Who Is Listening, Pt. I: A Problem Like Emilia
On Representation
First of All: Whoops!
Well, that didn’t take long. Remember in the summer when I outlined the rough framework for this space and provided the disclaimer, “it’s entirely possible I’ll fall into periods of prolonged silence from time to time based on where the universe takes me”? Go figure, not long after my last entry here, a number of personal and occupational priorities and their subsequent impacts on my health left me waylaid and unable to write a word until more or less this very moment. Believe me, this was not for lack of thinking about it!
A number of future pieces began to incubate during this time, and I aim to bring them into full being much sooner than I managed to with this one. As “luck” would “have it”, recent cultural forces pulled several of these ideas into much closer proximity than I first realized. In the interest of making up for lost time, it occurred to me they would be better served if talked about holistically rather than as discrete ideas, so I have decided to gather them under the umbrella of this now-miniseries1, “Who Is Listening”.
A last disclaimer:
When I first conceived of this writing project, I made a vow not to let gender become its primary theme, forbidding myself from writing about transness in two consecutive pieces. This is not a gender newsletter, nor do I mean for it to be, nor do I consider my transness the defining modality in how I think of myself as a person or a creator. Ideally, I would see fit to not talk about it all. However, to cite a line from my bygone stand-up days, evergreen as it was when I first said it six years ago: you all won’t fucking let me.
So,
i. How do you Solve a Problem like Emilia?
Since its splashy Cannes premiere this spring, which saw it greeted with a nine-minute standing ovation and laurels for its trio of lead actresses, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s musical crime-drama Emilia Pérez has been a source of alternating curiosity and dread for transgender people at large. The closed-doors discussions held the following tenor:
“Okay well it’s kinda cool that one of us is in the Oscar conversation at least.”
“Yeah but it was written by a 72-year old cishet French guy.”
“But would she have agreed to do it if he got it wrong?”
“Even if he didn’t, how do we know it’s any good?”
“With that premise, who’s to say.”
“People do seem to like it, though.”
This nervous anticipation snowballed as the film was bolstered by an $8 million Netflix acquisition and, by August, its position as a pillar of the coming North American festival season and de facto awards heavyweight. All of this, mind you, was before nearly anyone stateside had actually seen it. The jury was out until then, and in the meantime its critical stature seemed only to be growing.
Upon its arrival at the Toronto International Film Festival, I saw a very different yet all-too familiar story emerge. Every trans person I ran into who had seen it wordlessly greeted my faux-innocent “Oh, how was that?” with a grimace or an unhappy shake of the head. Those who brought it up first spat “I just got out of Emilia Pérez” with such weary disdain they needn’t speak the implied “fucking” before the title. The tone was enough to know.
I noticed that none of them seemed comfortable articulating that opinion in detail amidst the buzzing lobby of the Scotiabank Theatre, nor speaking the title at too high a volume. If the kind of upscale Torontonian who can afford to attend TIFF screenings as a civilian overheard us while still basking in the film's razzle-dazzle, no doubt it could turn into a whole thing. Already, the community did not feel safe sharing its opinions about this movie in polite company.
Two thoughts grew in my mind with each one of these encounters: “That bad, huh?” and “Oh no, not this again.” Online, damning morsels about the film began to circulate, each further beyond parody than the last. Lyrics such as “half he/half she/half kingpin/half queen,” dance sequences set in Thai gender clinics, an Israeli surgeon singing about how Emilia will remain her birth sex no matter what procedures he performs. Friends of mine responded to these tidbits not with anger, but resignation: “I just know my parents are gonna eat this up and think they’re being supportive for recommending it to me.”
An emphatic dud was on the way, and it was going to be a problem for all of us. Meanwhile, the film was voted runner-up for TIFF’s People’s Choice Award, named France’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, and its embargo lifted to a strong 87% on RottenTomatoes.
Yes, this again.
And yes, that bad.
But I don’t aim for this to be a discussion of Emilia Pérez’s technical merits2, its musical merits3, nor its racial insensitivities (I’ll leave that to my Latinx colleagues4). Nor do I mean for any of this to be taken as personal criticism of the film’s trans lead, Karla Sofia Gascón, herself—as a trans actor I’m all too sympathetic to the temptation to take the imperfect part simply because it is the part that exists.5
Rather, I’m interested in understanding Emilia Pérez as a particular kind of discursive object, one more commonplace than the average cisgender viewer is likely to realize. What makes it such a problem is its status as one of the most brazen cases of Ally Bait to emerge from the mainstream film apparatus in recent memory.
In order to explain why, I am going to have to spoil the entire plot of the movie. I don’t care.
