The Dilemma of Marta Shubb: Humanity and Humor

"I came to the realization that I was - and am - a blonde female folk singer trapped in the body of a bald male folk singer and, uh, I had to let me out or I would die."

- Marta Shubb (Harry Shearer), A Mighty Wind

If I had to make a list of my top 10 filmmakers, it'd primarily consist of filmmakers not just known for their technical innovations to the craft nor their extreme stylistic sensibilities but in how they personally resonate with me. Similar to how I approach music, I approach film from its personal impact on me - that's why a film like Black Panther, a blockbuster film that I worked one day on as an extra and whose message appears to be "colonialism is bad, but isolationism and total non-intervention merely sets up the stage for further types of colonialism - namely a woke variant of it" alongside being another movie made to sell toys, has the same impact as the very nuanced Lost in America, Albert Brooks' sarcastic-but-comparatively-gentle comedy about how the hippies became the yuppies told via the road trip from Hell. My list even contains some really problematic people - the types of people that nobody wants to celebrate anymore because they're not good people - because their films, before I became fully aware of the situation, really did drive me to give film a chance. I'm paying for it, but I don't regret diving head-first into the medium.

My top 10 goes something like this:

1. Joe Dante

2. Christopher Guest

3. Woody Allen

4. Christopher Nolan

5. Satoshi Kon

6. Charlie Chaplin

7. Martin Scorsese

8. Paul Thomas Anderson

9. Billy Wilder

10. Pete Docter

So why in the world is Christopher Guest my no. 2? He's that guy who makes the funny mockumentaries about dumb people trying to look like they're haute couture when they're merely in flannel shirts from Kohl's. However, a thing about my top 10 is that all of these filmmakers are not only filmmakers who are at the top of their game in their respective genres, but they also have this incredibly caring, human side to their films.

tangent: why do I still feel like I like the films of woody allen, the guy who allegedly molested dylan farrow in 1991 and had two underage/barely-legal relationships in his 40s because of course, you don't know how much this man disappoints me, or the obligatory woody allen part of this blog entry

Take for example Woody Allen, who I've written about in various (mostly negative) ways on this blog. I do not like the person. I do not like the way he courts controversy. I do not like the way that he singlehandedly torpedoed people taking into consideration the accounts of Soon-yi Previn and Moses Farrow by insisting some sort of involvement with their statements. I don't like how he rushed Soon-yi into a relationship - hell, I don't like how they got into a relationship in the first place. I don't like his way around women in real life. I don't like how he treated #MeToo as something of a joke while stating that since he's a doll to every lead actress who's worked on his films, he's the perfect director not to get the hashtag (even though he got the hashtag early on). I don't like how he still doesn't know the gravity of the situation even though everybody and their great-grandmother has written about where he went wrong. I see why people wish for his death. I see why Ronan Farrow is still bitter. I see why Amazon Studios would want to cease producing his films. I see why his exes want to talk trash about him. I see why Hannah Gadsby trash-talked him in Nanette. The dude is super-petty and shady as hell...

...but simultaneously, his movies did get me to watch more movies. His movies did wow me when I was in my teens and twenties. Hell, his movies still wow me - I rewatched Annie Hall a couple of days ago and I was still blown away at how human it felt. It didn't feel like he was in total control of the narrative, using everything as wish fulfillment. If anything, he chewed out a lot of the behaviors he would end up committing just a few years down the road. He doesn't look upon child molesters fondly, using them as a mere punchline to a joke about how "dirty" New York City is. He paints Alvy's friend Rob sleeping with underage twins as sick, but something he can't stop alone. Most importantly, he paints Alvy as this super-entitled taste-elitist petty little man with a stick up his ass who can't tell when a friendship should just be a friendship, insisting that he have sex constantly or else he go insane...often with the caveat that he have sex in very specific conditions (the partner has to be totally into it, i.e. not use drugs before sex) or he can't go through with it.

