Jun 28

Jun 28 [Pride 2022] The Grotesque and the Invisible: 'X' and 'Real Women Have Bodies' Say About Fem Bodies

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It was St. Patrick’s Day. Droves of drunk New Yorkers were staggering around the streets like zombies, their silhouettes darkening against the grey twilight. I was balled up inside an AMC theater with my best friend, watching the highly anticipated horror movie that was acclaimed as “clever,” with a “meticulous sense of humor.” Yet during the scenes when the theater boomed with laughter, I found myself tearing up. They triggered an ancient sadness in me, a deep ache at the horror—and absolute certainty—that when I age out of my current body and take on an old one, I will become invisible to society.

The first scene in X where director Ti Wes reaches for something profound is relatively early on, when the elderly murderer, Pearl, looks at herself in the mirror. Her thin hair falls out, her breasts sag to her belly. There’s a fire behind her eyes, but her body is doing its best to extinguish it. It’s no accident that Mia Goth, also starring as the final girl Maxine, is the one buried under practical effects makeup, playing Pearl. I wondered if the despair I felt watching this scene was felt by Goth as she acted it; if when she looked in the mirror, she saw a vision of her future…One in which she is no longer the Final Girl, but instead, the monster.

Our patriarchal society has a way of entwining youth and worth for women in a way that isn’t quite the same for men. Young women’s bodies are objects of desire, political battlegrounds, markers of male pride—while older women have their sexuality completely stripped from them. They’re accepted under few circumstances, like when they play the maternal role; but if they express desires of their own it’s seen as grotesque.

That much was clear when the audience cringed as Pearl tried to seduce the young RJ, played by Owen Campell. When he rebuffs her with the condescending tone of sending his confused Nanna back to bed, I felt Pearl’s pain. The true horror is in that moment: Pearl isn’t afraid of dying, but of living in a hellish reality, trapped inside a body that does not suit her.

So when Pearl stabs RJ, I cheered for her catharsis. As he dies, with his van’s red brake lights bathing the old woman’s carnage-soaked skin, Pearl does something beautiful: she dances. She moves in a way her feeble body allows, using her arms and facial expression to express the melancholic grace of this moment. Of course, the audience found this hilarious, just seeing a crazy old bag basking in irreverent gore. Their reaction further isolated me, the viewer who identified with Pearl; outside of the film’s universe was another layer of judgment. It spiraled outward, taking up the entire theater.

Later, when Pearl crawls into bed with Maxine, we essentially see the two sides of one woman (remember, Mia Goth is playing both characters). On a surface level, this is the villain indulging in her creepy obsession with the youthful main character. But looking a little deeper, I saw Maxine’s older-self reaching out, attempting wholeness. But her younger self is petrified of this possibility. She doesn’t want to be reminded of her pending fate, or rather, that she already is this woman. Pearl lies beneath Maxine’s skin, emerging more each year like an unstoppable body horror.

A similar scene plays out in movies like Black Swan, when queer sex between Nina (Natalie Portman) and Odile (Mila Kunis) is also a symbol of reuniting with oneself—Nina being the white swan, the good girl, and Odile being the black swan, the rebel. This scene plays out like a soft-core porn, filled with so much sensuality that we forget that this too, is a predator/ prey relationship. But unlike the scene in X, it plays out with young bodies, and is therefore, hot.

Being that so much of this dynamic relies on visual cues, it’s remarkable that Carmen Maria Machado’s short story, “Real Women Have Bodies,” communicates such themes using the written word. I first came across Machado’s brand of queer horror in the autumn of 2017: her short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press), stood on Barnes and Noble’s Halloween display like a patch of negative space in a chaotic painting. The quiet cover invited further inspection. I wanted to decipher the items entangled in the silky red web—or was it a string of cosmic ooze? The stories are like that too: Rorschach tests of dark fables, body horror, and deadly romance, each piece daring the reader to interpret through the lens of their own identity.

In this welcoming collection, queer characters exist in solidity; they are not ghosts of implication but rather real, lusting, loving, complex characters. The story “Real Women Have Bodies,” follows dress shop workers turned lovers, who suffer paranoia as a mysterious virus causes the women of this world to slowly fade. Eventually they become like holograms and loiter around the physical plane, treated as if they are no longer there. The nature of the virus makes me question what it means to be seen as a women in our culture: who is the “real woman,” who gets to have a body—to take up space, be noticed? Is catching the virus as inevitable as losing one’s youth? Or is this virus concerned with types of women, those who are perhaps not white, cisgender, heterosexual, and relatively well-off? The beauty of this metaphor, as with horror as a genre, is that it can be explored through so many lenses.

As more faded women are stitched into dresses to be worn by those who do have bodies, an odd disturbance creaked inside of me. What would it be like to be used in such a way? To be consumed, tried on and worn? It felt akin to “The Sunken Place” from Jordan Peele’s Get Out, where the rightful owner of a body becomes a passive viewer of their own life, while an insidious force uses them. Underneath the body horror lies a message about appropriation.

Outside the realm of ageism, bodies are also—if not more so—faded on the basis of transphobia, homophobia, and racism. It’s not hard to see, when a white victim is sought-after with search parties and news reports, and the Less Dead, or “a murder victim who is from a marginalized group of people,” (Urban Dictionary), is, well, forgotten.

And to take an even more literal approach, the stitching of the dress makers into the dresses suggest we analyze how we regard poor bodies: those who are unseen, pouring their life energy into garments worn by the higher class. Is there a ghost-like quality to goods produced by people who are hurting? Is a residue of their pain permanently sewed into the fabric?

It pains me to say that movies and books cannot solves these problems; they can only bring them to our attention. Stories like X and “Real Women Have Bodies,” make us take a good hard look in the mirror. I hope you’ll be able to see yourself past face value. Or at the very least, I hope you can see yourself at all.