In his 2009 book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz writes, “QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here…We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1).  Muñoz builds upon Ernst Block’s concept of utopia as a critical and collective longing relational to historical struggles as a means of critiquing the present to illuminate the potentiality of the future.  Utopia gives rise to a sense of hope to see beyond ‘what is’ to political possibilities of ‘what might be’ to help us reimagine the social and rewrite an alternative map of everyday life.  Both Muñoz and Judith Halberstam (In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies and Subcultural Lives) put forth the notions of a queer time and queer space/worlds, in opposition to heteronormative institutions of family, heterosexuality and reproduction (Halberstam 12).  Queer temporalities are performative because they emerge in a momentary instance to reveal a time of queerness that steps outside of “straight” time, out of “presentness”.  In this paper, I analyze the French queer filmmaker, Alexis Langlois’ short film, The Demons of Dorothy (2021).  I argue that the film challenges heteronormative institutions and “straight time” by reconceptualizing queerness through the concept of utopia in order to produce a queerworld that is always already in the process of becoming.  

Langlois’ The Demons of Dorothy centers around a 30-year-old lesbian filmmaker, Dorothy (Justine Langlois), who like Langlois, finds it difficult to get funding for her “revolutionary” films.  In the opening of the film, Dorothy sits in her room feverishly working on a script, while images appear on screen that bring to life the narrative she is writing.   Two bikers (Raya Martigny and Sonia Deville) soar through a barren apocalyptic landscape, machine guns on their sides, bathed in a haze of pink light with hints of glitter and metal music in the background.  Close ups of big breasts and buttocks appear, and then a cut to a medium shot of two women in pink helmets.  The pair stop, remove the helmets, and in a slow motion zoom with music that is more melodic, the camera reveals two scantily clad transgender women. One of the women reaches between the legs of her partner and pulls into frame a man’s severed head with “Patriarchy Worshiper” tattooed across the forehead.  From the start, Dorothy’s film challenges cinematic conventions by placing two transgendered women at the center of an apocalyptic, road movie, while employing traditional techniques reserved for the male gaze in mainstream cinema: the slow motion shot, romantic music, and fragmentation of the female body. Additionally, Dorothy’s film produces a type of female masculinity that asks us to consider “new and self-conscious affirmations of different gender taxonomies.  Such affirmations begin not by subverting masculine power or taking up a position against masculine power but by turning a blind eye to conventional masculinities and refusing to engage” (Halberstam Female Masculinity 9).  Despite the severed head, we do not see the two bikers engage in any combat with any characters. Furthermore, they are the characters who are most associated with masculine features through the road movie genre, their machine guns and motorbikes.  However, the very next scene reminds us of the stronghold of patriarchal power in society when Dorothy’s agent, Petula (Nana Benamer), calls to let her know that they have been denied funding.  Petula states that the financiers “feel left out” because the film is about ‘revolutionary lesbian terrorists’”.  Dorothy’s film is literally and figuratively out of time and out of place, unrelatable to mainstream male audiences.

What we find in Dorothy’s film style is a new structuring and mode of desiring that allows us to see beyond the formulaic conventions of popular cinema that conform to white, middle-class, heteronormative expectations.  Muñoz suggests that “we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic.  The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (Cruising Utopia 1).  Dorothy’s film then represents her refusal to conform to the repressive social order that remains in place in the present and that demands a sanitized, mainstream version of gender and sexuality.  Through her characters’ on-screen performances, Dorothy comes to better understand her own pleasures and sense of selfhood.  The queerness of her film opens up spaces to have the potential to “spark new ways of perceiving and acting on a reality that is itself potentially changeable” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia 135).  We get a glimpse of a vaster critique of how the world might and should be in a queer utopia.  