Alvy is not a character to be looked up to in Annie Hall, so Allen superfans (the idiots who have to remind people about the Moses Farrow blog post all the time or constantly mutter insults about Mia Farrow) that are all like "OMG ANNIE LOVES ALVY #ANNIEXALVY" are missing the entire point of the film. Even in the context of the sexual abuse and assault allegations, Alvy acts as something of a critique of Woody Allen's real-life persona - and he's supposed to be the self-insert of the film. A lot of Allen films have self-insert, but the difference between characters like Alvy Singer and Isaac Davis (from Manhattan, a genuinely kinda-overrated film) and characters like Gil Pender (from Midnight in Paris) and Emmet Ray (from Sweet and Lowdown) is that the former group are often critiqued heavily to the point where Allen outright states that you do not want to be like these guys whereas the latter group are celebrated for being ahead of their time in their own narratives. Midnight in Paris and Sweet and Lowdown are self-congratulatory narratives that serve to pat Woody Allen on the back whereas Annie Hall and Manhattan are not really self-congratulatory.

Like, Isaac running back to try to win Tracy over in her high-school chemistry lab is framed as somewhat pathetic. Romantic, sure, but pathetic since Isaac doesn't know when to just give up on a relationship. Similar to how Alvy flies all the way to Los Angeles (on his expense) to try to win Annie over and propose marriage after they've broken up - alongside him writing a play where his Alvy self-insert successfully wins back his Annie-in-all-but-name. It's designed to be really pathetic. Granted this does tie into the defense mechanism of "look at me, I know I'm in the wrong, I can't help it" that Gadsby deconstructed heavily in Nanette (the people willing to do that are often more screwed up in more ways than one), but it's not exactly something you'd expect from largely autobiographical movies. You'd expect the pathetic moments in Woody Allen films to be heroic gestures - like Isaac and Alvy are in the right for doing the things they want to do. I guess it comes down to the idea that Allen's a hypocrite. A hypocrite whose films are more universal than one might expect, but a hypocrite who still tries to sue Amazon Studios for putting his projects on hold because Mia Farrow said a thing a few times.

Allen makes these really human characters that get their just desserts when they act like immoral idiots, so to me, it's really weird that he'd be as much of a hypocrite as he is in real life, but at the same time, I understand that an artist will paint themselves in a super-negative light to make their work more universal. We can all relate to the downs of somebody's private life, especially when they admit that they behaved badly. I don't blame people for being exasperated with Allen - hell, I'm exasperated with how he's been reacting to everything over the past 28 years. I've lost my patience for him. I'm not seeing A Rainy Day in New York when that eventually comes out. Hell, I dunno if I'll see another Woody Allen film right now, but to ignore his influence on my writing and my movie taste would be stupid of me. I didn't discover Nora Ephron until Annie Hall and Manhattan convinced me to give romantic comedies an actual chance - and while she's leagues better than Allen on the gender-issues front (i.e. she makes an active effort to critique Harry's sexism in when Harry met Sally...), Allen was still my gateway. His films still have their potency for me and I'm not ashamed to admit that.

In summary, everybody's an idiot, but it doesn't come outta nowhere.

end tangent

Nolan has tons of human moments in his films - one of my favorite scenes in Interstellar isn't Coop's journey into the Tesseract nor is it TARS acting as sarcastic as only the giant sarcastic talking robot can. It's the scene where Coop, after returning from the first planet, finds Romily aged up by a good 20 years and has to painfully watch through this entire backlog of messages his family sent him. It is devastating to see Matthew McConaughey devolve into a human-sized fountain of tears as he has to watch his family's most important events and his daughter Murph's bitter acceptance of his absence from the vacuum of space, unable to talk to them as he once was able to. I about cried when I saw Murph's first message to Coop - and she is still bitter over the whole thing.

