Now you see her… Lili (Eddie Redmayne, right) poses for Gerda (Alicia Vikander) in The Danish Girl
[This post contains spoilers about The Danish Girl.]
There’s a scene in The Danish Girl – Tom Hooper’s new film about real-life 1920s trans pioneer Lili Elbe – in which a woman meets a presumptuous man. He rattles off a series of mistaken suppositions about her before she interrupts him. “Perhaps if you let me speak,” she says, “things would be clearer.”
The Danish Girl presents itself as supportive, celebratory account of Lili’s life, and seems to be underpinned by good intentions about improving trans visibility. Yet the film is strangely reluctant to let its subject speak. In fact, rather than an empowering expression of an alternative sensibility, The Danish Girl emerges on close viewing as a case study in the withdrawal of empathetic engagement from a protagonist.
At the powerful level of cinematic language itself, The Danish Girl enacts the very exclusion it claims to abhor.
Lili Elbe – formerly known as Einar Wegener – was one of the first people in history to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Until now, her name has been unfamiliar in mainstream culture. After all, normative social forces tend not only to attack those who won’t or can’t fit in but to erase knowledge of their existence. As Hooper recently put it, “history has a tendency to hard-bake in its own prejudices”.
The Danish Girl intends to redress this. Yet those same prejudices – the same tendency to put nonconforming lives beyond the reach of general empathy – are also hard-baked into Hooper’s film. The further Lili travels away from the norm and towards self-realisation, the more the film shuts her out. As such, The Danish Girl offers the rare chance to watch the alienation of aberrant experience take place before our very eyes.
The film opens as an intimate portrait of a marriage. Einar and his wife Gerda (Alicia Vikander) are close and happy. We spend time with them – in bed, at parties, discussing art (both are painters) – seeing what they see and learning their thoughts and feelings about life, society and work. We are with Gerda when her portraits are rejected by a powerful art dealer, and we are with Einar when he offers her his care and support.
We are also, quite powerfully, with Einar as he starts to question his gender. (As in Elbe’s own life, the male Einar and female Lili are treated as discrete identities in the film.) We are with him as he gazes with something like wonder at a graceful dancer friend; we look through his eyes as he wears ‘female’ clothing for the first time, his fingertips caressing the fabric in sensuous close-up.
We stay with Einar as he studies the techniques of spectacular femininity – that is, the everyday spectacle of being publicly feminine – educating himself in costume, make-up, hair and body language. And we are with Lili when she makes her public debut at a ball, receiving the kind of attention associated with spectacular femininity. This extends to a kiss from a man, which arouses mixed emotions – a rich and ambivalent moment in Lili’s experience, and among the last such moments to appear on screen.
The film wants us to recognise that Lili is subjected to the male gaze in a way that Einar isn’t, and that there is vulnerability in that power dynamic. But The Danish Girl takes advantage of comparable power dynamics itself. It could be considered an example of the cis gaze, looking at trans experience through a non-trans – or ‘cis’ – lens. (Of course, being cis myself, I can’t rule out elements of privilege and presumption in my own take on the subject.)
The cis gaze often privileges spectacular femininity and surgical procedures – aspects of trans experience that are not in fact significant to all trans lives – and The Danish Girl certainly does that. Lili’s femininity is unusually spectacular in that it is learned from overtly artificial sources: clothes and wigs from theatre costumiers; make-up applied with a paintbrush; body language from a Parisian peep show (!).
Lili, in other words, emerges from the cocoon less as a person to be understood than an aesthetic wonder to be beheld. No wonder Gerda begins to take Lili as a subject for portraiture. She is becoming something else – something beyond the norm – but also, it seems, beyond understanding, beyond empathy. The film is not hateful towards its supposed heroine; Redmayne endows Lili with gentleness, elegance and kindness. It’s a question of which of her thoughts, feelings, words and actions the film chooses to describe, and which it withholds. The result is that she gets our sympathy but not our empathy.
The Danish Girl doesn’t treat Lili as a monster. It treats her as an alien.
