Reimagining Representation: Tangerine, Trans Visibility, and Subversive Filmmaking
The film Tangerine, which debuted at the 2015 Sundance Festival, caused quite a stir amongst the audience and critics when it was revealed that the micro-budget drama-comedy was shot entirely on three iPhone 5s. The writer and director of the film, Sean Baker, spent eight months in the “unofficial red-light district” in Hollywood, getting to know the people and the area when he came across an aspiring black trans actor named Mya Taylor, who plays Alexandra, the more subdued one of the pair. It is then through Taylor that Baker met Kiki Rodriguez, a fellow trans actor, who Baker ended up casting as the volatile yet lovable Sin-Dee Reel. As it happens, Taylor and Rodriguez are very close friends with the trans women who work the area. Before signing on, however, Rodriguez made one stipulation: she said that Baker, in order to make this movie with her, had to promise to depict the harsh reality of what goes on in the streets. She went on to say that these trans women are out there because they have to be and that Baker should make the film hilarious and entertaining for both them and the women who are actually working the corner.
The film Tangerine, released at Sundance in 2015, depicts a day in the life of two trans women of color living in Hollywood. It is Christmas Eve, and Sin-Dee Reel is back on the block after a 28-day stint in jail. Upon hearing that her boyfriend/pimp hadn’t been faithful while she was away, the working girl and her best friend, Alexandra, a black trans woman, embark on a mission to get to the bottom of the scandalous rumor. Their journey leads them through the underbelly of various subcultures in L.A., such as trans street culture, and includes side stories such as an Armenian family dealing with their own repercussions of infidelity.
The initial release of the film elicited some cagey first impressions, such as the decision to not even mention the fact that the two protagonists of the film are trans women, and the decision to release a movie poster of a shadowy photo of the women that completely obfuscate their identities as trans women of color. That being said, I believe the film is refreshingly brash and brave in the way that it portrays its two fiery heroines as fiercely individualistic trans women trying to survive the gritty streets of L.A. by any means necessary. And at the time it was released, in 2015, featuring actual trans women as both the film’s principal characters, as well as integral writers, was an unfortunate anomaly.
There was a whirlwind of commentary surrounding the fact that Tangerine was shot entirely on iPhones. But the fact that a low-budget film about two transgender sex workers managed to reach mainstream cinemas, even back in 2015, is just as relevantly important. The film was released in the midst of an upsurge in transgender media programming that was occurring at that time, in which some expressed concern that is often rightly underpinned with disquiet about how trans lives are being represented and for what purpose. This includes debates about whether storylines are “voyeuristic, sensationalistic, overly focused on celebrity trans lives, or pathologizing (Malone, 2020).” Given that many transgender people remain marginalized, face mental health stresses, discrimination in access to healthcare, and secure housing and employment implore that populist representations create realistic and non-shaming portrayals of trans lives.
Despite some criticism surrounding the pitting of trans women of color into a trope of sex work, I consider the film Tangerine to be an accurate, nuanced, and strangely beautiful story of the real lived experiences of transgender folks. And it is a film, that when I watched it in 2015, elicited strong feelings in me and made me question my own sense of identity. I argue that the film Tangerine, with its inclusion of two trans women of color as both integral writers of the film, and as its two protagonists, coupled with the subversive filmmaking allowed by only using iPhones, represents a turning point in mainstream media representations of transness and intersectional marginalization. The social realism of the film, driven by the use of the iPhone to evoke elements of visual presentation, serves to challenge dominant narratives of cisnormativity. In this review, I plan to discuss how the film centers its trans characters, not as the stereotypical “villains, tricksters, or sinners, but as complex women who live difficult, though sometimes humorous, lives (Ridley, 2019, p. 482).” In addition, I plan to argue that the use of iPhones as the film’s only cameras is a subversive, yet aesthetic, technical choice that brings trans identities colorfully and vibrantly to the surface of the visual text. Furthermore, I discuss how filming Tangerine with the iPhone produces a real, yet celebratory, depiction of transness, and serves to disrupt the expected visual syntaxes of gender attribution (Koch-Rein, et al., 2020).
For this analysis, I will discuss different scenes from Tangerine to highlight how the film’s technical and visual choices depart from the norm and disrupts the transparency of most films, blurs the lines between perception and what is real, and emphasizes the non-natural, constructed nature of both film and gender identity. Additionally, the non-adherence to visual norms subverts ingrained perceptions of gender, as the use of the iPhone complements the content of the film to challenge cisnormativity while also presenting transness with dignity.