Rita Mora (Zoe Saldaña), a put-upon lawyer for a corrupt Mexican firm, is kidnapped by notorious cartel boss Manitas (Gascón, in wildly ill-conceived drag), and given a proposal she can’t refuse: covertly arrange for Manitas, a closeted trans woman who has been on HRT for two years despite still being in possession of a full beard (I’m sorry, are we back in fucking 2009?!), to receive gender-affirming surgery and vanish into the night as her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and two children are forcibly relocated to Switzerland for their own safety. Manitas receives every operation in the book in one fell swoop (cue Saldaña singing: “Yes!” at a surgeon while he explains chondrolaryngoplasty to her), and her plan succeeds as Rita falsifies a report about her death, leaving a grief-stricken Jessi none the wiser.6
Four years later Rita, now a high-level attorney in London, is approached by Manitas under her new name7, Emilia Pérez, with another proposal. Rita, Emilia, and Jessi convene on a Mexico City compound, where Emilia is reunited with her children while presenting herself as a long-lost aunt. In a bid to account for her criminal past, Emilia emerges as a folk hero, working with Rita to build an anti-cartel non-profit called La Lucecita (“The Little Light”). Through this, she enters a relationship with Epifanía, an abused widow (ugh) whose tyrant husband’s death is confirmed via the charity. Meanwhile Jessi, growing increasingly suspicious of Emilia, rekindles her relationship with Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez), her lover prior to Manitas’ “death.” When Jessi tells Emilia she plans to marry Gustavo and move the children into her home, Emilia grows violently jealous, threatening to kill Gustavo and outing herself to Jessi in the process.
In turn, Gustavo and Jessi kidnap Emilia and amputate three of her fingers, which they send to Rita as a demand for ransom. When Rita arrives with the money and Emilia’s militia in tow, a shootout occurs and Emilia is non-fatally shot. Gustavo and Jessi throw her in the trunk of their car and attempt to flee with Rita in pursuit, but Jessi begins to express doubts about their plan, and as she and Gustavo wrestle for control of the car, it veers off a cliff and explodes with Emilia still in the trunk in a moment I swear to god feels plucked out of a MacGruber sketch (again: what year is it?!). Rita returns to the compound and adopts Emilia and Jessi’s children as her own while Epifanía leads a procession of the now-idolized Emilia’s effigy down the street.
Hold for silence as I catch my breath.
For a film this brazenly retrograde and transmisogynistic, written and directed by an elderly white cishet man with little apparent input from either of the communities he is portraying, to be taken so seriously by the critical community as to become a legitimate Oscar contender backed by the most financially-powerful distributor in the industry in the year 2024 is nothing short of galling.
It is not just that the movie ends with Emilia being brutalized and killed, nor her function as an anti-hero8, but that from her first moment onscreen, Audiard is obsessed with her masculinity. The film takes great pains to deadname and misgender her at every turn well beyond the point of her transition. Upon her intercession as an estranged aunt, Rita chastises Emilia for being affectionate with her children, stating “it’s a miracle [Jessi] didn’t recognize you.” The most emotionally cloying song of the film involves Emilia’s son listing all the ways she smells like his long-deceased father9. Meanwhile, Jessi’s discomfort over Emilia’s Mrs. Doubtfire-esque domestic presence is played for laughs—and managed to get a few from my crowd.
Emilia’s femininity is coded as illegitimate and sinister, bought by way of bloodshed and brute force, nothing more than a veneer almost everyone around her can see through whether she realizes it or not. She uses her stature at La Lucecita to pursue an unethical relationship with an abused client in a plotline the audience is meant to see as forward-thinking because wow, a trans woman and a cis woman hooking up?! Inconceivable! She leverages her resources as an ex-cartel boss to coerce her family into living with her, and when the illusion shatters for Jessi, so too does the illusion of Emilia’s womanhood. Gascón drops her voice back to the same hoarse register with which she played Manitas10, her domestic cheeriness giving way to physically domineering menace, the gangster inside the girl exposing itself because she didn’t get her way.
Indeed, the film is clumsily obsessed with the question of whether Emilia’s transness alone is enough to let her outrun her past. Over and over, it hammers on variations of the question “can changing your outsides change your insides?” Surgeons say “no,”11 Rita says “maybe,” Emilia insists “yes” with such performative vigor she appears all the more childish and crude for eventually proving herself wrong. If there is any depth to Gascón’s performance, it lies in her rendering this tension of how the person we used to be—in Emilia’s case, a violent man—is present within the person we are trying to become; that we are fundamentally the same person we were at birth, whether we like it or not.
