Doris was a fictitious amorphous character who turned up at various Gay Liberation Front events in and around London in the early seventies.
Sometimes she was the prudish heterosexual, sometimes an auntie with gay relatives. She was an agony aunt for the GLF paper Come Together, and she wrote shocked letters to newspapers.
She was even once played by a woman, to open a gay jumble sale in Nottingham in 1975.
Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men in Frocks. London: Gay Men’s Press. 1984: 98.
Directed by Michael Lander
Script by Michael Lander & Ryan O Roy.
Edited by Sally Menke.
90 minutes 2010 Lionsgate
Cillian Murphy plays John/Emma Skillpa
Susan Sarandon plays Fanny Crill
Ellen Page plays Maggie
Keith Carradine plays Mayor Ray Crill
Country of finance: US
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Peacock, Nebraska
Filming location: Iowa
Synopsis
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
John has a low-level job in a bank in small-town Nebraska. Every morning Emma, whom no-one in town has met, makes his breakfast, does the washing and leaves him a note re shopping. John keeps a tin box under the outside stairs so that Emma will not know about his savings account and his sports cards. The room of the recently deceased Mrs Skillpa has been left untouched. Only a few minutes into the film we find out that John and Emma share the same body. One day a train caboose slips off the tracks and ends up in the Skillpa back yard as Emma is putting out the washing. This results in others meeting Emma. The local mayor wishes to use the derailment for political advantage. Emma is pleased to let him, John is antagonistic. Maggie comes by to ask why there have been no cheques since Mrs Skillpa, John’s mother, died. Emma drives her home and finds out that Maggie’s son was fathered by John – an attempt by Mrs Skillpa to make a man out of her son. Fanny Krill attempts to recruit Emma for her work at the women’s shelter, which results in John missing time at work. John attempts to run from Emma and the memory of his mother, and takes a room at the local motel. However when he opens the overnight bag that he has brought, he finds the dress and wig that define Emma. Emma decides to kill off John. She picks up a man, takes him the the motel room, kills him, dresses him in John’s suit and sets the room on fire.
Who are they?
This is the first and so far only film by Michael Lander.
This is the first and so far only film written by Ryan O Roy.
Editor Sally Menke died in September 2010 while hiking.
Cillian Murphy is an Irish actor of growing note who has played cis male parts in 28 Days Later, Girl with aPearl Earring, Cold Mountain, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Batman and Inception. He also played a trans woman, the lead character Kitten Braden, in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto – in fact Cillian lobbied Neil for several years to make the film.
Susan Sarandon, of course, was Janet in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. She has been acting since 1969, has been in loads and loads of movies, and if she were British would probably be a Dame.
Ellen Page is an up and coming young actress.
Keith Carradine is part of the Carradine acting dynasty, has also been in loads of movies, is especially noted for his roles in Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph films.
Curiosities
In the same way that most films made in Toronto or Vancouver are claimed to be set south of the border, Peacock is filmed in Iowa, but claims to be set in Nebraska.
The when of the film is left vague, but as no-one has a television, it must be set in the early 1950s. Although the women’s shelter and the feminist orientation of Fanny Frill do seem to be a bit anachronistic re this assumption.
John has obvious beard stubble, while Emma does not. Emma is not shown dealing with this.
Nobody comments on how similar looking Emma is to John.
Whilst being a much better film than most of the rubbish that plays the multiplexes, Peacock was not released to either the festival or to the art-house circuit. The film was delayed for over a year after completion and then went straight to DVD.
Is John/Emma a transvestite?
A few minutes into the film we watch as Emma undresses to transform into John and we see that she wears male underwear. This is unusual for a transvestite.
John and Emma are both ignorant of what the other does. This is a symptom of multiple personality. The shrinks equivocate about whether one can be both trans and multiple. The DSM has said that to be transsexual, one must not have any (other) psychiatric condition. Other shrinks talk about co-morbidity. Both of these positions of course make the unreasonable assumption that being trans is in itself a psychiatric condition.
Conclusion
It is difficult to watch this reacting as if John is a real-world transvestite. Some of the life options are real on this reading, but they do not stay so.
The ghost behind the screenplay is obviously Psycho’s Norman Bates. Both John and Norman are dominated by their dead mothers.
