(2 of 4)
Gender Performance "I feel as though I'm performing myself." "You do it better than I ever manage." (Referring to putting on make up, equating this with femininity.) "You're different from most girls." (The dialogue even calls this out for the cliche it is, but the film then doubles down on it.) "This is not how it goes." (It's all a script, a game, to Gerda.) "We're here to perform." (Implying that Lili will excel at the perfume counter.) "You've been two of them." (Terrible cliche and reminder of the assigned gender.) "I was always pretty. You just never noticed." (The worst part is, I and many other transgender people do want to be pretty, and movies like this reinforce that in those of us who are just starting to discover ourselves.) "Of course you can't. He isn't here." (The one time they get it right, it's rendered as a joke.)
There is a performative aspect to gender, but being transgender is not all about performance. Gender is complicated, made more so by the fact that it is socially constructed as well as self-imposed. Sex, biological sex, is something many consider to be innate, intrinsic. Julia Serano clarifyingly and empoweringly refers to the subconscious sex, an intrinsic part of all people that defines us; this is important. Being transgender is innate. It is part of us--part of me, and part of other trans people. The thing Serano suggests is asking people who identify as cis to imagine how much money it would take to convince them to have sexual reassignment surgery. In her experience, most people are horrified by the thought. There's more to it than that, but the basic idea is that if you can't imagine changing your assigned sex, that feeling you have when you try is what transgender people experience when they think of being stuck in their assigned sex.
There is also a history in this world of transgender people being forced to perform as themselves for at least a year before cisgender gatekeepers would allow them to transition. This film takes the idea of gender as performative and uses it--like so many pieces of trans-focused film--to emphasize the superficial aspects of being transgender, and in doing so, sets a narrative that comes with a built-in trial period before setting up surgery as the be all end all. Part of this is, of course, because of how Lili's life progressed, but the choice to do this story at all is in part predicated on having that narrative. The end result is a transgender story that suggests the clothes make the woman, that equates behaviors of some sort of fetishistic nature to being trans, that makes it clear that Lili's story is about learning how to be a woman. Not learning how to be herself. Not learning how to pass so she can survive. Not learning how to embrace being a transgender person. Learning how to "be a woman," such as putting on stockings, walking in high heels, holding your hands the right away, wearing the right clothes, getting your voice right.
"He won't be your husband when I'm finished."
And then, as it shows this, it repeatedly wants us to remember this is a performance. She stumbles in heels. Her voice cracks as she whispers. It shows her hairy legs in the stockings. It emphasizes her monthly nose bleeds. It shows her remove her make up as she's crying, shows her de-transition before our eyes--twice! It makes sure we hear the doctor use the phrase "construct the vagina." She works at a perfume counter, masking her scent.
Most awfully, a crucial visual metaphor is Lili's emerging from her masculine clothes to reveal female underwear. That moment is especially demonstrative of how the filmmaker failed to understand being transgender: it contrasts Lili in the underwear with cis gender Gerda fully naked, this bare and vicious contrast that forces the viewer to see one as fake and one as real. Similarly egregious moments include where Lili goes to a peep show and mimics the woman inside, until she touches between her legs. Her response reminds us that she has not had surgery, again reiterating what we already know and that Lili is somehow lesser or fake still. This is after what I hope will one day be recognized as the most infamous moment of the film, the "tuck scene," which visually references the most damning moment in Silence of the Lambs (because equating Lili with a serial killer is... I can't even imagine what Hooper was thinking). But this film shows Lili's genitalia, because we can't possibly be allowed to think for a second anything other than that this trans woman is a man underneath. And then, much later, when the surgery is over, finally, Gerda gets Lili's name right. This is treated as a triumph, a tender moment, when it's really just a sad insult, another instance of gatekeeping (she's only herself after radical surgery!). Exclamation points in parenthesis mean outrage, I think you will find. I am outraged.
Some of these things you might argue are necessary in a story about transitioning (though that begs the question I will address later of whether it's worth even telling this story), but there are ways to depict transition that don't overvalue the performative aspects, that don't take those performative aspects and make them seem crucial to trans existence. To put it another way, there's a way to tell this story without repeatedly depicting being transgender as an artificial circumstance. This film did the opposite; it argues that being transgender is not merely performative, but fetishistic, that it is a process that inevitably culminates in cisgender approval only after surgical intervention.
"Slip through the surface of the painting."
More than that, because it's about painters, it goes further, emphasizing the use of images, sketches, paintings. Hooper is clearly trying to evoke other artist biopics here--from Mr. Turner to Van Gogh--in making his film canvas-like, but the side effect is to reinforce the image of transsexuality as ephemeral, merely visual, only what is seen, not what is felt. Visually, this is reinforced by ripple effects, distorted reflections, and blurred framing that suggest, repeatedly, that this is all a matter of perception, when there is much, much more to it than that.
Furthermore, twice, it comes close to suggesting that there is something more substantial going on, and both times, it equates this to dreams. First, it is the assertion that no matter what Lili is wearing, she dreams Lili's dreams. This one argument for something more is treated as exasperating by Gerda and dismissed. Later, Lili has the most terrible semi-monologue about dreaming her mother called her Lili when she was a baby, but the scene is performed and filmed so ridiculously that it comes across as hammy and almost comical. It's insult added to injury, a sign that the filmmaker did not take any of it seriously.