Southern Comfort's main subject, Robert Eads, is a small, wiry, pipe-smoking country Georgian with a weathered face and a beard, who used to be a woman. He's also dying of ovarian cancer. "It's funny," he observes, in a line that's been re-printed so often it's almost become the film's unofficial slogan: "The last part of me that's female is killing me."
This may sound like the sort of movie you'd see out of a sense of obligation — something that would raise your awareness, that'd be good for you but kind of hard to swallow, like echinacea. I for one can't stand being pointlessly outraged about tragedies or social injustices that I can't do much about. But Southern Comfort is not a didactic film; it's a credit to Kate Davis, the director / cinematographer / editor, that her documentary shows us its subjects as individuals with their own eccentricities and foibles, rather than as poster children for a cause.
Robert has an easy humor about his precarious situation as a woman trapped in a man's body trapped in the South — what he calls "Bubba country." He reminisces, with obvious relish, about a friendly good ol' boy who invited him to join the Klan, telling him he was just their type. And he only shrugs, without visible rancor, when he tells us that he was refused treatment for his cancer by some twenty doctors who were either too prejudiced or too worried about their reputations to uphold their Hippocratic Oaths.
The transgendered are one of the last pariah minorities, disowned even by some within the homosexual community as too controversial and bizarre, a discredit to them all. Like actors who play the retarded or photographers who portray circus freaks, Southern Comfort's gotten a lot of critical attention for taking on the subject at all. A project like this could easily have turned into either an art-house freak show or a politically correct parable (or, worst of all, the former cloaked in the latter). If Southern Comfort ever wobbles toward either pitfall — and it doesn't, mostly — it's the latter; at moments the film seems to be too unequivocally on its subjects' side, letting them present themselves as they want to be seen rather than showing them as they really are. Robert's lover, Lola, gets the movie's last word in — "There's so much variety in nature. Why can't we learn to appreciate that in human beings?" This is a worthy sentiment, but still makes for a pretty predictable, politically correct moral.
On the one hand, it's hard to fault the film for this, since no one else is taking such peoples' side, and, besides, what other side are you going to take — the side of ignorance and bigotry? It's just that taking sides, spreading the message of tolerance and celebrating diversity, seems more like the job of propaganda than art. (It may be good propaganda in a good cause, but still, let's call it what it is.) In a good documentary we might reasonably hope for some perspective beyond garden-variety sympathy.
But the more I think about it, the more clear it is that Davis doesn't uncritically endorse her subjects' versions of themselves. She leaves it to the viewer to furrow the brow or raise a skeptical eyebrow now and then. Lola Cola, a transvestite, cultivates a flamboyant prima donna image that's hard to take at face value. Bobby and his younger (also transgendered) friend Maxwell repeatedly describe theirs as a surrogate father/son relationship, except it looks a lot more like a female/female friendship, complete with a little catty rivalry and thinly veiled contempt for one another's mates. (Also, they kiss each other casually in greeting and farewell, which is let's just say atypical among males, even fathers and sons, in this country.)
You find yourself trying to figure out and classify people and their relationships according to gender over and over again (let's see ... he used to be a female but is now a man and she's still a male but dresses and acts like a female, so they're what, like a lesbian couple, or no, more like a heterosexual couple, or no...) until it gets exhausting, and you finally have to ask yourself why you seem to care so much about fitting them all into some conventional category anyway.
Which may be the point. After all, plenty of "normal," — i.e. heterosexual — relationships would look just as full of contradictions and consensual self-deception if we saw them projected (realistically) onscreen. We see that there's just as much gossip, misunderstanding, and infighting among the transgendered as in any other community. And Davis also captures a lot of very funny, embarassing, human moments that I won't ruin for you by re-telling but that remind us, again and again, that however they're dressed, whichever genitals they've got, hey, they're just folks. Our usual definitions about gender roles and relationships turn out to be something like the premises of Newtonian physics, which work fine in everyday circumstances (like driving on I-95) but start to break down in extraordinary ones (like approaching the speed of light). Transgenderism is like the lightspeed of sexuality, the point when all our fundamental premises are exposed as assumptions without any certain basis, and we're forced to reconsider all our most reflexive preconceptions and stock responses.
The film goes on about twenty minutes after you might have expected to see it end. Robert's appearance at the Southern Comfort transgendered convention — frail but lucid and grateful to have made it there one last time — would have made for a triumphant, feel-good ending. But it is the film's last section, "Winter," that turns out to be its most moving. It's hard to watch as Robert becomes a husk of his former self — emaciated, bleary-eyed, confused and exhausted, barely able to get through a door by himself. It turns out it doesn't much matter whether you're gay or straight or transgendered or a transvestive — everyone's pretty much the same when they're suffering, or losing someone they love.
Southern Comfort's greatest achievement is that, in the end, it becomes less about transgender issues than about aging and death — experiences that await us all, male, female, and transgendered alike. This is the real, unsentimental moral of the film; that our humanity lies in our common fate, beside which differences like gender really are incidental.
Reviewed by Tim Kreider
05.05.01
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