The more Lili becomes herself, the farther she recedes from us. After her first surgery, we see her for the first time as a woman living daily life. Through its photography, editing and soundtrack, the film wants us to see this as a time of happiness and fulfillment. But what do we see? We see Lili merely as a vehicle of spectacular femininity, teaching customers and colleagues at the store where she works how to apply perfume and maintain a svelte figure. She is an elegant cipher, somewhere between Mary Poppins and Princess Diana, all catchy advice, downturned doe eyes and demure murmurs about macaroons.
Lili doesn’t want to be an artist any more, she says. She wants to be a woman. One can, Gerda points out, be both. But the question lingers: what kind of person is Lili, really, deep inside? We have no idea.
For comparison, turn to a film like Tangerine, directed by Sean S. Baker. It follows two friends during a single day in West Hollywood. The characters are trans women of colour (played by trans actors) but their gender identities are incidental to the drama. What makes the film so funny, surprising and affecting is that we see Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) from a wide range of angles, understanding the roles in their lives of friendship, love, money, labour, performance, sex, loyalty and more. Being trans is central to some aspects, marginal to others. But by the end of the film, we have a powerful sense of their experience of the world – what it is to see through their eyes and walk in their shoes.
Our relationship with Lili, by contrast, is defined by secrets and surprises.
The first time Einar wears a slip under male clothing at a party, we only find out after the event – the first flickerings of Lili coming into being, withheld from us at the moment they happen. Later, Lili shocks us by appearing unannounced in Einar’s place to meet an old friend. Later still, she literally pops up from behind a screen to make us jump. Such surprises underline the fact that an increasing proportion of Lili’s behaviour takes place beyond our knowledge and therefore beyond our empathy. How were these choices made? How did the results feel? We don’t know.
And it’s not just Lili’s actions. Her thoughts and feelings are secret too. We see her writing, first in a notebook, then in a diary. What does she write? We don’t know. Einar tells us “when I dream, they’re Lili’s dreams”. What are the dreams? We don’t know. Lili tells us her new GBF (Ben Whishaw in a cheeky beret) is “a friend… someone to talk to”. What do they talk about? We don’t know. And what is beyond knowledge is beyond empathy.
There’s a whole lot, then, that we don’t know about Lili. By “we”, I mean both the viewer and Gerda, whose perspective is aligned with the viewer’s in the examples above. We spend almost no time alone with Lili but plenty with Gerda. As we are pushed away from one, we are pulled towards the other; as the story continues, Gerda is revealed as its true protagonist. She, in fact, is the woman quoted at the start of this post claiming her right to speak, just as she is the only character referred to in the film as a “Danish girl”.
In fact, in narrative terms, Lili is less a protagonist than an obstacle – something that happens to Gerda, forcing her to recalibrate her life – a curveball, a project, a rival, a friend, the killer of her husband and a vehicle of grace. Vikander’s performance at times recalls those of Karen Allen in Starman or Geena Davis in The Fly – women balancing fierce, protective care for a loved one with horror at the changes taking place out of sight, under the skin.
Gerda is also increasingly cast as the giver of care. The journey from Einar to Lili is a journey towards illness and death. It is also, as tearjerking form dictates, a journey towards wisdom. Surgery here enables a kind of martyrdom and, like many deathbed characters, Lili is as much teacher as patient, guiding Gerda towards a greater appreciation of the rich tapestry of life. By her final scene, Lili has become a figure analogous to the Magical Negro, or even Spielberg’s E.T. – benevolent, inspirational, self-sacrificing if that’s what it takes for our protagonist to grow, and resolutely two-dimensional.
The logical implication of The Danish Girl’s filmic technique is that it is more interesting, perhaps even more important, to be married to someone undergoing a crisis of gender identity than to undergo such a crisis oneself.
Lili’s identity is ultimately displaced onto a scarf, which following her death is seized by the wind. “Let her go!” Gerda cries as it flutters into the sky, reclaimed by the elements themselves. The suggestion is that she is finally free. Yet by becoming one with everything – a symbol of the power of love rather than a complex, realistic human being – Lili becomes nothing.
Look at the real-life Gerda’s paintings of Lili and you see rich, empathetic characterisation of the kind that comes from knowing someone. It’s a sense missing from The Danish Girl. The film’s Lili remains vague, wispy, hard to see. Perhaps if it had let her speak, things would be clearer.
The Danish Girl is on general release in the UK.
