I really wanted to enjoy the movie "Adam." It's a new film by director Rhys Ernst, a transgender man, and it's based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Ariel Schrag, a 39-year-old cisgender lesbian who also wrote the screenplay.
No spoilers here. The plot, in one sentence, is that "Adam" is a cisgender male — meaning a man who is not transgender — who pretends to be a transgender man, so that he can date a lesbian. You can view the trailer for the movie by clicking here.
Controversy has dogged "Adam," with many critics weighing in even before they've seen it. Among those like me who have, The Advocate called it "dangerous." Planet Transgender asked, "you have to wonder why it was made in the first place." And the film is the target of no fewer than three Change.org petitions and a Twitter campaign calling for filmgoers to #BoycottAdam.
But reaction has not been universally awful. IndieWire's Jude Dry said the critics are wrong. As a trans-masculine identified person, Dry praised Ernst for training a "trans lens on a cis gaze." Trans film critic Danielle Solzman wrote in Out Magazine that "Adam" "works well" and even called it "great," in a review that bemoaned the almost total absence of out transgender directors. Who can name one, other than Lana Wachowski, her sister Lilly Wachowski, and Ernst?
He was one of the producers and directors on Amazon's "Transparent," and created “We’ve Been Around,” a 2016 series of short films about trans people throughout history. Ernst has said in interviews and written on Medium that his first feature film “flipped the ‘trans deception’ trope on its head. It was poking fun at, but also challenging, cis people’s obsession with transness.”
He's right that this is a phenomenon, both in the era in which "Adam" was set, 2006, and also when Ernst grew up. Anyone who lived in the transgender closet in the 1980s and 90s (including me) and sought out films like "Tootsie," "Ladybugs" and "Nobody's Perfect" remembers Hollywood's box office obsession with transgender deception. That's the suspicion by cisgender men that trans women are really gay men pretending to be women to trick them into sex; it is the ultimate, awful and all too common outcome of this mistaken understanding of what being trans is.
And without giving away a key plot point, the film "Adam" addresses this outcome: an epidemic of violence and murder that disproportionately targets trans women of color.
Ernst pointed out to Buzzfeed that you can trace these tropes all the way back to Shakespeare. And just as The Bard hit back at his critics, this trans man filmmaker isn't taking it lying down.
"I kind of am pushing back on that," Ernst told LGBT editor Shannon Keating, "that trans filmmakers or queer filmmakers have to do safe work. That we shouldn’t push boundaries, and we shouldn’t make people question things or be uncomfortable.”
Ernst described the blowback as a “war on nuance.”
Ohhhh. "Nuance." Okay, Rhys. Please elaborate?
“It’s a difficult time to push people a little outside their comfort zone,” Ernst told The Economist. “But that’s something that art should do.” He said he wants to advance his craft to a point when trans people don't feel it necessary to police works about our community. “As a trans filmmaker, I want to create the kind of complicated work that I was never able to see.”
"Complicated." Hmm. Okay, Rhys.
I don't mean to imply I know Rhys Ernst any more than any journalist who's interviewed him on a red carpet, which in 2015 was the one and only time we met.
But as a former film critic, a former actor, and a real, live, trans adult, I'm not comfortable with "nuance" and "complicated" works of art when our own government is actively seeking to discriminate against the community of which Ernst and I are members.
What I want to see, or more importantly, what I want cisgender moviegoers and potential allies to see, is a film that supports the transgender movement, not just subtly. Parts of "Adam" accomplish that brilliantly, with drama and humor. Kudos to Ernst and the many transgender people who worked on the film for those moments. Condolences to those who have gone online to complain about how they were treated during its production. The filmmakers addressed those complaints in Buzzfeed.
But all those people are not the ones filmgoers will remember when the final credits roll. They'll walk out of the theater recalling that they saw the story of a cisgender boy who pretended to be trans and was played by a cisgender boy, not a story that's primarily about anyone genuinely transgender.
That's my very real problem with "Adam."
