Television
Feb. 15th, 2006 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theotherlexI had this whole post written, then I accidentally posted it to my other journal. Then I accidentally quit Safari, and lost it.
I was watching the Movie Show on SBS. And I got very annoyed with Megan Spencer and her review of Transamerica. I haven't seen the film, but I do think it's remarkable that you can make a solid, middle of the road comedic film about a transexual, which isn't about the transexualism. It is about the relationship between and journey between two people. A person just getting their life they way they want it and the child they never knew they had.
It doesn't have to be a distinctly queer film. As if the distinction between queer and straight is clear in film when it isn't so in anything else. We'll have to lapse into discussions of Brokeback Mountain, is it more or less a queer film than Priscilla.
You don't have to have a trannie, or man, play the lead character, anymore than you had to have gay actors play Ennie and Jack in Brockback Mountain. In the first place, the main character has undergone two years of therapy (physical and psychological) and training to be assumed to be a woman in public (which is my working definition of gender for the moment). No man is going to be able to pull that off as convincingly as a woman. The character is a woman.
And against Megan's last point, which was that it is a middle-of-the-road film, and would make a better impact (because films are, of course, about making an impact than telling a story about sympathetic characters) if it were more like Boys Don't Cry. There's no way I would see it if it were.
I did catch the end of Going Bush with Deborah Mailman and Cathy Freeman, and I want to go back to the desert. I've lived in two Aboriginal communities, one for four weeks when I was six, and other for two weeks when I was eleven. We travelled a little as well, to Uluru the first time, and Kakadu the second.
There's a line from the film of Dead Heart that I always end up thinking of. The white school teacher is looking out of the classroom window, and he says "God, I love this country." His Aboriginal teacher's aid, a local of the community, looks him, incredulous and says, "Why?"
I think it's the colours.
I was watching the Movie Show on SBS. And I got very annoyed with Megan Spencer and her review of Transamerica. I haven't seen the film, but I do think it's remarkable that you can make a solid, middle of the road comedic film about a transexual, which isn't about the transexualism. It is about the relationship between and journey between two people. A person just getting their life they way they want it and the child they never knew they had.
It doesn't have to be a distinctly queer film. As if the distinction between queer and straight is clear in film when it isn't so in anything else. We'll have to lapse into discussions of Brokeback Mountain, is it more or less a queer film than Priscilla.
You don't have to have a trannie, or man, play the lead character, anymore than you had to have gay actors play Ennie and Jack in Brockback Mountain. In the first place, the main character has undergone two years of therapy (physical and psychological) and training to be assumed to be a woman in public (which is my working definition of gender for the moment). No man is going to be able to pull that off as convincingly as a woman. The character is a woman.
And against Megan's last point, which was that it is a middle-of-the-road film, and would make a better impact (because films are, of course, about making an impact than telling a story about sympathetic characters) if it were more like Boys Don't Cry. There's no way I would see it if it were.
I did catch the end of Going Bush with Deborah Mailman and Cathy Freeman, and I want to go back to the desert. I've lived in two Aboriginal communities, one for four weeks when I was six, and other for two weeks when I was eleven. We travelled a little as well, to Uluru the first time, and Kakadu the second.
There's a line from the film of Dead Heart that I always end up thinking of. The white school teacher is looking out of the classroom window, and he says "God, I love this country." His Aboriginal teacher's aid, a local of the community, looks him, incredulous and says, "Why?"
I think it's the colours.
