Netflix Deadnames Me All the Time

A few days ago [authors note: I originally wrote this over a year ago], Netflix released a new film called Girl. I have my misgivings about the streaming video service, including the fact that Netflix deadnames me all the time, but that’s not what this is about. This is about Girl. Belgium’s submission to the Oscars (it was not nominated), Oliver Whitney has called Lukas Dhont’s Girl “the most dangerous movie about a trans character in years” [1]. Whitney’s critique stands out as the sort of trans-centric criticism so often missing from the conversation, and on the surface I can see where the writer is coming from.

 Much like The Danish Girl before it, Girl is something of a trope-stravaganza. It’s full of mirrors, lingering shots of Lara’s exposed body, an awkward sexual encounter, and the torment of transphobia. The self-harm that punctuates the story is only the logical extension of a film that seems desperate to emulate the worst of trans cinema past (it’s less graphic than the chisel scene in Let Me Die a Woman, but it packs more of an emotional punch). Even the generic gendered title, Girl, evokes previous trans films like The Danish Girl, A Girl Like Me, Let Me Die a Woman, A Fantastic Woman, Boys Don’t Cry, etc. Lukas Dhont seems to have set out to make a Transgender Film, in multiple senses of the phrase. And given that the film trades on the seemingly endless suffering of its trans protagonist, I have to admit that Whitney makes a good case.

But I didn’t write this article just to reiterate those same criticisms. In fact, after watching Girl, I find Whitney’s argument unsettling for the assumptions made about the way that trans folks engage with media. While nothing Whitney says in incorrect, per se, the argument tends to erase any form of alternate reading, suggesting that viewers, whether trans or not, simply read films at face value. Things have changed drastically even in the nearly six years since I critiqued Dallas Buyers Club for its depiction of Rayon; as viewers become increasingly sophisticated in trans issues and trans people see themselves represented in media more, there’s increasing latitude in what makes for “positive representation”, for what usefulness that term still carries at all, and I think Girl will go down as an important film for dramatizing dysphoria in a way that makes room for aspects of the trans experience people often don’t want to talk about.

Last year, I argued that Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman was “a film about films about transphobia” [2], suggesting that the film was a commentary on the way films and other media represent trans people, particularly in a social context. In contrast to films made to appease cisgender viewers, A Fantastic Woman, as I wrote previously, “subtly confronts classical liberal transgender cinema, and even the social issue drama itself, by questioning the logic of fictionalizing the traumas of the marginalized for consumption by the mainstream.” While it seems, on the surface, that Girl is exactly the type of film that A Fantastic Woman critiques, I think it’s worth reading Girl against the grain; where Whitney finds “trans trauma porn”, I find body horror. Body horror, as Stuart Gordon describes, is “[n]ot dead bodies. Your own body. And something is going very wrong. Inside. Your body is betraying you, and since it’s your own body, you can’t even run away.” [3] The key in those is the words you and your: true body horror takes the central body as its subject, not its object.

Transgender body horror has a long tradition, from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome to Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In; suffice it to say that classical Cronenbergian body horror has frequently dealt with trans issues on the sly, just as trans films have frequently featured a tinge of body horror. Girl unites these two frequencies to create perhaps a true piece of transgender body horror. And if cis women can have stories like Marina de Van’s odyssey of self-harm In My Skin, a powerful deconstruction of what it means to live in a particular body, why can’t trans women? As someone who experiences dysphoria and has engaged in self-harm, both Girl and In My Skin are important to me.

Indeed, the reason Girl resonates with me is the same reason that most body horror does: it dramatizes the body in ways that few other films are willing to. Where most trans films are obsessed with the surface of the trans body (The Danish Girl stands out as a prime example) or some rote repetition of gatekeeping narratives of being “trapped in the wrong body”, Girl actually dares to tackle the experience of inhabiting a trans body. Indeed, it strikes me that much of the cause of Lara’s emotional turbulence is precisely those sugar-coated trans narratives that proliferate throughout popular culture. Where most trans film characters suffer from the very condition of being trans, owing to the belief on the part of writers and directors that being trans is simply to be unhappy, for Lara the cause is that real life fails to live up to her expectations. When films obsess over the mechanical processes of transition, they typically neglect the phenomenological experience of being in a particular body and thus fail trans youth like Lara. The people in her life know the right things to say, in the most clinical sense, but their treatment of Lara is just that: clinical, lacking in any genuine understanding of Lara’s experiences.

For me, dysphoria has always been a nightmarish experience of being at odds with my body in ways that are ultimately inescapable, something body horror (including Girl) captures with gusto. And yes, hormone therapy helped, but it’s not enough, and while I suspect that bottom surgery will help, that too will probably not be enough, making it easy to empathize with Lara and her final moment of desperation. Body horror, and Girl, says something that most cinema, or media in general, avoids: sometimes the very fact of having a body is a nightmare.

Where classical body horror preoccupies itself with the body as it begins to change and deviate from the norm, Lara’s body in Girl becomes problematic to her precisely because it doesn’t change, making Girl a kind of anti-transition movie in which the body defies the stereotypical binary, beginning-to-end trans narrative. When her life fails to live up to transnormativity — a term one might use to describe the simplistic “positive” narratives of happy and normal (read: wealthy, white) trans people, whose poster child is Caitlyn Jenner — she resorts to drastic measures.

Writing on the films Black Swan and Rosemary’s Baby, Alissa Wilkinson says that “the uniquely terrifying implication … is of a force from inside turning you out, slowly sucking away whoever you thought you were and leaving you a shell you might not recognize.” [4] Girl is the inverse; trans folks often don’t have the luxury of recognizing themselves to begin with.

Whitney makes much of the final shot of the film, in which Lara, following her act of self-harm, walks confidently towards the camera. To Whitney the shot is problematic for presenting the self-harm as potentially beneficial for Lara. I dislike the shot for a different reason: it strikes me as a cowardly attempt to undermine the powerful shot that comes before, in which Lara stares into a mirror which warps her reflection. It’s a powerful visual representation of dysphoria (and the best mirror shot in a film full of them), and ending the film there would have been a powerful way to refuse closure of an issue that, in real life, is frequently left open.

Girl may not be the trans film that some critics want, but it’s the trans film I needed. Films about happy and healthy trans people are necessary, but films like Girl are a necessary feature of a truly diverse landscape of trans images.

1. Oliver Whitney, “Belgium’s Foreign-Language Oscar Submission, ‘Girl,’ is a Danger to the Transgender Community”. The Hollywood Reporter, December 4, 2018
2. Eleven Groothuis, “A Fantastic Woman is a Film About Films About Transphobia”, thirteenminustwo.tumblr.com
3. Stuart Gordon, “Body Horror”. In The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan
4. Alissa Wilkinson, “The Terror Inside: ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘Black Swan’. In Musings: The Printed Collection, Volume One, edited by Scott Tobias