Gender Roles at the Movies: Which of These Classic Horror Films Got It Right? – pride source.com

Part issue movie and part throwback slasher, Blumhouses new horror film They/Them, out Aug. 5 on Peacock, aims to flip the script for how queer characters are treated in horror films onscreen. Since the gender-bending twist in Psycho (and partly due to that 1960 landmark films influence), horror has provided some of mainstream cinemas most overt explorations of transgender themes, dealing with trans or trans-adjacent figures in fraught but often rich ways.

Directed by veteran screenwriter and playwright John Logan (who is openly gay) and set at a conversion camp for LGBTQ+ youth, They/Them spotlights a diverse ensemble of characters led by nonbinary actor Theo Germaine as Jordan, squaring off alongside an ensemble of their peers against Kevin Bacons Owen Whistler, the camps warmly unsettling proprietor.

Here, the films central concern isnt the existence of LGBTQ+ people as an affront to the normality of a conservative society: a dynamic the late queer critic Robin Wood has often described as driving much of the last centurys horror films. Instead, the films threats stem from the power and prevalence of conservative actors who would treat queerness as an aberrant threat and a problem to be reckoned with, even solved. By making queer people its subjects (even as theyre targets), captives surviving through a combination of resourcefulness and solidarity, They/Them feels like an exception in a genre with a pattern of treating trans and nonconforming characters as ones to be feared rather than understood, much less granted agency.

Film history has played host to trans and gender-nonconforming characters, though its often had to do so in quiet, covert manners. In horror, thats been less the case, and not for ideal reasons; the genre, ever rife with queer killers, has always made a space for whatever mainstream society fears. In this context, queerness has rarely been depicted as a lived reality, pitched instead as a frightening late-stage revelation. Across the genre, its long been common for a character to be revealed as both queer and murderous at precisely the same time.

It was the late act reveal that a character wasnt who they were supposed to be, and it was the demonic femininity of men in dresses and lace that became the lasting image, explains trans critic Willow Maclay, who points to Psycho as a starting point. The killer behind the blade was a man who thought he was a woman, and genre filmmaking [has] been milking this for all its worth ever since.

In light of this trend, what follows is a brief examination of some of these horror works all directed by cisgender men that deal with varying effect in trans themes.

Psycho (1960), director Alfred Hitchcock

Were all in our private traps, clamped in them. And none of us can ever get out, muses Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, an innkeeper and serial murderer who does his killing in his late mothers old clothes. Though hes ostensibly talking about geography rather than gender, his words easily resonate beyond that. So, too, does his burnt air toward the cruelties of his eras psychiatric approach, lending his eventual fate a tragic air that a chillier, more distanced depiction wouldnt grant.

Even so, Psycho draws a hazy boundary around Normans compulsions, conflating dysphoric experience with dissociative identity disorder, positing Freudian roots for what it treats as an eventual psychic break. In elaborating a succession of repressive mental gymnastics which allow Norman to assume the identity of his matricidal victim (and deny his role in her murder), the films coda with a psychiatrist strives to establish Bates as singular, not representative of anyone else. This conflation of trans-coded acts with murderous impulses at least singles out repression as a problem, too, allowing for the possibility that Bates actions stem from social realities bigger than himself.

Dressed to Kill (1980), director Brian De Palma

Laying out a complex relationship between looking, aspiration, desire and gender identity, Dressed to Kill consciously reiterates the blend of dissociative and repressive psychodynamics seen in Psycho. Engaging openly with transgenderism as a subject while still retaining hints of multiple-identity frameworks from decades earlier, the film distinguishes itself by linking its flashes of violence to a kind of cognitive dissonance in such a way that its outward drama becomes an expression though hardly an accurate or representative one of a deeper conflict within its key figure. With a twist revealing Michael Caine as Bobbi, the films femme-presenting killer (living publicly as Dr. Robert Elliott, a prominent psychiatrist in everyday life), the film finds a bit of truth when it suggests that heterosexual desire and a deeply felt, essential womanhood need not be perceived as at odds: a reality Bobbi struggles to accept.

Despite this stroke, De Palmas regard of the medical processes of transitioning discussed within talk shows, office settings, and dinner-table discussions can feel at times prurient and leering. Like many films before and after, Dressed tightly links breaches of traditional gender identity with violent impulses, enmeshing them with the more concrete, still-evolving difficulties of pursuing gender-confirmation procedures. (In this, it treats trans experience as both alien and sympathetic). Across all this, a razor becomes a visual symbol and a kind of fulcrum for Bobbis conflict, nodding to the socially embedded aspects of gender performance and the means by which such constrictive roles are both enacted and enforced.

Silence of the Lambs (1980), director Jonathan Demme

Engaged with gender as a constant pressure from its opening moments, Silence of the Lambs finds Buffalo Bill (played by Ted Levine) in a desolate, isolated place. Having been rejected by numerous hospitals in attempting to transition, his choice to take matters into his own hands through a brutal series of flayings and killings all in pursuit of transformation into a more outwardly femine form becomes, troublingly to viewers then and now, a driving force toward violence.

But Bills relationship to transness proves contentious, both within the film and in its reception since. Billy is not a real transsexual, insists Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in one scene. Shortly prior, Jodie Fosters Clarice Starling says theres no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence, using what she now acknowledges as dated terminology. At the same time, the characters coding feels adjacent to transness, and Bills psychiatric diagnosis by Lecter and other unrelated cis characters registers in retrospect as eerily paternalistic.

While a perpetrator of monstrous acts, not only brutalizing women but displaying swastikas around his home, Bills framing by cinematographer Tak Fujimoto seems psychologically attentive in a similar way to the rest of the films head-on portraiture of Lecter, Starling, and everyone else. At the same time, his treatment of Bills body differs in key ways, particularly in the films infamous tucking scene, which renders Bills form as something evoking an obscure, nearly alien interest. Such tensions run basically unresolved throughout, with characters insisting that anything now monstrous about Bill was made rather than born, seemingly by what Robin Wood deems the worst excesses of patriarchal culture in his writing on the film. Rife with contradiction and ambiguity in its depiction, Demme, Levine and Fujimotos portrayal of Bill signals an effort, at least, to understand him, never wholly discounting the life of the characters mind.

They/Them (2022), director John Logan

Logans new film happily sheds most of this cultural baggage, responding to it all the same. Even as its LGBTQ+ characters prove victimized by both physical and emotional forms of violence as captives at the camp, they retaliate in ways that are more wiley than rough themselves, with Logans screenplay avoiding even retaliatory forms of queer people inflicting harm. [Readers, note: spoilers follow] This tendency comes to a head and maybe a breaking point in the films climax which features a sympathetic character (whether theyre queer is never quite laid out) harshly exacting vengeance against those responsible for the camps history of queer suppression. What Logan gives his queer cast is not so much revenge or firm agency but rather a way out of a longstanding representational trap, seeking to put daylight between the possibilities of the present and a troubled history of queerness in the genre.

More here:
Gender Roles at the Movies: Which of These Classic Horror Films Got It Right? - pride source.com

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero