This was originally published a couple of years ago on another blog. I still haven't gotten around to seeing the film again.
So, I finally got a round to watching Fassbinder's A Year of 13 Moons. It was recommended to me on the IMDB's Classics Board earlier this spring after I was outed as a transsexual. Well, not recommended, per se, but I was asked what I thought of it. Here, many months later, is the conversation I've been having about it. The asterisk in the title of this post? To remind me to give apologies to Julia Serano
.My initial, knee-jerk reaction:
I'm still sorting out my reaction to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons (1978). It's been a while since I was more conflicted over a movie. On the one hand, the cineaste in me recognizes a keen cinematic intelligence behind the film. But another part of me, the transsexual who is completely fed up with the way transsexuals are depicted by cisgender media, is completely appalled by it. I mean, DEEPLY offended by it. She wants to take the cineaste part of my mind, tie her to a chair and make her watch Jess Franco movies A Clockwork Orange-style as penance for even suggesting that this is a worthwhile movie. Well, you can see my dilemma. I'm sure I'll have a LOT more to say about this when I actually sit down to write an in-depth analysis. I'm going to watch it again, first. But for now, I have this to say. First: while it's striking from both a cinematic and symbolic standpoint, this film's tour of a meat packing plant is probably what most pissed me off. The suggestion is that our heroine--if you can call her that, rather than "our object of pity"--is a piece of meat, not a human being, mutilated by her desires and ultimately disposable. That the film ends the way that it does reinforces this idea. Frankly, this sucks on so many levels that it has an event horizon. Second: I can see this film's influence on European cinema's depictions of transsexualism ever since (which is NOT a good thing). Three: when I was sorting through critical reactions to the film, I stumbled across Ed Gonzalez's review of the film for Slant. I rarely agree with Gonzalez under the best of times, but he's never written a review that actually offended me before: from his occasional tendency to put the words "she" and "her" in quotation marks, to his egregious use of the phrase "she-male" (which is more or less equivalent to the "N" word when you're talking about trans people), to his condescending sympathy with our object of pity, this is the work of someone who has bought in to the kinds false truths Fassbinder arrives at by setting up a false set of conditions under which to examine his characters.
A response to this assessment from "Rigor":
Isn't part of Fassbinder's point that the central character Elvira went to Casablanca to have the sex change operation because of the offhand comment made by a straight man (and a rather horrid one at that) that he had fallen in love with. This suggests that Elvira is not really transexual in terms of her own identity and therefore would not have been able to make the transition under acceptable psychological/medical care? Granted this scenario is pretty "out there" in terms of anyone's reality but I think it pretty clearly isn't attempting to be representative of transexual/transgender or intersexed experiences. If this really has over determined the way cinema has represented transexual and other gender non-conforming people I am not sure that this is really the fault of the film as much as of the ignorance/prejudice of the viewers of the film.
It seems to me that the film is clearly supposed to be a highly stylized rendering of reality in the same way that Whity or Ali: Fear Eats the Soul are highly stylized renderings of their social contexts. Nobody really takes Ali: Fear Eats the Soul as realistically representing Moroccan Immigrants do they? And maybe this is the point that with nationality/race we can deal with the stylization and understand it as such but with gender non-conformity many viewers will buy into the stylization as reality (something you seem to suggest Gonzalez does in his review). You may be right but I am still reticent to blame Fassbinder for that. I probably need to see the film again before writing anymore about it. I look forward to reading more of your comments on the film.
A response to this assessment from "zolaar," who originally pointed me at the film:
Rigor is right, it's not a film about transsexuality per se, it is rather about a person losing/destroying his identity.
I don't know if you are familiar with the film's background on Fassbinder's part. Fassbinder's boyfriend, Armin Meier, committed suicide that year after a very difficult relationship between both and a letter where Fassbinder broke up with him. This death left the director deeply disturbed and in shock. 13 Moons was kind of a way to find back into life for him; it is his most personal and radical work (although it's not autobiographic; rather a document on the shock that was caused by the lover's suicide.) Fassbinder is director, author, producer in one person, responsible for cinematography, art direction and editing. He even speaks from the off as the "Seelenfrieda" and in one key sequence in the film we can see an authentic interview with Fassbinder on an overhead TV-screen with excerpts that have some sort of a confessional character.
What we see here his merely the "Passion" of Elvira/Erwin - her five last days in life. She's a deeply broken, shattered, depressed, hopeless person who is left alone with the pain. She's neither man nor woman, her transsexuality (or her sex change for the love to a straight man) has not found a new identity for her, but has destroyed the old one. The film is the process of Elvira's self breaking off completely where the suicidal act at the end remains to be only a physical act. On balance, I would say that 13 Moons is perhaps the saddest, most hopeless film I've seen all my life.
And I agree with Rigor a second time: You have to be familiar with Fassbinder's uncomfortable style and his real life (somehow) to really appreciate this film.
With what is said above, Elvira is the projection of Fassbinder's boyfriend, her characterization being the attempt to come up with a reason/motivation that lead to his suicide. The hate rants towards Elvira (by her "lover", who has a way more significant role than it probably seems) are exaggerated as hell, but in retrospect, Fassbinder apparently had huge feelings of guilt and self doubts - in his relationship he was the dominating part as well and thought that his behaviour was the reason why his (ex-)partner committed suicide. So, it is rather a pay off with his own self.
The suggestion is that our heroine--if you can call her that, rather than "our object of pity"--is a piece of meat, not a human being, mutilated by her desires and ultimately disposable.
My response to them both:
Let me preface this with a couple of things: I mentioned in my initial comments that the cineaste in me is very sympathetic to the film (and, yes, I am aware of the background behind the film's making--Fantoma's disc does an excellent job of putting it in context, as do most reviews of the film). When I note that there is a keen cinematic intelligence behind the film, there is a certain amount of admiration involved. Have you read George Orwell's essay, "The Benefit of Clergy," about Salvador Dali? My reaction to 13 Moons is one that Orwell might have recognized. For whatever reason, I'm not able to divorce my experience as a transsexual from my reaction to this movie. I'll try to articulate some of the context.
First of all, you're right. This isn't a film about transsexuality per se. Elvira is clearly not a transsexual. And this constitutes a huge part of my problem with the film, because in appropriating transsexual imagery and context for such a purpose, this film and others like it have a tendency to invisiblize the experience of transsexuals. This is not uncommon. Regarding this film, this mostly centers around the pernicious fantasy of the gay man who gets a sex change in pursuit of an indifferent or unavailable lover. This film is not the root of this fantasy. It had already surfaced in mainstream cinema as a minor part of Dog Day Afternoon. The same year as 13 Moons, the television sitcom, Soap, presented the exact same narrative in its first season (Billy Crystal's character intends a sex change for his gay lover, only to be rejected in the end; he attempts suicide at the end of the season). Hedwig and the Angry Inch, one of Fassbinder's inheritors, also uses it. These stories displace the narratives of actual transsexuals and replace them with constructs by people who have no idea of what transsexuality actually entails. I call this a pernicious fantasy because it is one that has had actual, real-world consequences, in so far as it has formed some of the pseudo-science that informs some corners of the theraputic instrumentality that treats--or rather deals with--transsexuals through reparative and conversion therapies, in spite of the fact that there is no shred of clinical evidence that they work. But I digress.
So this is not a film about transsexuality. Neither is Some Like it Hot, or Victor/Victoria, or Hedwig, or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or The Crying Game, or Psycho, or La Cage Aux Folles. Where, then, are the films that ARE about transsexuality? Where are the transsexuals qua transsexuals? Honestly, they don't really exist in the cinema.* The films that are most famous for it appropriate the trappings without actually telling the stories, privileging cisgender notions of transgenderism while squeezing out countervailing transgender narratives. This irritates me.
