By Titus Tan
Dressed in last-century flamboyant style, a pair of crystalline eyes always glimmers with mystic melancholy on his/her blanched face—the protagonist, Lili Elbe/Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), of the film, The Danish Girl, not only appalls her beholders by her incredible beauty, but also inspired many audiences to live true to themselves despite societal biases (Short Comments). The film upliftingly narrates her strenuous journey in pursuit of her trans* identity in the 1930s when such identity was yet to be widely accepted. On the other hand, only if you were an experienced trans* activist, the film would not fit your tastes.
Unlike many positive feedbacks from audiences strange to trans* activism, trans* activists (among whom are many trans* people themselves) almost unanimously backlash this film soon after its debut: they collectively condemn that this film whitewashes, depoliticises and oversimplifies the history of trans* activism, that it divorces from a variety of actual trans* experiences by homogenising them into one fantasised grand narrative (Keegan, 2016, p. 51) and upholding trans* norms and stereotypes (Solomon and Kurtz-Costes, 2018, p. 37), and that it replaces trans* aesthetics with that of dominant culture’s by mostly cisgender, heterosexual, male, white, elitist and bourgeois filmmakers to capitalise from global/mainstream receptive (i.e., young educated women) demographics of audiences who might fall for its misrepresentations (Keegan, 2016, p. 52 and 55; Solomon and Kurtz-Costes, 2018, p. 34 and 44).
Other than their lucrative profitability, these condemnations however do not address other possible roots as to why cinematic misrepresentations of trans* lives, exemplified by The Danish Girl, are so prevalent. Or, why are they so alluring to the audiences, which leads to this lucrative profitability? Among other reasons, I postulate that the misrepresented trans* woman characters satiate the needs of cisgender, heterosexual males to rescue “the girl” in dismay.
It almost becomes classical as much as cliché that in films, the male hero wins the charismatic girl after saving her from dangerous situations, such as in Superman films (and many other male superhero film alike). These films inflate the delusion of some male individuals that their dream girls would somehow by all means desperately fall for them so long as they find the perfect opportunity to save them from distress. Similarly, Einar/Lili in this film elicits great yet again delusional sympathy from these individuals. Only this time, the dangerous situation is no longer failing airplane, but “a girl trapped in a wrong body”.
In history, in order to receive Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS), one has to be diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder (GID, now renamed Gender Dsyphoria (GD) in the latest DSM-5) whose typical symptoms include feeling trapped in a body of the opposite sex (Stryker, 2017, p. 17-20). While certainly many trans* people do feel this way, many more recite this narrative so that their doctors could prescribe SRS for them. To this day, it is somewhat acknowledged among trans* communities and activists that the tremendous diversity of trans* people overwhelm this single grand narrative generalised by medical professionals. Yet in the film industry, many filmmakers seem to be rather oblivious of this fact, and continue to sustain this idea.
A paradigm of such is The Danish Girl. On the onset, Lili/Einar’s paintings are said to repeatedly involve a scene that three trees stand before a seashore, which, as a male Lacanian psychoanalyst, Sans (2015), interpreted, ”…[are] the recourse that [Lili/]Einar uses in order to produce a fantasy…[and] a metaphor of what is irrevocably lost, leaving partial traces that the subject pursues” (p. 86). In short, Lili/Einar projects his/her inner desire, i.e., to be a woman, onto this repetitive scene of his paintings. Paintings, granted with so much fame from psychoanalysis as one of the “windows to the unconscious”, could be used to infer the woman trapped in his/her unconscious mind.
In the ball scene, Lili/Einar is solicited by Henrik Sandahl (Ben Whishaw) for a deep kiss. On one hand, his/her delighted face of being solicited as a woman could be rewarding as well as falsely affirmative for some male audiences; on the other hand, such rewarding is challenged by a third intruder, the solicitor. The tension between these two feelings invokes these audiences’ drive to save her from a solicitous man, peaking at the moment of the unjustified nose bleeding in face of Henrik’s coercion.
Another scene in which Lili/Einar elatedly trysts Henrik, further escalates the tension. As Henrik urges to have sex with Lili/Einar, and s/he hesitantly rejects (particularly when touching his/her penis, which reinforces the genital resistance explained below), he accidentally blurts out the name of Lili/Einar man identity, Einar. This accident discloses Henrik’s hypocrisy of disguising his homosexual identity so as to have sex with Lili/Einar. What could be more sympathy-enticing than an already-despondent girl being further exploited of her despondency? Plus, analogous to classic male superhero films, there is finally an outright and straightforward “enemy” to whom some male audiences could direct their anger.
