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Notes -
Emilia Perez and “Sacredness” of Concepts
I follow the film industry pretty closely, but like most other film buffs, I had never heard of the movie, Emilia Perez, until a few weeks ago when it was nominated for 13 Oscars, the most of any movie this year. For comparison, the Godfather got 11 Oscar nominations. For that, and many other reasons, it’s easily the most culture war controversial film of the year, and IMO, for pretty interesting reasons. If you want a truly unexpected Culture War punch in the face, then go watch it on Netflix. Otherwise, full plot SPOILERS ahead.
Emilia Perez is about a Mexican drug lord who undergoes a MTF gender transition. She fakes her death, leaves her wife and two kids behind, lives as a woman alone for a few years, but then tries to get them back in a somewhat Mrs. Doubtfire manner. Also, the film is a musical. Most infamously, there’s a song about getting gender reassignment surgery - https://youtube.com/watch?v=VHyPL2fBTHs.
I watched it and thought it was bad. I don’t like musicals to begin with, but I thought the musical sections in particular were terrible, boring, and didn’t further the plot. I thought the characterization was confusing and the plot really wacky and dumb. But in its favor, I admire the film’s ambition, and I think it has some occasionally interesting visuals and character dynamics. It’s not mindless streaming slop, it’s stupid auteur bullshit. 3/10.
The interesting culture war aspect is that Emilia Perez perfectly wedges itself between two broad factions on the left. Left-leaning liberals seem to love this movie. The Academy Award voters are mostly very old Hollywood lefties, and their 13 Oscar nominations seem to indicate that Emilia Perez says something culturally important and meaningful. But left wing progressives hate Emilia Perez. Just search for it on Reddit and you’ll find a million hate threads highly upvoted about how terrible and offensive it is.
The best comparison I’ve seen is to the film, Crash, which one the best picture Oscar in 2006. The same left wing cultural split applied, with the moderates thinking it was a brilliant film about the complexity of race relations and the progressives thinking it was nothing more than racial stereotypes and white savior narratives.
In Emilia Perez’s case, progressives think the film’s portrayals of transness and Mexico are offensive. A lot of the blame is put on the writer/director Jacques Audiard, a cis-gender white Frenchman, who in an interview I haven’t seen, admitted that he did almost no research into transness or Mexico for the film. He seems to be interested in the setting and ideas of the film in a generalized and aesthetic manner, not in any deep “I have to say something important about society” way.
Having watched Emilia Perez, I genuinely don’t get the claims that it’s offensive toward trans people. If anything, the film is way too nice to trans people. The movie expects us to immediately sympathize with Emilia Perez after her gender transition even though she has lived a life of carnage and mayhem and is implied to have killed tons of people. It’s not impossible to make a sympathetic character there, but IMO the film really doesn’t sell it. Her personality basically transforms from “crazy murderous psycho” into “standard Western educated progressive” overnight without justification. The Mexico complaints have a little more justification and are more complicated:
I think some of these complaints are legit and some are typical progressive culture warring. I think a huge does of the criticism of Emilia Perez is that a white guy made a movie about a “Brown” country without being excessively apologetic, and if the nationalities were reversed (ie. a Mexican made a movie about France), no one would care. The best counter-example is Moulin Rouge. It’s a 2001 musical about a real French landmark in the French capital that deals with French culture (burlesque, bohemian lifestyles, etc.), but it was written and directed by Aussies, all the actors are from the Anglosphere, and all the music is American or British. Yet no one gave a shit about misrepresentation of French culture or thought it was offensive to French people.
What I find more interesting is that much of the criticism of Emilia Perez seems to come down to what I would call the “sacredness” of topics in popular culture. The progressive left tends to hold non-white cultures to be more sacred than white cultures, therefore Emilia Perez is offensive and Moulin Rouge is not. Similarly, Emilia Perez (a goofy musical soap opera) is offensive for not portraying Mexican cartels in a super serious way, but that same criticism isn’t applied toward movies that portray the American Italian Mafia as cool or goofy, like Goodfellas, Analyze This, Mickey Blue Eyes, Corky Romano, that episode in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, etc.
The phrase I've seen a lot in the criticisms is that Emilia Perez "uses Mexico and its culture as an aesthetic," to which I think the the director would YESChad. He doesn't think Mexico and its culture are so incredibly important and sacred that they are above being an aesthetic. The director also made a weird movie that used the Wild West as an aesthetic (The Sisters Brothers). I believe the progressive critics are fine with using France and its culture as an aesthetic. It all comes down to what people consider sacred or not.
Likewise, transness is such an intense and sacred topic on the left that many consider it offensive to put it in any film that doesn’t treat it with the utmost seriousness and deference. I’m pretty sure that’s the basis of the anti-trans claims against Emilia Perez. It doesn’t actually say anything bad about transness or trans women, it’s just inherently offensive to make a goofy movie that doesn’t take transness serious enough.
Prompt: what is a rational approach to assigning sacredness in society, especially when it comes to comedy? Is it ok to joke about the holocaust? Is it ok to joke about 9/11? Is it ok to joke about Muslims? If my best friend’s son dies in a horrible freak accident, is it ok to make a joke about that the very next day? Where should the lines be drawn? How do we distinguish between personal lines and broader societal lines? My sense is that the progressive left has conquered this space in the popular culture, but I haven’t seen a coherent alternative beyond 4chan “make fun of everything” culture. Are there better models out there?
Did people start warring about the film and then someone found Gascon's tweets? Zoe Saldana had to make a speech during a Q&A event bolstering her commitment to diversity in response to the tweets being dug up. (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/zoe-saldana-responds-emilia-perez-costar-karla-sofia-gascon-tweets-1236124082/) There is also a lot of anti-trans rhetoric being directed towards Gascon on X and I'm not sure if that would have been tolerated or not under the previous management of Twitter.
It is funny when a trans person says or does something that shocks progressives. By nature, trans people are defiant and refuse, in the most essential way imaginable, to be boxed in. Even if you don't think they suffer from a mental illness -- which would bring a whole other level of unpredictability to their thoughts, words and actions -- expecting them to conform to any model would seem to "deny their existence" as much as any bathroom law might.
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