Emilia Pérez: An awful movie

European liberalism does violence to trans women and Mexico. What else is new?

Will no one rid me of these troublesome Europeans?

Disclaimer: This post is an essay beyond the scope of my MFA. This is the sort of post that will, eventually, be available to subscribers only. Consider it a free sample.

On the 19th of June 1867, Maximilian of Habsburg, Tomas Mejia and Miguel Miramon were shot by Mexican soldiers at the Cerro de las Campanas near Querétaro. Over the preceding five and a half years the three men had fought a bloody, psychotic and useless war against the Mexican Republic. They used French soldiers and adherents of Mexico’s conservative party in a vain effort to set up a French puppet “Empire” in Mexico. Benito Juarez, may peace be upon him, led the Liberals and the nationalists against the invaders and tried to establish a stable republic in Mexico.

The French poured men and guns into the country. They looted. They burned. They slaughtered. The Mexicans fought back. The Mexicans won. The French fled. Their compradors died. Juarez came back into Mexico City in a carriage that now sits in Chapultepec castle, one room away from a mural of Karl Marx.

On the 18th of May 2024, by the camera of Jacques Audiard, the French had their vengeance with the premiere of Emilia Pérez at the Cannes Film Festival.

Emilia Pérez follows an exhausted lawyer named Rita Mora Castro, played by Zoe Saldaña, as she arranges for the gender affirming care for the Kingpin of a drug cartel, Juan Manitas Del Monte, who is reborn as the titular Emilia. Four years later, Emilia summons Jessi, her exiled wife (Selena Gomez, who audibly does not speak Spanish), and children back to Mexico City from their Swiss idyll and sets about a Mrs. Doubtfire-type plot to win them back.

Along the way she founds an NGO to uncover the remains of people killed by the cartels (and the police and their American collaborators) and to agitate for more police funding presumably at the behest of the CIA, which is looking to destabilize the government of the National Regeneration Movement, MORENA, by strengthening specific cartels and their paramilitary allies in the police, allegedly, in keeping with the new American regime’s anti-Mexico policy. though this is not present in the film. There’s no evidence Jacques Audiard knows any of that, and he has made no conscious attempt to set his movie in a historically identifiable form of Mexico, beyond telling us it is Mexico.

Things spiral into a conflict between Emilia and her lawyer on one side against her (ex?)wife and Gustavo, a guy who’s good at fucking and has guns, for some reason, over control of the children. Gustavo and Jessi kidnap Emilia, Rita rides to the rescue with a death squad led by a lesbian, and Gustavo, Jessi and Emilia all die in a car crash so Rita can learn some life lessons and become the surrogate mother to the orphaned children.

It is the worst movie I have seen in four and a half years.

The film drips with tokenizing racism, liberal transphobia, contempt for the place it depicts and resentment for an audience that asks for anything other than background noise. It throws a crumb of representation in your face as if to say, with a sneer and a flourish: “The subaltern is the plaything of capital; ask for more and you will die, unless a drug kingpin murders your husband and then founds an NGO to redeem and seduce you.”

Audiard didn’t bother to film it in Mexico, virtually the entire movie, according to Variety, was shot in Bry-Sur-Marne, near the French capital. One of the only moments actually shot in Mexico is an establishing shot during the romance between Emilia and Epifanía Flores (lol), the love interest whose abusive husband was murdered by the cartels. Emilia seduces Epifanía when the latter comes to the offices of the NGO Emilia is now running. They go home together, and we get one establishing shot of what appears to be Ecatepec de Morelos or Tlalnepantla de Baz, major proletarian suburbs on the northeastern side of Ciudad Mexico. And that’s pretty much it. The desert landscapes and the rural areas are pretty clearly quarries somewhere in the french countryside, if not heaps of dirt on studio backlots.

Now, other writers have covered lead actress Karla Sofia Gascon’s racist tweets, so I won’t here, but I do have to acknowledge that they exist. But I think it’s more interesting to attack the film as an aesthetic/political object, rather than the cultural workers as individuals. That said, Jacques Audiard is a lazy man, who is taking advantage of liberal sentimentality to try to win awards. While Audiard’s slop bucket has cleaned up awards—Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy, BAFTA for best non-Anglophone film, AAFCA award for best international film (over Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, and Ainda Estou Acqui!), a Jury prize at Cannes—his work is bumbling, transphobic nonsense.

