Glen or Glenda

At a glance...

• Directed by Ed Wood
• Released in 1953
• Runtime 71 minutes
• Watched at The Beacon Cinema
• Final feelings: it's true, my fellow men. The natural outcome of your existence is transvestitism.

A lot of random thoughts for this little diamond in the rough:

First, once you learn that Ed Wood is both directing and starring in this film as Glenda, the whole project becomes the most unsubtle wish fulfillment in existence. This movie is a dress rehearsal for him to reveal to his actual girlfriend, Dolores Fuller, who is playing his fictional wife in the movie, that he is a cross-dresser and therefore implicated in this mental disease of gender. Fuller was apparently "shocked" to learn of this fact after this movie's release. If you want to imagine what that shocked conversation probably looked like, it's conveniently depicted for you in parts this film. And if you want to know what Ed hoped would come out of that conversation, it's seemingly also depicted here. Reading the director's bio on Wikipedia, I feel like he just injected his own life into the story as much as possible to the point where it seems comically specific. Even the angora sweater in the movie is playing to his own personal taste. Were people just more clueless back in the day or was Ed just really practiced in not being dressed up in the house at the wrong time?¹

Second, I will admit I got a little tilted watching this at the theater and hearing so much laughter during certain parts of this film. I promise I am over it now. This is genuinely and comically over-the-top and presented in that exact matter-of-fact tone that we associate with the era, so there is a level of absurdity baked into the thing that no one could be blamed for laughing at. I just took it all very seriously (or rather, just the parts with Glen and Glenda) because it was so earnest. It just felt bad to me to laugh when Ed Wood was clearly litigating his very legitimate real-life fears about his secret double-life. And it felt so terribly sweet to hear these very funny conversations between working class men around the country politely discussing and defending the validity of the plight of the man who thinks he's a woman. Transvestitism ought not be a target of our shame, but of our pity!

So, while it's funny to see the image of the steel being extruded and then cut while off-screen the steel workers talk about men who want to have a sex change, and it's funny to compare the medical "progress" of understanding transvestitism with the progress of airplanes and automobiles, it's also true that Ed Wood was writing this and maybe hoping to move the needle on something by taking advantage of the salaciousness of the idea of a sex change. The most frustrating part of the conclusion is that the path forward into out womanhood is gatekept. For Glenda, the psych explains that her best outcome would be subsuming into her new wife Barbara, as opposed to the example of Alan/Anne, who was born a "pseudo-hermaphrodite" and could thus surgically attain the complete womanhood. We laugh at the oafishness of the psychiatry, but this is still the framework for our modern medical gatekeeping for trans health care.² Thus, it's got a lot of over-the-top dressing, but forgive me for being somewhat reticent to lean in to that characterization for all of what Glen or Glenda is doing.

Third, the absolute best part of this movie is the fact that it's all happening as a conversation between a cop and a shrink, because everything the cop is saying makes it sound like he, too, hides cute shoes and skirts in his closet and is desperately concerned for his-I mean for all the other poor men who are suffering from this mental illness.

To conclude, this film has a special voyeuristic quality that goes into and out of the screen: just as the audience is learning how to understand this strange and reaction-demanding thing called a "sex change", Ed Wood is toeing the line as close as possible with making a movie about his own excitements and his own performance without saying so in the movie. What I don't know is how widespread the knowledge that Glen or Glenda was made by a cross-dresser, was made by someone at least adjacent to the dreaded transvestite. If people knew that fact going in, as modern audiences do, how would this movie differ to if you were like Dolores Fuller, and simply had no idea at all? I guess all I can say to that is, if you know, you know.

/1953/ /3.5 stars/ /the beacon cinema/