Come for the Aliens, Stay for the...???

 

While it seems like some people in the class enjoyed Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, the rest were thoroughly disturbed and wondered why we were watching a film like that for an academic course. Personally, I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I probably wouldn't watch this movie again, yet it was hard for me to look away the whole time it was playing. 

The film's flashback sequences and even some of the more intimate present-day scenes made me feel like I was intruding on the characters' lives and seeing things that should be private, despite the fact that the story was fictional. There's an inherent voyeurism in viewing any sort of film or video, but I think the taboo topics of pedophilia and prostitution in Mysterious Skin made it especially weird to watch. Still, like I said earlier, I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. This is probably partly due to the film's nostalgic feel, showing us both the 80s and the late 90s in small town America. I was also very intrigued by the sexual dichotomy between Neil and Brian. While Neil was completely aware of what the coach did to him when he was a child and turned out to be a hypersexual young adult, Brian blocked out the memories and even went as far as believing aliens were responsible.

To sum up, Mysterious Skin probably isn't a movie I'll be revisiting, but the experience of seeing it definitely gave me a lot to think about. The way that it tracked the development of the two main characters from boyhood to adulthood was reminiscent of many coming-of-age stories, but this one harnessed nostalgia and Americana to explore sexual assault and its effects in a way that captured my full attention.

A Trip Down Gay Memory Lane

 

This week I'd like to do something a little different on here. Since Mosquita y Mari hit so close to home for me, I'm going to talk a bit about how it impacted me to watch a friendship like this depicted on the big screen. This film took me back to my early high school days, back when I was in a very similar situation with a female friend.

Seeing Yoli and Mari doing schoolwork, hanging out at the car garage, and sharing their hopes and dreams with each other made me almost nostalgic for my old friendship that I adamantly insisted was strictly platonic for the longest time. In class, someone had mentioned that physical affection is much more accepted in female friendships vs male ones, and this definitely opens up space for young queer girls to explore their sexual and romantic feelings for other girls. Yoli and Mari touched each other and got close to each other but never in an explicitly sexual way, which was something I appreciated. In high school, my friend and I showed similar forms of physical affection towards each other, although sometimes we pushed a little further than the characters in this film. We never actually had sex and didn't even kiss, but I still consider her an integral part of my sexual awakening.

The scene that really got me was when Yoli and Mari were cuddling on the couch. Almost the exact same moment had happened to me one day when my friend came over after school. Instead of the couch, we were hanging out in my room on my bed, and somehow we found ourselves in the same position as the girls in the film. The only difference was that no one burst into the room unexpectedly like the parents who caused Yoli and Mari to jump to opposite sides of the sofa. I can't really remember what else happened that day, but the feeling of lying there next to my friend has been seared permanently into my memory. Interestingly, I don't think we ever discussed the event after the fact just as we never had the talk about what exactly our relationship was. Hopefully I haven't overshared; I just wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on my own past based on the memories this film brought back.

I Spy With My Little Eye

 

Jennifer Reeder's Signature Move was definitely not a fan favorite in our class, and for good reason. For example, the dialogue and acting felt forced in many scenes, the leads didn't have much chemistry, and there was an overall lack of character development. Still, even though there were many things about Signature Move that didn't work for me, I think it's worth taking the time to consider the role of looking in this film, especially as it relates to Zaynab's mother, Parveen. 

Parveen lives to look, whether she's watching her Pakistani soap operas or gazing out at the people on the street through the binoculars permanently hanging around her neck. I think her desire to engage with the world as an onlooker rather than an active participant for most of the film may be partly due to her knee pain which makes her mostly chair bound as well as the pain from dealing with the loss of her husband. For her, trauma and disability combine to make looking be her primary activity. 