In a vacuum, one can see this idea making for potent dramatic territory. But we are not in a vacuum, and this idea is the basis for precisely the same rhetoric that is currently being used to legislate trans people out of existence the world over. The same logic that still causes cis women to abruptly change their manner of speech when I join a circle of them at parties. Emilia Pérez is but the latest iteration of a message that has existed for as long as we have: “You are a fool for trying to decide who you really are, and you will be punished for it. You don’t get to decide. We do.”
I have been out for almost a decade, and in that time I have seen movies like this come and go at a regular clip. In fact, when Emilia Pérez broke out at Cannes, my first thought was “Hm, something oddly familiar about a movie by a lauded auteur that wields a Latinx trans actress tipped to make Oscar history in a ~bold and lavish~ portrayal of the miseries of outness?” Yes, because we literally did this already with A Fantastic Woman nearly eight fucking years ago and it didn’t do us any good then either! Though in Daniela Vega’s case, the “Oscar history” in question turned out to be merely presenting an award, in what now reads as an extravagantly condescending participation trophy. And yet, we are doing it again.
So, if Emilia Pérez is, in fact, nothing new (and it isn’t), then why is it still being taken so seriously?
I don’t want to diagnose the matter too broadly, but from a distance I can only characterize the persistent success of films like these as the product of a deep lack of intellectual curiosity about trans people that extends to even the self-professed allies among us. Yes, even you. For as much superficial acceptance of us has become mainstreamed in the last 10ish years, there is still a latent reluctance on the part of most cis people to do anything more than merely put up with us at a distance.
People are willing to concede that we are not our assigned genders, but still unwilling to view our actual gender as legitimized in the same way as their own. There remains no desire to substantially interrogate the material conceptions of gender and sex upon which the world is built, and therefore we can only be allowable deviations from the mean, never integrated in the multifaceted and egalitarian whole that spoiler alert, you are a part of too. And god forbid one of us voice these frustrations aloud lest we be accused of jealousy and subterfuge, resentful of our own deviance and unable to cope with that inescapable otherness as if absolute cisnormativity should be everyone’s desired endgame.
What makes films like Emilia Pérez not just pernicious, but outright dangerous, is that they prey on this ongoing complacency on the part of well-meaning cis audiences. They seek to take the age-old harmful beliefs you’ve been conditioned to hold and cynically repackage them as something forward-thinking and transformative. Unfortunately, the last decade of online discourse has rendered the words “virtue signalling” effectively meaningless, but I can think of few phenomena that better embody the original spirit of the term.
Audiard communicates that because this is a go-for-broke musical with a Latinx transfemme lead and a “transgressive” plot involving cartels and whatever, that it is okay to come out of it thinking exactly what you thought about us heading into it. That yes, we will always be our assigned genders. Yes, our transitions are a thing we inflict on our cis loved ones, rather than the stigma against transition being a thing society inflicts on us. Yes, trans women are innately masculine and violent and likely to prey upon and endanger cis women when left to our own devices. You have always been right about us. Keep it up, you’re doing great.
These are not low-stakes social forces either, these movies do not just impact the likelihood that trans filmmakers will be given high-level work. The ideas at the root of these films are the ideas that keep us socially isolated and structurally ostracized from normative society, that keep us from feeling safe in clothing stores and giving strangers directions in the street. They keep us from being seen as viable romantic partners, from being able to start families, from being allowed the right to self-determination.
They are actively, materially damaging, and for as much as everyone seems to know this, very few seem to feel it, and fewer still have been willing to act. I regret to report that you all keep falling for this stuff no matter how many times we break it down for you, and it stems from an active disinterest in understanding us as full, complex human beings, and not just walking debate topics.
Criticism of this messaging on the part of trans people is also nothing new, and yet I feel compelled to reiterate it here, because clearly the amount of times we’ve said it already has not proven enough for it to be heard. What disturbs me most in this regard when it comes to Emilia Pérez is the apparent lack of critical thought being exercised by even the most otherwise-respectable voices in the establishment.
In six months of rollout, I’ve yet to hear any critic express skepticism over the fact that this story was solely penned by people who are neither trans nor Mexican, as if the participation of its cast is to be taken as a tacit endorsement of its subject matter and not the byproduct of a powerful filmmaker hiding behind the hunger of actresses hard-pressed to get major roles tailored to their identities like this anywhere else. Do people really think this movie must be getting it right simply because Audiard did not cast a cis man to play Emilia? I refuse to believe the bar is that deep in hell. Surely not.
This goes hand in hand with the fact that, of course, our own voices have been effectively absent from the critical discussion around this film. In a casual survey of the 165 critics reviews responsible for that aforementioned RottenTomatoes score, I found four that were written by out trans people, only two of which were for accredited publications. That’s 1.2%, for those of you keeping track at home.12 We are no strangers to this dynamic, either.