Or how in Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers when Gin tells anybody - just anybody he can talk to - about why he's homeless in the first place. He sees himself as having really fucked up with his family - how he fell into gambling and drug addiction just to fuel his passions, only for those to really backfire on him. It's why he's trying to convince Miyuki to go back to her family - because he doesn't want her to end up like him. He screwed up really badly. And when he finally meets his daughter at the hospital - when trying to bring back this baby he, Hana, and Miyuki have been safeguarding for about the entire night - his guilt over having left her floods over him. He can't hold back his tears. He knows he screwed up. He knows he was not a good father in any sense of the world. And he knows he could've been better, but now - now with the life of this baby at stake, as the entire city's on high alert thanks to the situations the three Tokyo vagrants have found themselves in - he has to come to terms with who he is. He has to face his own daughter and, by proxy, face the music. It is hard to watch him try to talk to his daughter. But it feels so human.

But Christopher Guest? Nigel Tufnel himself? The dude who writes amazing songs, only to put lyrics about how it's so sad to be really rich and about having lots and lots of groupie sex? That guy?

Yeah, Lord Baden-Guest is full of all of those human moments. Waiting for Guffman is a bitter pill to swallow for any sort of artist - the idea that any sort of big break can be averted at any given moment, where your love for the art can't overcome the coldness of the world. It's hard to watch the cast of Red, White and Blaine come to terms with the fact that Guffman will never get to see their play. The heartbreak on Corky St. Clair's face as he realizes that he will never get to actually sell himself is potent, especially when paired with what he's doing a year after the play. He's trying to stay positive, but even he finds himself slipping back into that realization that fate just wasn't in his favor that day. He's stuck selling lunchboxes for prestige pictures nobody watches anymore. It's genuinely happy when he comes back and he's a choreographer for one of the mascots in Mascots - it lightens up my life to see Corky, one of my favorite gay comedy protagonists, actually have a second chance at life at doing what he loves, even if it is choreographing super-pretentious mascot performances. That spark is still inside of him - and at the end of the day, I wanna hug the dude.

Similarly, This is Spinal Tap, which technically a Rob Reiner film (though spearheaded by Guest), has all of these little human moments - and not just in the big screw-ups (i.e. walking into the wrong auditorium right before a concert; underselling the hugeness of Stonehenge, to put it mildly). I love the little human interactions - the fact that Derek still wants to play "Stonehenge" even though the show ended in disaster, much to the chagrin of Nigel and David, who are just embarrassed, is a nice little touch to a funny scene. It makes it all that much funnier that Derek is still trying to see the positive side - that "Stonehenge" as a song is still good, so they could make the woefully-undersized monument work - after what we, the audience, just saw. Even Nigel showing that he has this strong songwriting knack, coming up with riffs on the fly and showing off his classical influences, for songs titled "Lick My Love Pump" and "Sex Farm" is a nice little human touch. And let's not forget that time he freaked out over the tiny bread - something tells me he might be a tad autistic (and I'm not saying that as a joke - he is genuinely perturbed by the impractical nature of said hors d'oeuvre, alongside the fact that the dude has the social skills of a kid trying so hard to make friends; it's heavily implied that Derek and David are his only friends). There is genuine heartbreak to Nigel Tufnel, the dude who thinks that labeling his stock amps up to eleven makes them louder, and that's what makes these jokes potent. They're not just gags on idiot rock stars - they're mini-tragedies about a guy who wants to be better, but finds himself in a world where he's considered mediocre at best.

Which brings me to A Mighty Wind. Why I mentioned Marta Shubb in the title and the opening quote is because she is, indeed, one of the most human characters in any film despite being designed to be a gag on how the Folksmen are effectively just like any other major-label '60s folk act, down to transforming from the Kingston Trio to Peter, Paul and Mary. But the fact that she, despite being largely a joke (a trans woman played by Harry Shearer, a cis male, just to be off-brand Mary Travers), said that opening quote - and the fact that Shearer improvised it on the spot - shows me that her character becoming who she becomes is not out of malice (i.e. Lt. Einhorn from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; All in Zoolander No. 2; almost every edgy '90s gag on the "reveal" from The Crying Game; the prostitute in The Hangover Part 2) but out of sympathy.

