THE ANALYTIC FIELD
Does the (Fantastic) Transwoman Exist?
Oren GOZLAN
A Commentary on the Film A Fantastic Woman, a Chilean Drama directed by Sebastian Lelio, and the Question of Psychoanalytic Pedagogy We now live in a time when there are different ways of thinking and representing gender, and in this regard, the transsexual subject represents a new kind of subjectivity, that along with other individuals subjected to exclusion, such as autistic or indigenous groups, is oriented by a desire for social change. There are multiple realities that are at stake, and there is a question of how far we can go when we think about what is possible or the human’s determination, and this comes to a boiling point on the matter of gender. The attempt to change the nature of how to make meaning also involves the capacity to face difficult questions and to have the courage to tolerate anxiety and frustration without falling back to compliance or destruction. There are new demands being made from LGBTQ groups for a different way of approaching discourse on gender, including demands for recognition, inclusion, and, recently, an apology for a history of willful disregard. The slow-moving creep of discourses about gender now involves a move from looking at transsexuality towards examining the cisgender reception of trans subjectivities and demands for recognition. In turn, trans communities are making demands from within for education about their own subject position in relation to transsexuality. There is an intensity that belongs to the topic of education, because it is a site to which we bring our own desires, our hatred of dependency and development, and our tacit fantasies of what it takes to change minds. This paper engages with the question of film as one site of education, in which the central question is the viewers’ reception. The question of reception is crucial, because clinicians are now beginning to think more deeply about their own work in relation to gender demands, and about their own education in matters of gender. In this paper, I offer a brief reviewing of the film A Fantastic Woman (2017), a passionate melodrama by Sebastian Leilo, a Chilean director, with the question of reception in mind. The use of the melodrama, I suggest, animates a particular kind of passion, and if as analytic viewers, we also study passion when we study this film, what sense can we make of melodrama in relation to the film’s reception? What do we think about the film’s effect of addressing mentalities towards gender? The larger question I attempt to address in this paper is this: what do we think about the film as a pedagogical tool in affecting people’s minds? A Fantastic Woman is a film about inexplicability. It presents us with a geometry of what would be the stakes for the aftermath
of a transgender love affair. Yet it is a fiction taken at its tragic dimensions. The movie begins with Marina and Orlando celebrating Marina’s birthday. Orlando presents Marina with an envelope containing a missing object. In a piece of paper, there is a promise of a trip to Iguazu Falls. The “would-be” tickets themselves are lost. Soon after returning from the restaurant, Orlando collapses. Marina rushes him to the hospital, where he dies. It is at this point that the movie leaves the transgender scene and moves into the trauma of the society: there is no time for grief for Marina, who is confronted with an onslaught of humiliations and attacks. She is misgendered, believed to be a prostitute, suspected of committing murder or of having engaged in bizarre and deadly sex. She is asked by her lover’s wife and son to leave the apartment she shared with her lover and is violently attacked for attending her lover’s funeral. In a normative rule-governed reality, there is no freedom even when you die. The film opens up the clichés of the mistress’ story. The new narrative, involving a love affair between a young transwoman and an older man, challenges the fault line of the old story because it opens up the repressed qualities of an affair, its enigmatic desires for escape and entrapment, the enigmatic qualities of attraction and its persecutory anxieties. It presents a different, non-normative narrative of old conflicts, burdened by new additions like questions around identity and escape from heterosexuality. Yet as I was watching the film, I wondered, does the transwoman exist in the fantasy of the society? Judging by the film, the trans body is imagined as having no interiority: how does Marina make sense of her lover’s family? Of her lover? Of her situation? It is the family who takes the center stage, while the audience watches a transsexual being beaten. The family cannot believe that a husband and a father would fall in love with someone they could not anticipate. They are the persecutory face of the society that disavows the capacity of someone to decide what they want to do or be. The story of transitioning, one could argue, is one of taking ownership. One of making meaning of an intricate story, whose traces one is unable to capture or undo. It is a story that is never-ending, whose consequences are unknown. The advent of transsexuality has opened for us a new position of gender as it raises the question of whether femininity and masculinity, as they are conceptualized, are the extremes of gender, and yet are not the whole of gender’s capabilities. A broad story of transsexuality, where the 4
DIVISION | R E V I E W
SPRING 2020
center of a question is not physical violation, aggression, or rape, however, is hard to come by. It is precisely this difficulty that brings the film A Fantastic Woman so close to the trauma of gender, and in this way, it is traumatic and hard to watch. In essence, the film is not so much about the transsexual, of whom we know very little, or their affair, of which we know even less, or about Marina’s relationship to life, of which we know nothing at all. A Fantastic Woman is a film about the experience of the scorned woman, who is betrayed. And so, we may wonder, why are we seeing it as emblematic of the trans experience? After all, how well does anyone do with an affair? Would it be different if we placed any other disclaimed person in Marina’s place (e.g., a young boy, a gay man)? The space of the disclaimed subject, I suggest, is interchangeable. Yet, the radical moment in the film, I believe, is sexuality, not trans. It is about two people who surprised each other and had sex. That disrupted the normative marriage, the age relation, and gender. The normative is disrupted not so much because of who Marina and Orlando are, but because of what they did in bed. Yet, what did they do in bed? The big question of the sexual act is not asked. The voyeuristic fixation about the genitals is an extremely veiled curiosity in the film. And yet, like Poe’s purloined letter, it becomes evident through the question of how unbelievable the relationship is felt to be. It is the relationship between Marina and Orlando whose impossibility is at the heart of the movie and that remains alienated in the film. Why is Marina and Orlando’s relationship so unimaginable to the heteronormative family? Partly because they thought they knew. So, the fantasy of mastery is the defense against the anxiety of not knowing the other. The viewer may experience a torn loyalty, see an impossible paradise, or feel anger towards the couple. The film, I suggest, is made from the point of view of the society that cannot make sense of the transsexual, at the same time that it does not make sense. The central question of the film becomes the ways in which the body is addressed by normalcy, and so we are witness to the brutality of the society and what it does to the transsexual. A Fantastic Woman is also a film about adolescent fantasies and is steeped in ideality: Marina and Orlando’s ideality of the affair and the viewer’s ideality, that if we could only explain the brutal reality, there will be tolerance. These idealities present a dilemma that also belongs to psychoanalysis: can there be an address to the normative
