The Danish Girl isn’t the hoped-for advance in transgender portrayal
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Articulating exactly what is wrong, insulting and grotesque about The Danish Girl — The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper’s latest bit of corporate Oscar bait — is a job unto itself, and I’m by no means the most qualified applicant. The film is a symptom of a culture in which cisgender people, some gay but mostly straight, take it upon themselves to dictate to transgender people the terms of their own lives. I have no intention of continuing such a pattern in this review. Instead, I highly recommend Carol Grant’s excellent analysis of the film on Indiewire, in which she explains why the film is, in her words, “regressive, reductive, and harmful.” (The comments that her review has generated essentially prove her points.)
Trans folks are assaulted, raped and murdered at a staggering rate, even compared with the rest of the LGBTQ community. And within that subset of victims or survivors, trans women of color are the most likely to be affected. (Seven trans women of color were murdered in the first two months of 2015 alone, a horrid pattern that has mostly continued apace.) In terms of more commonplace violence, one need only witness the recent repeal-by-referendum of Houston’s equal-rights ordinance, an omnibus anti-discrimination law defeated with a transphobic smear campaign by the city’s evangelical churches. These are real-world crises that entertainment can’t fix.
On its face, none of this would seem to have much to do with a period film about Europe in the 1920s. This is the story of two Danish artists, Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) and her husband, Einar (Eddie Redmayne), who eventually discovers that he’s actually a woman, Lili Elbe. With the help of an experimental gynecological surgeon, Dr. Kurt Warnekros (Sebastian Koch), Lili elects to undergo an early form of gender confirmation surgery. Due to complications from a second surgery, a vaginoplasty, Lili — spoiler alert — dies.
Redmayne’s performance, while severely lacking, only reflects The Danish Girl‘s much deeper structural problems. Yes, the actor engages more in mimicry than in the creation of a rich character. But this could be said for much of the current crop of young British thespians, whose tic-and-gesture indicating is in tune with the stereotyping proclivities of millennial audiences — keep it shallow, cut to the chase. As for whether a trans actor or actress should have played the role of Lili, it’s almost beside the point. Yes, the industry must hire more trans talent, no question. But should anyone play Lili?
One wonders: What is the pressing cultural question to which The Danish Girl‘s Lili Elbe is the answer? Her discovery is presented in a kind of shorthand of mini-revelations, touching silky slips and trying on nylons or, in one key scene, looking at herself in the mirror with her penis tucked behind her legs. With Redmayne’s goo-goo eyes and the garish music, The Danish Girl argues in this moment that transgender existence is just a switch that gets flipped, with identification subject to “triggers,” which can be isolated, as if gender and sexuality were reducible to the furtive donning of a negligee or playing in the sandbox with a Tonka truck. These are practically James Dobson talking points.
The film engages with more complex questions of gender fluidity, only to defiantly cancel them out. When Einar visits a peep show to observe and copy “feminine” poses, the film crosses a kind of Rubicon of gender theory. It could choose to emphasize the double-performativity of the moment, how Lili is patterning herself in part on a copy of a copy because we all do. But no, The Danish Girl insists that Lili is an essence that must be set free, something God made (she says as much), and not a sense of becoming, a work in progress. This essentialism may reflect the experience of some. But there’s a conflation of sex and gender in the way Lili’s life is depicted. For her, to be a woman is to be passive, a wilting flower practically aching for the grave.
Gerda, meanwhile, is for some reason never seen by Lili as a viable model of womanhood. Gerda, who desired Einar and Lili, whose art displayed the complexity of their relationship, and who insisted that being a woman and a painter were by no means mutually exclusive, reflects the paradox at the heart of The Danish Girl, the aporia the film seems barely aware of. This is a 2015 movie that conjures trans women as the apex of conservatism, and somehow the wife haunts the story as a figure of queer modernity. Far from being a subversive fillip, this film only shows how clueless it really is.