Another film that is echoed in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, where the personality of the previous tenant of the room takes over Trelkovky’s body and life.
The film is not about choice, about deciding who you are and taking steps to be yourself. It is about an other that takes you over, and even kills the original.
There is another ghost behind the screenplay, one that Lander and Roy may not have heard of. The recurring voice of the dead mother constitutes an introjection. Remember how Sanda Davis explained how introjections can take you over, and that transsexuality can and should be treated and cured as an introjection. But apart from me and three other people, nobody has read Sanda Davis. I think that Davis owes much more to Psycho than Peacock owes to Sanda Davis.
As I said about Norman Bates, John/Emma is not like any other transvestite that you may have met.
Jonathan Katz has co-curated Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, which is currently on until February 13, 2010.
Incoming Speaker John Boehner and the Catholic League objected and achieved a partial censorship.
Some images of interest (Click on the link below for more details):
Romaine Brooks. Self Portrait, 1923.
Janet Flanner, aka Genet, by Berenice Abbott, 1927
Dancing Sailors, 1917, by Charles Demuth.
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991, by Nan Goldin
Directed by Sergei Livnev
Script by Sergei Livnev & Vladimir Valutsky
93 minutes 1994
Aleksei Serebryakov as Evdokim Kuznetsov
Country of finance: Russia
Nationality of director: Russian
Location of story: USSR
Synopsis
As part of a experiment to meet the demand by Stalin that the Soviet Union have more soldiers, Evdokiia Kuznetsova is taken from the gulag and is transformed into a man, Evdokim. He then becomes a Stakhanovite building the Moscow underground in the 1930s, marries a female fellow worker, and adopts a child, Dolores, who had been orphaned in the Spanish Civil War.
They became the models for Vera Mukhina's famous sculpture that adorned the 1937 Paris World's Fair and became the emblem of Mosfilm. The athletic male representing the Hammer (Heavy Industry). After posing for the statue, the Kuznetsovs became celebrities, living in luxury, Kuznetsov a member of the Supreme Soviet.
However Kuznetsov became angry and attacked Stalin. He was shot in the scuffle. Paralysed and unable to speak, Evdokim was turned into a hero once more: he had supposedly saved Stalin's life and was exhibited as a museum piece. His wife commanded his thoughts, and even wrote his book "Hammer and Sickle."
Aleksandr Prokhorov. “ “I Need Some Life-Assertive Character’ or How to Die in the Most inspiring Pose: Bodied in the Stalinist Museum of Hammer and Sickle”. Studies in Slavonic Cultures. 1, Jan 2000. http://www.pitt.edu/~slavic/sisc/SISC1/prokhorov.pdf
Directed by Euros Lyn
Script by Russel T Davies
45 minutes 2005
Christopher Eccleston plays the Doctor
Billie Piper plays Rose
Zoë Wanamaker voices Cassandra
Country of finance: UK
Nationality of director: Welsh
Location of story: a spacestation
Filming location: Cardiff
Channel: BBC Wales
Synopsis
The Doctor takes Rose billions of years into the future to witness the end of the Earth as the Sun expands and destroys it. Observation is from a space station, and the guests are the super-rich. One of the guests is Cassandra, who has had 708 operations and is now just a stretched face. She is described as the last Earthling (which of course ignores the two minions who move her frame and frequently moisturize her).
Cassandra is also the bad guy. She releases robot insects which destroy the station's protections so that all will die and she will make a killing having bet against the other guests on the stock exchange. She teleports out at the last minute, but is brought back by the Doctor.
Incidentally, Casandra who uses makeup and mentions various ex-husbands is obviously to be taken as female, started out as boy. This makes her one of the more rococo specimens of the old film favourite, the transy killer.
Trivia
Zoë Wanamaker was unable to be in Cardiff when the episode was filmed. Cassandra was originally voiced by Eve Myles, and Zo's voice added later.
Of course referring to this series as number 1 is high revisionism. The original season 1 of Dr Who was back in 1963.
Novel by Herman Hesse. Berlin: G. Fisher Verlag 1927. English translation by Basil Creighton. London: Martin Secker. New York: Henry Hold & Co. 1929. Many other editions.
Film produced by Melvin Fisherman & Richard Herland.
