Film Review: Transamerica (2005)

Finally, on dvd I got around to watching "Transamerica" which was first screened December 23, 2005. The dvd version includes brief conversations between the director Duncan Tucker and his lead actors, Felicity Hoffman, who plays the transgender woman, Bree, and her son, Toby, played by Kevin Zegers. There is also an optional commentary on the film by the director. I was pleasantly surprised by the film's blend of humor with melodrama, well done scenes of various locales on the road trip that Bree undertakes from East to West Coast with her son. The film begins with Bree eagerly looking forward to move ahead with a new life after surgery, but an unexpected individual from her past--her distant son's reappearance with whom she has had little contact--threatens to delay her long awaited goal. If Bree believes her own life has been derailed, so too, she realizes has that of her son. He is a runaway who lives on the streets of New York City, and who is certain only about two goals--to find his long lost father and to start his acting career.

But a conflict arises because Bree is reluctant to disclose her true identity to her Toby as his father. Exactly, why we don't know--partly, it's a sense of shame that holds her back, and partly it's a fear of taking responsibility for a young man who seeks guidance, yet rejects authority. On the way back to California at a stop at a transgender friend's house in Texas, however, we learn that Toby accepts her friend, but here Bree misses her chance. And so the film tantalizes us--when will Bree talk to her son? how will he react? Doubtlessly, some measure of secrecy is an unfortunate consequence of living with a such a stigmatized transgender identity, but at the same time in some instances, it is harmful to keep a secret.

To what extent is Bree controlled by her own fear we don't get a clear answer; if asked, she herself probably would not have an answer. This becomes the tragic fate of someone who becomes imprisoned by what is an understandable and justified fear. At times the line is very fine and difficult to discern, so often you find transgender individuals erring on the side of caution or boldness.

Bree and Toby are a study in contrasts. Bree is formal to a fault, reserved and guarded, while Toby is brash, spontaneous and outgoing--too much so. The film is as much about Bree as it is about Toby's own growth. Bree needs to confront her deepest fears from her past as a man, that is her son, who she was estranged from; Toby, to stop acting out in anger against the world and himself after having been abused.

The film's flaws were minor. Some scenes were needlessly overdramatized, like Toby's confrontation with his stepfather, and some of the dialog trite, like Toby's crude trashing of the Lord of the Rings.

Ex-Fashion Model out of control, Janice Dickinson

Having an interest in woman's fashion, last night I watched the first six installments on dvd of the realty show, Janice Dickinson, a former model, who decides to begin her own fashion agency in LA. She presents herself as a tough-talking, hard-driving, when necessary, ruthless business woman, who has a soft spot for models that remind her of herself. That is to say models who may look a bit different and not find ready acceptance and promotion. I imagine Ms. Dickinson believes she presents herself as a resourceful, confident and tenacious business woman, worthy of admiration and emulation. Doubtless, we will grant her some of these admirable qualities, but at the same time her manner is so blunt, abrasive, and overbearing that she seems a stock character from stage or film, who serves as source of our laugher, amusement and contempt. Thus her arrogant character, virtually oblivious to criticism and change, serves as one of the chief attractions of this realty show.

During the course of the show, Ms. Dickinson, who herself wears a variety of impressive outfits, ends up making the very indiscretions she counsels her models to avoid, like arriving late to an appointment and behaving oneself at a show. She also can't resist dropping all pretenses of professional conduct, when in one incident, she insists one of her male models to whom she's attracted remove his underwear, so she can check out just how much he packs.

The culmination of Ms. Dickinson's business is almost undermined by her own wild antics. Invited to serve as a queen at the White Party in Palm Springs, wearing a one of a kind designer dress, she meets the designer at the party. Here it should be added that this designer is supposed to be supplying her dresses for her opening day at her fashion agency. Unable to resist temptation, Ms. Dickinson leaps into the white fountain, insisting that she be photographed while doing so, and ruins her dress out on loan. The designer decides to take revenge, so refuses to supply dresses for the opening day of Ms Dickinson's agency. Only the entreaties of her more sensible partner to the offended designer to go ahead and supply the dresses, saves the day for her.

Overall, I enjoyed this show, which offers insight into the world of fashion, a look at fashions, and a larger than life character, Ms. Dickinson, who plays the role quite well of someone quite oblivious to her own shortcomings and flaws, which makes for great theatre.

Film Note: Kalatazov, The Cranes are Flying (1957)

I watched the Russian award winning film "The Cranes Are Flying" (Letiat' Zhuravli, 1957). It was quite an impressive piece of cinematography, featuring beautifully composed shots throughout the film, brilliant acting, moving scenes. The only fault this film, if it can be called that, is the obligatory positive treatment of Russian patriotism during WWII without any hint of the arrogance and incompetence of Stalin and his regime, which allowed the Soviet Union to be caught off guard and to suffer massive casualties, ie, to throw poorly armed or not at all armed troops into combat. Another minor flaw of this film I felt were the occasional and overly done dramatic confrontations scenes. But overall, given the political restrictions under which this was made, it is moving film.

The film focuses on Veronica's plight during the war when her virtual fiance to be, Boris, goes off to fight the war, and she waits for his return. Veronica is the epitome of virtue and dedication, but her ideals are smashed by the war and then by Mark, who manages to have his against Veronica's wishes to marry her. Much of the film depends on key symbols, like a small squirrel that Boris leaves Veronica before he marches off to the front; the migrating cranes seen at key junctures of the film. This film reminded me of Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, which was made few later in that it adopts a different perspective on the war--through the eyes of child, while in Cranes, it's through the eyes of a woman left behind.

