| While Hollywood cinema’s representations of the transgendered certainly leave ample room for critique, what I find most interesting about these depictions is their illustration of the competing narratives underpinning the entire spectrum of sexuality in Western societies. In his essay, “We are all Transsexuals Now,” Jean Baudrillard notes that the West has witnessed a “flourishing of erotic simulacra of all kinds and transsexual kitsch in all its glory. Postmodern pornography, so to speak, in which sexuality gets lost in the theatrical excess of its ambiguity and indifference.” Baudrillard’s assessment of contemporary forms of eroticism may have no better cinematic apotheosis than the oeuvre of Brian De Palma; however, it is De Palma’s 1980 film, “Dressed to Kill,” that I believe best tracks the shift in the collective aesthetic, whereby, to again quote Baudrillard, “we no longer pursue beauty or seductiveness, but the ‘look’.” Engendering a narrative that achieves its coherence through ritualized violence, specifically mutilation of both the self and the Other, the ‘look’ represents the asexual, and somewhat farcical, reproduction of not just bodies, but sexual desire itself. |
