The year of weird Barbie

To anyone looking past the media circus of “Emilia Pérez,“ 2024 was a breakout year for a new generation of indie trans filmmakers. "I Saw The TV Glow,“ "The People’s Joker, " and self-described Mexican Emilia Pérez parody “Johanne Sacreblu“ gave us wildly idiosyncratic visions of how trans people find ourselves in mass media that rarely acknowledge us, let alone seek to tap into our imaginations.

To me, that unholy trinity of unconventional trans film is the vindication of a subtle discourse on queer and trans representation in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.“ In the decade plus that I’ve spent covering trans representation in comics, film, and television, one thing I can say for certain is that there has never, and may never, be enough visual media to represent all the various ways that trans women want to be reflected. This is largely true of just about any demographic, but the ratio of supply to demand in the mainstream feels particularly acute for us.

But “Barbie,“ to me, opened up a discourse about the twin poles, or perhaps parallel tracks of desire for trans representation in art between Hari Nef’s role as Doctor/DJ Barbie and Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie. On the one hand, both Nef’s career and character represent an aspiration to be seen and recognized within the canon, to feel a sense of inclusion, recognition, and prestige without our transness being exploited as a spectacle. To wit, Nef recently announced that she wrote the screenplay for the “Candy Darling“ biopic she’s set to star in.

McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, on the other hand, functions as a representation of the desire to manipulate and abject the canon. While not explicitly presented as trans, Weird Barbie represents a composite of all the dolls that were played with too hard. McKinnon, herself a lesbian, commenting on how the children who play with her always seem to want to put her in the splits, was saying the quiet part loud: that the off-label use for a “Barbie“ is to act as a canvas for a child’s notions of sex and gender. Once you get a “Barbie“ out of the box, Mattel can’t tell you want to do with it, and the past year in indie trans filmmaking has given us a fresh set of filmmakers who want to bring that ethos to the entire pop canon.

“I Saw The TV Glow’s“ writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is the most modest of the three in that motif, as if modesty came anywhere near the movies under discussion. Perhaps best described as Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF reimagined as a quintessential Clive Barker journey of obsession into dark epiphany, Schoenbrun accesses the pop canon as fragments, an after-image of something barely remembered. Schoenbrun laces the mysterious channel at the heart of the movie with typefaces and visual cues that are just short of the mainstays of 1990s culture to trigger latent memories in the audience to reconfigure nostalgia into something sinister and unsettling, instead of comforting.

It’s a motif that seems like it should be almost mandatory for millennial filmmakers, given how astonishing it is that the late 1990s and early 2000s have become a site of significant nostalgia for Gen Z and Alpha. There was never any sense of permanence or posterity in the pop culture of my youth. Even at the time, there was a broad recognition that precious little of what we were consuming would stand any test of time, let alone achieve the glossy reverence for the ’60s and ’70s that simultaneously entranced our parents in “Forrest Gump,“ “Almost Famous,“ or “Oliver Stone’s The Doors.“

Instead, Fred Durst represents the face of millennial nostalgia in both “Y2K“ and “I Saw The TV Glow.“ Of course, the turn of the millennium was also bisected by 1999, arguably the greatest year in film history and inarguably the single year that shaped an entire generation of queer film with “The Matrix,“ “Fight Club,“ “But I’m a Cheerleader,“ “Cruel Intentions,“ “American Beauty,“ “Girl, Interrupted,“ “The Talented Mr. Ripley,“ “Boys Don’t Cry,“ and “Being John Malkovich.“ So it wasn’t all Woodstock 2000, but it was very that.

As unexpected as it is to see pop stars like Charli XCX, Troye Sivan, Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan dress like the teenagers we were and wax nostalgic about the years between Columbine and 9/11, there’s an entirely different dimension to trans millennials because those aren’t the teenagers we were. Nostalgia is a site of horror and deep psychic scarring for Shoenbrun the way that the Trinity test was for Christopher Nolan in “Oppenheimer“ and David Lynch in “Twin Peaks:“ The Return on an intimate scale. Coming of age in the years between Columbine and 9/11 defines millennials in North America as a generation marked by mass trauma, and so it seems correct that the truest and most urgent films from our generation will come from trans filmmakers uniquely adept at accessing the low hum of mass trauma that marked our teen years.

