Disclosure
トランスジェンダーとハリウッド: 過去、現在、そして
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
A century of trans people on screen, narrated by trans people; the reference film before any review touches the subject.
Disclosure, directed by Sam Feder, is a history of how film and television have shown transgender people, told entirely by trans people: actors, writers, directors and scholars, among them Laverne Cox (also an executive producer), the historian Susan Stryker, the film-maker Yance Ford, Jen Richards, Chaz Bono, Lilly Wachowski, Candis Cayne, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Angelica Ross. Its starting point is a statistic: about 80 percent of Americans say they do not personally know a trans person, so for most people the screen does the introducing.
The film begins with cinema itself. Stryker reads a cross-dressed servant in D.W. Griffith's Judith of Bethulia of 1914, and Ford sets Griffith's cross-dressing gags beside his use of blackface. It moves through the drag jokes of Milton Berle and Flip Wilson; the trans or gender-variant killers of Psycho, Dressed to Kill and The Silence of the Lambs; and the 'deception' plot of The Crying Game and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, with scene after scene of men vomiting on learning they had been attracted to a trans woman. On hospital and crime dramas trans women end up dead or raped; 'I've died so many times I've lost count,' says Candis Cayne. Cox says such stories made her think being trans was a death sentence. The trans men in the film remember Boys Don't Cry as both a landmark and a wound; Jen Richards recalls a friend who brought up The Silence of the Lambs when she came out. Talk-show questions about surgery get their own montage. The film also gathers what helped: Yentl, Victor/Victoria, Bugs Bunny in drag in What's Opera, Doc?, then Orange Is the New Black, Tangerine and Pose. In its last minutes the lawyer Chase Strangio warns that visibility is not enough: lifting a few trans people to fame does not change the systems that shut most trans people out of the basics of life.
Starring
Laverne CoxHerself
The actress and executive producer, who recalls screen deaths that made being trans feel like a death sentence, and the joy Yentl gave her.
Susan StrykerHerself
A historian of trans life who reads the earliest films and argues that trans people and cinema grew up together.
Yance FordHimself
An Oscar-nominated documentary maker who connects Griffith's cross-dressing gags with his use of blackface.
Jen RichardsHerself
A writer and actress who remembers a friend bringing up The Silence of the Lambs when she came out.
Chaz BonoHimself
Sonny and Cher's son, who describes 'faking my own death' in order to transition away from public view.
Lilly WachowskiHerself
The Matrix co-director, among those who remember Bugs Bunny in drag as a first glimpse of themselves on screen.
Why it matters
Disclosure makes a simple argument with a long reach: when most people have never knowingly met a trans person, the screen does the introducing, and for a century it introduced trans people as jokes, killers, liars and corpses. As GLAAD's Nick Adams says in the film, Hollywood taught audiences to react to trans people with fear. The film's weight comes from who is speaking. Every interviewee is trans, and many are watching scenes that shaped how they saw themselves, or how their families saw them, before they had words for it. It also names its own limit: in its closing minutes it concedes that visibility is not the same as safety or justice. Some critics wanted more analysis and less pain, and one objected to its telling of Stonewall. It won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary in 2021.