Yesterday I devoted a post to my best film of the year, though that was really a way in to discussing a larger phenomenon.
When I reviewed
The Matrix Resurrections, giving it tied for the lowest rating I gave any film in 2021, I was not thinking of it as a film with trans themes directed by a trans person. This was a precursor to rating it my worst film of 2021 earlier this week.
Before I had a chance to do that officially, about a week after my review went up, a friend told me he didn't like it either and said "It was just a film entirely about transitioning."
Uh oh, I thought.
His argument was that the shift of power from Neo to Trinity was a mirroring of the director's own decision to transition from man to woman.
I don't think this friend is a transphobe. He didn't really elaborate on why that specific thing was a detriment to his enjoyment of the film, but if I had to read between the lines, I'd say he thought it was a film about transitioning at the expense of all the other things a Matrix film should be about. In his view, it could have been about transitioning as long as that didn't prevent its director from devoting the energies and resources that make a good Matrix movie a good Matrix movie.
Which is worse, that he saw and was somehow bothered by a trans theme, or that I didn't see the trans theme at all?
Did my sisgender privilege give me the "luxury" of not seeing a trans theme in The Matrix Resurrections?
There's a sentence I wouldn't have written ten years ago. I wouldn't have even known what "sisgender" meant. But I'm glad I do now because trans rights are human rights, and I'm wiser than I was then.
Still, it's possible someone doesn't see a trans theme in a movie because they are not trained to see -- or because they are trained not to see -- such a theme. They passively dismiss the possibility that something is trans because it's too foreign to them. The possibility of a trans theme never even enters their consciousness in the first place.
More to the point: Would I have judged the movie less harshly if I did perceive the trans theme?
Either because it would have contributed in some useful way to what the film was doing, or just to come off looking better myself as a critic and human being?
And that gets into this tricky gray area in film criticism where you have to try to control the way you're perceived by your readers. If you're like me, you live in fear of being thought of as racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic. You know you aren't, but the fear that some careless wording might cause you to be perceived that way is strong -- even as you are taking great pains to avoid such carelessness. It's another situation where a line I love in Glengarry Glen Ross feels really pertinent. Ed Harris' character tells Alan Arkin's character "You know who doesn't get nervous around the police? Criminals." It's the people who are least guilty of something who are the most worried that they might be found guilty -- might actually be guilty.
I'm probably not the least guilty person out there in any sphere, but I sure do worry about this sort of thing. "If I don't rate this movie directed by this person of this race or gender high enough, what will my readers think about me?"
The thing is, The Matrix Resurrections really is shit. Lana Wachowski made a movie in which she takes pleasure in trolling her fans, though I suspect she thinks the object of her trolling is really Warner Brothers. I say, we're all trolled. Equal opportunity trolling.
But first there was my friend who agreed with me about the film, and whose comment was possible to interpret as transphobia, and then, making it worse, I heard the movie discussed on The Slate Spoiler Special, where host Dana Stevens had a trans critic on to discuss it with her. I'm not going to find that critic's name right now, because it's not relevant and I probably don't want to add to the list of terms someone could search to find this post -- if there's any chance they might misinterpret what I'm writing here. (See, there I go again.)
But it was a trans woman, which I could tell from the pairing of the name with a voice she had not made any specific attempt to modify, if her goal had been to better align it with our preconceived notions of her gender identity. Plus she revealed that identity near the end of the podcast, in what she jokingly characterized as a completely unsurprising disclosure of information.
Anyway, this woman admitted the movie was flawed, but loved it.
It's that more than anything that makes me wonder if I was too poorly equipped to see the themes in The Matrix Resurrections that she saw.
I think Dana was caught in between a rock and a hard place too. She clearly didn't like the movie very much, but I could tell she was selecting her language in such a way that she made it sound like a "her problem," and tried to over-praise the things she could legitimately say she liked about it.
What I don't know is, does this trans critic love the movie because it's about transitioning, because she thinks it's important to support trans artists in anything they do, or just because she thought it was a good movie?