In another scene, Lili/Einar secretively realise his/her woman identity by undressing him/herself in front of the mirror in the women’s dress room and observing his/her feminine body by hiding his/her penis underneath his/her crotch. While some trans* women do irritate their penises, this irritation is by no means universal. However, to fully actualise the idea of “the girl trapped in the wrong body”, it becomes irresistible to illustrate this stereotypical resistance of the male body, especially the male genital. Similar case occurs during which Lili/Einar imitates the erotic feminine performance in the closet.
If the above misrepresentations are somewhat problematic, the blatant distortion of history in the scenes of Lili/Einar’s hospitalisation could be pernicious. Keegan (2016) found the absence of trans* communities in Berlin where Lili/Einar is hospitalised rather curious:
When the real Lili[/Einar] travelled to Berlin in 1930, the city was a global hub for sex and gender minorities: there were so many people traveling to see Hirschfeld that by 1909 German authorities had begun to issue a special form of identification called a ‘transvestite pass’ (Transvestitenschien) to those utilising the institute’s services, which included medical treatment as well as social networking and job placement (Beachy 2014:172-80). (p. 55)
From my perspective, this absence is explicable: this unjustified isolation is a crucial component of Lili/Einar’s manually-enhanced misery, which tells the fantasised story that not only is Li/Einar “a girl trapped in the wrong body”, but she also has to endure this entrapment without any peer support.
Filippo (2016) also suspected the generosity of Dr. Kurt Warnekros (Sebastian Koch) during a time when the medical establishment is by and large transphobic (p. 404). Still more curious is that before the performance of Lili/Einar’s surgery, s/he proposes to Dr. Warnekros in hope for marriage and children. Curiously, s/he gives herself up to seemingly any man closely available to him/her (that happens to be Dr. Warnekros) in an almost irrefutable posture (sickly effete women appear highly attractive to some men). To this point, some male audiences have long been covetous to receive this free gift—At the end of the day, superman gets the girl.
These fabrications apart, it is such a relief that the film does not opt for an all-out Disney show—they all live happily thereafter. Instead, it does align with the history that Lili/Einar dies after surgical failure. However, rather than dying of an unknown ailment as the film suggests, his/her death is explicitly attributed to organ rejection following his/her uterus implant (Filippo, 2016, p. 403). But the true-to-life representation of his/her death would only end messily: in the end, s/he would be seen fighting torturously against the tremendous agony; there would be no space for him/her to calmly comment on his/her poetic “rebirth”—the ultimate resolution stage of the grand narrative, “the girl is rescued by getting out of her wrong body”.
Originated from universalising medical presumption, the idea of “a girl trapped in the wrong body” is deliberately and reiteratively sustained in The Danish Girl in part to elicit some male audiences’ sympathy. Were the idea legitimate, trans* people would all have to be gender-binarised (i.e., either man or woman). Yet, the whole idea of transgender is in large part to defy this dichotomy, and instead to acknowledge the fabulous diversity existing in-between. That being said, for people who understand trans* identities, the idea is invalid from the start, as it runs contrary even to some basics in this field.
The message is once more clearer again: in films, regardless of which dangerous situation the girl is put in, it is always the man who would rescue the girl, who in turn, would unconditionally give herself up to him. This is one of the reasons why misrepresented trans* woman characters sell.
References
Bevan, T. (Producer) and Hooper, T. (Director). (2015). The Danish Girl [Motion Picture]. United Kingdom: Working Title Films.
Filipo, M. S. (2016). Female trouble: representing transwomen in The Danish Girl and The New Girlfriend. In Journal of Bisexuality, 16(3), 403-407. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15299716.2016.1199843?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Keegan, C. (2016). History, disrupted: The aesthetic gentrification of queer and trans cinema. Social Alternatives, 35(3), 50-56. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1868510469?accountid=14656
Sans, A. A. (2015). “This is truly me”: a Lacanian approach to The Danish Girl. In Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 40(1), 83-94. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?ty=as&v=2.1&u=ubcolumbia&it=DIourl&s=RELEVANCE&p=LitRC&qt=SN~0252-8169~~TI~%22This+Is+Truly+Me%22%3A+A+Lacanian+Approach+to+The+Danish+Girl+%282015%29~~VO~40~~SP~83~~IU~1&lm=&sw=w
Short Comments (of The Danish Girl). Douban (a Chinese film Catalogue). Retrieved from https://movie.douban.com/subject/3071604/
Solomon, H.E. and Kurtz-Costes, B. (2018). Media’s Influence on Perceptions of Trans Women. In Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 15(1), 34–47. Retrieved From https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13178-017-0280-2
Stryker, S. (2017). Contexts, concepts and terms”. In Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolutions (Second Edition), Chapter 1, 1-44.