Jun 9

Jun 9 [Pride 2022] The Incessant Conformity of 'Vivarium' (2019)

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I live in the UK, which, in recent years, has not-so-lovingly been nicknamed 'TERF Island'. This is due to the rampant transphobia seemingly going unquestioned in feminist spaces for decades, finally rearing its disgusting head at full force, due to its endorsement by popular figures like J.K. Rowling and Graham Linehan. It's a movement that asks women to see their gender as a source of perpetual pain and trauma, eventually manifesting in transphobia. This type of transphobia, one that claims to be fighting against misogyny, seeks to weaponise the pain of this bigotry whilst never taking any concrete steps to end it beyond the deeply harmful campaigning and misinformation that leads to trans people being harassed and pushed out of all spaces, not just single-gender ones.

In a strange way, misogyny is a haven for these people because it means that they never have to deconstruct womanhood (or manhood for that matter), and it never means that any structural change has to happen. It's not surprising that many TERFs are middle class and white, because it doesn't occur to them that they themselves may be causing harm. They never seem to consider the fact that their perception of gender was constructed for the sake of maintaining heteronormativity and white supremacy.

When I watched Vivarium (2019), I wasn't expecting to have such a visceral reaction to it. Audiences didn't seem to connect with it but that hasn't really stopped me from liking a film before. I just wasn't expecting to be actually disturbed by it. In terms of tone, it's a little bit off, with certain moments of violence coming off as more silly than intended, but honestly this added to the watching experience. The whole film feels strange, right from the start.

Vivarium follows a couple, Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), as they attend a house viewing in the suburbs and find themselves trapped in what looks like a perpetually recurring neighbourhood. After many failed attempts to leave, they find that a box has been left on their doorstep, containing a baby. They are told that they will be released once they raise the child to adulthood.

Set in a nightmare version of the UK (completely different to the current nightmare this country is), the repeating suburbs convey a consumerist outlook on the process of buying a house. A home is not simply given to you because you, as a human, need a place to live. It's something you must earn. In this film, it's earned by staying there, obeying the commands directed at you and dying once your purpose has been fulfilled. Cut off from people and devoid of any unique flourishes that signal humans lived there, it's a version of my country that is alien yet familiar.

The couple, along with the audience, recognises how corporate and meticulously designed this place is but not before it's too late. Once they become trapped and are forced to live out the ideals of a 'normal' nuclear family, they become hostile to one another, taking different stances on how they should be trying to escape. Tom is adamant that if they dig down far enough into their perfectly cut astro-turfed lawn, they will find a way out. Gemma, on the other hand, wants to appease the omnipotent forces that are keeping them there and raise the boy they've been given, in spite of her anger at his increasingly demanding and intrusive behaviour. Both of their conclusion are attempting to work with the situation they are in and with no other option, this is all they can do.

This is specifically why they fail.

The horror of this film comes from the fact that spending enough time in a hostile space will mould you to its demands rather than the other way around. Despite endeavouring to leave repeatedly, they eventually, though not knowingly, conform to the kind of gender essentialism the middle class, family-oriented home demands. Any sense of individuality is forgotten once the hope of escape is dangled in front of them.

The film rightfully asserts that you can play into the hands of what is normal, that being heteronormativity, cisnormativity, patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, or really any system of power, as much as you want. But the system will always win, because that's what it's designed to do.

It pleas with the audience that conformity and assimilation will not only do great harm to you as a person but will keep the cycle going, keeping the power with the already powerful. This idea that TERFs believe, that hurting enough trans people will be a net good in the fight against patriarchy, is a fallacy, because every action they take reasserts a binary idea of gender that this system of power created in the first place. The truth is that the horrors of the world, and the trauma that follows, if uninterrupted, will recur endlessly, because that's what it's designed to do.