I’m making another movie.
I was a month shy of nineteen and was the top student in my Film 101 class. I quickly became my film professor’s favourite student after talking to her about Pasolini on the first day of the semester. She was a Lacanian scholar and a dyke and I wanted to impress her more than anything, but I’ll always remember the abject disappointment she expressed when I said I didn’t just want to write theory, that I wanted to make movies too. I applied to my university’s film production program and was swiftly rejected. I was talking a lot with my partner about how cool it would be if we were both the opposite gender. I was six months sober after spending all of high school dropping acid on the weekends and snorting meth before class every morning. My brain was fucked up from a lot of things but I had a 4.0 GPA. I turned nineteen and the semester ended. I was all alone for the summer while my partner returned to California and all I had were my friends from 4chan and Letterboxd. I wanted to transition. That seemed impossible. I didn’t want to end up some tranny hooker. Or maybe that wouldn’t be so bad? I decided to make a movie.
I launched the crowdfunding campaign for Computer Hearts in the summer of 2013. I advertised it on Letterboxd and 4chan. Whether it was genuine affection or schadenfreude, I unexpectedly raised the $525 I asked for in the campaign. The movie ended up costing me $5525 but I hustled over the course of a year to get it done, along with my partners Dionne Copland and Romijn Miller who carried me through the production when it felt most impossible to get it finished. I made another film while Computer Hearts was in post-production called SIDS. When I showed Dionne the screenplay she asked me point blank, “Are you trans?” Computer Hearts didn’t get into a single film festival and immediately became a punchline on 4chan and Letterboxd following its release. I hated being a male voice in film so I decided I didn’t want to direct any more movies and threw myself into producing and cinematography. What else was I going to make a movie about anyways? I already cut my dick off twice.
In August of 2022 I received two emails. One was from Will at The Music Box asking if they could show Computer Hearts in their Halloween horror marathon. The other was from Lisa and Ahbra at Fantastic Fest asking if I’d host their legendary 100 Best Kills show in a night dedicated to dick destruction. It took ten years, but suddenly people wanted to see my work. That August marked one year on hormone therapy. I hated the thought that transition played a part in my work being recognized; I explicitly didn’t transition because I was so career-oriented that I worried becoming a girl would sabotage the whole thing. There were no working trans women directors who started their career as trannies, as far as I knew in 2013 at least.
In 2014 I remember a joke being made on 4chan after Fantasia announced their programming in which someone posted “G-guys there’s still hope for Computer Hearts at Fantastic Fest, right?” I showed a clip from Computer Hearts during my 100 Best Kills show to massive applause. I returned home and I was mostly living out of my car, couch surfing with friends for as long as I felt comfortable asking. The Music Box flew Dionne and I out to Chicago and we screened the computer fucking movie to an audience of 700 people. After the show a non-binary couple got engaged and ran up to Dionne and I to say how our movie would be their entire personality now. Something that was such an existentially embarrassing failure for me was starting to feel like it mattered. Maybe it does?
I decided that I was going to make another movie.
The initial idea came to me while sourcing clips for the Dick Destruction show. There are a handful of movies about trans women in which the big climactic moment comes when her dysphoria and societal struggle collide in an act of graphic self-mutilation. I found this funny because as a trans woman filmmaker the castration scenes in my films were minor parts of the story, a means to an end. My character doesn’t even care that her balls are gone in SIDS, the whole point is the fear that she can’t even control them after she cuts them out. So why not challenge myself to make a movie that builds up to this act of self-imposed castration-liberation and try to do it in a way that isn’t meant to inspire pity from the audience. I decide to finally finish off my Castration Trilogy with a feature-length adaptation of SIDS.
That’s the pitch. Easy to digest, right? Louise is gonna cut her dick off again! Everyone clap. But, it’s a Trojan horse pitch, because that’s just how I’m selling the movie. This is not a castration movie.
At Sundance I told a Vulture reporter that I wanted to make movies “by us, for us, and about us.” I had just optioned Little Fish and I was really excited because in my head I’d built a narrative that I was stepping out of my underground roots and forward into something more respectable. I felt a little disappointed when my impassioned plea for trans storytelling was undercut by my goddamn castration fixation. I was starting to worry that I was becoming a punchline, the trans girl who does the dick mutilation. I dug this hole for myself, so if “the future of indie film” I represent is going to have to include castration then so be it. But I don’t actually want to cut my dick off. I know a lot of girls that do. Hell, maybe even I do somewhere deep down, but I couldn’t justify another cinematic narrative built around some trans girl’s dysphoria. I think that the idea of self-harm and dysphoria being represented on film by the extreme act of castration is interesting from an analytical perspective, but falls apart when you want to write a trans character who isn’t just a political statement. All of the trans people in my life self-harm in some way, but it’s rare to find the girl who likes to drive a nail through the head of her cock — let alone cut the whole thing off. So the idea of making a castration movie becomes secondary, let’s try to bring a dynamic group of trans characters to the screen first.
