{"id":14504,"date":"2020-07-21T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-21T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=14504"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:18:57","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:18:57","slug":"the-unintentional-empathy-of-brian-de-palmas-dressed-to-kill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-unintentional-empathy-of-brian-de-palmas-dressed-to-kill\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unintentional Empathy of Brian De Palma\u2019s Dressed to Kill<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the forty years since the release of Brian De Palma\u2019s \u200bDressed to Kill<\/em>\u200b, the conversation has shifted from the controversy at the time over his treatment of women to the film\u2019s transphobic twist\u2014that the killer is a trans woman. When the Criterion Collection added the film in 2015, many writers praised De Palma\u2019s visual technique while criticizing the use of a trans serial killer. But there is another reading of this film with a much more empathetic view of its trans villain.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u200bDressed to Kill<\/em>\u200b begins as the story of a bored and sexually dissatisfied housewife, played by Angie Dickinson. After a sexual dalliance with a stranger she meets at a museum, she is brutally murdered in the elevator of his apartment by a woman in a trench coat wielding a razor blade. Liz (Nancy Allen), the prostitute who witnessed the killing, teams with the housewife\u2019s son (Keith Gordan) to investigate when the police show little interest in looking into the murder themself. The two eventually discover that the murderer is in fact the housewife\u2019s psychiatrist (Michael Caine), a closeted trans woman who has denied herself medical transition because of her attraction to women, and because of this, splits into two personalites: Dr. Elliott and Bobbi. Whenever Dr. Elliott becomes aroused by a woman, Bobbi takes over and murders that woman out of a misplaced blame for her inability to transition. Eventually a trap is sprung and Dr. Elliott \/ Bobbi is captured.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his 2015 Daily Beast <\/em>piece<\/a> on the Criterion release, writer Keith Phipps quotes trans woman film critic Alice Stoehr as noting,\u00a0 \u200b\u200b\u201cElliott\u2019s pathology\u2014\u2018opposite sexes inhabiting the same body\u2019\u2014bears minimal resemblance to the experiences of actual trans women. Instead, it reads as a conflation of trans identity with dissociative identity disorder. At its most hostile, Dressed To Kill<\/em>\u200b suggests that trans women are dangerous, unstable, and confused. Whereas in Carrie<\/em>\u200b, De Palma found truth by telling his monster’s story, here the monster is incomprehensible and alien.\u201d This was one of the nicer quotes I found about the movie from other trans women, but you get the idea.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a fan of De Palma and a trans woman, I\u2019ve always struggled with this film. Over the years, a different portrait of the trans killer Bobbi began to emerge; each new viewing led me to believe there\u2019s more empathy towards her than other critical readings have suggested.       <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The film has some pop psychology gobbledygook about two sexes inhabiting the same body \u2013  that both Dr. Elliott and Bobbi, the trans woman, wanted control, and  Dr. Elliot barred Bobbi\u2019s transition. Liz asks Bobbi\u2019s gender psychiatrist, Dr. Levy, about this: \u201cYou mean when Elliot got turned on, Bobbi took over?\u201d Levy responds, \u201cYes, it was like Bobbi\u2019s red alert. Elliot\u2019s penis became erect and Bobbi took control, trying to kill anyone that made Elliot masculinely sexual.\u201d   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was much harder for trans people to be able to transition in America. One would have to fit a very narrow criteria to be approved for the process. The Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, long one of America\u2019s primary trans gatekeeping associations, described it this way in 2001:                   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the 1960s and 1970s, clinicians used the term true transsexual. The true transsexual was thought to be a person with a characteristic path of atypical gender identity development that predicted an improved life from a treatment sequence that culminated in genital surgery. True transsexuals were thought to have: 1) cross-gender identifications that were consistently expressed behaviorally in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; 2) minimal or no sexual arousal to cross-dressing; and 3) no heterosexual interest, relative to their anatomic sex\u2026 Belief in the true transsexual concept for males dissipated when it was realized that such patients were rarely encountered, and that some of the original true transsexuals had falsified their histories to make their stories match the earliest theories about the disorder.