I Am Jack’s Transgender Sensorium

Transgender Visual Culture, The Wachowskis, and Fincher’s Fight Club

Abstract

This article examines the connections between transgender ways of retroactive meaning-making through image-making technologies by analyzing David Fincher’s Fight Club (USA, 1999), films from the Wachowski sisters such as Bound (USA, 1996) and The Matrix (USA, 1999), trick cinema such as the work of George Méliès, and before-and-after photographic comparisons. This article approaches transgender studies from the perspective that trans* wishes to externalize a yet unrealized bodily presentation. Image-making technologies help to accomplish this goal, particularly when one examines the evolution from before-and-after photography to early trick cinema, and then to digital filmmaking technologies which allow an image to be completely computer-generated while heavily resembling the physical world. Fight Club adopts a narrative structure which is similar to before-and-after photography, in which the film begins at its climax, flashes backward in time to fill in the gaps, and then repeats and pushes past the introductory moment. As the audience gains insight into how the unnamed narrator (played by Edward Norton) invents his alter ego and forms a bond with Tyler (played by Brad Pitt), Marla Singer (played by Helena Bonham Carter) is revealed to be the center of this Möbius strip narrative. The dysphoria Marla sparks is the heart of a trans* reading of Fight Club.