This was originally published a couple of years ago on another blog. I still haven't gotten around to seeing the film again.
So, I finally got a round to watching Fassbinder's A Year of 13 Moons. It was recommended to me on the IMDB's Classics Board earlier this spring after I was outed as a transsexual. Well, not recommended, per se, but I was asked what I thought of it. Here, many months later, is the conversation I've been having about it. The asterisk in the title of this post? To remind me to give apologies to Julia Serano
My initial, knee-jerk reaction:
I'm still sorting out my reaction to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons (1978). It's been a while since I was more conflicted over a movie. On the one hand, the cineaste in me recognizes a keen cinematic intelligence behind the film. But another part of me, the transsexual who is completely fed up with the way transsexuals are depicted by cisgender media, is completely appalled by it. I mean, DEEPLY offended by it. She wants to take the cineaste part of my mind, tie her to a chair and make her watch Jess Franco movies A Clockwork Orange-style as penance for even suggesting that this is a worthwhile movie. Well, you can see my dilemma. I'm sure I'll have a LOT more to say about this when I actually sit down to write an in-depth analysis. I'm going to watch it again, first. But for now, I have this to say. First: while it's striking from both a cinematic and symbolic standpoint, this film's tour of a meat packing plant is probably what most pissed me off. The suggestion is that our heroine--if you can call her that, rather than "our object of pity"--is a piece of meat, not a human being, mutilated by her desires and ultimately disposable. That the film ends the way that it does reinforces this idea. Frankly, this sucks on so many levels that it has an event horizon. Second: I can see this film's influence on European cinema's depictions of transsexualism ever since (which is NOT a good thing). Three: when I was sorting through critical reactions to the film, I stumbled across Ed Gonzalez's review of the film for Slant. I rarely agree with Gonzalez under the best of times, but he's never written a review that actually offended me before: from his occasional tendency to put the words "she" and "her" in quotation marks, to his egregious use of the phrase "she-male" (which is more or less equivalent to the "N" word when you're talking about trans people), to his condescending sympathy with our object of pity, this is the work of someone who has bought in to the kinds false truths Fassbinder arrives at by setting up a false set of conditions under which to examine his characters.