Extended thoughts on Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda
Ed Wood is a polarizing figure in cinema. Many regard him as the worst filmmaker of all time, some others regard him as an infallible, pseudo-ironic cult champion. I, for the most part, consider him a lovable tramp; he is a hack for sure, but the bizarre methods he employed in order to cut corners ended up giving his movies a unique, memorable identity. What few things he didn’t rip off during the creation of his myriad B-movies and pornos is evidence of a man who clearly had a lot of meaningful ideas and the knowhow to pursue them. The budget often could not support him, and he was also rather apathetic about controlling his sets and actors.
Wood has been written about at length for many years, and I have little to add to the discussion. But I recently watched his debut film Glen or Glenda, which is quite different from everything that came after it. It’s not a B-movie in any recognizable sense. It’s a sort of pseudo-documentary about Wood’s own struggle with gender roles, made in equal parts kino-pravda and Twilight Zone. My initial thoughts (which I stand by) are listed in capsule form on my letterboxd page, which is now to be appended to my linktree (and this website) as proof of my continued development of writing style. In that first writing, I commented on how the movie can seem conflicted and anxious, sometimes hurt by the concessions it makes, and I also reduced it to Wood “coming out as trans.”
I believe that may be sort of misleading. Not explicitly untrue, but just not the entire story. The movie as presented is deeply personal and drawn from Wood’s own experience with clandestine cross-dressing, yes, but it isn’t necessarily a coming-out story. In fact, at the very end, the psychiatrist within the movie appears to “cure” Wood (or, the fictional character representing his real desires,) of transvestitism through psychoanalysis and therapy.
There is an argument to be made that the story ending this way is evidence that Wood is not truly as forward-thinking as the movie implies. Sympathetic, perhaps, but really only interested in the fetishism of wearing women’s clothing. This argument is also supported by the fact that Wood includes, briefly, another completely true story of an intersex person (a “pseudohermaphrodite,” since this was the 1950s,) who medically transitioned, and seems to harp on the idea that not only is transition only possible through reassignment surgery, it may only be feasible for the intersex. But I’m not so sure that these anecdotes are meant so literally.
The filmmaking supports this hypothesis. Most of the movie, though given in didactic, documentary form, is layered over the top of garish montage and dream sequences with Wood’s icon, Bela Lugosi, ominously presiding over events like a television host. The inclusion of these sequences is no accident; upon keeping us at a distance through dense, academic dialogue, Wood wants us to view these nightmares from the outside in an intellectual capacity. Why would the innermost feelings of the characters on screen be conveyed to us as so chaotic and unreal, when they appear to have recognizable lives?
To me, the answer is that Wood did not necessarily mean everything he said in an ideological sense. It is obvious that Wood’s own repression of his femininity is central to the construction of the movie’s imagery wholesale, and I don’t believe that his fixation with medical “cures” for gender nonconformity is due to his belief in it. I believe the movie, as optimistic as it is politically for the acceptance of nonconforming people, is driven primarily by defeatism. Wood spends almost an hour describing a 1-to-1 allegory for his own inner dialogues with himself, and invites the viewer and, indeed, his girlfriend (who is played by his real-life girlfriend at the time,) not to judge this allegory by existing gender conformity standards. We see his basest fears and desires laid completely bare, and we see him triumphantly reject the ridicule and pigeonholing of the world around him, which is then vindicated by the support of the woman in his life. At this point in the story, Glen essentially has transitioned into Glenda, and the dialogue supports the thesis by gendering her properly. Suddenly, it all falls apart when a detour into another woman’s life–a woman with a more ideal transition–interrupts the story.
Why the sudden turn away from confidence? It is my belief that this structure betrays Wood’s own retreat from commitment to a full transition. Wood launders the story of the other woman through beliefs of medicalism and faith in conversion therapy as a way of stifling his own jealousy. He had his moment: the beautiful triumph of finally feeling the beautiful Angora sweater he always dreamed of. For just a moment, it is not inconceivable that he (both Wood and Glen) could be a woman. But Wood may, in reality, already believe that it is too late for him to fully transition, and holds it against himself and the greater world that there weren’t clearer answers to the questions he asked himself for his entire life. The tale of Anne is crushing to him, and to the Glen he sees himself as. She was born with the right stuff already, she was already dainty and womanly, she got all the shots and all the treatments, she got the newspaper article.
“Why couldn’t that have been me?” he asks himself. “What’s the point in trying if I can never be that?” he concludes. Wood’s plight is one we still see today very frequently in repressed or late-transitioning women. The submission in the end that the only meaningful transition would be from some level of intersex into a medically-approved woman is Wood metaphorically looking at his shoes and kicking rocks. He would prefer to lie to himself about his desires being a transient fetish that can be purged from his mind, or at least made peace with, rather than being something bigger. What would be the other way out for the woman he obviously is? We know now from observation that the answer is simply suicide, and even years before having ugly statistics taunting him in the media, Wood knew this. The image of a non-transitioning cross-dresser dead by suicide is what sparks the movie’s entire discussion. That is Wood conceding that no matter how hard he represses himself, he at least wants to avoid that eventuality. We all do.