To her credit, I could not tell from her analysis. She didn't go on excessively about issues of transitioning, and in fact, they might have only gotten a quick mention in passing. So there was no way, from the text of her words, to ascribe to her the same motivations in liking the film that my friend ascribed to Lana Wachowski in making it.
But it might be worse if just being a trans person allows you to appreciate certain trans dog whistles, if you will, that I didn't see/hear, because I was not capable of seeing/hearing them.
Why is this worse? Well I'll try to articulate that.
For starters, there is the goal I try -- fruitlessly, I'm sure -- to achieve in my criticism, which is to suppress the self as much as I can. That is to say, I try to remove my particular subjectivity as a white, heterosexual, 48-year-old American man living in Australia, so I can try, if at all possible, to view the art before me objectively.
Well a) that's the luxury of some white sis hetero privilege right there, but b) it's probably impossible anyway, so I shouldn't blame myself. Trying to pretend that I can see a movie made by Black people through Black eyes is a self-delusion meant to make me feel more comfortable about my place in the sociopolitical landscape. (Bo Burnham is well aware of this essential truth.) I can no more see a Black movie through Black eyes than I can see a trans movie through trans eyes.
The problem, then, is how much do I allow my constitutional deficiency to adjust how I either praise or scorn a movie for a reading audience of indeterminate demographic makeup? If I hate a movie, as I did The Matrix Resurrections, is it my duty to hate it ten percent less because [fill in the blank] person made it, as some kind of offset to compensate for my constitutional deficiency? Does some part of me have to write the review keeping in mind the comparatively small percentage of my reading audience -- and even smaller in the case of potential trans readers -- who might get things from the film that I don't?
The philosophical purists would tell me not to do that, and would applaud me for going with my gut and naming The Matrix Resurrections the worst film of the year despite my reservations about how it could make me look. But then you have neurotics like me who continue to wonder.
Because part of choosing any film as your worst of the year is a statement, right? The movie you say you hated most may not actually be the worst, but something about the manner it disappoints you makes it "worse" than a piece of technical garbage that was made poorly. If we were going for the actual worst film that I saw in 2021 -- like most poorly made -- I might have to choose the low budget film Royal Jelly, a body horror movie in which a woman starts taking on the traits of a bee.
And yet there are always mitigating factors. Things like this can never be absolute. I actually ranked 16 films lower than Royal Jelly because I was considering those mitigating factors, like the low budget, like a cast with limited professional experience, like the fact that there were some cool ideas, some of which were executed interestingly, even as the vast majority of the film was executed poorly.
Naming a film your worst of the year is really a measure of how much it disappointed you based on your expectations. And I was super disappointed by The Matrix Resurrections. When you add in a sort of bad faith by Wachowski in the cheeky manner in which she skewered The Matrix and the whole idea of reboots -- in addition to how ugly the film looked, how poorly the fight scenes were executed, how uneven the performances were, and how totally lacking it was in mind-blowing concepts -- you've got what was a fairly slam dunk choice for worst of the year. I was never even tempted to drop #169, Sweet Girl, below it.
But the fact remains that someone, somewhere, would/will read my rankings, without reading this post that provides context for them, and will assume my hatred of the movie is a result of my retrograde ignorance about gender identity -- my desire to downvote trans themes or trans artists the way people downvote movies on IMDB whose subject matter and/or creator offends them.
To make matters worse, I've cheekily chosen a specifically provocative title for this post. J.K. Rowling is perhaps the world's most famous transphobe -- at least among people from whom we would expect better -- but I hope even in her weakened moral state she would not judge The Matrix Resurrections on the grounds of it being trans wish fulfillment.
In particular because I don't think it is. To say that those themes aren't present on some level would be incorrect, but to say that Lana Wachowski only cares about issues of transitioning is to do her a massive disservice. The best artists are the ones who care about a lot of different elements to and perspectives on the human condition, and stuff all of them into their films. And Wachowski has been a great artist for a long time, dating not only back to The Matrix and the several smaller successes she's had since then, but to Bound, which is currently ranked as my 20th favorite movie all time on Flickchart.
She just needs to make a better movie next time.
