Burn-in: 'Perfect Days' (2023)
Like Wenders, a podcast on trans medical history valorizes irreducibility.
A fews ago I listened to a podcast with historian Jules Gill-Peterson1 about the history of trans children and the medicalization of gender identity. She discusses how sociologists and clinicians after World War II created a paradox for themselves in which, in order to treat people out of diversions from the male-female sex binary, they defined sex as malleable. To make an intersex person conform to a “pure” masculinity or femininity, clinicians had to acknowledge that sex can and does change, not only within the body and lifetime of an individual but even at that individual’s discretion.2
In imposing a sex binary where they by necessity understood none existed, these clinicians also imposed an end-point onto human sexual development: all changes in sex, whether occurring with or without medical intervention, must finish by affirming separated categories of male and female.
When discussing Perfect Days last week, I wrote about Georges Bataille’s images of the turning wheel or the rotating solar system, metaphors for the abolition of hierarchy and the lack of salvation in that abolition: we don’t elevate ourselves by acknowledging and incorporating the contradictory elements of ourselves, we just come closer to experience as is. He (like the film with its depictions of everyday life) rejects end-points with these metaphors, demanding that we don’t reconcile contradiction but feed ourselves to it and let it define our existence.
Like Gill-Peterson’s sexual malleability paradox, Bataille’s turnings replace the end-point (salvation, completion, perfection, or stability) with irreducibility and instability as values. Each one of us shows the world a singular and flexible experience of sex which we can neither squeeze into ideals nor define by its proximity to those ideals. I am not just a man x degrees away from the Ideal Man, the floating head and rigid body on the men’s restroom sign. Nor am I man with a little bit of woman, or a “feminine side.” My sex, like all sex and like all existence, turns on a great wheel and ends up nowhere in particular along the course it has already charted.3
In another essay, Bataille rejects common methods of understanding and systematization: “And the idea has over man the same degrading power that a harness has over a horse.”4 I look forward to seeing what I become when I surrender my self to what resists order, and what the world becomes when I remove the harnesses I have placed on it.
See other films from: 2020s | Japan | Germany
See other burn-ins.
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler
The image for this entry, “Boy Wearing a Wig” by German photographer Wilhem von Gloeden, came from an article Gill-Peterson wrote in Ohio Capital Journal.
Or, more often, at the discretion of their parents or the doctors who saw them as “natural experiments.”
The film I gave my lecture on this week, Wings (1966), also makes me think of the freedom of gender evolution and malleability. It is a really surprising film for the Soviet Union in the 60s.
“The ‘Lugubrious Game.’”