This whole thing smacks of gender!

This is a transphobic movie in three ways, two obvious, one somewhat more subtle for cis audiences. We’re going to talk in depth about this because this movie is probably up for Best Picture (and a dozen other Oscars) as a political reaction to the transphobia and xenophobia of the current American regime. Though, as Sam Bodrojan writes, liberalism’s approach to trans people is fairly similar to conservatism’s overt bigotry.

The most obvious way is this: during a dispute with Jessi over where the children live Emilia’s “masculinity” reasserts itself. Her voice deepens, she is shot as larger, more physically aggressive than in previous scenes and she is framed with masculine colors. She manhandles Jessi. This is a cinematic recitation of the sort of transphobia familiar from J.K. Rowling, or the autogynephilia school of psychotics. Trans women in this text are men who act as women for fetish play, whose manhood—Male socialization!?!?!?!?—reasserts itself as violence against women and children.

Disgusting.

I must say before we go further that the right to bodily autonomy, including the right to alter one’s gender presentation, physical sex characteristics and appearance, is the most fundamental right we possess. Trans people’s right to self-expression is your right to self-expression. Their right to dignity and respect is your right to dignity and respect. That there is a panic about this at all reflects the gross solipsism of reactionaries; transphobes cannot conceive of a different way of living from their own and assume that attempts to change one’s life are insincere and done for predatory or dishonest purposes, rather than genuine attempts at self-actualization. They project this stunted solipsism forward into the future as the Treatlerite dictatorship (the triumph of the society of the consumer over political democracy) and into the past as the traditionalist fantasy of state-of-nature brutality. They are incapable of seeing that people we would now call transgender have always existed and will always exist. Blindness is necessary for transphobes at a libidinal, fantasy level.

This is why the anti-trans reaction is so firmly rooted in the parts of our society most obsessed with borders and boundaries and separation of the individual from the social body: Reactionaries are not like us. They do not even believe in the possibility of an ‘us’ or a ‘we’ that encompasses all of humanity.

Without liberty for people to live, dress and do with their bodies as they will there is no meaningful political liberty or social freedom. This is why the cultural portrayal of trans people matters, not for liberal identitarian reasons, but because cultural production shapes people at the level of fantasy, which, in a broadly bourgeois society between periodic real crises, is arguably the most important psycho-political force.

Fortunately, I don’t think Emilia Perez’s transphobia is a particularly compelling fantasy. The songs suck shit. They’re too quiet, they lack a compelling rhythm, the lyrics and lines are unmemorable except for a few notable stinkers; a line translated as “My pussy still hurts when I think of you,” which Gomez delivers as a voicemail is the only piece of dialogue I passively remember. The score is uninspiring, I can’t recall a single bit of the music aside from Saldaña’s ‘El Mal,’ which is almost kind of an interesting song, but lacks the angry dynamism to be an interesting denunciation of oligarchy.

The most widely memed and mocked part of Emilia Perez is the infamous La Vaginaplastia number, wherein Saldaña’s character researches medical transition for her cartel boss by visiting a hospital full of bandaged, singing trans people. It is a boring, ugly song with little to recommend it musically or lyrically. But it gets at the second central flaw in Jacques Audiard’s approach to transness. He has written a movie that argues the only really valid form of transition is a total medical transition—the sole counterpoint to this perspective is an irrelevant duet between Saldaña and an Israeli doctor.

The Israeli doc suggests that Saldaña’s boss transition socially before transitioning medically and Saldaña gives us the following nugget of wisdom: “Changing the body changes society, Changing society changes the soul, Changing the soul changes society, Changing society changes it all.” While this is the closest french liberalism has come to a materialist understanding since May 1968, it is the sort of dumb bullshit we all saw as dumb bullshit when Yoda said: “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”

Changing the body does not, in fact, change society. Notably, Emilia’s transness never comes up in her NGO roles, despite the role macho death squads play in policing gender boundaries—she’s just some lady, she never meaningfully acknowledges who she was or takes any accountability, and her decision to renounce the drug trafficking lifestyle precedes the film, precedes even the changes to her body. Like what the hell are we doing here? Why does the dialogue in The Phantom Menace sound better than this? Of course, textually, the film undermines Saldaña and ignores the Israeli doc, who does the surgery anyway.

