a (white transgender female) knight of cups
The other night I went to a party. When I walked in, an aerialist was performing to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own.” This is a song that means something to me. Something about the specific ways in which I’ve sometimes felt invisible. It was a party scene that resonated with emotional connections to so many other moments in my life.
The next night I went to another party. It was good. Conversations about why games matter, about how games can challenge (rather than reinforce) the culturally constructed patriarchy in which we live. About all the intersections of work and life, and how these things are inseparable.
At the BART station afterwards, while I was waiting for a midnight train to take me home, a woman dropped her ticket. When I told her this, she said “Thank you, sir,” with no hesitation, no attempt to be cruel. It was just what she saw. She obviously wasn’t really looking. But it made me feel so invisible. It made me feel what I have so long and so often felt, that the way I look makes it almost impossible for anyone to really see me when they look at me.
Then I had to go home alone.
In his review of Terrence Malick’s new film Knight of Cups for The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes,
It’s an instant classic in several genres—the confessional, the inside-Hollywood story, the Dantesque midlife-crisis drama, the religious quest, the romantic struggle, the sexual reverie, the family melodrama—because the protagonist’s life, like most people’s lives, involves intertwined strains of activity that don’t just overlap but are inseparable from each other.
If there’s anything that has complicated my life in recent years, it is the fact that it is made up of intertwined strains of activity that don’t just overlap but are inseparable from each other. And I have great admiration for the grand scope of meaning that Knight of Cups finds in one character’s life, and I love that it is structured in a way that much more closely resembles my inner experience of life than the conventional, linear narrative film. Things echo. Things are associated by memory.
However–and I know that people grow tired of hearing me beat this drum but it is a drum that I will never stop beating until the world is different than what it is–why do those films that Hollywood markets as revolving around a single character whose experiences offer a kind of grand, universal meaning about the human condition almost exclusively find that meaning in the experiences of white men? The last film I saw that was in this mold, Anomalisa, was all about a white man. Before the screening of Knight of Cups that I attended yesterday, I saw the trailer for Demolition, another film that is clearly reaching for great truths about the human condition through the experiences of a white man.
Sometimes when I raise these concerns, people say, “What difference does the race or gender of the character make? Can’t you project yourself onto him?” My god. Of course. Of course I can. I’ve had to project myself onto straight white men all my life. The problem is that the overwhelming prevalence of straight white men in such stories means that audiences aren’t being asked to see the same value and meaning and richness in the lives of people who are not straight white men, that white men aren’t being asked to project themselves onto characters who are not like them and see their lives–the lives of women, of people of color–as having just as much universal truth about the human condition to offer as their own lives do.
I saw so much of myself in Knight of Cups. The main character’s father says at one point, “You can’t figure out your life. Can’t put the pieces together.” Another character says that we are not living the lives that we are meant for, and this is the ache I carry around with me all the time, the feeling that something is amiss, something is missing.
Rick (Christian Bale) seems to be looking for answers in his connections with others, and though I am deeply frustrated by the way that women exist in Knight of Cups and in so many such films (Anomalisa, too) merely as riddles or questions or possible answers, as obstacles or possibilities for salvation on the hero’s quest, it is true that I, too, seek salvation in my connections with others. But not at all in some sort of one-directional way where I am the hero and the recipient of salvation. Not that, never. As Masha writes in her book Love Dog,

There is one major difference between Rick and me. As Rick, Christian Bale walks through the film like an empty husk. “I know you have a soul,” his father says, but if he does, I never see it. I’m all soul. And I found his absence infuriating. I wanted to shake him, tell him to choose to be present, choose to love. Even in the hollow, alienating, lonely, forgetful Los Angeles he lives in, he still has a choice. His absence is an indulgence, a privilege.
Brody concludes his review with,
…be honest about your experiences, about your failings—and about your enduring intimations of beauty even in places and situations that you’d hesitate to call beautiful, because the production of beauty in a world of suffering, and from your own suffering, is the closest thing to a higher calling that an artist has, the closest thing to the religious experience that art has to offer.
I believe this. But I want to see the experiences of all sorts of people elevated in the way that Knight of Cups elevates the experiences of a privileged straight white man.
The tagline on the poster outside the theater where I saw the film was, simply, A Quest.

My life feels like a kind of quest. Maybe yours does, too.
Our stories are also worth telling.
Notes
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