No More Than Smoke and Mirrors: Queerness and Identity in Lady of the Night (Laurent Boileau, 2014)
Lady of the Night (Laurent Boileau, 2014).
Laurent Boileau’s 2014 French animated short Lady of the Night tells the story of Samuel, who retires to his bedroom following the annual commemoration dinner for his deceased lover Cornelius. Samuel is tortured by the closeted nature of their irretrievable relationship, and seeks refuge from his crushing personal regret – as well as wider oppressive social forces – by dressing up in drag and performing a ballad that voices his ‘yearning for the dream of freedom’. In this blog, I will examine a short ten-second clip from Boileau’s film (see left) to demonstrate how animation can challenge and destabilise limiting identity binaries by exposing the performative nature of all identity expressions. I will illustrate how Lady of the Night steps outside the norm in terms of tone, characterisation and narrative, and in doing so raises questions about the very foundations of societal conventions regarding gender, drawing attention to their true constructedness. The ‘realness’ of fixed identity categories is revealed to be no more than smoke and mirrors, yet these fantasies are shown to have painfully real lived consequences.
The sequence begins with a plume of smoke from Samuel’s cigarette morphing into an androgynous silhouette. From here, we pan to Samuel’s hand lifting a make-up brush which is lying on a dresser in front of a mirror (Fig. 1). He gently strokes the brush across a powder compact as he prepares to apply it. The smoke-turned-silhouette sequence is later echoed when a room full of marble statues morph into ghoulish figures which swirl around Samuel, smothering him in a threatening dark cloud and hurling his feeble body back onto the floor of his bedroom. The ability of animation to shape-shift in this way – with smoke turning into silhouette, and statue turning to silhouette and back into smoke – is one reason why animation has been seen as a fundamentally queer medium. Sean Griffin describes how animation’s penchant for “metamorphosis and transmogrification… emphasizes how shaky the boundaries of identity are” (2004: 107). The transformation of the cloud of smoke, a free-ranging and unstable entity, into the outline of a body reflects the fluidity and unfixed nature of human identity. The ethereal silhouette is suggestive of ideas such as those of famous cross-dressing artist Grayson Perry who, when asked to define ‘identity’, responded: “it seems so amorphous, like grabbing smoke. Different bits of us come out at different times” (quoted in Hattenstone 2020). This moment in the film suggests that, just like a cross-dressing man, true identity is multifarious, complex, and cannot be neatly categorised.
Fig. 1 - Samuel’s cigarette smoke plume (L), and the lifting of his make-up brush (R).
The refusal to be defined by clear-cut identity categorisations is the crux of theoretical definitions of queerness – and it is also at the heart of the ontology of animation. Jane Batkin describes how “animation, as a form, need not be contained. It refutes the idea of a cage” (2017: 93), much in the same way that queerness refuses oppressive definitions of identity. In Lady of the Night, Samuel is initially represented as the stereotypical animated man, with a muscular frame and chiselled features, but as he reaches for the make-up brush our understanding of gender within this short film is immediately and deliberately complicated. Theorists often point towards animation as a performative medium, because everything is created from scratch and therefore everything overtly ‘performs.’ Nothing can be disguised as ever-present or natural. Griffin poses this in relation to sexuality, arguing that “all renditions of heterosexuality in animated films are just as performative as any rendition of homosexuality” (2004: 107). This statement strongly recalls Judith Butler’s ideas about gender as a “performative accomplishment,” constructed through “a stylised repetition of acts” (1990: 140). When Samuel, having thus far been coded as a masculine man in a dinner suit, reaches down for the make-up brush, we are suddenly forced to confront the constructedness of all identities, and the fact that all that separates the masculine from the feminine truly is merely a repetition of acts, including the application of make-up. When a character who has been coded as male engages in an action that we categorise as female, the artificiality of binary, normative identity categories is exposed. As Samuel picks up his powder brush and begins to apply make-up, the assumptions we may have made based on our socialised understanding of gender expression and associated behaviours become unstable and amorphous, billowing out into the air like a plume of smoke.
Fig. 2 - Samuel is carried along by the plume of smoke (L), before curling up on his bedroom floor (R).
