The Danish Girl Leaves Maturity And Realism Out of The Picture
The Danish Girl bills itself as a movie about Lili Elbe, the first publicly known transsexual woman to receive very experimental surgeries for her transition. Its screenplay is loosely based on a completely fictionalized account of Lili and Gerda[1]. It makes a very slight attempt to stay true to the actual history of their lives. The film opens with a sequence of panoramas of Lili’s childhood landscapes. These form a main theme for the visuals and art in the movie and help give it a sense of cohesiveness and closure. The cinematography is stunning in those sequences. The play of light in those scenes conveys a sense of the movie being a dynamic painting — a feeling which stays for the whole movie.
As a movie about a transgender woman, I was surprised to find it doesn’t help the plight of transgender people at all. I found it confusing at best. It only skirts around the real matters a transgender individual deals with and presents a bunch of worn and inaccurate tropes to viewers. At its worst, it sends the message that Lili was foolhardy and doomed to die. In some ways the movie portrays Lili’s transition as a lifestyle choice — which is never the case when it comes to transsexuality (or being intersex, for that matter). Its a choice between giving up (suicide) and struggling to be oneself. These were two very important parts of Lili’s real life narrative which escaped the movie.
Another aspect of the movie which suffered was its historical accuracy. Through much of the movie, I had no sense of the timeframe in which it was happening. I also had no sense it started during part of WWI. I also felt lost in terms of place. It just felt vaguely European, and not so French. In real life, the couple spent a lot of time in Paris during the 1920s with a few travels to the countryside and Capri, an Italian island with a reputation for having a few clusters of lesbians and gay men. Much of Gerda’s artwork appeared in popular magazines, such as Vogue and La Baïonette, as well as some dirty rags, such as La Vie Parisienne. The two of them would have enjoyed rubbing elbows with some of our worlds most highly regarded artists and writers of the “Lost Generation”. Gerda and Lili (as Einar) even exhibited in the Salon d’Automne.
When the movie portrays Lili and Gerda’s relationship, it presents a very sparse picture. It presents a tired and boring view of the couple, especially for a movie that mostly takes place among artists in the Left bank of Paris in the 1920s. The dances they appeared at in the movie were probably a far cry from the balls and parties they actually would have gone to in the 1920s.
There could have been so much more depth and exploration of their relationship as a queer couple. There could have been more focus on how Lili, when presenting as Einar, was always feminine and how that was an underlying factor in their relationship working — especially considering Gerda’s interest in depicting women and their relationship the way she did. They could easily have been in a relationship much more akin to a lesbian relationship. Instead, it’s been hetero-washed and confused.
Somehow, this movie partially confused gender dysphoria with a transvestic fetish. For those unfamiliar with the term dysphoria, it is an intense unease. So gender dysphoria would be an intense unease about the gender one was assigned at birth. This movie would be so much better if it focused on how natural being in a certain kind of clothing and social context was for Lili. It could have focused on how Lili’s transition was really a process of bringing other people’s perceptions of her into alignment with her own identity. Instead, it focused on the sensuality of putting on women’s clothing and how easily Eddie Redmayne could reach an orgasm while dressed up.
One must understand that, from a transgender person’s perspective, the change in identity is really more of something people around them experience because their own identity is already different than how others perceive their identity. There’s also possibly such deep dysphoria of one’s own anatomy that sex may not even be pleasurable. Also there is the process of acculturation to social expectations of women— however, that is something some transgender people may have already learned and may already be a part of the cause for the unease in the gender assigned at birth.
The real reason for someone to transition is just as deep as one’s ingrained sense of being-ness. There’s an intense pain that comes from not transitioning socially — even then the pain from all the other dissonances builds up. When one perceives the dissonance between their body and their mind, it is painful. When one perceives the dissonance between how they perceive themselves and how everyone else perceives them, it is painful. When others expect oneself to relate to them in a different way, in an uncomfortable and unnatural way, it is painful. When one understands how differently people relate to them compared to the way with which they need to be related, it is painful. When others attempt to abuse and coerce someone into behaving the way they expect one to behave, it is even more painful — possibly even physically. Suicide can be a reality of trans lives — especially when people perceive one’s identity as a mental illness.
