Emilia Perez and Cancel Culture

Emilia Perez, a genre-defying film directed by Frenchman Jacques Audiard, has been generating a lot of buzz especially after nabbing a whopping 13 Oscar nominations a few days ago—the highest number of any other film this season, including a first-ever Best Actress nomination for a trans woman (Karla Sofia Gascon). It has already picked up several European Film awards (Best Film Best Director and Best Actress), Eleven nominations at BAFTA with wins for Karla Sofia Gascon (who transitions from being a macho Mexican drug lord in the film to a beautiful woman) and Zoe Saldana (who plays her lawyer); Jury Prize and Best  Actress for the female cast at Cannes, and, at the Golden Globes, it won 4 awards including Best Film in the Musical or Comedy slot, as well as a Best Supporting Actress for Saldana.

Those of us like me who approach popular culture to study trends in political and cultural discourse, and have actually enjoyed the film, have been observing the backlash against the film, its actors and director for “inauthentic representations” –of both Mexico and trans lives—with some agreement but also surprise at the degree of hostility unleashed in this moment of cancel culture. We (who admit to liking/enjoying the film)–are not only being dissed for being insufficiently “woke” by the authenticity brigade (ie insensitive, unable to see the perceived harms caused by such a film to both the trans and the Mexican population represented), but also accused by those on the “right” of liking the film ONLY because of our perceived “wokeness.” That is, we stand accused simultaneously by the anti-woke crowd, for liking the film just because it centers the experiences of a trans woman, and as such, is perceived as a resistant slap in the face of Trump and his Executive Order targeting Trans and other non-binary people.

I reject both these camps.

In favor of Camp.

In favor of campy satire that upends all manner of pieties.

In favor of the remit of a genre that is a gen (d) re-bender.

Thus, for the New York Times to call Emilia Pérez, “a musical exploration of trans identity,”—is, I believe, a profound misreading, and the discursive equivalent of waving a red cape in front of bulls (and cows!).

No wonder folks are so upset.

As I see it, the film is only tangentially about trans identity. It is much more a love story, though not a typical one between a heterosexual man and a woman, or even between a trans woman and cisgender lesbian (though the latter is part of the storyline). At its heart, the film is a nod to a transcendent love that can bring together differently classed and gendered Mexicans into a shared solidarity, to help resist the horrors of cartel violence, to ease the suffering of the families of the disappeared, to end with the loving possibility of families created on the basis of care and compassion, not blood and DNA. Saldana’s character, a lawyer who agrees to help the violent drug lord transition into a new body and a new life, one that seeks redemption through centering the feminine principle, herself transitions from an individualist ethos defined by a desire to live alone in the neoliberal, profit-driven, overworked US, into a communal embrace of her people after Perez persuades her to return to Mexico. Once back “home,” they together create a community organization to help find the disappeared members of families in order to let them mourn those who were killed in some modicum of dignity. It is an embrace into whose sanctuary Saldana’s character pulls in the orphaned children of the drug boss and his former wife (played by Selena Gomez)–after both parents are killed in an apocalyptic ending that also ensures we see there is no easy redemption.

 Yet, it seems portraying the transformation of a violent, macho cartel boss into a woman who wishes to redeem the sins of her past by helping recover the remains of the disappeared –who gets former cartel members to turn a new page and help in this endeavor, to create a love story celebrating solidarity between flawed people, men, women, trans, lesbian, heterosexual, good, bad, indifferent—is to have strayed too far from the promises of a too-easy identity politics.

Indeed, many Mexican citizens have asked audiences there to boycott the film, calling it out as racist for employing so few “real” Mexicans in important roles, and because the director is a white French male. They are upset that only one main character is played by a “true” Mexican (Adriana Paz, who plays Epifania, Perez’s love interest), which begs the question: why don’t they see Karla Sofia Gascon as a Mexican? It is true she was born in Spain—but she moved to Mexico in 2009 and has been living there ever since, forming a family with her wife and (now) teenage daughter. She considers herself “Mexican by adoption” but this doesn’t seem to qualify her as an “authentic” Mexican.

So then we see how the utility of identity politics breaks down, its limits get exposed, and we realize how it often misses the forest for the trees.