13 Moons shares with most of these films another trait that's even more offensive, though. Part and parcel of the "pathetic transsexual" archetype--which this film presents, regardless of what else it's actually about--is a mode of hyperfeminine presentation that casts transsexual identities as inherently artificial (and, for that matter, inherently sexualized). This is usually contrasted with an actor or actress who is NOT particularly feminine, which exaggerates that perceived artifice. This is EXACTLY what this film is doing. One need look no farther than this outfit to know that this is true:
This kind of depiction completely negates any notion that transsexual identities are authentic. 13 Moons compounds this with the notion that Elvira got a quickie quack sex change in Casablanca, which feeds yet another derogation of transsexual identities as artificial constructs of mad science and quack medicine (if you want a particularly destructive explication of this idea, I would refer you to The Transsexual Empire by Janice Raymond, which is notorious among genderqueer theorists for sheer hatefulness). Even if 13 Moons ISN'T about transsexuality as such, it presents these images as representative of transsexuality as the filmmakers themselves understand it. Which is to say, they don't understand it at all, and don't understand how destructive their misapprehensions are.
I think I articulate my opinion of the narrative arc of Elvira's story in my initial posting, but I'll expand on it by noting that, as a transsexual, I have a 1 in 12 chance of being murdered. Had I remained a white male, with all the bullshit privilege that entails, my chance of being a murder victim would be 1 in 18,000. I have a similar chance of committing suicide. This kind of Sword of Damocles makes me a bit oversensitive to depictions of transsexual lives as disposable, because in the culture at large, it's very easy to adopt that viewpoint as an instrument of violence and self-hatred.
*Of course, this is an exaggeration for effect, but it's not much of one. Even though Boys Don't Cry is about a real transsexual, even that film will inculcate in some members of the audience an attitude of "she" should have known better and "she" got what she deserved. Another example: TransAmerica indulges in the hyperfeminine fallacy, all the while filming Felicity Huffman with a series of short lenses that tend to project her facial contours into high relief and otherwise depicting her identity as inherently artificial. I know a lot of transsexuals and I've never met anyone like Bree. One of my friends called this depiction "the trans version of blackface."
Rigor responds:
Points well taken. I understand your aversion to these kinds of representations.
In terms of mainstream examples of trans/gender queer experience you are correct that most are unsatisfactory. My problems with BOYS DON'T CRY actually relate to the way the film eliminates one of the real life victims (an African-American heterosexual disabled man) from the narrative entirely. In someways this is done to create a more "purely victimized' Brandon. It has extreme political ramifications on the film in terms of race and class. It suggests that Brandon has virtually no community and certainly no male community that can accept him for who he is. It also doesn't allow the audience the opportunity to make connections between white supremacy, heterosexism, patriarchy, and class exploitation.
A good example of gender queer cinema might be BY HOOK OR BY CROOK (2001). I think it is a mistake to think that advances in the representations of trans/gender non-comforming people will be created by gender conforming/commercial artists. They will have to be pushed forward by Trans/intersexed and other gender non-conforming artists making their own work.
A last word from zolaar:
I certainly do know where you're coming from, and I kind of understand your anger (as far as I can dig into), and there's really not much to argue, but...
We're still talking (also) about Fassbinder here. He's the ultimate cinematic exaggerator and the master of cool abstractions. His films are all and without exceptions highly artificial. And they are all meant to be like that. What we see on the surface of his films are just medial techniques.
13 Moons shares with most of these films another trait that's even more offensive, though. Part and parcel of the "pathetic transsexual" archetype--which this film presents, regardless of what else it's actually about--is a mode of hyperfeminine presentation that casts transsexual identities as inherently artificial (and, for that matter, inherently sexualized). This is usually contrasted with an actor or actress who is NOT particularly feminine, which exaggerates that perceived artifice. This is EXACTLY what this film is doing. One need look no farther than the outfit this puts Volker Spengler into for Elvira's tour of the meat packing plant to know that this is true. This kind of depiction completely negates any notion that transsexual identities are authentic. 13 Moons compounds this with the notion that Elvira got a quickie quack sex change in Casablanca, which feeds yet another derogation of transsexual identities as artificial constructs of mad science and quack medicine.
