Immaculate Contradiction: Curtis Harrington Makes the First Trans-themed Film
The public library in Beaumont, California had a policy in the mid-1930s of strictly segregating its holdings. A great, fortress-like structure set, as they often were, in the species of small, placid American city that generations of authors would, without ever setting foot in it, describe as sleepy.
But as a kind of unintentional rebuke to the small-ness, the placid-ness, if not also the American-ness, of the place, its library was stocked with the literary fruits of Modernity itself. All the big names were in evidence: Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, Conrad Aiken, you name 'em; even the recently liberated "One Book Ulysses." For a small town, it could be said, the library assumed much about its community. But due to their often unruly content, these treasures of the hour were, as it is with most libraries, not permitted to be lent to children.
One exception was a child named Curtis Harrington. As he would later write in his memoirs, his budding fascination with the world of adult appetite and, suggestively, its darker corners was encouraged by an unusually permissive librarian who allowed the lad, once his interest had been registered, to check out, take home, consume.
It was in the course of one of these safaris, however, that he happened upon the 1919 edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe. It is a celebrated edition, largely for the illustrations of Harry Clarke — the book itself had been many times celebrated by then — and Harrington is at great pains to impress upon the reader the impact one particular tale of mystery and imagination had on his impressionable mind. "The Fall of the House of Usher," he writes:
"was the story that gripped me, held me in thrall as no other story ever had. By the end of it, I was almost gasping for breath and leapt from my chair in an attempt to relieve the pressure on my brain. The horror of the story’s final revelation of the returned corpse totally engulfed my mind and senses.”
To be clear, Harrington did not come to Poe, and Usher, through a yellowing, dust-covered edition from 1845 or, for that matter, a brutally truncated Classics Illustrated rendering of Usher. By the 30s, a 1919 edition of Poe was less than two decades old, and the immediacy of Harry Clarke's illustrations had more than a bejeweled toe lingering in 19th century art movements like Symbolism — which itself drew enormous inspiration from Poe's concepts of Infinity. The figures, swallowed in patterns that dematerialized human anatomy, swirling linear involutions that made cosmic beings out of mere mortals, the summoning of Poe in visual/book form and the supremacy this would bestow on cinema as a new kind of literary art. Such reversals were regent.
Harrington does not give his precise age at this pivotal moment in his life, and it would otherwise be hard to imagine the directness and imminence of Poe for anyone in that time, or the access that Harrington's youthful imagination had to his mentor. "My memory," he writes, "was seared with it, leaving a scar that I would never lose. It was as if I had discovered my soul mate in the world of literature.”
That scar — his blunt, 9 minute Fall of the House of Usher, made in 1942 — is not a striking example of any particular strain of cinema known in its time. Indeed, had it not been for its director's later notoriety — beginning in the American avant-garde’s West Coast division, then gradually ending in the shlockiest favelas of made-for TV ruination — it may never have risen out of the obscurity into which it was born. It is nevertheless an alarmingly personal work, manifesting such direct representations of what would one day come to be known as Trans identity that the director’s pesky claim on film history, however callow, can be denied only at one's peril. Sadly for anyone seeking a clear-eyed history of gender explorations in experimental film, cinephiles have an almost native suspicion of anything too direct in its expression. In this particular instance, our youthful “auteur” was young indeed. Harrington was 16 years old.
Caught between horror (“the story’s final revelation of the returned corpse”) and his own cross-dressing desire, Harrington, it would seem, was being nominated by history; by the surrealist experimenters whose adolescent “scandalizing” performances were rotting amidst global militarism’s square-jawed outrages. Easily dismissed, to the extent that its audience existed at all, as juvenilia, this mini-Usher nonetheless has emerged a worthy inheritor to Harry Clarke’s mystically-minded illustrations in which identity itself flickers. Madeline, rising from the tomb, appears in three distinct zones, a kind of striped space without ambient light of any kind. She herself takes on the guise of a spatial dimension, overwhelmed by the tattered shroud of living death.
Madeline rises once more when Curtis Harrington himself, donning a wig and displaying no particular gifts as an actor, nonetheless appears before us transfigured. His decision to play both of Edgar Allan Poe’s doomed siblings — or, if you prefer, the two incestuous halves of one Self — adds compelling honesty to the horror tale. His personal interpretation exclaims, blurts and spills the beans. Precisely because of the film’s directness, epiphany becomes plausible. Harrington stands before us like some religious celebrant in the act of receiving God.
A nimbus of innocence causes our awkward teenaged blasphemer to glow.
By Daniel Riccuito
Special thanks to Tom Sutpen