Emilia becomes Emilia through a sort of surgical shock therapy. She’s done some HRT preparation for this, but only begins the process of social transition after getting top, bottom, facial feminization and other surgeries in one day and faking her own death. That’s how she becomes a woman! She gets a vagina, breasts and a more feminine face—in this film womanhood is the act of surgical violence. Adam gets his bottom rib removed so he can suck his own cock.

The argument that surgical process is what makes someone trans is antithetical to the idea that gender is a social relationship. Transmedicalism is a concession to the anti-trans claim that gender is defined by genitals—and it’s not a concession the enemies of bodily autonomy are willing to accept, because they do not believe in an existence outside the normative bounds of sex and gender.

The more subtle transphobia is evident in the film’s belief that Emilia is absolved of her sins by transition. She founds an NGO to uncover the bodies of people killed by the American-backed death squads. What we call “Cartels” are really organizations meant to enclose land, extract surplus value and natural resources, destabilize Mexico as a coherent political entity, and supply the Seven League Giant with its daily requirement of blood and drugs.

As I mentioned above, she never discusses her role in the Drug War with anyone. We’re meant to take her founding an NGO to recover the dead of the Drug War, including her own victims, as indicative of some broad moral transformation. Her role in this violence is mentioned obliquely once or twice, but the film acts as if there’s no continuity with her past self beyond her attachment to Jessi and how she smells to her kids. There are the blocks of an interesting movie here, a defector from masculinity and the drug trade tries to atone for her sins while struggling to situate herself in a new life, but this is not the movie Audiard made.

Instead, Emilia’s sins are washed away by her symbolic death as Manitas and reincarnation as Emilia. She never has to come to terms with them. I have never seen anyone argue that this is how transition works or ought to work, and I think the movie is made boring by it. We watch movies because we want drama, not a LinkedIn post about ‘my new chapter with a tax-exempt non-profit.’

In the end, for digging up some graves, eroding state capacity and shagging a widow, Emilia Perez is remembered as a saint.

God damn this movie sucks.

What the global north owes the global south

On Dec. 11, 2006, Mexico’s Harvard-educated President Felipe Calderón opened the hot military phase of the Drug War with the start of Operation Michoacan, which saw the Mexican military and federal police confront drug trafficking organizations with direct armed force.

Calderón was likely not a legitimate president. Like his major backer, Mighty U.S. Warlord Premier Bush, Felipe Calderón and his Party of National Action allegedly stole his election and relied on a conservative deep state and quiescent media to legitimate his elevation to the presidency. Like Bush, he launched a disastrous war that destabilized his own society, unleashed massive repression, and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Like Bush’s war in Afghanistan, the primary beneficiaries of Mexico’s Drug War have been the unaccountable security elite, drug traffickers themselves and the murky partisans of parapolitics.

Unlike Bush,* Calderón's legacy was eventually repudiated. In 2018, the man who probably won Mexico’s 2006 election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was elected president. In 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum, AMLO’s successor, won 61% of the popular vote after AMLO’s party more than doubled the minimum wage during his tenure, embarked on ambitious state construction projects and tried to reassert public control over natural resources. (MORENA’s government still has significant problems, and they have not turned Mexico into a social democratic paradise, but the party’s governance is undoubtedly preferable to the soft dictatorship of the Party of the Institutional Revolution/Party of National Action years.)

But by the time MORENA swept to power, the damage was done, the social and political dynamics of the Drug War had become deeply entrenched in Mexican society. Tens of thousands had been butchered.

I’d like to talk about some of them for a minute.

In the fall of 2014, forty three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were kidnapped and slaughtered by police near Iguala, in conjunction with the military and with drug trafficking organizations. The students were young people committed to the proposition that teaching can give humble people the intellectual arms with which to defend themselves from oppression. They’d been on their way to Ciudad Mexico in buses they’d commandeered as part of a long-running radical tradition in commemoration of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, when the soldiers of the U.S.-backed Party of the Institutional Revolution gunned down hundreds of student demonstrators on the Plaza of the Three Cultures.