<\/em>    <\/em>    <\/em>   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An argument can be made that Dr. Elliott, who would have been familiar with these gatekeeping guidelines, would have found it impossible that he could be trans. Most of his profession would have believed this, which could have caused him to try to  squash these desires. In fact, Dr. Elliot represents the psychiatric field\u2019s gatekeeping of trans people for not fitting a very narrow definition, which came from the doctor\u2019s own biases over what makes someone a man or a woman.                   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Does this make Bobbi the secret hero of \u200bDressed to Kill?<\/em>\u200b Not really, as she is still committing murder. To some extent, she represents the way marginalized communities can sometimes misdirect their anger towards other marginalized communities. It\u2019s the patriarchal field of psychology that has prevented her from transitioning, but she instead focuses on the immediate problem: that when she sees attractive women she becomes aroused and this prevents her from reaching her goal of transition. Rather than blame the problem, she blames a symptom of the problem.                   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did De Palma set out to hide all this subtext in Dressed to Kill<\/em>? Probably not, but there are two things about De Palma that aren\u2019t talked about enough. One is that the man does his research. He certainly did not set out to make a film about trans gatekeeping, but he seems to have done enough research to have been aware of its existence \u2013 and that impacted where his film went and how he dealt with the (admittedly loose) psychology in it. Without meaning to, he crafted a story that actually tells us important things about the way trans people were treated in the late \u201870s.                   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second point is that De Palma, for all the talk of cruelty that surrounds his filmography, is ultimately an empathetic filmmaker. Think of his handling of the rape and murder of an innocent Vietnamese girl in \u200bCasualties of War,<\/em>\u200b or, more recently, take a look at his 2019 film \u200bDomino, <\/em>in which \u200bDe Palma focuses on a terrorist leader whose bombing plot fails because he’s filming it, and won’t set off the explosions until he gets the perfect shot. In fact, it’s the only reason he doesn’t succeed. Sound like any other filmmaker we know?               <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately I believe that De Palma does have some actual sympathy for Bobbi. Beyond all that, however, it\u2019s just a damn good movie. Maybe what draws me to defending a film that so many other people in my community actively despise is how well it hits all my personal cinematic buttons.        <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in our outrage-driven online culture, liking a \u201cproblematic\u201d film has been treated by some as a great offense. Honestly, none of that matters; there\u2019s no need to justify loving any movie to anyone, except to yourself, especially when that film clashes with beliefs about yourself and the world that you hold deeply. (I\u2019m not out here defending the transphobic material in \u200bAce Ventura: Pet Detective, <\/em>\u200bbecause frankly it\u2019s a movie that\u2019s not very good.). But \u200bDressed to Kill<\/em>\u200b is a movie I\u2019ve seen a lot. By being willing to engage with the film, even though it upset me, I discovered new ways to dissect and view it. I discovered there was even more underneath than I would have realized if I had given up on it because it offended and hurt me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are some who will bristle at my revisionist view of \u200bDressed to Kill. <\/em>T\u200bhis is a movie that has rightfully upset many trans people over the years, and it\u2019s impossible not to see it as dated in the way that it handles its trans politics. It\u2019s hard to watch a movie that represents people like you as mentally ill serial killers taking revenge on women for something they had nothing to do with. But there\u2019s a compelling metaphor about denying people from being who they are buried under this stylish thriller. And more importantly, it\u2019s a really fun movie, made by one of the great directors at the height of his power. It\u2019s meant a lot to this trans woman. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the forty years since the release of Brian De Palma\u2019s \u200bDressed to Kill\u200b, the conversation has shifted from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":601,"featured_media":14509,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1428,1381],"tags":[1429,1422,162],"class_list":["post-14504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-happy-birthday","category-movies","tag-happy-birthday","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22774,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14504\/revisions\/22774"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}