Identity

So far my break has been rather drab. I have seen several movies, some of which weren't really worth seeing ("The Virginity Hit", what an awful movie). I have read (romance novels and horror), but I have lately really been into graphic novels, chiefly The Sandman and Fables series. I am attracted to the eternal idea--the myth which survives throughout ages and across space. And that is what gods, fables, and The Endless represent: constants. y=mx+b, they are the m's and b's--the stable trends or truths which will continue until the end of life. On Monday, I saw Rango at the Shiloh movie theater in Billings. I was one of the few people there. It was pleasant and quiet, and I was quite alone, just me and the 20 foot movie screen... (not really, but it felt that way). To my surprise, Rango began with a lizard questioning who he was, locked away in away in an aquarium. He was putting on a fake show for himself. He acted all the roles and gave the inanimate objects around him personalities. This theme runs throughout the movie. He pretends to be a sheriff and gains the respect of the town. He cross dresses and puts on a play for the villains. One of the most telling sections is when he confronts "The Spirit of the West"--a proverbial god of the denizens of the desert. Golden globe awards are in a golf cart, and we see Clint Eastwood dressed in cowboy garb about to tee off. "The Man with No Name" tells Rango we are all in a play, acting our roles and playing our parts, and no one can leave his story before it is through. This is classic Shakespeare, "As You Like It", "Midsummer Night's Dream", affair. The main problem Shakespeare deals with, I THINK, is the problem of identity--who we are. who am i. who are you. And I have noticed a recurring motif throughout tales that deal with identity crisis: the cross dresser. It appears in Rango, in The Sandman "The Game of You", and "As You Like It". In The Sandman, it is Wanda, who is a man who wishes to be a woman, and Hal, another man who likes to me made-up as a gal, who achieve these motifs.

A few semesters back in Literary Criticism, I read Judith Butler. She suggested that gender is merely a cultural play we perform for others. There is no "true" woman role, only the role we choose to perform. Hence, cross dressing reveals the illusion of gender types. When a man dresses as a woman, or a woman as a man, they clearly perform something which is often hidden to us by our own culture, bringing light to the illusion we live every day. Butler states, in her "Gender Trouble", "Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a 'natural fact' or a cultural performance, or is 'naturalness' constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within the gay and lesbian cultures often thematize 'the natural' in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex. What other foundational categories of identity--the binary of sex, gender, and the body--can be shown as productions that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable?" Often, when authors use cross-dressing as a thematic point, it is to point out the unfixed identity. Shakespeare uses it in "Midsummer's Night Dream" when Francis Flute dresses as Thisbe and in "As You Like It" when Rosalind puts on the mask of Ganymede. But even before any line is spoken, there is still the fact that all the female roles are performed by men. There is much confusion and it is very pertinent that often this gender anarchy takes place in the forest or Northrop Frye's "Green World"--a realm without designators, walls, or borders, of Dionysus, the god of masks, chaos, and the theater, of the Mother Goddess, Titania, Demeter, Venus, and Isis. The Green World's wholeness reveals the made-up games we play in the masculine world. It is the obelisk versus the dome. Emotion versus rationality. Rome versus Egypt. The Federation versus the Borg. The Doctor versus the Dalek. Meg Murry versus IT.

Near the end of the "Game of You" arch in The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Barbie says, "... Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world--no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. Isn't that a weird thought?" These mundane lives we lead are manifestations of the culture around us. We are filled with epics and universes, waiting to spill over into "the real world", if there is such a thing.