Vera Drew, director, star, and co-writer of “The People’s Joker“ played so loosely with the canon that it was withdrawn from the Toronto Film Festival in late 2023 over legal threats from Warner Brothers for copyright infringement, which is probably the most millennial thing to ever happen to a filmmaker. We are, after all, the Napster generation as much as anything else. “I Saw The TV Glow“ leans back into the dying days of the analog world, but both filmmakers are marked by the dawn of the ubiquity of access to media, or at least until our parents got letters from their ISPs threatening to cut off service.

In that sense, “The People’s Joker“ was probably an inevitable millennial tipping point in film. Pastiche, parody, plagiarism and detournement have existed in film for decades but there’s a very particular way in which it manifested for us. We grew up on “The Simpsons“ riding the line between parody and plagiarism with episodes that simply restaged Cape Fear or came off as a smash cut of “The Fugitive“, “Twin Peaks,“ and “Dallas.“ Of course, we weren’t just pirating movies and music at the turn of the millennium and into the 2000s, we were getting our paws on professional software like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro to hack up and reassemble any digital media that came our way, usually by cutting “Dragon Ball Z“ battle montages into Linkin Park music videos.

As such, Drew is the most immediately legible Weird “Barbie“ filmmaker, not just for playing the same postmodern tricks of portraying multiple iterations of “The Joker“ in conversation with each other, but eschewing any distance from the intellectual property itself. “The Joker is Drew’s“ “Barbie“ and she will put him in the splits as much as she wants.

Meanwhile, “Johanne Screblu,“ the self-described parody of “Emilia Pérez,“ may in fact get a theatrical run of its own. Originally funded through a GoFundMe campaign inspired by co-director Camila Aurora’s criticism of “Emilia Pérez“ on TikTok and debuted on YouTube in January, “Johanne Sacreblu“ had its first theatrical screening in Mexico on Valentine’s Day. While it bills itself as a parody, the actual plot of “Johanne Sacreblu“ has next to nothing to do with “Emilia Pérez.“ Instead, it’s a screwball comedy riff on “Romeo and Juliet“ starring a trans man and a trans woman as the heirs of France’s two biggest bread-producing families: The Croissants and the Baguettes, who fall in love despite the intentions of their families.

Instead of a direct parody, “Johanne Sacreblu“ is a cultural broadside against the totalizing stereotypes of how Hollywood as an institution reduces Mexico down to a sepia canvas for extreme violence. The genius of “Johanne Sacreblu“ is how the satire emerges in ways that transcend any language barrier. Some of the best jokes in the film, like a yellow paint shortage sending up the sepia filter that became ubiquitous for any Hollywood film portraying Mexico after Traffic, do require some fluency in Spanish. However, much of its charm lies in things like stuffed rats multiplying and moving around characters between shots without being acknowledged, or mimes getting into scuffles in the background, so there’s no reason to be sitting around waiting for English subtitles.

“Johanne Sacreblu“ is razor sharp in its disdain for “Emilia Pérez“ with touches like a musical number portraying its director Jacques Audiard as a man made of garbage in a landfill, but it isn’t beholden to what it’s skewering. It has a life and a meaning of its own. There’s something incredibly striking about the fact that a 30 minute goof shot in a few days still manages to portray a novel T4T romance of the kind that just does not exist in the mainstream. If there’s a particular lesson about representation in “Johanne Sacreblu,“ it’s that however we position ourselves relative to the mainstream, we have agency in how we respond to it. No one has better access or better knowledge on how to make great stories about trans lives than we do. A crowdfunded short uploaded to YouTube can, and more often than not, resonate more deeply with our actual lives and orientation towards the world than a glossy feature completely attenuated from its subject matter.

What’s truly great about film and the various ways that it can be made and presented now, is that it can accommodate just about any vision if you don’t limit yourself to the multiplex and the scrolling boxes of a major streaming service. Hari Nef’s “Candy Darling“ biopic is going to be a generational achievement with the weight of the world on its shoulders, but it will exist in the same world with the same access as “I Saw The TV Glow,“ “The People’s Joker,“ “Johanne Sacreblu,“ and whatever other Weird Barbie comes next. At the end of the day Doctor Barbie and Weird Barbie are both Barbies. We don’t have to put the weight of our aspirations on one or the other. Because what matters most is the dolls.

Véronique Emma Houxbois (she/fae) is a trans woman cartoonist and board member for Vancouver Dyke March.