Thoughts on The Lady and the Dale, or Revealing Yourself in the Dark

 

If anybody hasn't watched The Lady and the Dale yet, please do so. It is an amazing documentary series that does what Caleb Hannan wishes he did, but without the constant conflation of transgender identity with criminality. It's simultaneously hilarious - Liz Carmichael trying to force a car onto the market like she were a one-person Galt's Gulch without realizing that the design she took was very flawed is the stuff of absolute bewilderment - and enraging (look at any interview with the transcendentally stubborn Dick Carlson - yes, Tucker's father). It's also inspiring - if Liz Carmichael could be herself, warts and all, in this decade, maybe just maybe we could admit that Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena were way more complicated than clean-slate martyrs for gay and trans rights (again, not to conflate any alleged criminality with their queerness - gender identity and sexual orientation are independent of peoples' personal moralities, that much is stressed all throughout The Lady and the Dale) and celebrate them not as martyrs but as people who were at least themselves in times where there was so much societal pressure against them for things out of their control? - and heartwarming (Liz's family and coworkers are still fiercely devoted to her even after everything).

However, there's way more to The Lady and the Dale than just a recounting of the Dale automobile plan-turned-scam. Throughout the documentary, there's talking heads with trans and cis journalists regarding their opinion on the whole thing. For example, the trans journalists are very calm, cool, and collected about making it clear that while Liz Carmichael's crimes were reprehensible, she still became the whipping girl for everything once she was forcibly outed against her will. Liz's pleas to journalists and reporters about how constantly bringing up that she's trans effectively destroys the integrity of the court case (which is supposed to be about whether or not she defrauded a bunch of customers out of their money during her time running her Ayn Rand-themed car company) are ignored time after time again out of the dogged pursuit of this story. The idea of somebody having a different gender identity than the one assigned upon them at birth, be they trans men, trans women, and nonbinary people, was seen as scandalous - that fueled in large part due to people often trying to find the edgiest horror or comedy story possible, society at large often saw trans people as having a criminal disposition - is sadly still relevant to this day thanks in part to the cultivation of the cultural freak show and its offshoots (the outsider music community, lolcow culture, reality TV). It's gotten to the point where a good deal of the queer community has snidely co-opted the slogan "be gay, do crimes" just to make fun of the fact that contemporary legal, political, and religious institutions constantly see any form of queerness as criminal.

As for the cisgender (no, it's not a slur, stop acting like I said the gamer word to the tune of jaunty vaudeville music) journalists, they constantly dehumanize and belittle Liz over the most minute of details. Oh, she has a firm handshake? Guess I gotta investigate her company! Oh, she has a deep voice? Quick - gotta get glasses with her fingerprints on them so the policemen can match them with an obscure petty criminal from the early '60s! She yelled at me because I violated a bevy of no-trespassing signs at her compound? I'm gonna destroy her roadside flower-selling business and remind people that she once identified as a man! Oooh, that'll gross out people! The cutthroat tactics that Dick Carlson and Mark Lisheron (who are both conservatives who cut their teeth in journalism, who would've thought) pulled just to get the juicy story, the one that gets them the most views, the one that exploited peoples' fears of the unfamiliar and gave them a simplified tale of everything, etc. reminds me of the same tactics a lot of people pull when they talk about people like Christine Chandler, Daniel Johnston, the Wiggin sisters (The Shaggs), and about anybody targeted by the new number Gamergate. 

An aside: I was there when Christine came out - when those of us in the Christine-chan trolling community realized that her "tomgirl saga" wasn't a mere phase but rather a gradual coming out - people were stubborn to accept her gender identity. To this day, I still have friends of mine who pull me aside and INSIST that the creator of Sonichu, by virtue of her public behavior (which isn't good by any stretch of the imagination), is somehow trying to pick up chicks by pretending to be a woman, that she's just another person in a long line of "female impersonators." It's why Geno Samuel could get away with constantly misgendering Christine-chan in his 51-PART DOCUMENTARY (as of this publication) about her. It's why a good swath of the trolls, including those who had been ostracized for their beyond-extreme tactics (BlueSpike), set up shop at their rebrand-of-the-CWCki-Forums. It's why I left that community - if she had lived with a feminine gender expression for that long, why were people still insistent that she wasn't legitimate on at least that front?