It's interesting that there were so many shots of people outside from her point of view through the binoculars, but we never get to see what she sees on the TV. Maybe that's just because the director thought the 'film within a film' would draw too much attention away from the main storyline between Zaynab and Alma, but it could also have to do with the fact that the main impact of the soap operas comes from what we hear rather than what we see. The sound on the TV is most crucial when Alma, Zaynab, and Parveen all watch a telenovela and Parveen tells Zaynab that she doesn't need to understand Spanish to know that the two characters are in love. As corny as the scene and the metaphor are, the interplay between sound, visuals, and meaning stood out to me.

Anything Boys Can Do, Lesbians Can Do Better

 

In Dee Rees' queer coming of age story, Pariah, we get to see someone rarely depicted on the big screen: the Black, masculine presenting lesbian. It was fascinating to watch Lee and Laura borrow from traditional masculine norms in their dress, language, and behavior. The two friends refer to each other as 'man' and wear baseball caps, baggy shirts, and boxer shorts. Not a single word of dialogue would have had to change in the scene outside the club when they talk about how many girls' numbers Lee scored that night had the characters been male. That, along with the shots of Laura dancing with the women in the club challenged what it means to be a Black woman in every way possible. 

The brief dance clips actually reminded me a little bit of the way Mario was depicted in Pelo Malo. The camera doesn't really sexualize either of them but captures their cool, confident masculinity in a way that almost makes us want to be like them. There's a similar technique used in Tomboy directed by Celine Sciamma, another film I watched recently. There, the neighborhood boys are shown in their full masculine glory taking their shirts off for a soccer game, spitting on the ground, and wrestling by the lake. These kinds of characters, although they come from different films and different countries, give us a sense of what it means to be masculine. 

When women embody traits so deeply associated with men, we're forced to separate masculinity from maleness, like Halberstam writes in Female Masculinity. Watching Laura dance under the strobe lights with several women is obviously different than watching a man do the same thing. A man in that position would be reinforcing every conventional notion of being a 'real' man, from wearing baggy clothes to getting girls. A woman like Laura, however, particularly as a Black woman, defies every societal expectation. She's not sassy, she's hard; she's not going steady with some guy, she's in the club with multiple women. In moments like the club scenes, Black female masculinity is not something to hide or be ashamed of. It's something that's truly magnificent.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

 

Sean Baker's Tangerine from 2015 is a fast-paced, Christmas themed comedy that gives viewers a taste of what life is like for Black, transgender prostitutes in West Hollywood. In particular, the sounds in the film help us empathize with the protagonists and make us feel like we're in the middle of the action alongside them instead of looking in on them as outsiders.

When Sin Dee first gets out of jail, she meets up with her friend Alexandra at Donut Time to celebrate, and the scene's witty dialogue and ambient noise around them helps us empathize with these women we only just met. With no other sounds like music to distract us or tell us how to feel in the moment, we pay closer attention to what Sin Dee and Alexandra are actually discussing. The audible hum of traffic outside the shop solidifies our place in the scene right beside them; we hear exactly what they hear. Upon finding out about the girl her fiancé Chester had been cheating with, Sin Dee storms out onto the street and uptempo electronic music starts playing complete with gun sound effects, showing that she is not messing around. The music combined with the shots of her strutting along the street align us with Sin Dee and her new mission to find Chester.

Towards the end of the film, each of the main characters come together, incidentally at Donut Time, and all hell breaks loose. Razmik, one of Alexandra's regular clients, shows up to see her, but his wife who just found out about his business with her and other trans prostitutes enters with their toddler. Meanwhile, his mother-in-law barged in earlier as Sin Dee, Chester, and Dinah were loudly arguing. For the majority of the scene, we only hear the dialogue and the ambient noise as well as the baby crying, which heightens the already tense mood. As Razmik and his family argue in Armenian, Sin Dee, Chester, and Dinah occasionally interject in English, and the language difference really drives home how no one's on the same page in this moment. Once Razmik leaves with the baby, we hear fast percussion music which signals a change in the action, similar to the scene when Sin Dee leaves Donut Time to look for Chester in the beginning.