Hear me out: Einhorn is designed to be a conventionally attractive woman who's suddenly given the green light to be dehumanized, mocked, abused, and turned gross by Ace Ventura and the Miami Police Department because she used to be a football player for the Miami Dolphins who got really pissy and disturbed. She's a sexpot who's largely the target of "oh god I'm gonna be sick" gags - i.e. Ace taking cold showers, vomiting, brushing his teeth, etc. because he finds out she has a penis - just to make some stupid joke on The Crying Game. And in that movie, Dil revealing herself to Fergus is painted not as a "oh, look how gross this woman is - she has a penis!" moment but instead her thinking that Fergus knew. And even then, Fergus doesn't start dehumanizing her and calling her ugly because of what she wants to do with her genitalia - instead, he stays in love with her, realizing that their love transcends any little hang-up. It even breaks his heart just for him to have to suggest to Dil that she shave her hair as to not get spotted by the IRA, now trying to kill Fergus for betraying their cause - look at his face when she has to cut her hair off. Dil is sobbing - she has to play somebody she vowed never to play again just to save herself from people who want her dead - and Fergus is silently sitting there, his face full of heartbreak because of what the situation is making Dil do.

How you could go from some of the most powerful moments with trans characters (albeit ones played by cis actors, so they're not exactly ideal for the community at large) to "ha ha woman have penis, she's gross and ugly, ewww" is heartbreaking.

A Mighty Wind refrains from calling Marta ugly. It goes out of its way to paint her male-presenting self with this ugly chin beard, dressing like she doesn't know how to dress herself - in effect calling Marta's prior gender expression by demand of society "ugly," for lack of a better term. You can tell that she does not really fit in with her lot in life - a balding male-presenting folk singer who sticks out like a sore thumb even when put with the rest of the dorky-but-confident Folksmen. 

She's also trying to play mediator, like in this scene where the Folksmen realize that the New Main Street Singers, the weird color-worshiping cult with a manager constantly relishing his past as an unsuccessful child actor, are butchering their standard "Never Did No Wanderin'" in their usual upbeat sugary-perky style. She suggests that the Folksmen just play their own version of the song - to give the audience a decision, so to say (and in effect referencing the folk tradition of artists covering each others' songs) - but is immediately shot down by her bandmates since they're concerned about the diversity of the overall set. She's ignored in favor of opening with "Old Joe's Place," a safer bet since in-universe, it's their hit song. Granted she doesn't like the New Main Street Singers' version of the song, but she wants to give the audience a chance to experience folk music in all of its variations, even if it's just a simple "toothpaste commercial" vs. "real folk music" comparison. She knows a bit more about the tradition of folk music than her bandmates Alan (Christopher Guest) and Jerry (Michael McKean) is what I guess I'm trying to say.

Here in lies the dilemma: she's this fully-realized character whose rationale for transitioning isn't really treated as a joke but as something serious (i.e. she had to transition, or "let [her] out," lest she commit suicide via the massive dysphoria, or "[she] would die"), showing that Shearer does not intend for Marta to be read as cynical or designed with malice towards the transgender community. Her character is depicted as positive, if still a bit petty in that classic Christopher Guest sense, compared to Alan and Jerry. And compared to The New Main Street Singers' increasingly desperate attempts at relevancy and Mitch and Mickey's total tragic dysfunction, the Folksmen are the most well-adjusted band out of the three chosen to perform at the Irving Steinbloom memorial concert since they're the ones who manage to be reasonably quirky and approachable. They don't have an agent who thinks he's hot because he was in a TV show that got cancelled after one season, nor do they have a socially-inept songwriter who doesn't know that his relationship with his ex-wife is over. They're petty, but they're tastefully petty and really friendly folks - the ones you'd like to have some fried chicken with over at Old Joe's Place. They are the yin to Spinal Tap's yang, essentially.