Be it our healthcare, our art, or our oppression, trans people are rarely given the license to speak with authority about matters specific to our own experience. In the rare instance that we are, as with the former, it is often met with skepticism and bad-faith challenges to our integrity. We remain a thing to be talked about and around, but rarely a thing to actually be heard, to the point where it apparently crossed the minds of not a single editor of consequence to consider, say, asking one of us what we thought about the most high-profile trans-lead studio movie in recent memory.
Again, I must emphasize that this trend (at least when it comes to the arts) is rarely a matter of malice, but one of apathy. In recent instances of widely-acclaimed trans films authored by trans talent that do investigate the complexities of our lives in texturally meaningful ways, I’ve observed our so-called allies leaving us out of the praise for these works as well. For as willing to laud the formal elements of these films as cisgender critics are, when it comes to their subtextual nuances, the conversation ends at “of course there’s no way for me to understand those elements, but.” When I encountered this disclaimer in reviews and lists and podcast segments, time and again I wondered, “don’t you think you might like to, though?”
It seemed that, once more, even cis people cognizant of their own blind spots never cared to go so far as to ask us about them. I heard one group of cishet hosts on a podcast specializing in marginalized representation say “we weren’t able to get a trans person on to speak to this, unfortunately.” Really? You’d be hard pressed to go more than two minutes online without tripping over at least one of us, am I meant to buy that nobody would have been willing or able to come on and talk about a major once-in-a-blue-moon for-us-by-us film of the moment? Or is it that we are so materially excluded from the lives of cis people that even our colleagues care only to consider us in the abstract.
This syndrome is what I mean when I say “lack of intellectual curiosity.” We are one of the few demographics for whom it is still widely acceptable to talk about as if we are not in the room; omnipresent within the conversation, but seldom allowed to be a part of it. Talked around, rarely talked to, never invited to speak for ourselves. Go figure the vast majority of our artistic and scholarly output stays consigned to spaces such as this one—the cultural firmament is obsessed with us, but wants nothing to do with us.
In over eight years of moving through this world aware of my own transness, I have seen our writers and critics and creators describe this issue and propose these solutions countless times over. We have had this conversation again and again: in my adult life alone, we had it with Dallas Buyers Club, with The Danish Girl, with Anything, with A Fantastic Woman, with Rub & Tug, with Girl, with Next Goal Wins. Heck, the creators of Pose had it with themselves.13
It has been said to death and nothing has changed because still, nobody is listening to us. Not even our friends. We are a social artifact to only ever be spoken about in the third person, never granted the dignity of an “I,” of a present tense.
So where does that leave poor Emilia, the latest in this lineage of reinforced transphobia masquerading as progressivism? Appropriately, after the indignity of her final moments and the posthumous “justice” of her children being handed back to a cis woman14, she is made a literal object. Her legacy is that of an effigy, at once more mythological than human, given the kind of veneration in death that she was never going to be afforded in life.
Hmm. Now where have I heard that one before?
Continued in Part II: “Never Said Goodbye: On Sophie”
Definitely not a late-breaking conceit to account for the fact that I ran long on all of these.
Though I could go on about its murky, one-dimensional choreography, inept lighting, and Audiard’s apparent allergy to covering scenes in anything but a locked-off steadicam waist shot.
Though I could go on about its reliance on dull recitatives written without a whiff of structural or melodic sense. I’m no Mariah Carey either but does anyone in this movie have a vocal range of more than a fifth?!
No doubt they could go on about this movie representing Mexico with all the nuance and tact of that one Arrested Development episode.
Though one can’t help but feel that maybe they would stop writing these parts for us if we started refusing to take them.
These two sentences comprise almost an hour of the runtime, for those of you keeping score at home.
Which, as we all know, trans people only choose while crying into the sunlight upon waking up perfectly lucid AFTER receiving our simultaneous bottom surgery/implants/trach shave/FFS/BrazilianIsraeli(?) butt lift. Cue Zoe Saldaña singing “Just for the butt, how much will it be?”
Not all trans people are good people and it’s fine to put that in your movie as long you remember to include the “people” part!
Jacques sweetie, your body odour is like, the very first thing that HRT changes.
I mean for crying out loud her deadname literally has the word “Man” in it! Be serious!
Ha!
I concede this is a wildly unreliable bit of data collection—not every trans person is visibly trans nor acknowledges it in their author bio—and that I may have easily missed some people, but I don’t consider the margin of error significant enough to significantly affect my point here (unless Peter Travers has something he wants to tell us!).
Regarding Audiard: dude, do you realize how badly you have to fumble to make Ryan Murphy look like Tony goddamn Kushner by comparison?!
Of course a trans woman is delusional to think she could ever truly be a mother.
one of my favorite essays, ever.
Thank you for writing this.