On May 26th, 2020, a Minneapolis black man, George Floyd was murdered by police officers in broad daylight. The incident, captured on film was the catalyst for a mass protest movement across the United States and around the world against institutional racism and decrying police brutality. This was of course met with more police brutality, hundreds of incidents caught on video (even more that weren’t), and a series of riots from New York to Atlanta. Donald Tump called in the National Guard and teargassed civilians for a photo op, sparking even more outrage and a widespread conversation about the public function of the police, with calls to defund in favour of diverting more resources to public housing, social work, education, etc. Most of all though it has shone a spotlight on systemic racism far more difficult to ignore than it has been in the past. Even in a small Canadian city such as mine, numerous accounts are coming out of police profiling and disgusting acts of racism towards black and indigenous people.
On June 6th, 2020, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling drew substantial controversy for tweets criticizing the phrase “people who menstruate”, doubling down a few days later with a lengthy essay explaining and attempting to justify her transphobia. These remarks and the lengths she went to defend them immediately made her a pariah of the LGBTQ community, with organizations like the British trans charity Mermaids publishing an open letter denouncing her comments as misleading or outright lies, numerous fans of her books expressing disappointment and betrayal (and in some cases a reevaluation of the subtexts in her work itself), and Harry Potter movie cast members, including Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, distancing themselves from her by publicly criticizing her politics and proclaiming solidarity with the transgender community. It too has sparked a conversation given the timing -it’s no coincidence Rowling said all this in the early days of Pride Month and while the aforementioned protests against racism were raging.
Racism and transphobia are intersectional, the modern Pride movement of course having been born out of riots spearheaded by a black trans-woman (Marsha P. Johnson). On June 14th, a Black Trans Lives Matter rally in Brooklyn drew thousands of demonstrators. And the very next day, in one bright light amidst all this darkness, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that LGBTQ people are protected from work discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. Black Lives Matter. Trans Lives Matter. Now is the time to talk about them.
So… I watched Tangerine.
It’s a 2015 indie comedy by Sean Baker about two trans women of colour sex workers in L.A. It’s set over a single Christmas Eve and is relatively novel for being entirely shot on an iPhone. Specifically, the film is about one of these women Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) discovering her pimp boyfriend has been cheating on her, going on a rampage to find and confront him, while her best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) tries to reign her in while advertising a singing performance she’s due to give at a bar that night. As these stories are happening, the film follows a day in the life of one of their clients, Armenian taxi driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian), and touches on scenes of that sex work subculture.
Tangerine is a broad film, its’ humour very big, exacerbated by its’ guerrilla shooting style and overpowering soundtrack serving to heighten the outrageousness of the premise and individual scenes, much in the way a bro or stoner comedy might do. The fights are explosive, the emotions high, the misunderstandings farcical, the measures taken absurd. Sin-Dee is an especially loud character, cartoonishly over-the-top at times or high-strung to a level of parody. And obviously elements of crude raunch comedy make their way into the film, given the specific centre of focus and its unorthodox subject matter. It’s set in a very specific underworld of Hollywood, distinct in how unrelatable it all is.
And yet, it’s a world that comes across as exceedingly honest and authentic, in spite of how alien it may be to the common viewer. Through the unfiltered environments of public spaces, seedy crevices and alleyways, to the naturalistic almost amateur documentary shooting style that puts the audience intimately in the scene (a favourite technique of Bakers’ is the behind-subject tracking shot that makes you feel like you’re literally following the characters), Tangerine’s aesthetic doesn’t match its narrative. That is the thing that most stands out about the film, and is I think crucial to its effect.