These characters should all be angels and nothing bad should happen to them. Let’s make a movie where a trans girl just vibes and everyone is nice to her. No tragedy porn! No conflict!
It’s weird how much I’ve heard these sentiments expressed at film festivals and online the past year. I can understand the idea of escapist fantasy, but to me it feels so assimilationist. I want to reclaim our tragedy and be able to show a suicidal abused pathetic loser tranny on screen. None of my trans friends have a life free of struggle, so why can’t we make movies about our lived experiences? My movie has a lead character who sucks! She’s an internet-poisoned cynical bitch with a misanthropic relationship to transness. She dreams of an escape from her miserable life through motherhood and the movie takes you on that journey in empathetic detail. I want to make a movie that hurts as much to watch as I feel that I can never have children.
I want new film language. My treatment was for an 80 minute film and then we started production. After shooting 5% of the total scenes we already had 35 minutes of footage. While I was staying with Will in Chicago I showed him my rough cut before we left for the Actors screening. I said, “I’ll have to cut this all down to less than five minutes in the end but I’ll show you the highlights.” Will said, “No let me see the whole thing.” After twenty minutes, “Louise, you can’t cut a second of this.” “But the movie would be six hours long!” “Then I guess you’re making a six hour movie.” I can perhaps justify the running time by saying I’m making up for lost time. My ten year directing hiatus. The history of trans representation in cinema. Extremely long movies are better anyways because as a director you can take advantage of the viewer’s Stockholm Syndrome. There’s nothing new about a really long movie. Is there a trans film language? Probably not yet, and the question of whether there even could or should be is apathetically discussed among the handful of trans filmmakers working today. So I decide to construct my film grammar from three of my favourite movies which I most closely associate with my transsexuality: Breaking the Waves, Gummo, and Actors. Someone else good at analyzing films can elaborate and project their insights about what that means when the movie’s done.
I start shooting the film on Hi8 tape using the consumer video camera I had as a child. I couldn’t source new Hi8 tapes so I’m filming over my childhood home movies. I hate that I’ve never seen a fat trans woman on screen so I intentionally gain 20 pounds before appearing on camera. I work 80 hours a week on bad network tv shows and film with my friends on the weekends. My employment is extremely unstable because whenever they cut numbers the trans woman is always the first to go. I recognize that I never had that problem before transition — I showed up to set with no experience many years ago and was immediately hired and promoted for an entire season and then kept on working — and now I see boys getting that same treatment I used to take for granted. I am grateful when I find a boss who is a tranny chaser, as it’s stable employment. I didn’t want to end up some tranny hooker is a thought I quietly giggle to myself about. Wasn’t so bad, was it Lulu? So much of my movie is about employment. Employment, motherhood, worth — different words for the same theme.
Since there’s no shows to work on due to the strike, I spend my week splitting my time between finishing the draft for a kickstarter campaign and talking my friends down from suicide. I feel like trans femme culture is making sure your friends don’t kill themselves. I consider that this may be the one universal trait that all trans women probably share. My roommate Ginny offers to give me a tarot reading and the cards have her telling me that I’m severely fucked up and not being honest about how the weight of supporting everyone in my life is going to kill me. I admit she’s right and that I don’t plan on changing anything. I have enough guilt from the time I tried that, thank you very much. The first pass at my kickstarter campaign is soaked in irony and self-deprecation, making fun of the entire prospect of me asking for help. I realize that I should probably be sincere and how scary that is to admit, as now failure can’t be laughed off as if the whole thing was a bit. My filmmaker friends tell me I’ll do great and I tell them that when it fails it will finally be proof that everyone has been gaslighting me this whole time. These are all ugly feelings and I hate having them, but I don’t know how to give myself permission to believe that something could actually work out for me.
I think about how fucked up I am and how easy it’s been to make a movie about a girl who sucks. I don’t understand why people like me. I can’t comprehend why I’m told that my work is good or that I’m a good filmmaker. It seems so long ago that I made anything, I don’t know why it’s relevant now. I wish I had transitioned ten years ago instead of making Computer Hearts. Maybe then I wouldn’t hate myself so much. It’s the day before launching the kickstarter and I nearly forget I have plans to grab drinks with Casey while she’s in town for her book tour. It’s lovely. We drink lager and after a comment about how Gen Z seems less uptight about transgressive art than Millennials we cheers to making difficult work.
That night I spend my last $6 on a hamburger and eat it alone in my car. Afterwards, I cry the hardest I ever have.