Changing the reflection: re-visions on the trans mirror scene

ABSTRACT

The mirror scene that produces an eerily mismatched reflection is a staple of both trans and speculative films. Jay Prosser and Jack Halberstam have examined this trope, the latter asserting trans mirror scenes allow a disruptive ‘trans look’ for a non-trans audience. This essay takes up the trans gaze, but the process reverses. Rather, non-trans characters can become readably trans by way of a new trans look, one that takes account of asymmetrical mirror images as well as formal cinematic devices that collectively comprise an expanded trans aesthetics, proposing that the formal device itself, a mirroring split, is the trans mediation. Thereby, all misattuned mirror scenes (not only those confined to attempting trans representation) are fundamentally trans. The mismatched mirror reflection elicits an uncanny discomfort that is dysphoria. When characters control or align with mismatched reflections, films take a trans imaginary seriously, but unintentionally. The combination of trans technical and visual aesthetics made possible by mirrors, moving cameras, and a floating, disconnected view, both visualize and enact a trans point of view. Like the images reflected within the scenes’ mirrors, mirror scenes (trans and non-trans) are slightly altered reflections of each other.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• spectatorship
• gaze
• trans cinema
• mirror scene

Acknowledgments

My gratitude to Andrew Campana and Jonah Hirst for their attention, support, insight, and enthusiasm across multiple drafts of this piece. I also owe this pursuit in large part to my father from whom I came to understand the value and power objects possess.

Thanks of course to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Queer and Trans Caucus and to the award selection committee whose close attention to this piece has produced a thorough and fundamental ‘re-vision’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Because so many trans people write autobiographies, Prosser refers to the narrative of transition as ‘second skin’ – a story that confirms a true inner self exists. To be trans is to be a storyteller (113). Though Prosser’s book is decades old, trans people, especially youth, still find themselves telling a certain scripted story to access trans affirming health care. The script must be recited, repeated all but identically, to the clinical establishment and must be sure to include all the generic qualities of the Harry Benjamin ‘Standards of Care,’ a gate firmly maintained and, even in 2022, legislated.

2. Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel elaborate on ‘the simultaneity of sameness and difference’ in repetition that is thus constitutive of performance, ‘lodged at the center’ of the performance studies field (7).

3. S.J. Langer refers to this distinction as body schema versus body image.

4. In Season 2, Episode 4 ‘What Price Gloria?’ (written by Donald P. Bellisario and Deborah Pratt), in the body of a woman, Sam pretends to be trans to escape sexual harassment, a guise that presumes the harasser’s (and the audience’s) transphobia and thereby the show posits transness as self-evidently revolting.

5. Somewhat odd given its specifically military milieu, the film consistently refers to the character by his first name, Colter, rather than by his rank and/or last name: Captain Stevens.

6. In what I’m sure is an intentional Easter Egg, winking at time travel fans, Colter’s father is voiced by Scott Bakula.

7. Arden is a gay actor not known for film but rather musical theatre. He also wrote the score for the song cycle Easter Rising which features a love song between men.

8. Wright won a Tony, Golden Globe, and Emmy for his performances as Belize in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America – perhaps the ultimate queer time fiction, as Kushner’s AIDS play was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History,’ an interpretation of Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint Angelus Novus in Benjamin’s 1940 essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’ See Charles McNulty, ‘Tony Kushner’s Theses on the Philosophy of History’; see also Jean E. Howard who argues in ‘Tony Kushner’s Angel Archive and the Re-visioning of American History’ that ‘[Kushner’s] play queers history by rewriting, interrupting, and co-mingling received narratives as a way of moving beyond their limitations, including narratives of national exceptionalism, special election, and progress.’

9. It should be noted that Wright performs a disability, but he is also Black. His contrast to Gyllenhaal’s all-American hero/boy next door look is not arbitrary.

10. This moment haunts Gyllenhaal’s earlier title role as Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly 2001), whose titular character states, ‘What’s the point of living if you don’t have a dick?’

11. The penultimate line in Kushner’s two-part, seven-and-a-half-hour Angels in America is also ‘More Life.’ (italicized in print, see: Kushner, Perestroika, ‘Epilogue: Bethesda,’ pg. 290). In Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer’s android character Roy Batty requests ‘more life’ from his maker Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel), only to be told, ‘a coding sequence cannot be revised once it’s been established.’

12. Halberstam is referring to The Crying Game (Neil Jordan 1992), but the reference to Quantum Leap is coincidental.

13. Colter refers to the surreal space in which his consciousness manifests as a ‘capsule.’ Rutledge insinuates he has not designed such a space, and enigmatically asks, ‘Is that where you are right now, Captain? In a capsule?’

14. Eerily and tragically, this foretells Williams’s choice to leave the world of the living.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Bastian Cole

Joshua Bastian Cole, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, has appeared in a variety of platforms and publications including the ‘Cinematic Bodies’ special issue of Somatechnics. Cole’s dissertation has the working title, A Plastic Medium, and explores trans men’s packer prosthetics as both trans objects and method—an approach to media that organically brings together certain processes of mediation as trans, and specifically trans masculine.