In a very real way, transitioning is less about the changes to one’s body. Those changes are awesome and ease the pain of that fundamental incongruence, the gender dysphoria. However, those changes only happen once. Every relationship with someone else is a separate transition in itself. When everything is laid out as a timeline, it is more about changing the way others relate to and perceive oneself. It is also about embracing oneself and no longer allowing others or norms of any kind to imprison oneself.
When I first heard the line “I want to be a woman, not a painter.” it felt like it didn’t come from Lili. Gerda’s response, “Some have been known to do both.”, didn’t feel strong enough of a retort either. It didn’t feel true to my ideals, because I feel that being a woman is not something one does. It’s not an act. It’s not a job. I can’t even fully say it’s an identity, because some people derive their identity from what they do and how they act. It is really a sense of self, a being-ness. It is more ingrained than anything else from which someone can derive identity. People’s actions all spring from this fundamental being-ness and those actions are reifications of the identity that most closely aligns with that being-ness.
After researching Lili’s story a bit more, I found out she actually wrote a similar line, but the movie completely removed it from the context in which it was written. It was written right before her last surgery (the forth or fifth). There’s a lot that went on in the year before her last surgery. She conquered her fear of seeing her family and those who would know her as “Einar”. After they were back in Denmark, they tried to sell Lili’s old paintings under the name “Einar” to raise money for her next surgery. People were curious why the painter wasn’t around. She was eventually pressured into publishing a Confession in the local newspaper about what happened. This had the effect of sensationalizing her old paintings and she sold most of them.
Before her final surgery, she got back into painting and wrote of it as though she were better at painting now that she had transitioned. She had started to tutor a friend’s daughter, who was studying art. Her friend and lover for at least two years, known as Claude in her memoir, had just proposed to her and asked her move with him to Turkey from France. She had just finished a painting of her heart she would take to Dresden to give to her surgeon before requesting an operation that she believed would allow her to have a child. Two days before her last operation she wrote:
Here you have, dear friend, the explanation of my character, of my endeavor and deepest longing; all that I desire is nothing less than the last fulfillment of a real woman; to be protected from life by the sterner being, the husband. I think death would be more welcome to me than, for instance, a life as an artist, even as a great and feted artist on my own account. For I do not want to be an artist, but a woman. Hence I must shut out all artistic creation out of my life — you will remember I insisted on this during our last conversation — because I cannot continue the work of the virile artist who was [Einar].
And in contrast to [Einar], who had to create works of art from inner compulsion, my own life feels deflected from everything that constitutes art. Do I make myself clear? It is not with my brain, not with my eyes, not with my hands that I want to be creative, but with my heart and my blood. The fervent longing in my woman’s life is to become a mother of a child. Wether this wish can be fulfilled or not, the fact that I can openly acknowledge this desire from the fullness of a pure woman’s heart is an infinite happiness to me. The fact that I may experience this happiness justifies everything which has happened to me here in Dresden.
And because it is so, dear friend, the Confessions which I have placed in your hands must end on the note which expresses my strongest craving: “I want so much to become a mother.”
In addition to several other layers of meaning here, she was so appalled with art as a sole creative force in her past and the association of painting with her dead name that that she would rather die than continue being associated with painting. This was something she had struggled with for months going up to the first surgery. Even then, she struggled with resuming painting until she painted that last picture of her heart, a symbol of her desire to be a mother.
This is a lot to leave out of the picture, but the movie does just that — focusing on her surgeries with no regard to the rest of her lived life before and up to her ultimate and untimely demise. They should have at least depicted her real-life relationship and how intimate she was with her lover, Claude. That would have at least given a proper background for wanting to have a child and carrying through with the rest of the process. The movie killed her off leaving the impression of the movie being a cautionary tale. The real story was much more interesting, daring, and unfortunate.
