Scene 6: Beyond the symbol, into the self
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Does the way we look at trans lives on screen change depending on how close the camera allows us to be?
Watching The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, 2015) and Boy Meets Girl (BBC, 2015) demonstrates how much media shapes the way trans stories are told. The Danish Girl is a biographical drama inspired by one of the first known people to go through with gender affirming surgery, while Boy Meets Girl is a heartwarming rom-com featuring a trans woman. By watching these two texts quite closely together, I became very aware of the difference in how the two characters are portrayed. In The Danish Girl, we, as viewers, are always at a noticeable distance from Lili Elbe’s emerging identity; the visual style the film uses, such as soft focus lenses, pastel costumes, and gentle camera movement, frames Lili as a symbol of transness, making her feel untouchable instead of relatable. Viviane Namaste (2005) argues that trans lives are often “symbolised rather than recognised,” and Hooper's reliance on visual delicacy does exactly this. Namaste’s argument is also greatly supported by the fact that the person playing Lili is a cisgender male actor, which not only (in my opinion) defeats the whole purpose of trans representation in media, as it frames trans womanhood as a ‘performance’, but also deprives trans actresses of already limited opportunities.
On the other hand, Boy Meets Girl’s protagonist, Judy, is played by a trans actress, instantly making it feel much more authentic, as Judy is not metaphorical or symbolic; she’s a person. The camera gets up close to her while she goes about the ordinariness of daily life, and we follow her as she deals with the awkwardness of dates, family, and love. Glyn Davis (2009) describes television as a medium capable of creating “queer intimacies of the everyday,” and Boy Meets Girl is the perfect embodiment of this. The contrast between these two works reveals how medium shapes representation: where film might elevate and stylise, television can domesticate and humanise.
Sometimes the most radical act of representation is simply allowing someone to be seen up close