[Preface]: I have a confession to make: I have not seen chapter one or two of the Castration Movie Anthology. Forgive me. Having missed the first two lectures of Prof. Weard’s cinematic masterclass, consider my viewing experience an experiment: an immersion in Louise Weard’s world without predisposition. It is surprisingly familiar and confronting.  

My favourite thing in cinema is when a movie balances seriousness with unseriousness. I think it is the most impressive strike – to demonstrate a deep, sincere, vulnerable truth in a way that illuminates the complex contradictions of reality. Unseriousness can disarm the seriousness of the thing, and vice versa; to be disarmed is also a condition of intimacy. 

Watching Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii Junior Ghosts – Premorphic Drift; a Fragmentary Passage, I am confronted with my favourite criteria: the seriousness of coming out as trans is met with an air of satire, exhaling the unfortunate reality that trans stories are too commonly about the cisgender people around them rather than the trans people themselves. 

Louise Weard presents this stereotype in Junior Ghosts, as the plot follows the crumbling of Trent (Henri Gillespi) and Izzy’s (Avalon Fast) partnership once Trent comes out as trans and embarks upon her new gender identity as Tiffany. The film is almost entirely about Izzy’s reaction, as she quickly descends into transphobic thinking. While the film presents this stereotype at face value, its satirical overtones suggest otherwise. 

The film does more than poke fun at a trope for those in on the irony: through Izzy’s struggle to separate herself from Trent/Tiffany’s personal decision to grow into who she is, Junior Ghosts interrogates the tension between the Self and empathy. This aspect of the story really stood out to me, as I started to notice that each scene felt like a case study on different instances of support systems: conversations between partners, friends, strangers, or support-group leaders – each scene offered a different instance where support or discussion around gender identity ensued. These conversations were funny in their disgrace, because they were recognizable in their display of ignorance, whether they were self-serving or a cycle of projection.

Junior Ghosts encourages inquiry into one’s critical authority and where it comes from: in what ways do our own Selves intervene in our capacity to support one another? And why do I kind of have sympathy for a transphobe?

Weard’s ability to develop this kind of interrogation through film form is impressive, enlightening, and expansive. I want to describe Weard’s gaze as both interrogatory and imploratory: the film invokes both a critical distance and a point of view intimate to the characters—both in terms of the camera’s physical proximity to their bodies and their interiority. Through the use of zooms, close-ups, and long takes of uninterrupted dialogue, Weard creates a present feeling of bearing-witness within the viewer. The camera’s gaze is therefore distinctly non-voyeuristic: it is simply too close, too proximal, too present in the characters’ body language and dialogue to evoke the perspective of an invasive onlooker. 

This feeling of presence is heightened through the home-video aesthetic, where the fuzz and shakiness of the handheld digital camera, along with its singular point of view, feel privy to the intimate. The minimal cuts and unclean pans and tracking shots offer a glimpse into Izzy’s interiority, as we watch her eyes perceive and notice her brain glitch as she tries to compute and justify her transphobia in service of her Self. The lingering gaze captures all the moments in between dialogue, zooming in on body parts or panning around the room aimlessly, similar to the way our eyes might fixate on random features or objects when we are thinking in conversation. The camera zooms in on mouths, glances into reflections, and follows the characters as they fall into their own trains of thought during moments of stillness between reaction, compassion, and defence. It is through this non-invasive, though privy, gaze that a more universal observation of the human condition begins to form. 

It is this teetering between the interrogatory and imploratory gaze that Junior Ghosts teaches the audience something, as we are subjected to the contradictory experience between the Self and empathy which Izzy navigates. I am simultaneously appalled and humoured by Izzy’s overt transphobia, just as I somehow sympathize with the root of her struggle. The rawness of her struggle does not change the disgracefulness of her reaction, but it aids in understanding, more broadly, the way that the dominant cis-hetero ideology becomes internalized as a source of authority which we enact over our Selves and others, in many convoluted ways.

It is comical how much Izzy makes Trent/Tiffany’s transition about herself, and ironic that despite her frustration and confusion about Trent/Tiffany’s decision, she makes very little effort to understand or accommodate her needs through inquiry. But ultimately, the gag is that one need not understand someone in order to create space for them to be. Humour is a gateway to the truth, and Weard uses it to dissect the human condition like a game of Operation. It feels rather signified in the title that something is going to be mutilated, and that this experience is going to be raw – not to take the title too seriously, of course.

VANCOUVER, BC
Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage
has its West Coast Premiere at OFF-VIFF on October 12 at The Rio Theatre.

Buy Tickets Here