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Glen or Glenda (Edward D. Wood, Jr., 1953)
🕑 Added 2020-07-20 19:30:46 +0000 UTC
I've always been a fan of Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, despite the protestations of tastemakers that it is "the worst film ever made." Yes, it is filled with unintentional comedy, but there is a certain pathos to it that really moves me. It has been said that all films are unintentional documentaries of their own making, and few films demonstrate this more than Plan 9, which so poignantly depicts a coterie of outcasts coming together to realize an awkward, sincere vision. J. Hoberman was right to link Wood with Oscar Micheaux in an essay several decades ago, since both men were relegated to the margins of the industry and their productions tell us a great deal about the kinds of ideas and emotions that the industry was (and to some extent still is) incapable of allowing in.
It's taken me far too long to catch up with Glen or Glenda. It's always intrigued me that uber-formalist critic Fred Camper has listed it among his favorite films, and now I can see why. Glen or Glenda, intentionally or not, operates within an avant-garde realm, so "unsatisfactorily" combining stray images and narrative information as to allow them to hover around each other, two like magnetic poles that keep driving each other away. It's not just the obvious stock footage -- highway traffic, battle footage, men and women in the street -- that Wood fails to integrate. Glen or Glenda behaves like a personal essay film that is trying to fool its producers into thinking it's a real exploitation film.
With nightmare sequences and faux-Baroque costuming that clearly inspired Kenneth Anger, Owen Land, and especially Jack Smith, Glen or Glenda is a psychodrama encased in a PSA about transvestism, using the recent Christine Jorgensen case as hopeful sign that science, humanism, and understanding might lead to a freer world. There is no doubt that its sexology, terminology, and wild, inadvertent slippages between cross-dressing and transgender identity are dated and misguided. But Wood's depiction of Glen (played by the director himself) as a man trapped, surrounded by misunderstanding and torment, seems brutally honest.