The sounds of Tangerine immerse us in the world of the characters whether they're on the street, on public transport, or at Donut Time. Through dialogue, music, and ambient noise, we get to know Sin Dee and Alexandra as well as Razmik and the others, and these noises get us truly invested in their story.

Feast Your Eyes

 

As a part of the New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s, Paris is Burning by the independent director Jennie Livingston introduced the members of NYC's drag ball scene to the big screen in a way that was meant to educate mainstream white heterosexual audiences about that subculture. Despite its intent to inform, however, the film is not without its issues. Today I'd like to focus on feminist author and theorist bell hooks and her argument that Paris is Burning transforms the "ritual" of the drag ball into "spectacle."

In her essay on Livingston's documentary, hooks asserts that, "Ritual is that ceremonial act that carries with it meaning and significance beyond what appears, while spectacle functions primarily as entertaining dramatic display" (150). The camera's gaze captures all the glamour and athleticism of the ball contestants as they do their thing at the Imperial Lodge of Elks, but when it comes to the personal lives of those same individuals, we don't learn much about them outside of their relationship to the ball scene. When we do, in the case of Venus who is a classically pretty light skinned woman, the story ends in her death which is still ultimately framed as spectacle. That a young, beautiful, white-passing girl who claims to want nothing more in life than to be adored and spoiled dies is a tragedy but one that does not need further investigation or explanation according to the film.

I believe part of the reason behind Livingston's presentation of ball culture and its participants as spectacle rather than ritual has to do with her intended audience. It's pretty safe to say that the documentary is aimed at "outsiders" who want to look in on a marginalized subculture they're not a part of, i.e. cisgender heterosexual white people belonging to the middle and upper classes. In order to capture the interest of that particular audience, Livingston packs the film with images of lively, glitzy drag balls meant to elicit "oohs" and "aahs" from viewers. Another tactic she uses is the repeated message that these Black and brown queer people aspire to become their white cishet counterparts because as we said in class, white audiences typically want the media they consume to somehow relate back to whiteness. 

The depiction of spectacle is a key aspect of Paris is Burning and likely contributed to its commercial success. This film goes to show that even when watching documentaries which are meant to inform, mainstream audiences want to be entertained, even if entertainment comes at the expense of omitting the true complexity of the subject matter.

Hard on the Outside, Softer on the Inside

 

Mariana Rondón's Pelo Malo from 2013 gives viewers a glimpse into the life of a young boy named Junior as he navigates family struggles and begins the process of figuring out who he wants to be. Part of this journey involves observing people in his urban Venezuelan neighborhood, most notably Mario, the older boy who works at the kiosco on the street below Junior's apartment. 

The many shots of Junior gazing at Mario can be interpreted in a few ways. Because the film deals with Junior's gender nonconformity and its repercussions, there's a strong case to be made that Junior's fixation is an innocent childhood crush. Alternatively, the older teen could represent the sort of masculinity the younger boy wants to emulate. There's also the possibility that Junior is simply observing this figure who's conventionally masculine in how he presents but is accepting of his friend for who he is. Regardless, Mario is the only male character that Junior likes to spend time with, which is interesting given that he must go to school with lots of little boys his own age.

On the outside, Mario is a man's man. He works for a living, shoots hoops in his spare time, has close-cropped hair, and sits with his legs splayed far apart. He's also totally fine with Junior just being who he is and isn't afraid to show that he cares about the younger boy right on the street where anyone can see them. As part of the boy's chosen family, he's the one Junior turns to after the massive fight with his mom where she cuts a lock of his hair with scissors. Instead of passing judgement or shooing him away, Mario gives him his hoodie and the two sit for a bit, with Mario taking up as much space as possible and Junior doing the opposite. Despite his macho appearance, the teen never comments on the things that set Junior apart from other boys. More than anything, Mario exhibits a form of masculinity that doesn't demean other expressions of gender in order to legitimize itself, highlighting how even the side characters in this film have nuance.