The first scene in Tangerine I would like to discuss takes place early on in the film. Just prior to this scene, Sin-Dee encounters a drug dealer named Nash (Ian Edwards), whom she asks where she might find her boyfriend Chester (James Ransone) and the mysterious new woman he has taken up with. During this scene, Nash intentionally misgenders both Sin-Dee and Alexandra. When Alexandra leaves, Nash suggests Sin-Dee should “just go with your homeboy and get the fuck out of here” (14:05), then later says to Sin-Dee “Alright, come on man,” as she picks up his pack of cigarettes and takes one (14:56). This scene and its misgendering foreshadow the scene that is to come. Following this encounter, the iPhone shows Sin-Dee sitting at a bus stop bench in the low, midday December sun. At this juncture, the audience knows that Sin-Dee’s goal of finding her boyfriend Chester has been hampered as she spent the last of her money on bus fare and a donut to split with Alexandra. Rather than present the story as a reduction down to Sin-Dee’s transness by focusing on her body or her transition, it rather presents a conflict almost anyone can identify with—tracking someone down—while still paying homage to her transness by depicting issues and struggles specific to trans people: the daily experience of being misgendered coupled with the poverty many trans people of color face (Fischer, 2018). (Scene follows next paragraph)
In the scene mentioned above, Baker uses the iPhone, and close-ups of Sin-Dee’s facial expressions invite the audience to consider her thoughts rather than focusing on her body, as she is only shown from the neck up in this sequence. Instead, we witness the anxiety strewn across her face as she considers her next moves. The iPhone moves behind Sin-Dee so we can only see the top of her head above the bus bench as a bus enters the shot from the left (16:01). A large print ad is plastered to the side of the bus, half of which is obscured by the bench. Everything in the scene is in clear focus, from Sin-Dee’s head to the print ad, to each passenger disembarking from the bus. While we cannot see Sin-Dee’s face, we are able to see the face from the eyes up on the bus ad staring directly into the camera. Audiences would most likely conclude that the face is that of a man, however, in the ad is a slender hand with shiny purple painted nails wrapping around the forehead of the face. This sequence serves to challenge the “passing” model of gender attribution (Koch-Rein, et al., 2020). (The entire sequence is below)
Due to the extensive depth of field that comes with an iPhone camera, viewers must absorb all elements of the scene equally. As the shot demonstrates and depicts: Sin-Dee, whose gender identity is under inquiry; the passengers getting off the bus, who will make a judgment about Sin-Dee’s gender; and the bus ad, an image that shows viewers they cannot depend on their visual perceptions to make judgments about gender (Koch-Rein, et al., 2020).
The other scene in Tangerine I wish to discuss employs the intersection between the film’s distinctive visual presentation elements and its content to subvert cisnormativity. This scene occurs towards the end of the film, after Alexandra, an aspiring singer, finishes a set at a dingy, sparsely-populated club. The iPhone captures a “tight shot” of Sin-Dee and Dinah, the cis woman with whom Sin-Dee’s boyfriend Chester had been sleeping, as they are in a small bathroom sharing a bowl of meth. Rather than the harsh, white fluorescence that is to be expected, the bathroom is instead lit up in a beautiful visual array of magenta, with perpetually cascading points of pale blue light, akin to what one would see from the light refraction of a disco ball. As Sin-Dee and Dinah stand facing each other, while Sin-Dee smokes drugs, ambient music overtakes the scene. After the iPhone swivels back and forth a few times, alternately focusing on Sin-Dee and Dinah as if sizing them up, the camera finally allows both women to appear equally in the scene (54:00). Pink hues in the scene intensify, and the diamond-pointed bits of pale blue light continue to circulate while moving across the bodies of these women throughout the scene. Up until this point in the film, Sin-Dee had been abusing Dinah as she dragged her around town. But now, Sin-Dee mouths to Dinah to “come here,” pulling Dinah closer to her as Sin-Dee proceeds to apply under Dinah’s eyes and forehead with gentle strokes. Sin-Dee appears calm and gives an apprehensive Dinah a conciliatory smile, as she eventually calms down and accepts the gesture. At this juncture, Sin-Dee is teaching Dinah how to apply lipstick, first using herself as a model before prompting Dinah to follow suit. The scene ends with both of the women looking into the bathroom mirror after a brief makeup lesson, as Sin-Dee nods to confirm the completion of a successful conciliatory gesture.