Directed by Fred Haines
Script by Fred Haines based on the novel by Herman Hesse
106 minutes 1974
Max von Sydow plays Harry Haller
Dominique Sanda plays Hermine
Pierre Clémenti plays Pablo
Country of finance: USA/Switzerland/UK/France/Italy
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Germany
Filming location: Basel, Hamburg.
Synopsis.
Harry Haller, a man devoted to the high culture of Goethe and Mozart but alienated by the shallow bourgeois pretence of admiring that culture, sees himself as having a second animalistic nature, a wolf of the steppes. However he is in despair and on the verge of suicide when he encounters Hermine in a chance visit to a dance bar. She offers him friendship and teaches him to value the little things in life, to dance and to take drugs. From the start he notices that her features have a masculine aspect, and feels that she reminds him of his childhood friend Hermann. He eventually fully falls in love with her at the costume ball where she is dressed as a man. She and Pablo, a jazz saxophonist, take Harry to a magic theatre where he is able to encounter some other of his myriad personalities.
Who are they?
Herman Hesse (1877 – 1962) was an influential German-Swiss novelist with interests in Buddhism and Jungianism.
Melvin Fishman produced only this film. He was a student of Jung and Alchemy and wanted Steppenwolf to be the first Jungian Film. The film was in pre-production for seven years as Fishman built up a relationship with the Hesse family to obtain the film rights. He did lots of drugs and had a heart attack shortly after the film was finished. Two years later another heart attack killed him. He died with 20 Swiss Francs in his pocket, and no other money.
Richard Herland produced one television series and four films between 1964 and 1986. He raised the money for Steppenwolf.
Peter Sprague, the major financier, was a scion of US industrial wealth who thought of himself as radical.
Fred Haines (1936 – 2008), from Los Angeles, fluent in French and German, did a degree in literature. He met film director Joseph Strick and together they wrote the script of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1967. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was a co-writer of Strick’s Tropic of Cancer, but took his name from the credits after a disagreement. Steppenwolf in the only film that he directed.
Max von Sydow has been in over 140 films. He is one of Sweden’s most distinguished actors. He has played both God and the Devil.
Dominique Sanda is a French actress who was especially known for her roles in Italian films. She has been in 54 films.
Pierre Clémenti, also French, had just completed a two-year sentence for drug charges.
Timothy Leary, on the run from prison, was considered for the part of Harry Haller, but he gave two acid tabs to Sprague who then had a bad trip.
Conrad Rooks, a heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, who had made the druggie film Chappaqua, was also courting the Hesse family for Steppenwolf, but ended up with Siddhartha instead.
While the film was made in English, none of the actors are native English speakers.
Peter Sprague, the major financier ended up owning the rights. He put the film on a shelf for two years.
The colours were wrong when the prints were made.
The special effects were cutting edge for 1974.
Mati Klarwein (1932 – 2002), who did the album covers for Santana’s Abraxas and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, painted the images in the corridors of the Magic Theatre.
The Czech artist, Jaroslav Bradac , did the animated sequence.
Decades earlier than the Terminator films and The Matrix, Steppenwolf includes a sequence where humans are fighting a war against the machines.
The entire film is available on YouTube.
“…it seems to me that of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other, and frequently it is actually the affirmative and enthusiastic readers, rather than those who rejected the book, who have reacted to it oddly…”–Hermann Hesse in the 1961 prologue to Steppenwolf.
I was one of very few people who saw the film on the big screen.
Interpretation
Do we have one personality? Or is it an illusion? Early in the book, Harry sees himself as having two personalities: the spiritual, high-culture snob; and the wolf from the steppes who loathes the bourgeoisie.
When he enters the Magic Theatre the illusion, his fake personality are fractured and he finds that he has thousands of personalities. Significantly he does not have any female personalities, or perhaps he merely fails to acknowledge them.
There is a suggestion in the text that somehow Hermine is not real - as such she would be Harry's Anima (Hesse was influenced by Carl Jung at the time he wrote the book). This idea is supported by the fact that 'Hermine' is the feminine form of the Hesse’s first name. As Harry is not able to recognize his feminine selves, his anima is projected outwards. and takes the form of an independent person. The ‘fact’ that he maybe/maybe not kills Hermine at the end would constitute a further refusal to accept his inner woman.
The tale goes thus:
Bert was an FBI agent from Minnesota. He joined the FBI in 1935 to fight Nazi spies.
