The Corporate Gaze

I Saw The TV Glow, Emilia Perez, and the limits of trans storytelling

I think a lot about the fact that the best “transgender” story told last year did not feature the word “transgender” in its script once. I Saw The TV Glow from director Jane Schoenbrun quickly became canonical in queer cinema for its haunting and ethereal portrayal of a life unlived, told through the story of two teenagers and the hypnotic draw of their favorite paranormal television show that comes to serve as metaphor, as fable, as warning. The beats of a transition story within I Saw The TV Glow are familiar to those of us for whom transition was not a neat, made-for-TV narrative but a nonlinear, chaotic lived experience—the private moments of recognition, the public and nameless torments of frustration and shame, the slow piling of years like dirt on a grave. The inexplicable distress and dissociation that doctors come to call dysphoria is made real by Schoenbrun and the film’s lead (played by Justice Smith) whose every moment on screen is spent hunched over and whispered, spoken like someone with a hand around their throat.

Compare the impactful subtlety of I Saw The TV Glow (effectively shut out of the Hollywood awards circuit) with the hamfisted, onerous transgender visibility of Emilia Perez, a French movie about a Mexican transgender drug lord that has been heavily critiqued and mocked by Mexicans, transgender people, and Mexican transgender people. Despite this, and likely thanks to an expensive and sprawling for-your-consideration campaign by Netflix, Emilia Perez beat Wicked for Best Musical at the Golden Globes and has a stunning 13 Oscar nominations, tying it with Oppenheimer, Forrest Gump, All About Eve, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But the film’s chances to win any of those nominations have been apparently sunk by a series of scandals and critiques over its exploitative portrayal of Mexican drug gangs and gender transitions alike, compounded by a lack of Mexican talent involved in the film and a litany of offensive, racist tweets from the film’s transgender star Karla Sofia Gascón.

But as many critics have pointed out, the film’s problems are pretty obvious on-screen before you even have that off-screen context. Gender transition exists in the film as redemptive metaphor more than material reality, one that regards trans women’s femininity and sex change surgeries as a cleansing fire for the violence of our presumed masculinity. Gascón herself reportedly had to punch up the script from filmmaker Jacques Adiard’s original which had apparently dropped any discussion of Perez’s struggles with the closet and instead offered up a sex change as a criminal disguise. As Harron Walker wrote of Perez in her review, “I sensed that the film wanted me to like her, to root for her transition from an evil rich man to an evil rich woman, to celebrate her solely for the fact of her transition.” Wesley Morris of The New York Times came to a similar conclusion, suggesting Perez “mistakes her transness for sainthood.”

One wonders if that same presumption is why Gascon’s public racism evaded the vetting process one would imagine accompanies a star-studded film and massive Oscars campaign—did Netflix “mistake her transness for sainthood?” It would be ludicrous to suggest trans misogyny had somehow kicked into reverse and Garcon benefitted from a kind of privilege by way of her trans identity. What is more likely is that Netflix and Oscars voters alike see in Emilia Perez a chance to redeem both trans people and the entertainment industry by sheering both of complexity or context. Hollywood and The Oscars specifically were frequently the focus of 2010 culture fights over trans visibility, namely the decision to cast cisgender actors like Jared Leto, Eddie Redmayne, and Scarlett Johansson to play transgender characters, rhyming with campaigns like #OscarsSoWhite and controversies over awards going to films like Crash and The Green Book. Thus, Emilia Perez’s many nominations (and any awards it might win) function for the Oscars, much like sex change surgeries do for Emilia Perez—an uncomplicated salvation for past sins.

Last summer, I got to speak with a number of trans filmmakers and writers for both a panel I joined at Sundance and an event hosted by the WGA about the business of trans storytelling. We talked about the double-bind of identity, the economics of backlash, and how to avoid tokenism even when rent is due. What many described, however, was a studio process that often led to notes and cuts that sought to shrink the complexity of trans life by reducing characters to a gentrified, liberal version of transness tailored by focus groups, public opinion surveys, and what would get you yelled at least on Twitter (until about 2022). This is how many people in elite institutions across media and politics encounter trans people—not as a people but as a list of rules. When these characters or projects fail to find an audience among cis or trans people, they are inevitably booted from the show or quickly forgotten. One thinks of Che Diaz, the nonbinary podcaster on HBO’s Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That. My actual worst nightmare is that any cis person watched Che Diaz—censorious, grating, and depressingly unfunny—and thought “wow—trans people must love this.”

Post-election, some studios like Disney are fleeing “trans storytelling” like a cat out of a bath. But like the broader corporate effort to put liberal identity politics of “diversity” and “Pride” behind them, these studios are largely pointing to a creature of their own invention as proof trans people cannot be trusted with power over our own narratives—something they rarely ever gave us in the first place.

When I first saw it last year, I Saw The TV Glow was refreshing precisely because it seemed to break every rule of “trans storytelling” much of Hollywood has tried to adapt itself to over the past decade, and the most obvious reason why is that it’s not catering to the “cisgender gaze.” In truth, however, it’s a corporate gaze that the film elides and that has pushed Emilia Perez onto an unwilling public. This dynamic is more directly and forcefully rejected by Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, an absurdist and anarchic piece of illegal art that I’m genuinely shocked was allowed to survive. Drew’s co-optation of an extremely-copyrighted DC Comics character feels like a middle finger to the machinistic, profit-driven process that brought us perhaps not Emilia Perez but certainly its fruitful awards season campaign. To the degree that any movie available on Amazon Prime can be said to be “anticapitalist,” The People’s Joker at least offers a glimpse of what’s possible when we behave as if these constraints don’t exist.

There’s a nonzero chance Emilia Perez survives as a cult classic, a camp display of excess and bad songwriting (you’ve probably seen more than a few parodies and tributes to “La Vaginoplastia”). In a just world, that honor would more likely go to Johanne Sacreblu, a 30-minute parody film directed by trans Mexican filmmaker Camila Aurora. Like any good satire, Sacreblu reveals more truths than its source material ever could—including the ways our current cultural industries serve to hammer our identities and experiences into shapes we could never recognize.

But such is the consequence of the self becoming a product. Emilia Perez’s awards circuit success feels like an insult at a time trans people aren’t short of reminders of how powerless we are—”always the topic but rarely the voice” as critic Niko Stratis once put it. But it also seems like a last gasp of a liberal vision of change that preferred more cultural gatekeepers rather than fewer and debating who is allowed in which rooms rather than how to destroy the walls containing them. And while that corporate naivety was certainly more welcome than the developing blacklist being fueled by the right-wing, saying goodbye to it is how we dream of something better in its place.