Henry Roth, Truth and Stigma, How Silence Stifles Growth

Browsing articles posted in Arts & Letters Daily, an online list compiled by The Chronicle of Higher Education, which I provide as a link on this blog, I came across one that caught my eye and caused my pulse to quicken as I was reading it. In an essay, "Memory Unbound" in The Threepenny Review, Morris Dickstein discusses the enigmatic Henry Roth (1906-1995), an American writer, whose first novel, Call it Sleep, published in 1934, and republished with acclaim in the 1960s, but for some reason the career of Roth as a writer faltered, and he never lived up to the promise shown in his first novel. What happened to Roth? What prevented him from continuing to write and publish works like his promising first novel again?

In a word, stigma, the shame of adolescent sexual gone awry, incest. Dickstein explains:

In Shifting Landscape, a collection of essays, stories, and interviews that came out the same year, Roth contemplated the mystery of his aborted career but left out the root cause that most obsessed him. This changed in 1995, when his younger sister, missing from both Call It Sleep and the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, suddenly appeared in his work. He wrote about years of incest with her and a cousin, beginning when both were in their early teens. Though his sister was still living and in her late eighties, he rejected her heartfelt plea that he not shame them by raking up horrors from the distant past. Roth continued to resist any single explanation for his catastrophic writer's block, but it became evident that it was the incest, and the self-loathing that accompanied it, that threw the biggest roadblock across his path. As an autobiographical writer whose work depended on emotional honesty for its devastating power, he found he could not go on in fiction past the ghetto childhood brilliantly evoked in Call It Sleep. In Mercy he at last confronted the dark transgressions he could not face in the years following his first novel.

In his essay Dickstein goes on to make an appeal, arguing that there are strengths in Roth's late and multi-volume autobiographical work of strictly factual reminiscence from the 1990s. According to Dickstein, Roth in a Proustian-inspired manner comes to terms with his long suppressed dark past that clearly haunted him and stifled his writing career; paradoxically Roth does so by using modernist and postmodernist literary devices in a work that is ostensibly factual.

For anyone who has had the misfortune of bearing a stigma from childhood into adulthood, this is a bracing and moving story. Personally, I have a strong connection to this story, because I have struggled with the stigma and shame of my transgender identity in adolescence and young adulthood. But living in a much more tolerant time, the 1990s, I have found validation and solace in being able to write personal essays about my experiences, and my self-imposed prison sentence of guilt-induced silence was thankfully not as long as Roth's near life-sentence.

Stigma is the nemesis of personal growth. If ever there was something we could call a curse in our enlightened age when we regard a curse as a vestige of a supernatural world we no longer believe in, it is the silence of an adult about his or her own stigma. An adult who remains silent about their own stigmatized sexual activity (abuse, incest) or sexual identity (trans or homo or bisexuality) in adolescence is compelled to put a hold on his or her personal life and happiness.

http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/dickstein_su07.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Roth

The World Naked Bike Ride in Chicago June 2007

In the name of protesting oil dependency, a carnivalesque protest of riding nude in the manner of critical mass rides (when hundreds of cyclists ride one day a month on city streets, taking over lanes and blocking traffic for a time) takes place annually, and this year I joined the Chicago ride. Since I am on the online listservice of Chicago's Critical Mass, I found instructions notifying anyone interested to first arrive at a Chicago park from where they would be directed to a nearby private home of one of the participant-organizers. This is done to avoid creating a distraction in a public area as riders prepare for the ride in the hours leading up to it. By prepare, I mean some put on amusing and outlandish costumes, while others have body paint applied.

The mood already seemed festive with music blaring from a garage set aside to be used as a body painting area, and many cyclists already milling about nude and or with body paint. I went ahead and joined the line to have my body painted, and it turned out to be a bike then fire around it. The ride seemed very well organized with someone in the park, at the entrance, and other individuals talking on cell phones who were going to lead and direct the ride. Finally, the ride set out shortly after nightfall around 9PM. For a time the ride didn't attract too much attention since it was in the industrial Near West side of Chicago where there aren't too many people walking around in the streets, nor many retail stores and restaurants.

Eventually, the ride did come across the first commercial retail street, which usually provoked honks, shouts, cheers, comments, and on occasion you could see people rushing from stores and restaurants to catch a view of the spectacle. People also rushed to take pictures, now quite easy since many cell phones include cameras. In the more crowded streets, the ride assumed a parade-like atmosphere as people lined the streets to look. I should add that not everyone was quite naked, that is, many people wore what look like underwear or bathing suits or various types of costumes. Also, some of the ride organizers were dressed and riding around on bikes or roller blades.

The ride itself was accompanied by speakers in a trailer playing music for most of its entire length. At some moments the music, the festive atmosphere, the notion of violating the rules of social decorum and behavior--all these gave me a sublime sense of pleasure and happiness. I have read Mikhail Bakhtin's book, Rabelais and His World, on the importance of carnival in ritually violating social rules and decorum in order to affirm one's sense of self and connection to others which is restricted and controlled by rigid social hierarchies and status. After a time I did indeed feel this that I could take part in an event and join other people, setting aside the usual barriers that would prevent us from making contact and assembling in an activity.

Personally, I've also had a liking ever since I can recall I was told to wear clothes. Seeing pictures of primitive people from around the world who wore virtually next to nothing always made me think--now why should you wear clothes if it's hot out.