I suspect it was this historical connection that made the massacre in Iguala so traumatizing and has made it a stand in for the whole wretched war. The purpose of the war is to create a transnational state of emergency that reinforces America’s military and political authority in Latin America. To serve that end, people completely uninvolved must occasionally be suffocated, sawn apart at their joints and dissolved in acid.

You see, the ‘68 massacre was part of the American Cold War, when repressive capitalist governments slaughtered their democratic and left-wing opponents. The death toll of that war ranges into the tens of millions across countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Algeria, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Ethiopia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile and so, so many others.

Even America’s European vassal states like France, Italy, Belgium, and the Bundesrepublik saw U.S.-backed right wing movements and intelligence operations destroy left wing parties, poison civil society and strangle the possibilities of democracy.

The 2014 massacre was part of that American war. And if there is any justice in the world, when the military history of the 21st Century is finally written, the battles we remember will not be the killings of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi or Osama Bin Laden, but the disappearance of those teachers and the killings of Berta Caceres and Marielle Franco. Because it is this relentless social violence that makes societies too weak, too fragmented and too distrustful to resist oligarchic domination and American interference.

The Ayotzinapa Forty Three were all I could talk about with my Mexican and Mexican-American friends in the fall of 2014. It was a senseless crime when viewed by a bunch of high school students in New Haven. The brutality was so extreme, the silence that followed from the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI) so complete, that we could not possibly look away, though we could not possibly understand it.

I still cannot, though I have since been to Mexico and seen the graffiti painted on the walls of a notorious police barracks in the capital: AYOTZINAPA 43. Once you see that number in Mexico you never stop seeing it. 43, 43, 43, again and again and again, on walls, on light posts, scratched into the wood of tables and painted on the sides of highways. It comes to me in dreams, 43, 43, 43. I see the protest placards with their faces. I see the magazine photographs of the empty stretches of highway where they were disappeared. 43. 43. 43.

They were not alone. Activists protesting the disappearance and demanding answers uncovered mass graves in the region containing dozens of bodies, totally unrelated to the disappeared students.

Because this is war in the 21st century: the senseless slaughter of innocents to make commodities slightly cheaper, to ensure the flow of cocaine to right-wing “literary” parties in lower Manhattan and the flow of untraceable dollars into the covert budgets of intelligence agencies and military special forces. The Third World War was a war by the global north against the global south. It is still ongoing. One day historiography will acknowledge the continuity and scale of this violence and we will remember the teachers, the socialist organizers, the campesinos and the civil society groups who had the courage to resist the same way we recall the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad or the soldiers of the 1st Minnesota: Heroes in a just cause. Heroes who died for a better world.

I felt this in my body while I watched this fucking movie. The film and its reception show only the arrogance of the Europeans, so safe from the repercussions of their vile, forgotten imperial crimes, and the snide ignorance of the American academy voters too stupid to realize their clapping at this spectacle sounds like the fleshy whacking of a madman masturbating in a graveyard. Because in making his little fetish film about the disappearance of thousands of Mexican people in the Drug War, Jacques Audiard has pissed on every unmarked grave in that country.

And he is grinning at you. He is asking if you like his piss on the bodies of the innocent, grinning his stupid French smile, like Maximilian Habsburg on his throne. The smell of rot is in the air around him, but he does not know the smell is his own flesh rotting, rotting and falling from his bald head, so alike the skulls of Spanish conquistadors captured in the Night of Tears** and put to death (to their white surprise) for their European presumption.

Europe is indefensible.

Next week: Emma Cline’s Daddy. And more? If Emilia Perez wins best picture at the Oscars next month I will write another essay connecting it to Netflix’s decision to produce slop for the slop eaters.

-30-

*This man deserved to end like Goering and to be thrown into a municipal landfill, yet he is free and rich and when he dies he will have a state funeral.

**The skulls at the top of this post are those of Spaniards and their allies captured during the retreat from Tenochtitlan on June 30, 1520, La Noche Triste in the annals of Spanish arms, La Noche Feliz for partisans of this continent. They were put to death by the Aztecs.