If you haven’t heard of They/Them(2022), I envy you. It’s a 2022 horror film staring Kevin Bacon and a fairly diverse cast of young queer and trans actors who have run-ins with a masked killer as they stay at a conversion camp. Think Sleepaway Camp(1983) mixed with But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), but worse than both in every way.
I like Kevin Bacon, and after this I kind of questioned if he might be lowkey homo/trans/queerphobic in some way, because he shilled for this so hard and the content is so awful and dull. Please, don’t feed me gruel and tell me its caviar. They/them, looking beyond it’s cheesy title is still sanitized and shallow, and I do not feel thankful for the scraps that they laid before me attempting to convince me it contained true sustenance.
Half-truths are not truths, and I will not placate them as such as it does a disservice to all of us, especially right now. This movie is not the inclusive haven that it was hailed to be, many of the people shown in the trailer were background characters with no significant personality and no lines, often referred to in caricaturing ways (the fat girl gets a compliment on her pie, cool). There is a disoreinting, upsetting and pointless scene in which one of the girls is showering and she gets walked in on, the reaction the girl who walked in has immediately tells me she saw something she didn’t expect to see — and we cut to the girl who just had her privacy invaded being marched over to the boys cabin. It’s deeply transmisogynistic, and it wasn’t real commentary but instead a crass and thoughtless depiction that served little to no purpose. I still don’t know if it’s supposed to be heartening that Jordan, the nonbinary camper who was tossed around both gender segregated cabins, is kind to her and protects her from the other boys in the cabin who call her a “fucking freak show”, but it feels very bare minimum, very half said.
Alexandra, the Black transfeminine character who was walked in on, has her estradiol taken away and has to pour out her gory truth to the white lady keeper of the important items in order to convince her to let her have her own medication. This is supposed to be a tender moment, but I see it for what it is. The softening due to having a vulnerable person disembowel themselves in front of you so that you can connect to the humanity of the person in front of you is not a beautiful act. I don’t find it honorable, or heartwarming. The consumption of our pain for basic human sympathy. It makes me feel sick. One of the biggest dynamic flaws in THEY/THEM is that they think they’re creating caricatures but they are not. These are just normal ass people. They’re not scary movie villians. They’re the soccer moms who make dope brownies for bake sales. They’re the nice lady who runs the farmers market. The insults said during the conversion sequences are not exaggerated when you’re someone who has lived life as a trans person, particularly a racialized trans person. It instills a sense of dull anger in me to watch what I’m sure the creators believe is something that would horrifying me to my core to hear, things suitable for a conversion camp horror film — when in reality, i’m just listening to the same shit I see on twitter everyday in my free time.
This is a movie for people who do not want kink at pride, and think cops belong there because they keep us safe. I have no idea what the point of this film truly was, ultimately. It feels like they only made it a horror because they felt that’s what would appeal to people, but they half-stepped on just about everything, and the lack of clarity or focus in the film shows. I really hate superficial inclusivity. Nothing violent happens until the third act, and the build up toward it isn’t satisfying, as it drags on and bogs itself down, sprinkling in social commentary that doesn’t land.
This movie feels like an inevitable consequence of instagram infographic culture and the draw of the mass consumption that’s available to us via the internet. A consequence of queer pride as consumption. The one saving grace of this is the fact that those young adults acted their asses off given the steaming pile of a script offered to them. I hope to see many of them in future works that honor their talent. I am infuriated at the fact that they allow Alexandra to be outed, deadnamed and misgendered the entire film, and they do not deadname or misgender the titular (white) trans nonbinary character, Jordan. It is blatantly transmisogynistic and it makes me angry because I know this was not intentional, pinpoint choices to show a nuanced portrait of the ways that transmisogyny can often be so subtle and pervasive, and I refuse to give them that benefit of doubt. This was not a commentary on how white transmisogyny-exempt nonbinary people are often given prefferential treatment and acceptance over transmisogyny affected people of color, in spite of that being exactly what happend. I don’t belive for a second they knew what they were doing in a thoughtful way. This was careless. Alexandra gets a ton of screentime, so it doesn’t make sense to say “oh Jordan is the primary protagonist, that’s why they were gendered correctly”. It’s a very clear cut example of transmisogyny and really upsetting to watch for a lot of reasons, but it’s not horrifying, it is not titilating, I don’t feel dread — I feel deeply, deeply annoyed and hurt at the lack of care that went into something that could have been pivotal for the genre in a time of massive social upheaval — a horror film that is explicitly queer and trans, with an explicitly queer and trans cast.
THEY/THEM never for a moment allows me to feel a genuine confrontation with the horror that is conversion camps and how violent transphobia and white cisheteropatriarchy is, but it springs happily toward the bland messaging of “love yourself, you can be whoever” like yeah, we’re fucking trying but the world wants us dead, and is is trying to suffocate us.
I mentioned it previously, But I’m a Cheerleader(1999) is a film that addresses many of the subjects they/themattempted to in much more horrifying and entertaining and less offensive ways. There are things to be said about But I’m a Cheerleader, mostly that they display some of the same things that they/them does, in treating a trans character of color as disposable, their problems as secondary. They/them is an affront to me on a much higher level, however, because unlike But I’m a Cheerleader — the characters on our screen are meant to be explicitly trans, and the care still isn’t there.
It feels like a show, and in the worst way possible. THEY/THEM is a room meant to look horrifying and dingy but it still smells like bleach on every surface, and I don’t buy it as representation or a positive for myself or people like me. I’m happy for the queer and trans actors that earned visibility and resources for their work on this film, and proud of them for it — I believe they all, and we all deserve better than this.
1/2 star out of 5