Race and Gender

Speaking of Netflix, I have been considering cancelling my subscription due to their wrong-headed handling of the Dave Chapelle controversy, but on the other hand, they have exclusive content that I can't find elsewhere, such as the live-action Cowboy Beebop with John Cho. (I mostly liked it, but found some storylines like Mad Pierrot too macabre and disturbing. Yet they had quirky comic scenes too such as Teddy Bomber wearing a giant teddy bear head while shirtless and fighting the bounty hunters.)

Netflix's defense of so-called "free speech" for anti-trans hate is all the more infuriating when they have movies like Passing and The Harder They Fall that handle identity issues sensitively.

As I had hoped, Passing was excellent, nuanced, and tragic. It's based on a novel about two light-skinned Black women in 1920s New York, and director Rebecca Hall has given interviews about how she found out her grandfather was a Black man who passed. Irene and Clare are both light skinned, but Clare has chosen to pass as white and marry a racist white man. (Horrifyingly, she lets her husband call her "nig" as he jokes about her getting darker over the years.) Meanwhile Irene remains in Harlem, having a black family and black friends. There is a white author who hangs out with them, on a cultural safari through the Harlem Renaissance. Clare aches to return to Harlem and wheedles her way into joining Irene's social circle. Irene too seems unsatisfied with her life, and her husband Brian keeps wanting to move to another country due to the racism in America. Irene worries that Clare is having an affair with Brian, and no wonder when Clare tells her strangely, almost as a threat, "I'm not ethical like you. I'd do anything and hurt anyone to get what I want." But at other times, it seems that Irene is attracted to Clare even subconsciously as she envies her sparkling vivaciousness. Finally, Clare's husband finds out that she's really Black and confronts her at a party with Irene and all their friends. The ending is left ambiguous and haunting.

Meanwhile, The Harder They Fall is a cowboy movie as a fantastical showcase. The characters are based on real historical people, but the story was fictional. In fact, the characters did not resemble the real people at all. It was more of a pastiche where people were combined from different timelines and locations like a League of Extraordinary Gentleman or a Penny Dreadful. Idris Elba is good here as a villain, unlike his contemporary role as an urban cowboy in Concrete Cowboy. They even featured a character named Chuffie who turned out to be William Cathay aka Cathay Williams, a Buffalo soldier. Chuffie is treated as a transman who will not wear a dress except as a disguise while going on mission against the enemy. It's implied later that he will join the army as a Buffalo Soldier.

Outside of this movie, historians often treat Cathay as a woman who lived in disguise; same as with other soldiers like Deborah Sampson in the Revolutionary War. Without being able to ask these soldiers what they felt and explain current terms like "transgender" to them, we cannot actually know if they considered themselves women who lived/dressed as men out of convenience, or if they really felt like men born into the wrong bodies.