Jayne Pilling discusses animation’s ability to “affect and empathetically engage viewers,” by way of embracing the “complexities and contradictions of the individual’s lived experience” (2012: 4). The essential humanness of Samuel - as we pan across close-ups of his hand, his cheek, his eye and his lips - makes us share in his humanity and feel his pain. Samuel’s human body becomes the central location for not only the challenging of societal norms, but also for the display of his inner turmoil. His heart-wrenching song also shapes the emotional trajectory of the piece, and transports us with him on his journey. The final shot of his body thrust back onto the ground and curled up in the foetal position (Fig. 2) is evocative of the original state of being that unifies all of us, until we are propelled out into a world which may be so arbitrarily cruel, for no better reason than – in Samuel’s words – “the love of minds we did not choose.” Ultimately, the empathy piqued by Samuel’s humanity serves to advocate for a social embracing of queerness as we yearn alongside him for his “dream of freedom.”
Fig. 3 - Queer representation (L), and Samuel and Cornelius (R).
The characterisation of Samuel and Cornelius, the nature of their passionate romance, the genre of the music, and the grand aristocratic setting make Lady of the Night evocative of a classic melodramatic Disney love story. Boileau takes this format and makes the content queer. The familiarity of the aesthetic serves to normalise the otherness of our protagonist and his story, while simultaneously acting as a mirror for society and alerting us to the lack of representation in contemporary pop culture. It’s Disneyesque, but the two central characters are gay and there is no happy ending, which raises questions about the traumatic repercussions of society’s exclusionary hegemonic discourses. Batkin writes that in Disney, those who do not conform to patriarchal social norms are villainised (2017: 91), but Boileau inverts this to make a non-conformist the hero. He employs the handsome Disney prince aesthetic, and dresses him up in drag (Fig. 3). The fact that a gay storyline feels unfamiliar in this format draws attention to the real and detrimental social conditions that our stereotyping fantasies of gender and sexuality result from, and serve to reproduce.
Fig. 4 - Lady of the Night’s mirror image.
The presence of the mirror in the ten-second clip is pertinent because animation can be seen as reflective of society; a mirror to life itself. Batkin sees cinema as a mirror which “occasionally tilts and offers insight that seem incomprehensible or that challenge our sense of ourselves” (2017: 89). She points to Horton Cooley’s looking glass theory, where identity results from the picture we create from what we think other people think about us, and ultimately describes Disney filmography as a “looking glass to American society itself” (2017: 93). The mirror in Lady of the Night is pivotal because we are seeing Samuel see his own reflection (Fig. 4). It is a Russian doll moment that illuminates the injustice of being denied true self-expression, and always seeing oneself through society’s disapproving, oppressive glare. The Disney-style aesthetic, alongside the historic setting of the piece, transports us back to the time of the first Disney movies and makes us question how much things have really changed.
Fig. 5 - Drag and cross-dressing in Lady of the Night.
Drag and cross-dressing have a long history in animation, but this tradition is also subverted in a provocative way. Griffin asserts that ‘animation has conventionally been used for creating comic narratives” (2004: 108), and Batkin likewise gestures to the “postmodern humour” that transvestism in animation typically generates (2017: 106). The lack of humour, and the prevailing sense of tragedy and sadness, makes Lady of the Night stand out. What Griffin terms as the “ever unstable universe” (2004: 108) of animation is not employed for comedic purposes, but rather to encapsulate a character’s crushing inner emotional turmoil. The turbulence of Samuel’s inner world is made visible through the surreal animated sequence (Fig. 5). Through this focus on sadness and the conspicuous lack of humour, the film communicates its powerful and memorable message through the subversion of gender. Lady of the Night disrupts convention to reveal the fantastical nature of sexuality and gender binaries – and therefore the potential to structure our own world differently. Animation is a medium that presents infinite possibility, and reflects back to us the endless scope there can be for carving out a society that allows every one of us to flourish.
**Article published: August 28, 2020**
References
Batkin, Jane. Identity in Animation: A Journey Into Self, Difference, Culture and the Body (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Griffin, Sean, “Pronoun Trouble: The Queerness of Animation,” in Queer Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin (New York: Routledge, 2004), 105-118.
Hattenstone, Simon. “Grayson Perry: “Just because you don’t have a dress on doesn’t stop you being a tranny”,” The Guardian (October 8, 2014), available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/04/grayson-perry-dress-tranny-art-who-are-you-tv.
Pilling, Jayne. “Introduction,” in Jayne Pilling, ed. Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality and Animation (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2012), 1-18.
Wells, Paul. Understanding Animation (London: Routledge, 1998).
Biography
Rosie Thomson is a recent graduate from King's College London where she gained a BA in Liberal Arts, majoring in English. She enjoyed the opportunity to study film as part of her degree, with a module about animation particularly capturing her imagination!