Oz Perkins responds to critics who say Longlegs is anti-trans
The director would like not to be confused with “a fucking piece of shit idiot,” thank you very much
Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Ever since it crept onto the scene with that first heartbeat trailer earlier this summer, Longlegs was instantly raised to the level of Discourse Movie. Was it any good at all? (We gave it an “A,” so we, at least, say yes.) How can other movies learn from the masterclass that was its marketing campaign? And finally, from a smaller but still vocal group, is the film anti-trans?
The argument does make sense. (Slight spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the film already.) While the gender identity of Nicolas Cage’s eerie character is never explicitly confirmed, he does appear to be slightly trans-coded. In a certain light, his long hair and cakey makeup seem to play into some backwards tropes that have plagued the genre for years, not to mention the fact that he was clearly inspired by Silence Of The Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, a character whose queerness is far more textual. If this was the thought behind the character, Perkins’ film would be playing into a long and awful tradition of equating transness with villainy, one that has no place in any modern day work.