When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover saw him he was re-assigned as a special agent en femme using the name Bettina.
Hoover kept him from quitting by a mixture of promises and intimidation. He even had Horgson’s legal identity changed to ‘female’, so that it would be illegal for him to wear men’s clothes. Hoover gave orders that after his own death, Horgson was to be confined to a high-security nursing home as a national security risk.
Katrum Schultz. “J. Edgar Hoover Ordered Agents To Impersonate Women”. Weekly World News. 11/11/2002. Online at: http://bit.ly/cKKASn.
Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was the son of a prosperous timber merchant. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, where he read history, art and architecture but left without a degree.
The first photograph that he sold was of the Shakespearean scholar, George Rylands, in drag as the Duchess of Malfi. It was published in Vogue. Beaton worked regularly for Vogue from 1927 in addition to having his own studio. He became known for his fashion, society and royalty photographs.
In 1934 Gerald Berniers, under the name Adela Quebec, published his spoof novel, The Girls of Radcliff Hall, which featured himself, Beaton and others as lesbian schoolgirls at an institution named after the famous writer. Beaton attempted to have all the copies destroyed and it became a very rare book until reprinted in 2000.
Five years later Beaton published his own spoof of the memoirs by minor royals that were popular at the time. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton features photographs of Beaton and some of his friends crossdressed as the characters in the book.
During the war Beaton worked for the Ministry of Information. Later he photographed many Hollywood and Broadway stars. He expanded into set and costume design for both stage and film, and won Oscars for the costumes in Gigi, 1958 and My Fair Lady, 1964. He was an influence on photographers Angus McBean and David Bailey. He had affairs with Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo.
He was knighted in 1972, and two years later was paralysed on the right side of his body after a stroke. He died in his sleep at age 76.
Adela Quebec. The Girls of Radcliff Hall. Privately published 1934. Reprinted as by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt Berners. London: Montcalm, 2000.
Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Bülop, Baroness. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton. London: B.T Batsford. 1939. Reprint: London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson xiv, 105 pp1960.
John has a low-level job in a bank in small-town Nebraska. Every morning Emma, whom no-one in town has met, makes his breakfast, does the washing and leaves him a note re shopping. John keeps a tin box under the outside stairs so that Emma will not know about his savings account and his sports cards. The room of the recently deceased Mrs Skillpa has been left untouched. Only a few minutes into the film we find out that John and Emma share the same body. One day a train caboose slips off the tracks and ends up in the Skillpa back yard as Emma is putting out the washing. This results in others meeting Emma. The local mayor wishes to use the derailment for political advantage. Emma is pleased to let him, John is antagonistic. Maggie comes by to ask why there have been no cheques since Mrs Skillpa, John’s mother, died. Emma drives her home and finds out that Maggie’s son was fathered by John – an attempt by Mrs Skillpa to make a man out of her son. Fanny Krill attempts to recruit Emma for her work at the women’s shelter, which results in John missing time at work. John attempts to run from Emma and the memory of his mother, and takes a room at the local motel. However when he opens the overnight bag that he has brought, he finds the dress and wig that define Emma. Emma decides to kill off John. She picks up a man, takes him the the motel room, kills him, dresses him in John’s suit and sets the room on fire.
They became the models for Vera Mukhina's famous sculpture that adorned the 1937 Paris World's Fair and became the emblem of Mosfilm. The athletic male representing the Hammer (Heavy Industry). After posing for the statue, the Kuznetsovs became celebrities, living in luxury, Kuznetsov a member of the Supreme Soviet.
Cassandra is also the bad guy. She releases robot insects which destroy the station's protections so that all will die and she will make a killing having bet against the other guests on the stock exchange. She teleports out at the last minute, but is brought back by the Doctor.
by Basil Creighton. London: Martin Secker. New York: Henry Hold & Co. 1929. Many other editions.
produced by Melvin Fisherman & Richard Herland.
Five years later Beaton published his own spoof of the memoirs by minor royals that were popular at the time. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton features photographs of Beaton and some of his friends crossdressed as the characters in the book.
. Privately published 1934. Reprinted as by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt Berners. London: Montcalm, 2000. 
, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton. London: B.T Batsford. 1939. Reprint: London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson xiv, 105 pp1960. 