As Rigor pointed out, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul uses the immigration problem as only a backdrop in depicting an unusual love in a world of bourgeois intolerance, as does Katzelmacher. The immigrants in both films, being the "subjects of pity", too, are abstracted as rather dim-witted, rootless sex machines from another planet with a huge virility. In Fassbinder's theatre production "The City, the Trash and the Death", the play was even accused of being anti-Semitic and put down in consequence. But why does Fassbinder so blatantly play with these clichés? And why do people rub him the wrong way all the time? Maybe because he takes exactly the standpoint of the majority of the people (in Germany); he quasi looks through their eyes and speaks with their tongues. And believe me, that is exactly the way we Germans see the world, it's either black or white, although nobody would ever admit it. Fassbinder debunks this falseness in holding a mirror up to us, grabbing our nose and sticking it right into the dirt that we excreted.
And that's what Fassbinder does with 13 Moons, too. He depicts Elvira exactly how most of the people perhaps see a transsexual: depressed, broken, pitiful, without identity. That this is far away from the truth inside knows the director, but doesn't matter for his medium. He brings all the artistic freedom of avantgarde theatre to the screen. And he scrapes on the surface, the hotbed of intolerance and prejudices, without any judging. Fassbinder, because of his own sexuality and lifestyle, did know the milieu very well. He had many transvestite and transsexual friends, especially in Frankfurt, where the story takes place and where there is a huge community... and where the rate of committed crimes against homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals was higher than in any other German metropole (it should be surpassed by Berlin by now, I'm not sure). With everything you said about the false conception of transgenderism, I'm completely sure that he was aware of that. Fassbinder was radical in every way, as an artist and as the private man.
Other than that, I can see easily why you are offended by the way 13 Moons transports the image of transsexuality. But if you could put the film in context to Fassbinder's art, it might be easier to understand his intentions.
What about Beautiful Boxer? Or Potter's Orlando? Or Derek Jarman? Apart from those there is not much. But what should one expect from mainstream cinema? Underground on the other hand...
Where, then, are the films that ARE about transsexuality?
My response to zolaar:
We're still talking (also) about Fassbinder here. He's the ultimate cinematic exaggerator and the master of cool abstractions. His films are all and without exceptions highly artificial. And they are all meant to be like that. What we see on the surface of his films are just medial techniques.
The trouble with this line of argument is that Fassbinder's depiction isn't an aberration. It's the norm. He doesn't skew his depiction any more broadly than, say, the transsexual characters in any given Almodovar film, and his depiction is on the tame side when compared to transgender farces (the first ten minutes of, say, Too Wong Foo, for instance, or The Birdcage).
But if you could put the film in context to Fassbinder's art, it might be easier to understand his intentions.
Oh, I understand what he's up to. I just object to the means he uses to pursue his intentions.
What about Beautiful Boxer? Or Potter's Orlando? Or Derek Jarman? Apart from those there is not much. But what should one expect from mainstream cinema? Underground on the other hand...
Beautiful Boxer isn't bad. Orlando isn't about transsexuality, nor do I think its title character is a transsexual. It's interesting as all get-out, but it also avoids most of the pitfalls I'm talking about here. I don't have an appetite for Jarman, so I'll leave that without comment. I think it's interesting that both you and Rigor arrived at the conclusion that no good representation is going to come from the mainstream. Rigor goes further--and I agree with him--when he suggests that trans people need to speak for themselves. New media has made that possible, and it IS happening. Thankfully, Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda is no longer the only example of a trans person wielding the cinema's bully pulpit on their own behalf.
This is a completely fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for sharing it.
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