The title “Corpses, Fools and Monsters” came about in a conversation between trans film critics Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay in the online cinema journal Reverse Shot. The two have a regular column called “Body Talk,” in which they discuss trans issues in mainstream movies, coming to the sad conclusion that “for the most part the only times we’ve been seen onscreen are to be murdered, turned into a joke or a tragedy of failed transition… It’s a lost highway of corpses, fools and monsters.”
Subtitled “The History and Future of Transness in Cinema,” their new book takes a rigorously researched look at trans images in film from the early silent era to “The Matrix” movies and the work of Jane Schoenbrun. It’s an essential read, wrestling thoughtfully with often troubling representations while shining a spotlight on lesser-known obscurities and offering eye-opening interpretations of some popular titles.
Gardner and Maclay have taken over programming at the Brattle Theatre next week for a pair of double features presenting starkly contrasting images of trans characters. Co-presented by Wicked Queer, “Transness in Cinema” begins on Tuesday, Oct. 8 with Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Best Picture winner “The Silence of the Lambs,” in which Jodie Foster hunts a cross-dressing serial killer making a dress from the skin of his victims. It’s paired with Alice Maio Mackay’s 2023 Australian indie “T-Blockers,” about an invasion of alien parasites that inflame casual homophobes into hyper-violent aggressors.
Then on Wednesday, Oct. 9, the icky 1983 teen slasher “Sleepaway Camp” — a film notorious for its climactic surprise gender reveal — is followed by “I Saw the TV Glow,” Schoenbrun’s enormously empathetic trans allegory from earlier this year. I had the pleasure of speaking with Gardner and Maclay over Zoom about why they chose these four films.
“We wanted to take an example of the way that a cis director had perceived transness through the horror genre and then pair it with the way a trans filmmaker perceives transness through the horror genre,” Maclay explained. “We wanted the audience to see these films reflected off of one another. By putting them together, you get a full scope of the trans film image we’ve been positing with our book.”
Both the book and the movie adaptation of “The Silence of the Lambs” go out of their way to state that the character of serial killer Buffalo Bill is not technically transgender, but that didn’t make much difference when the film became a cultural sensation and affected the way millions viewed a marginalized community. (I was in high school when it came out and can remember all the jokes that were going around.) That the film is also an extraordinary work of craft and compassion contributes to what Maclay described as their “complicated, sort of loving relationship” with a tricky text.
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Gardner elaborated, “People still see the character as trans. When the film came out there was controversy. There were protests. People were angry about this. Jonathan Demme did actually take that to heart, and some would say his follow-up film ‘Philadelphia’ was an olive branch to the queer community. He also worked with trans people in subsequent films. He was a very egalitarian, humanist filmmaker… I think we both say our views on the film are very complicated, but I like talking about works that are complicated.”
Gardner will be at the Brattle for a conversation about “The Silence of the Lambs” following Tuesday’s screening. He and Maclay were both invited to contribute their voices to the film’s new Arrow Video 4K Blu-ray edition, offering the kind of considered insight that characterizes their writing. What’s maybe most impressive about “Corpses, Fools and Monsters” is how even-keeled the book is, approaching sometimes hatefully misguided portrayals of trans people in a good faith attempt to explore the circumstances that produced them. In other words, it’s a real history book, not a finger-wagging polemic. (I spend too much time on social media, so I’m not used to such nuance, especially with regard to problematic content.)
“Some people have been surprised that this book isn’t just a lecture saying ‘this film is bad and you need to not watch it anymore,’” said Maclay. “There are films in the book we don’t like that we tried to give as much objectivity and nuance to as we could, to try and respect the way they were received at the time. It was always our guiding principle: we wanted to treat the films with a dignity that maybe they didn’t give us.”
Gardner explained the extensive research done through archives and collections, especially ‘90s DIY zines and publications like Transgender Tapestry that were vital in contextualizing the community’s contemporaneous reactions. “Even beyond good or bad, the language of how we talk about having a trans body has changed so rapidly. Even something from 10 years ago is very different from how we talk about it now, and we wanted to honor how people perceived it back then.”
Some in the trans community have attempted to reclaim Buffalo Bill and Angela the “Sleepaway Camp” slasher as subversive icons. Rocker Laura Jane Grace used a picture of Buffalo Bill on the cover of her band Against Me!’s 2013 “True Trans” EP, and there’s a popular pin featuring Angela at the end of “Sleepaway Camp” alongside an unprintable sentiment about TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). “I think that trans people are kind of funneling these disreputable images from the past through a punk rock ethos that’s really cool,” said Maclay.
Disreputable is a generous way to describe “Sleepaway Camp,” a nasty little movie that Maclay and Gardner concede they have no great affection for, but one that looms so large in the canon of onscreen trans depictions that it can’t be ignored.
“The ending has been discussed for as long as I’ve been a cinephile, which is 20-some-odd years now,” Maclay said. “There are some images that are in communication with one another from ‘Sleepaway Camp’ to ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ that link the teenage experience to dysphoria in a way that I think is really interesting and curious.”
Indeed, whereas most movies about young trans characters include the de rigueur scene of sneaking off to try on mom’s dresses, Schoenbrun’s film is about an internalized emotional state, communicating the protagonist’s gender dysphoria via horror tropes akin to “Twin Peaks” and David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome.” The words “trans” and “gender” are never uttered in the movie, and I know some people who saw it and missed the trans allegory altogether, yet still responded powerfully to the film’s eerie evocation of feeling lost in your own body and living a life you weren’t meant to live. It’s perhaps more effective and certainly more universal than an outwardly respectable, Oscar-friendly “issue” movie might have been.
“I have nothing against issue films,” said Gardner. “Especially ones that are done well. They can be very valuable to have. But there’s a certain way in which feeling seen is not so much having this sense of positive validation in terms of your pronouns or your gender identity or anything like that. Having an affirmation of the isolation you feel — in terms of fighting these feelings within yourself — I found it a very shattering and powerful experience. To me, it is a very major film.”
Maclay agreed. “‘I Saw the TV Glow’ has obviously had a great effect on members of the trans community, but I also think the sense of disassociation is on the pulse of what modern teenagers are going through being very attached to the internet,” she said. “I think this out-of-body experience is something that a lot of teenagers, whether they’re trans or cis, have a lot of personal access to and I think that’s one reason the film has been so popular.”
“Transness in Cinema” runs at the Brattle Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 8 and Wednesday, Oct. 9. “Corpses, Fools and Monsters” co-author Caden Mark Gardner will be present for a discussion between Tuesday’s screenings.