Because the gritty realism that abounds through Tangerine in its every frame transforms the comedy drastically. The humour is still there, but removed from all artifice, taking on new context and meaning. A goofy misunderstanding is now awkward and uncomfortable, an act of overzealous intimidation and minor violence is now unseemly, a big confrontation and blow-up in a public business isn’t witty or fun, it’s embarrassing -as your avatar of sympathy is immediately the put-upon business owner (whose position many of us who’ve worked in the public sphere have certainly been in). The comic devices turn inward as the movie becomes more and more about real people with real emotions, and it’s ugly. The humour no longer comes from the situation or characters but from shock at the situation and characters existing in an undeniably real context. A form of cringe humour if you will, albeit reliant on few of its usual markers.
But why is this important? Because Tangerine demonstrates how the superficial exists within plain sight of the sorrow, exemplifying this through a focus on an incredibly distinct marginalized world and its people.
Though Tangerine explicitly draws your attention to the gender identities of its protagonists from the opening minutes (where one of the first lines of dialogue is a casual remark about taking estrogen), transphobia is mostly an undercurrent throughout the film -and black transphobia even less pronounced. And yet it infiltrates to some level every aspect of Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s lives. In the streets or on a bus you can detect the people staring or side-eyeing them for the way they dress and move and talk. Micro-aggressions are all over the place, from the people ignoring Alexandra’s self-promotion, to the language used by a couple police officers when they see her fighting with a client who refused to pay (including dead-naming her). The culture of transphobia is seen in a larger aspect too. Two cisgender male characters who elicit the services of trans sex workers are called homophobic slurs for it, which is rotten; but then Razmik also demonstrates a presumption that all black sex workers are trans, and his specific attraction to trans women is seemingly fetishistic -representative of a prevailing objectification that accounts for why so many sex workers in that area are trans. The fact that black trans women are preferred is likely a further degree of exoticized objectification, though there are far more studied individuals qualified to comment on that. Regardless, Alexandra’s blackness and Sin-Dee’s brownness clearly inform their identities and perspectives, and the racial diversity of their somewhat squalid corner of the world speaks to that systemic racial inequity we keep hearing so much about -tying ethnicity to the social, economic, and sexual marginalization on display. And then there are things like Sin-Dee’s clear insecurity at the fact that her boyfriend cheated on her with a white cis-woman specifically, or the near empty bar that Alexandra is forced to perform to, because so few people she spoke to were willing to come. That scene in particular is very sad, rendered all the more so by the subsequent reveal that rather than being paid for the gig, she paid the owner for the opportunity.
All this is relatively understated next to the plot and the sheer bewildering realism of the setting. The fact that these characters lead often sad lives is secondary -though the film never denigrates sex workers themselves, as much as it may depict their work and circumstances in unflattering lights. This supposed glimpse into the everyday life of a transgender sex worker (it may be for Alexandra, though not for Sin-Dee) illustrates those facts of life behind the story -the institutional barriers that these women face for their race, gender identity, and profession. And yet they cannot be denied or ignored, the underlying reasons for Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s actions, the world they occupy and how it treats them is as vivid as the vendetta against the cheating asshole and the lascivious cabbies’ family drama. Realism strips away the narrative structure to expose the ugliness of a society that hates trans people, but in which they must live. Which is why following the big anti-comedic climax, in which Razmik’s secret comes out to his family as the pimp Chester (an oddly cast James Ransone) announces his engagement to Cin-Dee before revealing he slept with Alexandra leading to a formula falling out between the two friends, the movies’ final shock is a gross act of transphobic assault on Cin-Dee.
Tangerine doesn’t end there though. Alexandra, who witnessed the hate crime, comes immediately to her friends’ aid -their reconciliation facilitated not by any means typical of girlfriend comedies, but out of a uniquely shared empathy, vulnerability and compassion. These two trans-women of colour who, perhaps intentionally, mirror the ones who started the Pride movement, have endured a lot, have each had a bad day -they’ve been let down, betrayed, insulted, denied dignity, disrespected by authority, gaslit, abused, and torn apart- but they’re there for each other to support and uplift. The final scene is one of sweet solidarity, as Cin-Dee, momentarily forced out of her body, is comforted by Alexandra giving up a piece of her own. There’s I think an obvious metaphor in that we should be taking to heart.
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