Today we want to talk about transsexuality in cinema, to give visibility to a subject that seems to have always been in the shadows and treated as taboo in society throughout history.
Their normalization occurred on a very difficult path for trans people, it seems that there are fewer and fewer prejudices against homosexuals, that more and more people understand that love goes beyond the purely physical and more and more countries approve of the same thing every day. -sexual marriage.
- However.
- Demands and manifestations of barrier-free love remain much needed today.
- There is still a lot of prejudice and we continue to hear reports of harassment or aggression against gay or bisexual people.
- But what about transgender people?There is still a stigma deeply rooted in society.
- Being transgender is not easy for anyone because even in environments where there is a homosexual majority.
- Stigma tends to survive one way or another.
“Loving oneself is the beginning of a lifelong adventure. -Oscar Wilde-
It is hard to believe that even today, when this issue should already be standardized, there are families who have to move because one of its members is transgender, that there are still people who are rejected for a certain professional position for that reason and that, in some cases, the family itself does not accept the son or daughter as it is.
And the truth is that if we stop to think about the visibility that is given to transsexuals in the media, we will realize that it is minimal, that that participation is reduced to news of aggression and harassment or, in the case of cinema, it leads to parody.
In film and television series, with a few exceptions, transgender characters tend to play a supporting role, usually appearing as prostitutes or in comic situations. It is common to find humorous scenes in which a man lies down or approaches a woman and, in the end, she is a transsexual.
In 1952, Christine Jorgensen made headlines in the United States because she was the first person to successfully undergo sex-change surgery. This inspired Glen or Glenda of Ed Wood, known as the worst director of all time. Ed Wood is now considered a cult, and his low-budget films have been saved and studied. Tim Burton even made a movie about him.
“Nature made a mistake that I had to correct and now I am your daughter. -Christine Jorgensen to her parents-
Glen or Glenda, with Wood himself, is it a wood-worthy film, with several mistakes and scenes?Copy?Collar?file material. Undoubtedly, a film “of the worst director of all time”, but with a revolutionary argument for the time.
In Wood he talks about cross-dressing and does a kind of autobiography, in which appears a heterosexual character who likes to dress up, like the director himself, and a hermaphrodite character who undergoes sexual reassignment surgery.
In this way, it differentiates cross-dressing from transsexuality and shows that a heterosexual can also disguise himself. The fact is that it was 1953 and transsexuality and cross-dressing were considered diseases, which is reflected in the film. Find other examples in the movies, such as: Everything about my mother, Dallas Shopping Club?or musicals such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Priscilla, the queen of the desert.
The Dane brings us closer to a real character, Lili Elbe, although, as in any adaptation, with variations in the real story, Lili Elbe was the first known person to undergo sexual reassignment surgery. Before the move, Lili was called Einar. She was a painter and had married the painter Gerda Wegener.
In the early stages of the change, Lili faced several problems, it was in the 1920s and 1930s and cases like hers were still treated as mental illnesses, including the application of electroshocks; however, he managed to convince a German doctor to accept several surgeries. including an ovary transplant. At the time, it was a fully experimental surgery and there were virtually no studies on the subject.
We see this transition. Eddie Redmayne plays Lili/Einar and Alicia Vikander plays Gerda, the film has an exceptional costume that immediately transports us back in time, the same goes for photography, which creates an almost poetic atmosphere, moving away from the cliché and transporting us inside Lili. Suffering.
Many critics believe that the film may have softened excessively or quickly fell into the drama, but the truth is that it is a necessary film and, although the various operations of real history are reduced to one in the play, the performances of Redmayne and Vikander conquer us and show us another perspective of transsexuality, more natural and intimate.
It all starts as a joke, Einar will pass as a woman for a painting of Gerda, replacing the original model, at first both see this attitude as something fun, but in Einar they begin to awaken some feelings. She begins to feel that Lili has always been there, hiding behind her masculine appearance. Gerda will have professional success in introducing Einar as Lili.
As a child, Einar had a small homosexual experience, but was repressed by her family and hid it, Lili became trapped inside Einar’s body, Lili feels identified in the paintings Gerda paints, sees her reflection on him. But when you look in the mirror, that ID disappears completely.
The philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tells us about the mirror scene, a phase in which the individual recognizes themselves in front of the mirror, the moment when the recognition of the “I” is formed. When we’re babies, do we see the body as fragmented: an arm, a leg, a hand?The moment we recognize each other, do we see the whole body, in it?Another one in the mirror. Lili tries to recognize herself, but she doesn’t do it in front of the mirror. The images are closest to the recognition for her.
There is a scene in which Einar /Lili appears naked, always as a man, and looks in the mirror, but is not recognized, this is one of the most dramatic moments of the film, in which Lili hides the limb between her legs because she feels that she does not belong to her because she is a symbol of masculinity, and is not a man, she is a woman.
Something similar happens when you walk into a prostitute’s cabin, where men look at a naked prostitute. Lilí imitates the woman’s gestures as if she saw herself in this woman, for she was the body that belonged to her.
In addition to transsexuality, the issue of love is also addressed. We see how Gerda accepts Lili, from then on, she finds it hard to understand what’s happening to her husband. It is difficult to assimilate that Einar is dead, which is no longer there However, his love is greater than any prejudice, so he stays with Lili until the end. Although her love is different and she is no longer “the love of the woman”, she does not disappear. In this sense, exposing transsexuality to cinema is a favor for humanity and for us as spectators.
“Last night I had the cutest dream. I dreamt it was a baby on my mother’s lap, she looked at me and called me Lili. ? -The Danish girl-