She only just started living her life full time and a year and a half later she is dead because a surgeon performed a surgery which, at the time, seemed altogether perfectly reasonable. She had a uterus implanted along with a vaginoplasty in her final operation. Her death was most likely from organ rejection and the mess that entails. Immunosuppressants came forty years too late for her (ciclosporin was discovered in 1970). Uterus transplants have never allowed a pregnancy until 2014[3]. Of course, the movie never shows or talks about organ rejection or the actual social, relational, and historical context in which that happened.
Why would a movie focus so much on the surgery and not the context around it? A partial explanation of this comes from cissexual people’s fixation with the process of transitioning physically[4]. I understand the curiosity. It’s not something anyone would make a decision to do if they’re happy, and not dysphoric, with the alignment of their body and soul. It’s not glamorous — except maybe some parts, like growing boobs and having cleavage, or growing a beard and becoming more muscular. The surgical aspect may be gruesome and painful, but it’s done more artfully and skillfully than taking a knife to one’s own body — a thought which may flash through someone’s head when they are experiencing severe dysphoria. Most of the time, it is a very private process shared only with lovers and those whom are going through the same. It a many layered process and it takes a lot of time. It’s basically a second puberty that comes with many social transitions and inflection points. I understand how transitioning is also an important personal part of transgender narratives, but I would rather us not focus on that culturally. I’d just hope we move past that and get on with life and provide transgender people with the resources and care we need. Life happens all the while. It’s never an end-all and be-all, it’s just an inflection point in the music of life with many other lines of narrative flowing all around like water tumbling over a rock in a river.
The Danish Girl merely creates a poor caricature of Lili Elbe. This movie does no justice to the reality of being transgender. I’m wanting to find a narrative which doesn’t gloss over real life. I’m wanting to find a narrative which doesn’t emphasize actions and no context.
A movie with a much better storyline is Tangerine[6]. In terms of TV series, go watch sense8[7]. It has a better narrative around one of its main characters, Nomi, a transexual woman played by Jamie Clayton (who just so happens to be a transsexual woman in real life). Transparent is also pretty great from a narrative standpoint, but only has transgender people working behind the scenes and as auxiliary characters, never as the main character. What I absolutely love about both Tangerine and sense8 are they skip any aspects of transitioning and get on with the characters lives. There’s more to a life than transitioning; narratives in media should reflect that.
Notes:
- I encourage you to read the Kindle version of the original narrative by Lili and her editor. It’s less than five US dollars — Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change (Man Into Woman).
- There is some fantastic info on Gerda and Lili over here in the Arken Museum Catalog. They are having an exhibition of Gerda Wegener. More info here: http://www.arken.dk/udstilling/gerda-wegener/
- Here’s an NPR article on the first successful pregnancy due to a uterus transplant: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/10/04/353691555/a-first-uterus-transplant-gives-parents-a-healthy-baby
- Somehow, I also get the sense this is slightly skewed towards the physical transition of converting external male genitalia into internal female genitalia and not ever about creating external male genitalia for those who need it. In some ways, I feel this echoes the sexism inherent in our society. If a movie were about a transsexual man, there would probably not be any focus on surgeries for reconstructing his genitalia. It probably would have just focused on how he was a guy and not made a big deal about the transition. Whereas it’s so difficult to get past the “I’m transsexual” bit without the next question being, “Have you had the surgery?” It’s almost as though the patriarchy/kyriarchy and it’s adherents must enforce the idea that a woman’s sole existence is for the pleasure of man or that a woman is not a woman without having an absence of a penis.
- If you’re interested in seeing more of Gerda’s art without traveling to Copenhagen, I’ve compiled some of it on a Pinterest board. It’s a bit NSFW: https://www.pinterest.com/adaburrows/gerda-wegener/
- Tangerine is available on Netflix. I’m still trying to make a list of movies with great transgender characters.
- The show, sense8, is a Netflix original series by the Wachowski siblings and J. Michael Straczynski, of Babylon 5 fame.
- I’d like to point out that Alicia Vikander did an excellent job playing the part of a woman. However, I don’t think she’s as strong willed in the movie as Gerda would have been in real life. Congrats on the Oscar win, by the way.