But at the same time, she was designed as such to turn the Folksmen from The Kingston Trio into Peter, Paul and Mary to make a commentary on the interchangeable nature of '60s major-label folk-pop acts, as stated earlier in the post. She is still played by a cis male actor in a time where trans actors couldn't get work in major Hollywood films if they didn't settle for roles dehumanizing them or boiling them down to their genital situation. And that's not really acceptable in any sense.

I know, I know, "but they're actors! They're supposed to play characters! It's like saying that Eddie Redmayne shouldn't play Stephen Hawking!" And the easy rebuttal would be to say "well, duh, he shouldn't play Stephen Hawking! He's depriving disabled actors of prestige roles, cheapening their existence into mere Oscar bait!" because, again, it's a legitimate problem in Hollywood. But at the same time, Marta feels lived in in a way that Lt. Einhorn or All or the prostitute Stu slept with in The Hangover Part 2 don't - she has the concerns of real trans people. She's afraid that if she cannot transition, she will be driven to suicide. She has the experiences of real trans people - reference Tweets by Malmrose Projects and the ContraPoints video Autogynephilia to how they've realized their genuine selves. Those tales are full of heartbreak, self-doubt, and realizations over seemingly tiny things that, to them, were their make-or-break moments. Marta references less Lt. Einhorn's own transition - she was mad that she got booted from the Miami Dolphins and started kidnapping mascot animals - and more along the lines of something Natalie Wynn might say in her confessional. And again, this was all improvised by Harry Shearer on the day. His heart was in the right place, if not his praxis.

Her conception may have been designed as a gag saying "oh man, all of those '60s folk trios are the same, they play the same sugary distillation of folk that's easy to sell to middle America," but how Harry Shearer gave life to Marta feels less like a cynical joke and more like making this character feel real. And, even if it is really problematic (like to the point of "don't do this"), it still adheres to how Christopher Guest makes his characters feel real - like actual humans you're watching interact. I don't feel that from Lt. Einhorn. I don't feel that from All. I don't feel that from any other trans woman used as a punchline in comedy. All I see in A Mighty Wind is characters that feel real, even the ones used as jokes. The jokes have to feel real in a Guest film just for them to land - otherwise, they're just really mean-spirited. They're welcoming. They're relatable. They're more than just jokes - they're people like you and me.

And there are a lot of legitimate concerns regarding Marta from the trans community. Hell, I'm not the right person to even talk about this - I'm a cis male. I only have secondhand experience regarding the trans experience from what some friends and my brother have told me - and they haven't told me even a quarter of the things they've experienced. I am not an authority in any sense of the imagination. I can only tell you how I've experienced the film and my thoughts on the ending and how they tie into how Christopher Guest intermingles jokes and humanity to create something closer to the human experience. And to me, what could've been a joke made out of malice turns out to be a joke made to augment a character's humanity.

Do I recommend A Mighty Wind? Definitely - it's a warm film that treats the '60s folk-pop boom with the same affectionate-parody love as This is Spinal Tap does to hard rock and prog and Waiting for Guffman does to community theatre - but your mileage will definitely vary on the ending. Again, people are weirded out and insulted by Marta coming out. If you don't want that in your life - if you think the joke has malice - you're not wrong. You're entitled to your view, as there are many people with that same view. If you think the joke needs to be made because you:

a) think trans people are icky, and
b) ignored everything Christopher Guest has done in his movies before and after to develop his characters, making joke characters into fully-realized human beings with their own desires and lived-in humanity, just to consider every one of his movies a big joke on pathetic and mediocre people because comedy apparently has to punch down on the downtrodden,

You need to check yourself before you shrek yourself. And if you think the joke has legitimate heart and care to it while acknowledging its really problematic elements, like I do, that's fine as well. Everybody, except for the transphobes who think all comedy is insult comedy, is welcome at Old Joe's Place. Just look for the busted neon sign that says:

E
A

 oe's.