Like other scenes, this scene also serves to destabilize popular notions of gender attribution (Koch-Rein, et al., 2020). This scene, in which a trans woman and a cis woman occupy the same bathroom—a cornerstone of socio-political discourses around who has “rights” to certain space—seems to move back and forth between their expected roles. This subverts cisnormative expectations by first posing the women as enemies, as this moment of reconciliation is an unexpected turn in the story supported by the visual elements (Malone, 2020). As some viewers may assume that Dinah, a cisgender woman, is capable of achieving gender norms such as applying makeup, it may come as unanticipated that Sin-Dee, a trans woman, is teaching Dinah how to evoke femininity through presentation.
While there was some discussion about problematic representation surrounding the release of Tangerine in 2015, I believe that most of that criticism is far outweighed by the benefits of including trans actors as cultural interpreters in their own films. However, as Mia Fischer writes, “Sourcing practices also reveal that journalists continue to rely on non-transgender “experts” as proxies, rather than letting trans people tell their own stories, which often individualizes struggles and failures but does not address the systemic nature of intersecting oppressions (Fischer, 2018, p. 97).” While the subversive use of the iPhone to film Tangerine, coupled with the inclusion of two trans actors as protagonists, is a positive development, I do believe the social-realist style of the film and its portrayal of the struggles facing trans women of color do so at the expense of addressing larger socio-political issues. While the inclusion of Mya Taylor as Alexandra, and Kiki Rodriguez as Sin-Dee, the trans actors are able to wrest control of the narrative and challenge cisnormativity, there is no mention whatsoever of the white capitalist patriarchy American system that keeps these people relegated to perpetual marginalization. Moving forward, I will like to see films that encompass both representational elements.
As I mentioned earlier in this review, I saw Tangerine soon after it was released in 2015. I myself identify as a transgender female and am currently in the initial stages of my transition. Though I have long known I was “different” in some way, and have long known of the incongruity between my biological sex and my gender, I didn’t quite have the language to describe those very difficult feelings when I was younger. The time and the way in which I grew up played a substantial role in the formation of my ideas about sex and gender. I grew up with a healthy appetite for movies and television, and the lack of censorship of what I watched on behalf of my parents meant I was exposed, at a very young age, to a wide array of what is considered “adult” media. I do recall watching movies and TV shows in the 1990s that portrayed transgender people as perverts, sexual deviants, sex workers, drug addicts, and depraved villains. At that age, I already knew something was “up” with me, but both the media representations of trans people and the comparatively harsh and discriminatory rhetoric at the time made me feel incredibly insecure and like I had to protect my secret at all costs. As a coping mechanism, I developed a shield of sorts; overt displays of masculinity, aggression, drug addiction, covering my body in tattoos.
However, as I got into my early 20s, I was living in Los Angles, over a thousand miles away from my family and the small Colorado town I grew up in. For the first time in my life, I was completely anonymous and free to explore my identity without fear of being found out. L.A., and particularly West Hollywood, has a large LGBTQ population. I began to make some friends and the community and started presenting as female almost full-time for a period of 18 months or so. It was a time of great liberation, confusion, hope, and internalized self-hatred. Though I presented as female, I nonetheless felt dysphoric on a daily basis. I was in the midst of a bad heroin and meth addiction and was exposed to some very seedy, depraved aspects of the criminal underbelly that so many trans people encounter. And that is a big part of why I fled California in 2012 to move back to Colorado, where I settled in Denver. That move signified a sort of regression into the safety of my old behaviors until about 2015, when I happened to see Tangerine. By this time, I had gotten off of drugs and was slowly becoming more accepting of who I am. But when I saw the film for the first time, it brought up some very troubling memories of my time living in and around the area depicted in the film.
That realization helped me to process some of my past, and I eventually arrived where I am at today. I believe that is for a couple of reasons. First, the simple fact of getting older and maturing helped me in not caring what others thought of me so much. Also, I believe the continued visibility of trans identities in both our media and culture, while it has created some backlash, is a positive development overall in helping challenge hetero- and cis-normativity, and has helped me personally in that I can now see myself in trans characters in films and on TV. I believe we need to continue to make progress by increasingly including trans actors, writers, directors, etc. as integral to the process of reclaiming control of the narrative.
References
Cavalcante, A. (2017). Breaking into transgender life: Transgender audiences' experiences with “First of its kind” visibility in popular media. Communication, Culture & Critique, 10(3), 538-555. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12165.
Fischer M. (2018) Queer and Feminist Approaches to Transgender Media Studies. In: Harp D., Loke J., Bachmann I. (eds) Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90838-0_7.
Koch-Rein, A., Haschemi Yekani, E., & Verlinden, J. J. (2020). Representing trans: Visibility and its discontents. European Journal of English Studies, 24(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2020.1730040.
Ridley, L. (2019). Imagining otherly: Performing possible black trans futures in tangerine. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 6(4), 481-490. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7771653.