And are we really saying no white folk can ever “authentically” portray anyone but those who look like them? Who speak their language? Who belong to the same gender/sexuality/nation/age group/religion/ethnicity/class? That black/brown/gay/trans/straight folks can only ever represent someone from their own communities on the celluloid screen? Or write only about themselves? Speak only about themselves? At which border does the authenticity police stop? Have we forgotten that there is the ethical possibility—even the necessity- to speak with, instead of for, others? That the demand for authenticity can also be a chokehold on creativity—have we so quickly forgotten American Fiction?

Thus, while it is true that representation matters—and that historically oppressed and marginalized peoples who have been kept out of industries like filmmaking and the Hollywood Dream Machine need their own directors, producers, actors, involved, employed, seen and heard—it is ridiculous to reduce all progressive politics to a game of DNA. Rather, we need to get back to the moment of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition—the idea that we should judge people and their work on the basis of affiliative, not identity politics.

This means I don’t—or shouldn’t—care who you are or what you look like or where you come from or what accent you employ—as long as we share the same or similar goals, values, hopes for our shared world. And as long as our relationship is based on trust and respect, and yes—love.

And so.

I would like to ask all those who are interpreting the film purely from the vantage point of a narrowly defined identity politics, to consider the ways in which this film is utterly original in its revisionist approach to all expectations, including those we bring to the genre of the musical; that the acting is first rate and that the pleasure of the filmic gaze rests neither on a sadistic masculinist need to punish the woman, nor does it seek a faux feminist redemption for its main character. And this lack of redemption is not meant to promote an anti-Trans agenda. Rather, the queer feminism that lies at the ideological center of the film and brings all the non-gringo women of different backgrounds and temperaments and sexualities and classes into a shared space of sisterhood that nonetheless never collapses into a kumbaya moment—can only be represented through a genre that by definition is a satire of representation itself, and thus a paean to everything “trans”—bodies in flux, uncontainable, beyond borders, boundaries, labels and gen(d)res of all kinds.

Because the (anti) genre par excellence is camp—the film is meant to upend all pieties including overly politically correct ideologies of authenticity– even the a-tonal and a-phonal music upends traditional musical show tunes!

The issue of Missing Persons (which many claim was handled insensitively)—is, on the contrary, dealt with quite respectfully:  the former cartel members who participated in the disappearances are shamed into seeking out their remains and return them to their loved ones so they can get proper, dignified burials and families can achieve some sense of closure. At the same time, the film encourages a level of autocritique and truth-telling when it shows us how some of those who were disappeared weren’t necessarily perfect victims: the woman (Epifania, played by Adriana Paz)–who is the wife of one such desaparacido (a woman who ends up in a loving relationship with Emilia Perez in the film)—reveals the uncomfortable truth that her husband was an abuser and she hopes his disappearance means he is dead and stays dead! And so an important message here is that nothing should be treated as beyond critique and laughter. All hierarchies of gender/race/class/sexuality/expected behaviors must be challenged, so that the playing field becomes more level, the kings become the paupers, and vice versa. The film perfectly inhabits Mikhail Bakhtin’s upside-down world of power reversals that is the Carnivalesque.

The fact that the film’s dialogues and song are rendered entirely in Spanish, that it is utterly uninterested in engaging with gringoland, was a big plus for me. Of course, its depiction of Mexico as a drug and violence-infested society is problematic-especially since it fails to reference these issues within the context of US imperialist policies that affect the economies of countries like Mexico negatively, which in turn fuels the growth of the black market in drugs, guns, etc. Yet, we can also argue that the film, in depicting an American Mexico, engages in its own form of a decolonial critique that asks to engage and dismantle notions of center and periphery, while simultaneously giving voice and agency to an Other that refuses to be tamed within colonialist logics of propriety and authenticity.

To argue a both/and perspective, means one neither forgets the continuing role of imperial politics, which is present here in its pointed absence–but it also asks us to take responsibility for our own actions. By implying the need for autocritique within postcolonial (neocolonial) countries spanning the global south from Mexico to Pakistan and beyond, the film’s campy irreverence forces us to question whether the blame for every societal ill that plagues the global south can be laid at the door of our erstwhile colonial, and contemporary imperial masters. Shouldn’t independent countries start acting independent and rejecting corrupt criminality as a scourge that is always already excused as a predicament of neocolonialism? Might there be something we can learn from a character who transitions– however imperfectly– from a state of neocolonial dependency into becoming a fighter for justice?

Maybe Camp can deliver us from boring cliches and the endless blame game of cancel culture we all seem to be locked in.

Viva Emilia Perez!

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