This film is a suicide note. The woman inside Wood is choosing to destroy herself rather than face the pain of a difficult, and likely inadequate transition. In modern times, young women the world over have developed so many different terms and descriptions of this particular conflict it boggles the mind. That Wood would be able to identify these anxieties within himself and make the horrible decision to forget about it all is what makes this a terrifying, disturbing, and ultimately, horrifyingly honest film. This is far beyond the pale of “boymoding,” and intensely personal so to upset the viewer well past the political implications of the repression it shows, and how it has remained mostly unchanged for 70 years.
The inclusion of Lugosi then takes double meaning as a fascinating vector for Wood’s repression. It is not uncommon or unknown as a phenomenon that the repression inserted into young trans people’s minds by gendered expectations can significantly stunt their sexual maturity in a way. This was pejoratively lumped in under “Peter Pan Syndrome” a lot in the mid-century, but it’s far deeper than simple fetishism. Lugosi’s presence as the deific controller of events within Glen’s mind is Wood’s way of generating a sense of comfort from which he can honestly discuss his own feelings. The complexity of his obsessions with womanhood defy even the densest, most loquacious of screenplays, necessitating he find imagery to speak for him. This is where he finds the confidence to construct the dream sequences I mentioned earlier. Lugosi is at once a supportive patriarch that Wood was never able to have and an image imprinted on his young mind that represents a kind of freedom or aestheticism that he idolizes separately from the unfair expectations that torture him. His presence validates the idea that Wood is not betraying any sense of manhood by seeing himself differently, or not conforming.
This is comparable to another, more recent film about gender nonconformity, I Saw the TV Glow. Director Jane Schoenbrun uses the persistent pastiche of 90s camp comedy TV (mostly Buffy) as a sort of safety blanket around their movie’s thorny subject matter. This finds its way into the torturous and stupid plot, but I care for it as a comparison only in terms of the filmmaking, and the execution of a young director’s style. The film is oriented around this same idea of repression: the central character ends up being driven mad by his (or her, more likely,) decision to walk out on the idea of transitioning as unrealistic for any number of reasons. Constant images of familiar, existing ideas or shows in the American consciousness seem to provide a jumping off point where the main character can confront their own feelings. Is he obsessed with the show because he wants to be the girl in it? In the end, despite his protest to the contrary, the movie explains, literally, that “there is still time” to transition, no matter what you have decided previously.
In this way, the metaphors serve similar ends for similar psychologies. Glen is surrounded by images of Wood’s childhood hero, Bela Lugosi, because that certainty of comfort proves to him that there’s something undeniable and benevolent outside of meaningless gender performance in his daily life. Schoenbrun uses their own memories of the stylish iconoclasts of their own childhood as a similar platform to stand on, calling on the same necessity for confidence in order to derive a point about the futility of gendered performance. Our shared cultural memories can break down barriers, it seems to say.
I draw this comparison to illustrate how Wood’s own techniques have gone independently repeated by other gender non-conforming people. I believe there is precedent for the idea that Wood’s thought process, no matter what was explicitly written in the text, betrays an underlying desire to transition. Glen or Glenda may have been that desire’s final public appearance, and, in a sense, its remarkable swan song. It could also be argued that the years following the movie indicate the horrible fallout from his failure to accept himself, being that his art style instantly degenerated, his relationships rapidly fell apart, and his reliance on drugs spiked exponentially. Of course he became a shell of himself, and a laughing stock–he annihilated all respect for himself in a kamikaze attack on his own perceived inadequacy. He picked the devil he knew, in a sense.
Schoenbrun’s film provides a much more optimistic opinion. Wood’s puerile fascinations with gothic imagery and auteur film may have found him a community, had he been alive in a more accepting time. But, if you have read my letterboxd, you might see that I fucking hated I Saw the TV Glow. Why does one metaphor fail where another does not? What makes Wood more “honest?”
The simplest way to understand that conclusion is to look at the filmmaking style, flat out. Schoenbrun has no interest in representing something real, where Wood intentionally chose to keep things as vérité as possible. Flat medium shots in wide focus are presented with clinical, explanatory dialogue, often ripped from things Wood had read or heard firsthand. The actors are mostly civilians, sometimes shot without their knowledge (Dziga Vertov style,) and he chose to play Glen himself and write her to act as he did in real life. That’s not to mention his using details of his own upbringing as fillers for Anne’s backstory, which I believe is another form of self-flagellation, where he examines his own squandered youth and regrets not acting on his feelings in a more useful way. But how does Schoenbrun structure their film? In the exact opposite manner; the film is almost entirely shot in dutch angles and close-ups, constantly using soft focus to provide a sense of dissociation. The dialogue is all shrouded in hallucinated observations about a stylized, unrealistic suburban childhood allegedly ascribed to the players on screen, which they only interact with by either being cartoonishly mistreated by other people in their lives or having some kind of confrontation with the show-within-the-show.
