Corpses, Fools, and Monsters in LA and NYC

“Over eleven extensively researched, passionately argued chapters,” writes Leah Abrams at the top of her interview with Gardner and Maclay for Screen Slate, “they detail the history of the trans film image in mainstream cinema, tracing a complex body of work that goes well beyond the reductive tropes of ‘corpse,’ ‘fool,’ and ‘monster.’ In highlighting film images that alternately subvert and reinforce those archetypes—correspondingly complicating and maligning their offscreen counterparts—Gardner and Maclay chart a path to a new frontier for trans cinema, one in which its subjects are no longer forced to negotiate the grounds for their very existence.”

“Caden and I are both children of the ’90s,” says Maclay. “So this is right when Silence of the Lambs [1991] hits. So there’s your monster. It’s right when Ace Ventura [1994] hits, so there’s your fool. As for the corpses, you saw all these television shows, procedurals like Law and Order and CSI, where every now and then there was an episode investigating a murdered trans sex worker or something. Then you have Boys Don’t Cry in 1999, which is the ultimate trans martyr film.”

On Thursday, Gardner will be at Vidiots in Los Angeles to rewatch and talk about Robert Altman’s 1982 adaptation of Ed Graczyk’s 1976 play Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Cher, Karen Black, Kathy Bates, and Sandy Dennis play old friends and members of a James Dean fan club who reunite in 1975 at a Woolworth’s in the fictional town of McCarthy, Texas, on the twentieth anniversary of the star’s death. A few things have changed over the years. For one thing, one of the members used to be called Joe but now goes by Joanne.

As Mark Olsen notes in the Los Angeles Times, Maclay has called Karen Black’s turn as Joanne “the only trans performance by a cisgender person that I love with no reservations,” and in a Body Talk exchange in 2018, she added that Black “fundamentally understands the mindset of her character as it relates to her situation and her body.” Come Back to the 5 & Dime “may be imperfect,” wrote Gardner in 2017, “even when not on purpose, in its conceits and portrayals of a trans narrative and a trans character, but Karen Black gives the performance of Joanne a humanity, integrity, and a rebellious streak, from her first scene to the final shot of being able to return to something she held onto for all of those twenty years, a sisterhood.”

On Saturday, From the Margins: The Trans Film Image, a series launched this past weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York as a tie-in to the release of Corpses, Fools, and Monsters, returns with an afternoon screening of Rosa von Praunheim’s City of Lost Souls (1982). “While his contemporaries, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, and Ulrike Ottinger, regularly depicted nihilistic visions of queer suffering,” writes Matthew Robinson for Another Gaze, “Praunheim insisted on the possibility of hope, even within an era of social repression.”

Trans performer Angie Stardust runs a burger joint and pension in Berlin that attracts regulars from all over, including trans punk legend Jayne County. “Praunheim’s cinema is purposefully rough around the edges and delights in its own implausibility,” writes Robinson. “Within this cinematic excess, which Bradford Nordeen called a ‘fabulist punk cabaret,’ all essentialism and referentiality are stripped away, and a queerer vision of cinema appears.”