[responsivevoice_button voice=”UK English Female” buttontext=”Listen to Post”]
Tangerine, directed by Sean Baker ( co-creator of Greg the Bunny), tells the story of Sin-Dee, who discovers that her boyfriend/pimp has cheated on her while she was in jail, with a fish (a natural-born woman). Sin-Dee, played by Kitana Kiki Rodriguez is in tow with her best friend Alexandra, played by Mya Taylor (a new-era Marsha P. Johnson).
Video: Pay It No Mind: The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson
I love this movie because it’s refreshing to see a cast of mostly cisgendered and transgendered women in a plot. And yet, I’m also reminded of what it means to be a woman walking alone, and the implications behind it.
As refreshing as this movie is, there are very strong similarities to Larry Clark’s Kids.
In Kids, Jennie (played by Chloe Sevigny) finds out that she has contracted HIV from Tellie (played by Leo Fitzpatrick), and he doesn’t know it. Jennie spends the entire day and night trying to track him down and navigates the streets of New York from downtown to the nightclub scene. Both Tangerine and Kids take place over the course of one day, within a group of young, often ignored and neglected youth. Both portray one character’s singular mission to track down this one guy. Both primarily use trains, streets, and cabs to get around. Characters in both movies use drugs to cope with their pain, trauma, or boredom. Both display sudden bursts of character violence and doesn’t completely resolve itself.
As I said, there’s a high degree of walking, train-riding, and bus riding which is unusual for a movie set in L.A. It makes sense for the characters, as many low-income people tend to rely on walking and public transportation. The side effect makes Tangerine feel more like a movie set in New York, Chicago, or DC, where these modes of transportation are more common.
Note the beautiful architecture of this subway entrance.
”Los Angeles is a beautifully-wrapped lie. ... Agree to disagree.
I want to take this time to address Sin-Dee’s “rage” sequences.
Rage, particularly as it operates within bodies of color, can be misunderstood. A typical movie critique would’ve understood Sin-Dee’s anger as a character trait, rather than a reaction to how she’s been betrayed by her boyfriend, and *SPOILER ALERT* her best friend. More importantly, simply seeing her outrage as a part of her character doesn’t take into account the cumulative effects that abuse, marginalization, and discrimination burden a human being who simply wants to be loved, to work, and to have a place to live.
I highlight this movie in DWP because this could have gone so, so wrong. It could have gone the way of work like Harmony Korine, the skateboarder-turned-screenwriter of Kids and who would go on to direct Spring Breakers — a movie about five young, mostly white middle-class college students embark on an idealized life-changing Spring Break, and instead end up on an emotionally-remote killing spree through the drug subculture of South Florida.
Kids is very influential on Tangerine, but lately, it seems as if Korine takes pride in disregarding how his characters would be felt. Take Spring Breakers. A movie, ostensibly about five young college co-eds who eventually dissolve into violence and nihilism. At the end of a ruthless massacre in Spring Breakers, I didn’t feel sympathy, pity, or anger. I felt nothing because I knew little about what made these kids tick. But with Sinn-Dee and Alexandra, I did. As the director, Sean Baker clearly cares about his characters, even if they can be rude, violent, and hurtful. It’s because they also have the capacity to be hurt, traumatized, victimized. Korine should take notes. This is how you depict marginalized people with care. You give them space to be complicated and give them time to make it up to you.
Diversity Without Pity is a blog series from IDSL, highlighting media that uses smart design, and considers the diversity of it’s casting without selling the viewer or consumer, short. Select images courtesy of Netflix.
