Review: Envy/Desire

cvnty. doll. brunch.

Two weeks ago I boarded an Amtrak bound for NYC to attend the premiere of Aimee Armstrong’s new film, Envy/Desire. Beyond a couple of tangential social connections, the scene and the venue fell well outside of my previous experiences, and I confess to a degree of apprehension going in. I was worried enough that I put some amount of effort into butching up my typically androgynous presentation, lest I be gendered and found wanting by the cunty NYC dolls and their chosen chasers. Still, I’d seen the invite link and been intrigued, so I texted a partner and booked tickets. As it happened I had I little to worry about; when we arrived at the unmarked venue we soon found ourselves at home among a welcoming, mostly well-dressed (the man in the raceplay hoodie notwithstanding), and surprisingly varied crowd. When the film started, we were laughing along with everyone else.

First of all, Envy/Desire is funny—not a scene goes by without a witty, expertly-delivered in-joke or reference to Twitter discourse. The referential nature of many of the jokes perhaps makes the film somewhat insular, but I think that’s alright. Any work of art has an intended audience, and given Twitter’s (admittedly somewhat damaged) status as the preferred hyperreality of the intelligentsia, a work narrowly targeted to heavy users can still have an outsized impact. Nor, as I had feared might be the case, was Envy/Desire’s humor rooted in lowbrow man-in-a-dress transphobia. Aimee spoke in the Q&A about how she hoped the satire would cut both ways, and I think it largely succeeds at this. As much as Natasha (Salomé) is often right, for example, she’s portrayed as delightfully paranoid and comically reactionary, particularly via clever cinematic details, like when the camera ominously zooms in on the picture in Ray Blanchard’s Wikipedia article or a religious icon.

While Envy/Desire is obviously a low budget (shadowy right-wing billionaires are perhaps less generous to the arts than some are wont to believe) film, nothing felt egregiously low-end. The cinematography and the performances—delivered by Aimee herself alongside Salomé and George Olesky—were at worst merely good and occasionally inspired. The only gripe I have with the production quality was somewhat uneven audio which made it difficult to hear every line clearly, particularly in the packed venue.

It’s difficult to say too much without giving everything away—we are, after all, talking about a twenty-minute indie film—but the elephant in the room bears addressing. Other reviewers, along with quite a lot of people who haven’t seen the movie, have laboriously decried it as transphobic—with the first reviewer labeling it “the most offensive movie [she] has ever seen.” Specifically, they have argued that it not only reinforces but actively hawks Blanchardian typology. This contention, I believe, results from a misreading of the text on two levels.

The first level of misreading is a childish inability to engage with a text on any level beyond that of a medieval morality fable, preferably with included exegesis (or, for the more online, a tumblr story that ends with “and everyone clapped”). Natasha—a fictional character—says that AGP is real and Ethan—again, a character—has it, therefore the filmmaker must also think so. Natasha calls Ethan a man in a dress, therefore the filmmaker must be telling you to go out and use that phrase for anyone who looks remotely like him. Natasha’s framing is lost on this sort of viewer, because the very concept of framing is an affront to this kind of engagement with fiction. This refusal of any responsibility on the part of the reader (including the responsibility to even read the text) is strikingly similar to the sort that led a mob to harass Isabel Fall off the internet.

The second, more complex misreading is in understanding Ethan as a budding trans woman rather than as a chaser. This is a misreading that I was initially more sympathetic to, but find myself increasingly baffled by. I find it difficult to imagine that any transfem who has used Grindr, dating apps, or even Twitter long enough has not encountered a specific and common category of chaser. For these men, attraction to trans women exists on a spectrum of kinks that also includes embodying some aspects of hypersexualized transfemininity. Aimee even mentioned in the Q&A that the initial inspiration for the film was drawn from her lived experience. Do some of these men eventually become trans women? Of course—and for the record I am a firm “Catholic”¹ on these questions—but most, we must admit, are just passing through for a wank.

There is perhaps a serious conversation to be had about what constitutes right and graceful action for a trans woman whose boyfriend proves to be such a man—what, if any duties do you have to him beyond those of a romantic partner and fellow human being? And what weight ought to be assigned to the possibility that he may, in time, become a fellow woman? But this was not the conversation that Envy/Desire set out to have, and it seems strange to fault it for not doing so. It requires a certain refusal of empathy to deny a trans woman (of any sexuality) the space to be disappointed and even, yes, disgusted to learn that she is “loved” not as a woman and as the object of holistic masculine desire, but as fetish object (or, at best, a kind of sherpa into womanhood). To acknowledge and hold space for the feelings of a woman in such a position feels like it ought to be Feminism 101.

Some have argued that Ethan’s character is a slur against trans lesbians, but, again, this feels like a willful misreading. There are so many cultural signifiers—ranging from the cute to the cringe and Reddit to what are essentially blood libels—of trans lesbianism, and Aimee is certainly online and aware enough that I’m confident she could have made a vicious film that cut directly at all of their (our?)² deepest insecurities. But whatever her takes—and I won’t endorse all of them—that doesn’t strike me as the kind of artist that Aimee wants to be, and that’s certainly not the film she made here. I’m old enough to recall a time on Tumblr when Whipping Girl-toting transfeminists told people questioning their gender that if you still wanted to be a woman when you weren’t horny—if you still wanted to be a woman at work and at school and when you went to buy groceries and did all the other little mundane unsexy things in your life—then it probably wasn’t just a fetish. At the risk of giving away the ending, that’s not descriptive of Ethan. At best, the urge to read him as a trans woman feels like a trauma response—to have seen yourself depicted as a man in a dress so many times that, when faced with an actual man in a dress, you can’t help but feel you’re looking in a mirror. At worst, it feels like a stubborn refusal not just to understand, but even to want to understand another trans woman’s experience. I find this troubling.

I’ve expressed to friends before that it feels like the transfem identity has splintered rapidly in the last several years (I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone else at the premiere knew about the other group of trans women that call themselves dolls). This is probably natural and even a good thing, but it troubles me that this splintering is so often acrimonious. One significant source of enmity arises from Blanchardism itself, as online trans lesbians have lamented (often with good reason) that straight trans women seem happy to accept the dubious privilege afforded by the typology, even to the point of distancing themselves from their lesbian sisters. Nonetheless, when this concern fuels a slanted misreading that casts the film as a bigoted swipe at the out-group, and invites all the ensuing online castigation, it can only serve the same end—to deny the possibility of empathy between groups of trans women. There are likely several legitimate criticisms of Envy/Desire, and I’m hardly going to argue that everyone ought to have the same reaction to it as I did, but I would encourage everyone—particularly trans women—to see the film,³ and to approach it with an open mind. You might have fun, and, cringe and lib as it may be, the project of engaging in empathy through art is rarely a wasted effort.

1. That is, I would argue that one is gendered by actions or “works” as opposed to gender Calvinists or Evangelicals, who might argue that only the elect are truly their claimed gender, or that gender is acquired merely through declaration, respectively.

2. I am neither trans nor a lesbian. Some dispute this.

3. This article has been updated to reflect that Envy/Desire is now available for streaming. It can be found at the link at the top of the article, and here.