I was there when Brianna Wu became a target of Gamergate. I had gotten swept up in the movement because I thought they were legitimate about trying to reform video game journalism (which had started to become influenced by big game companies), albeit acting very hyperbolic about how Gone Home (it's a good game; it's basically Myst but set in a suburban home, complete with the same "the solution to the final puzzle was in front of your eyes this entire time" twist) was the linchpin in this whole thing. I only heard what others were saying about personalities like Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, so I took their words at face value. However, as soon as people began focusing on Brianna Wu because she made a series of Tweets critical of the movement, scrutinizing her iOS RPG Revolution 60 and bemoaning the art style, trying to claim she defrauded Patreon supporters over paying off a motorcycle she had for years, and culminating in a couple of "exposes" written by Gamergate personalities Ethan Ralph and Milo Yiannopoulos where they published a bunch of very private and sensitive information about Wu, constantly speculating on her gender identity, that's when I realized that this movement was never about reforming video game journalism. I began noticing a bunch of conspiracies, from claiming Anita Sarkeesian faked a bunch of death threats to Nathan Grayson supposedly having written a glowing and erudite review of Quinn's game Depression Quest. It is amazingly messed up that it took until two wannabe tech journalists investigated Brianna Wu's life in order to find out *why* she supposedly committed fraud for me to realize Gamergate was built on a house of lies from misogyny to a general cultural elitism regarding the ever-evolving state of the video game canon.

Hell, I remember the blowback against Caleb Hannan's Grantland article Dr. V's Magical Putter and the intense discussion it received. I remember reading trans criticisms of the story and thinking at the time - when the story was published in early 2014 - that this was a very important piece of investigative journalist, that Caleb Hannan was trying to figure out the criminal mindset. I was complicit in helping spread its virulent transphobia when it linked Dr. V's own con artistry with her gender identity - I thought this was something for everybody to read. Not only has Hannah disowned the story, saying at the Mayborn journalism conference in July 2015, "it didn't need to exist," but the piece has become forgotten. It's still important, but for all the wrong reasons. If you want to cover a too-good-to-be-true golf putter with a hole drilled into the wedge, cover the too-good-to-be-true golf putter with a hole drilled into the wedge. Don't go into the creator's private life when they explicitly ask you to not go beyond what is necessary.

All throughout The Lady and the Dale, I was constantly reminded of those moments. Of my own complicitness in helping spread these horrible ideas. Of my own first reactions to these moments. Of the moments that made me wake up and realize that I had been indoctrinated into a toxic attitude just by virtue of it being passed off as investigative journalism. And it got me thinking, "wow, things have changed, but things still stay the same. Carlson and Lisheron have gotten away with their transphobia - and this documentary exposes it in the light for everybody (with an HBO or HBO Max subscription) to see - because they passed it off as trying to find out the real story. And so what if they helped expose fraud? Does that mean that they had to throw in their biases? No. They set out to make the story more salacious. They aimed to keep it within a standard narrative. They both defied and fulfilled the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle by overcomplicating stories about a fraudulent car company run by an Ayn Rand fangirl and her roadside-rose-selling business later on in life by adding in big "exposes" on her exploits under her deadname (as if that's the Rosetta stone to Carmichael's libertarianism) AND ultimately delivering unchallenging stories that don't do anything to challenge societal perceptions. And to say that at least they at least brought down some justice on Liz Carmichael for her illegal tactics - to claim that a stopped clock is right twice a day - is not only incorrect (their investigations are inherently tied to their transphobia, as both Carlson and Lisheron have demonstrated all throughout the documentary miniseries) but it is morally reprehensible. It doesn't matter if they did the right thing (exposing the 20th Century Motor Car Corporation as a fraud), they still did the right thing for the wrong reasons (because they saw Liz Carmichael as different and therefore somebody to investigate by virtue of her being different). A stopped clock is never right twice a day. It's never right once a day. A stopped clock is irrelevant. It is dead. And to insist that it has staying power because the worst person you know made a good point just leads the worst person to hook you in. That's how they get you.

And that's at the heart of the documentary - the responsibility of journalists to respect peoples' boundaries while pursuing stories and the extreme moral failings of those who came before, of the people who get away with increasingly deplorable actions because "a stopped clock is right twice a day," forever tolerating Dick Carlson deadnaming and misgendering Liz Carmichael, who had only become a public figure when she began hard-selling her three-wheeled car, because she had a checkered past (thereby making it okay for some reason). Carlson and Lisheron, by their bigotry, have created a hero of a confidence artist-turned-car-company-owner - they made Liz into an inspirational defiant character. And she ran a fraudulent car company. And that's what I love about her.

And that's what I love about The Lady and the Dale.