In the sequence that follows, Dorothy’s mother (Lio) magically appears in her room with the purpose of setting her daughter “straight”.  Her mother harps on her “filthy” room and unkempt hair, calls her a dyke, comments on her age and tells her that it is time to pull herself together, make money and get a “normal” job.  Dorothy’s mother applies the autonaturalizing temporality of “straight time” to her daughter’s existence, which “tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life.  The only futurity promised is that of reproductive heterosexuality” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia 22).  Dorothy’s mother’s projection of a normative temporality of inheritance, defined as “generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties, from one generation to the next” (In a Queer Time and Place 18), functions as a means to control her daughter and to force her into her “proper place” within dominant society. In contrast, Dorothy’s daily existence is best described as a stretched-out adolescence that “challenges the conventional binary formation of a life narrative divided by a clear break between youth and adulthood,” a type of “subcultural involvement that does not delineate adulthood as reproductive maturity” (In a Queer Time and Place 280).  Even the set design in Dorothy’s room supports this kind of “stretched out-adolescence”.  Her bedroom walls are done up with leopard print and there is a constant pink glow to the room.  Pictures of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and other Hollywood actresses mix with more contemporary representations of Remy the Vampire Slayer and Madonna.  Stuffed animals are everywhere, and Dorothy wears a band t-shirt from Hole and also makes mention of Lana del Rey.  The room is a pastiche of the past and present, and as Dorothy sits dead center, she is the future awaiting its potential.   By refusing the generational temporality dictated by her mother, she defies the past, while also presenting new imaginings for a queer future that preserves the “critique of heteronormativity that [is] always implicit in queer life” (In a Queer Time and Place268).  

As a response to the devastating news from her producer and her mother’s lack of support, Dorothy gets in bed and falls asleep, only to find that her metaphorical demons have turned into literal manifestations bent on assimilating her into the mainstream.  Dorothy enters into a fantasy realm where she finds that Petula, who appears as a pathetic, powerless demon, has conjured up the powerful demonic personification of Xena Lodan (Dustin Muchuvitz), a so-called “serious” filmmaker with 19 films under her belt and 37 César Awards, all before she turned 30.  Although Xena is transgender, her films feature heterosexual couplings and assimilationist representations of queer culture.  Xena promises success if they will drink from a vial of “hype”, which will make them trendy.  The duo agrees, and in the very next scene, Dorothy sits nestled between her mother and Petula at the Cannes Film festival.  The theatre is full of admiring viewers, all there to see Dorothy’s big premiere.  It seems that Dorothy has taken up the call of interpellation made by her mother and Petula to become a “mature young woman and successful mainstream filmmaker.” 

As the lights in the theatre go down, Dorothy’s film begins.  Biker girls with big breasts have been replaced by transgendered women in sundresses riding bicycles to a picnic where they feed each other strawberries.  The audience revels in the sanitized and heterosexualized version of the film.  Dorothy squirms in her seat; this is not her movie.  According to Muñoz, the attempt to identify with and assimilate to dominant ideologies never ends well because in order to find “self within the dominate public sphere, we need to deny self” (Disidentifications 95).  Dorothy is unable to suppress her true vision as a filmmaker, and her anger grows until her energy transforms the screen back to her two biker chicks from earlier, metal music playing in the background.  The Cannes audience “boos” hatefully at Dorothy, who escapes the theatre by entering the screen, into her own movie, situated between the two big bosomed women on the motorbike.  Within this new fantasy world, her desires are made visible, and her identity emerges as an anticipatory illumination of becoming and a feeling of forward-dawning of future potentialities.  While this escape eschews reality, it does reveal the importance of utopia for enacting new pleasures, other ways of existing in the world, and creating new worlds.  Dorothy now actively disidentifies with the interpellating call of her mother and producer to fix her within heteronormative society and instead expresses an erotic and self-affirming pleasure that allows for new ways of envisioning queerness as something other than trauma, shame and/or guilt.

In conclusion, Muñoz states: Although utopianism has become the bad object of much contemporary political thinking, we nonetheless need to hold on to and even risk utopianism if we are to engage in the labor of making a queerworld” (Disidentifications 25).  Utopia is what permits us to think in terms of counterpublic spheres that stand in opposition to the homophobia and transphobia of the world in which Dorothy strives to find her voice as a queer filmmaker.  When she takes back her own agency from her mother, producer, and the Cannes Festival goers, she actively resists the oppressive and normalizing discourses of dominant ideology.  Her performance demonstrates a rejection of the here and now, giving rise to an insistence on a queer future or a genuine possibility of a queerworld.  As Munoz states, “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Cruising Utopia 1).

Bibliography

Halberstam, Judith.  Female Masculinity.  Duke University Press, 1998. 

---In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University Press, 2005.

Langlois, Alexis, director.  The Demons of Dorothy.  Inès Daïen Dasi and Aurélien Deseez, 2021.

Muñoz, Esteban José.  Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

---. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.  New York University Press, 2009.