Jun 29

Jun 29 [Pride 2021] Gender: Legend's Demonic Dancing Dress

dreadful, Gayly, Gayly dreadful, Gayly Helpful, LGBTQ, Movies, Pride 2021

Ridley’s Scott’s 1985 fantasy film Legend is, quite frankly, a mess. Unicorns make whale sounds. The personification of Darkness lives in a giant, dungeon-filled tree that somehow opens out into deep space. One prop is actually a statue of Pazuzu from The Exorcist. In the film’s climax, Tom Cruise wears armor but no pants. It isn’t actually a horror movie, but it is horror-adjacent, not least because The Thing’s Rob Bottin designed the makeup, including Tim Curry’s transformation into one of the most iconic devils in film history. There are multiple competing cuts and two scores. A person’s experience with the film depends entirely on which cut they get, and if they’ve seen more than one, they may find themselves more inclined to pick and choose bits of each to make the film seem more coherent.

When I was a teenager, I learned that gender is also a mess. The lovely group of weirdos who were my friends and I had a knack for finding subversive media, even though we lived in a rural town before the internet was popular. My favorite characters in such media were always one of two types: beautiful, regal women who embodied the fancy ideal I could never be, or total genderfuckery.

Gender has always felt like something Somebody Else decided for me. My personal, private view of gender is really images, irrespective of my sexuality. I actually like one of the horror villains most cited as an example of problematic representation; I find this character fascinating and a truly cool “fuck you” to gender binaries, and it’s entirely because of an image they create. If asked to describe my own gender identity, it feels more accurate to say “this expression Helen McCrory did in Anna Karenina”or “Brandon Flowers in a gold suit” or “whatever color a nebula is.” Media in which characters’ genders shift beyond their control resonate powerfully with me. The first time I watched the original Cowboy Bebop, I was drawn to Gren for that reason, and I felt the same about Shinichirō Watanabe’s continuation of that theme in Carole & Tuesday, though I’ve seen others who feel differently.

What does any of this have to do with Legend and its sappily cis-heteronormative story?

Looking back on it today, my pre-teen obsession with the film wasn’t part of my lesbian awakening but may well have contributed to my personal equation of gender with image.

One could argue there’s some minor gender play in the film. Lead goblin Blix is male-coded but is played by a woman, while the swamp hag Meg Mucklebones is female-coded but played by a man. A nearly-naked male elf has a feminine voice — because the voice was dubbed by the same woman who plays Blix. The greatest “character” in which gender becomes questionable, though, is the demonic dancing dress.

In my favorite scene, while lost in Darkness’s fortress, good girl Princess Lili stumbles into a chamber full of jewelry. She smiles as she touches a necklace obscenely laden with diamonds. On one hand, since she’s a princess, it seems vain and materialistic for her to take comfort in handling jewelry. The world outside is ending, after all. On the other, her journey through Darkness’s lair has left her filthy, lost, and stripped of her sense of self. The jewels must seem like a respite.

Enter the dress.

It appears behind her, a tall, dark, sparkling, faceless thing dancing in deep sways and bows. Its high collar makes it look like a Disney villain, but its lack of human features imbues it with an uncanny creepiness. Its movement is also a little scary; when it advances on Lili, we can’t tell if it means to attack her. The film never explains if the figure in the dress is only Darkness’s enchantment, a demon, or an anthropomorphization of a spirit that inhabits the fabric. Even the credits offer no clues, as dancer Liz Gilbert is credited only as “Dancing Black Dress.” And so, appropriately, the dress lacks gender signifiers.

The dress pulls Lili into the dance. No matter how one interprets the faceless figure in the dress, the dance with Lili is undeniably queer. There’s a maturity to the dress that’s conspicuously missing from Lili’s dalliances with good boy Jack in the forest. Romance with Jack is games and rings (and songs, if you’re watching the cut where Lili sings). But the dress means serious business. The dress is lawless, amoral, dangerous. If Jack is innocent love, the dress is sex.

For the first time since the film’s conflict began, Lili is happy again. She frolics. She lets go. Then, tearfully reaching out her hands, she pleads for the dress to — to do what, exactly? To be on her body instead, as it magically will be a few seconds later? To embrace her again? To take her as its lover? To release her from the confines of moralistic hegemony aboveground and let her live freely? We don’t know for certain, but Lili wants it.

That queerness becomes Lili when she wears the dress. The faceless figure disappears and there is only Lili, cleaned up now with a makeup job that was probably what sent me down the goth path. The virgin princess in white who flirted with Tom Cruise now looks like an evil queen. And it’s clear, as her dance slowly comes to a stop, that she has found herself again. She is a new creature, enchanted and darkly beautiful, part Lili and part something indefinable.

Lili is aware of the change. She looks at her new reflection in the mirror in its full glory. The dress is far more revealing on her than it was on the faceless figure, but she doesn’t shy away from her own exposure. For a moment, just before Darkness interrupts the scene, her reflection is a triumph.

I don’t have quite the loving nostalgia for Legend I wish I had. Where frequent rewatches were a coping mechanism when I was a depressed pre-teen, now I get a laugh out of how incoherent it is. But in my ideal queer world, it offers what feels like as good a gender identity for me as any: demonic dancing dress.