That seemingly works as a way of illustrating the detachment our hero feels from his environment, but why approach the subject like that? There is a clear and honest intention somewhere in Schoenbrun’s mind of sending a meaningful message to repressed people, but it is entirely smothered by layers of pointless obfuscation. Obfuscation and masturbation as well, as Schoenbrun lets the nostalgia floodgates completely open and the metaphor of the in-kayfabe TV show runs over everything else. The ability to empathize with the people is annihilated by references, parodies, and music videos for the director’s favorite shitty bands, all shot in overbearing, meandering mediums with garish neon colors.
This never manages to feel like something instinctual or necessary in the way that Wood achieved. Schoenbrun is never on screen themselves, nothing about them or their actual worldview is construed through the images included in the film, and, in kind of a vulgar way, nothing shown in the movie is something anybody actually gives a shit about. I described it as “fetishism” before, but since I have used that term in a different, more deleterious context in this writing, I should say that I mean “fetishism” in the sense that Schoenbrun wants to live inside a fantasy that vindicates their feelings for them. There is no need for conceit. They create a downtrodden character in a nightmarish world who is saved from themselves by the power of all the stuff Schoenbrun thinks is cool, including their own message at the end, playfully written in chalk on a road, like a child might write. Schoenbrun has created a complete simulacrum in which they can make a version of themself (a young black person, strangely,) that they can symbolically save.
In a way, it is less optimistic. Less so than something I just described earlier as a “suicide note.” Wood is willing to confront things in himself, and comes to the conclusion that he will never be the woman he may have wanted to be. He still finds a way to give others faith, however: he espouses a belief that there is still progress to be made, and that there are others who don’t necessarily have to end up like him. It is narcissistic, and very hopelessly dramatic, but in what way is I Saw the TV Glow not? Schoenbrun develops something that is little more than a therapy exercise, it’s final message intended to assuage the fears of a completely fictitious, unrecognizable main character for whom there is no real-life analogue. Their film is narcissistic too, but not in a way that’s instructive to any degree. Who is meant to find anything likeable or provocative in I Saw the TV Glow except for someone who was already the same kind of nerd as Schoenbrun, and who was seeking validation?
I harp on that movie for being annoying and pointless, but at least it has a good heart somewhere at the bottom (despite my calls for its negatives to be burned–there are many more layers to that film’s vanity that have very little to do with the gender politics behind its creation). There are far more dishonest and “irony poisoned” ego projects from far more tasteless and privileged people out there, some of them concerning gender transition in a sense. But I’m not willing to talk about The People’s Joker anymore after how ill it made me feel after my first watch.
The point of my diatribe on I Saw the TV Glow is to illustrate both the continuity of Wood’s attitude toward his own failed transition in the minds of the transgender people who have followed him, and the use of his candid technique in generating a sense of meaning in his own personal flogging session. It is deeply sad and horrific to consider what this movie’s ending may imply about Wood’s own life, knowing in retrospect that it turned out to be very tragic. That tragedy is what makes it feel so powerful, in the sense that its political optimism and its enormous, provocative imagery can still exist in spite of the path Wood took. It may be blasphemous or simply transphobic of me to imply that a guy who was in today’s terms a “repper,” and in some ways a transmedicalist, may have been the most successful in all of film at laying the angst of transition bare and creating the single most beautiful image of triumphant nonconformity we have ever seen. But I was left shaken after seeing Glen or Glenda, and it has not left my mind since.
I didn’t believe that the man behind Plan 9 From Outer Space could create something so original and so instinctive (not to even mention more of its bespoke formal nature, which I and others have described on letterboxd). But he did, and the stark contrast of that against all the self-congratulatory transgender art of today, much of which has done nothing to actually contribute to any discussion surrounding transgenderism politically or psychologically, was unbelievable to me. This and Pink Flamingoes may be the 2 most provocative queer films I know of at this point, which is a weird thing to say. But it appears true! The movie having inspired these thoughts in me is proof of the power to provoke that it wields. It is a grim mirror to our current perceptions of transition, in that it comes from a time of far worse and more backward treatment of gender nonconformity, but arrives in the same mental place that thousands of young trans women inhabit right this very moment.
I believe that this is an undeniably intellectual film, and is worth considering critically and comparing to other films with similar themes. Wood’s story isn’t often told from this perspective, but I believe that this movie proves that under different circumstances, he could have been considered a transgender woman. His refusal to pursue that may have been a far larger component in the development of his style and career than many understand.
My initial review of Glen or Glenda on letterboxd:
Triumph In Blog 
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