When it came to questioning the motives of the movie, I
think I had the same reaction as many of my peers. Before the reading, I simply
watched the movie and took in everything as an accurate representation of the
life of the transgender community. However, I realized that this is not the
case. I think that it is easy to initially just assume that the motives are
pure and the information is accurate when someone is portraying ideas about a
topic that I am specifically unfamiliar with. Since I do not know much about
it, it is easy to be less skeptical and more "gullible" so to speak.
But after contemplation, I agree with Bell Hooks that the movie did focus more
on the balls with the intention of making the movie more entertaining. However,
if an attempt was to be made to draw away from the glamour of the ball, where
would the focus turn to? Personally, I wanted more to be said about the angst
that this particular subculture experiences with respect to the mainstream
culture. I wanted Livingston to delve more into the turmoil that went along
with Venus’s death and to talk about the prevalence of such violence. At the
same time, if someone were to make a movie and specifically seek out people to
interview about these topics, would the film still be accurate? If the director
were to focus on the attitudes of the mainstream toward this subculture and
vice versa, would that movie still be an accurate representation of the normal
life of individuals of the transgender community? I am not entirely sure that by
drawing out a specific aspect of the culture, that anyone could get an entirely
precise overview of their life as a whole. As a director focusing on a specific
aspect that interests them, he or she runs the risk of a biased search for
evidence to justify a preformed speculation versus objectively examining
evidence and forming an explanation. The fact that I wanted to see more about
the disconnect between the two cultures perpetuates the idea that I am
searching for a specific evidence to support the idea and not objectively analyzing
to see if that idea is even evident.
I wanted a lot of the same things you did from Paris Is Burning. After watching Leave It On The Floor (even though this is a fiction story and still glamorized by the musical aspect of the film), I was more satisfied with the disconnect between views of the outside world and the transgender, ball community. There were two different scenes from the movie that touched on this. One was at a bowling alley where the house mom points out different groups of people and what they would do if they knew they were gay and transgender. Another was at the funeral with a house member in which there is a battle with the families of the house members.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that there are things missing for us to interpret the movie accurately. One thing I think would have helped me understand it was if the people in the film were shown doing things other than just going to the balls. If they were shown having jobs and maybe the struggles that go along with that. I think the film portrayed them as being too "out there" and not like real people.
ReplyDeleteI had a very different reaction while reading Bell Hooks’ critique of the film, mainly because I was very skeptical of Hooks, as she never explains why she thinks she knows more about this community than Livingston. Yes, she is African American, but she is not a man and she is not gay or transgender. Even so, I do agree that the film focused more on the balls with the intention of making the movie more entertaining (but is that not the goal of basically every film?), however, the film was titled Paris is Burning, one of the biggest balls this community puts on. Thus, the point is that the film was centered on the balls, and maybe that’s all that Livingston wanted to focus on. Maybe that was the extent of her interest, and I do not think that Hooks took that into consideration. If Livingston wanted to focus on the lives of those in the film, I strongly believe that the film would be tilted something completely different and would not have been as successful. That being said, there is no doubt that the film does not provide a 100% accurate representation of this community as you are only shown one side of their lives and only the parts that Livingston chose to include so you have to take it with a grain of salt, however, it is a documentary, so the parts that the audience did see, had to actually happen.
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