say that Glen Or Glenda is the Citizen Kane of exploitation cinema risks drawing us into another implicit hierarchy. Wood may have lacked skill, but he had talent, talent that can’t be measured in the perfectionism of a Stanley Kubrick (as Johnny Depp’s Wood says in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, “filmmaking is not about the tiny details”) or the grandeur of a David Lean, but instead in drive and that kind of special madness needed to create. While the Medveds harp on continuity errors, occasionally laughable dialogue, and a lack of special effects, there’s more to Wood’s work — any director’s work, for that matter — than the details (and for the life of me I will never understand the preoccupation with Lugosi’s “harmless as a kitchen” flub in Bride of the Monster).

I vastly prefer Cult Movies author Danny Peary’s take on Wood: “Plan 9 is a delirious movie, but perhaps we are missing the point. Could it be that putting up a crazy facade is the only way that Wood can get away with making a subversive movie?” In discussing such potential radical subtext, Peary suggests that “[b]etter directors who made pictures that made sense couldn’t get away with such pointed criticism of American institutions”. [9]

Grey claims that critics had “a field day of derision over the revelation of his transvestism” [10] (one might think that, given that Wood was apparently relatively open about his cross-dressing — and, you know, made a movie about it — this could hardly be considered a revelation, but why mess up a tried-and-true trans narrative?). Some commenters, perhaps most famously the Medveds, have tended to simply gawk. Meanwhile, there’s the oft-repeated story of Wood wearing lingerie into combat during the war, which appears practically everywhere Wood is mentioned, including the back cover of Blood Splatters Quickly [11].

In Cult Movies, though, Danny Peary has a more contextual take, describing Wood as “the radical, iconoclastic director who promoted transvestism beneath the sensationalism of Glen or Glenda” [12]. Guy Barefoot, quoting Jeffrey Sconce, similarly highlights Wood’s outsider status in the sociopolitical context of the era: “As Sconce put it, ‘Set against the bland cultural miasma of the Eisenhower years, Wood and his film stand out as truly remarkable figures’ … though they perhaps point to complications within that miasma” [13]. Indeed, Wood’s cross-dressing is relevant not only as an element of the director’s weirdness, however you feel about it, but as a counterpoint to the conservative backlash of the 1950’s and as part of the oft-hidden history of transgender art. As with many other early transgender artists, Wood worked from the margins, which gave him freedom that more mainstream artists lacked but also resigned him to obscurity, at least for a time.

Wood would, eventually, be discovered by fans and critics, and as a result was immortalized in Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy and later in Tim Burton’s excellent film Ed Wood in 1994, drawn from Nightmare of Ecstasy and starring Johnny Depp as Wood. Wood as a character and the film as a whole are unencumbered by Wood’s undeserving Worst Director status; the film is a loving portrait that hails Wood as an unsung Wellesian writer-director-actor — emphasized by a fabricated scene between Wood and Welles — who struggled against all odds to make his art.

The film is largely an homage to Wood’s fandom rather than Wood as a person or even as an artist, and as such it excludes his prolific writing career entirely to focus on the making of his three most famous films: Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Despite the many good qualities of the film and its fair treatment of Wood, the film is something of a sanitization of Wood’s legacy, cutting off with Wood in the raptures of ecstasy following the Plan 9 premiere and avoiding all discussions of Wood’s more risqué and controversial work as well as what we might reluctantly term his descent: his struggles to make ends meet and his death just as his films were being rediscovered.

But Wood’s work lives on. Many of his novels, stories and films have been republished and rereleased and are more available than ever. Wood was nothing if not a titan of low art who broke ground in ways that we may only be beginning to appreciate.

“The legend had been dispelled as a legend. The realness of reality had to leave my mind.”

—Ed Wood, “Dracula, Revisited” [14]

Sources

1. Wood, Jr., Edward D. A Study in the Motivation of Censorship, Sex, & the Movies, Book 1. Los Angeles: Gallery Publications, 1973.
2. Grey, Rudolph. Nightmare Of Ecstasy: The Life and Art Of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Portland: Feral House, 1994.
3. Medved, Harry, and Michael Medved. The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners— The Worst Achievements in Hollywood History. New York: Perigree, 1980.
4. Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful. New York: Delta, 1981.
5. Medved, Harry, and Michael Medved. The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners— The Worst Achievements in Hollywood History. New York: Perigree, 1980.
6. Stiver, Jason. “Ed Wood Jr’s ‘Glen or Glenda’ The First Trans Film?” Odyssey, July 25th 2016: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/ed-wood-jrs-glen-glenda-trans-film
7. Berenstein, Rhona J. Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
8. Nightmare Of Ecstasy: The Life and Art Of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Portland: Feral House, 1994.
9. Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful. New York: Delta, 1981.
10. Grey, Rudolph. Nightmare Of Ecstasy: The Life and Art Of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Portland: Feral House, 1994.
11. Blood Splatters Quickly: The Collected Stories of Edward D. Wood, Jr. New York: OR Books, 2014.
12. Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful. New York: Delta, 1981.
13. Barefoot, Guy. Trash Cinema: The Lure of the Low. New York: Wallflower Press, 2017.
14. Wood, Jr., Edward D. Blood Splatters Quickly: The Collected Stories of Edward D. Wood, Jr. New York: OR Books, 2014.