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Setting the (Death) Scene

Earlier this month, I read a book called The Death Scene Artist, by Andrew Wilmot. (Spoilers follow, obviously. And discussions of both body horror and dysphoria.) And while I had pretty mixed feelings, I've been chewing it over, and I think it's helped me put a lot of my own artistic practice into words. This post is kind of an exegesis for the fic I published today; but it's also kind of a rationale about the novel I've been writing, and rewriting, for nine months now. And both those projects have been hugely influenced by my doctoral work, and my thinking about bodies.

So. Death Scene Artist details the relationship between M_____, who makes a living playing extras in Hollywood films, and D____, an actor who remains relatively unknown, despite having played nearly 800 different characters who've died onscreen. Stylistically, it reminded me of Palahniuk and Easton Ellis; two writers I remember enjoying in my late teens, but couldn't go back to now, not really. It's told partly in first-person blog posts as M_____ unpicks their relationship, and partly in the form of scripts from films they made together. The other salient point, of course, is that M_____ has a closet full of human skins which they wear around town. Female skins, in particular:

In my closet hang the skinned and stitched body sleeves of a hundred different women of all shapes, sizes, ages and ethnicities. Each one is a composite, a unique artistic statement carefully pieced together from several worlds’ worth of experiences. I remember in our early days what it was like, hunting for that perfect body, that exquisite, impossible-to-describe-but-you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it skin that would better serve the stories we wanted to tell. It was an art in and of itself, the pursuit – the creation of a character of our very own. You were good at it, too.

As this excerpt suggests, what brings M_____ and D____ together is an intense commitment to the art of creating characters, and an obsession with death. M_____ started out as an obituary writer, and writes false obituaries in order to cope with their circumstances; and, on numerous occasions, they tell stories of murdering women in order to take their skins. And D____ has carved out an entire profession of dying on film, again and again. At one point, M_____ describes him as a ronin, "a travelling purveyor of death for hire" who'll work for anyone who pays him. Consequently, their relationship is about as dysfunctional as you'd imagine. They pretend to be other people together, but D____ also resists M_____'s attempts to get to know the man beneath. They fall apart when D____ refuses to break character one too many times, and ends up hurting M_____. Wilmot effectively conveys the final exchange between these protagonists, by switching between prose for M_____, and script format for D____:

You called again an hour later. Your voice was hoarse, and you were huffing into the receiver as if you’d just come in from a run. I couldn’t tell at that point who you were even trying to be.

D____

(Exhausted)

I'm safe. For now, anyway.

“Look,” I said while pacing my apartment, staring for a moment at the mirror on the dresser in front of me – at the two softball-sized purple blotches on my chest that had not even started to fade. “I … I don’t think I can do this anymore. I think … I’m tired, D____. Of this. Of us.”

And so they break up, and so M_____ goes to therapy, and so they start keeping a blog, the very same one we're now reading, and so on and so on. But there are two major twists near the end, both crucial to unpicking the narrative. One is that M_____ has not really been killing women, but that their 'sleeves' are characters from their old manuscripts, as they hope to be a screenwriter. The other is that they're (presumably AMAB) trans. There are allusions to this throughout, but it only really came together for me as a deliberate Trans Thing, rather than a coyness about M_____'s gender, right at the end. With M_____'s self-authored obituary, and the revelation of their real name. Obviously, this whole conceit draws on the trope of the transfem serial killer, though not for a transphobic purpose: Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill, whatever the fuck J.K. Rowling did in her last crime novel, et cetera. Not a trope I'm personally interested in, but I get why another trans person would be. I get the appeal in trying to sympathetically make sense of the archetype, of that kind of relationship with your own body, and the idea that it's not inherently evil to want to be someone else. There's plenty of trans-studies academia about that, too. (See Halberstam on The Silence of the Lambs, and Koch-Rein on The Skin I Live In, for instance.) But that's not what I want to talk about, not really.

Here's what bothered me about Death Scene Artist. Not that it's doing multiple thematic body-horror things, or that it's trying to work through a transphobic trope, and definitely not that it has a trans protag who's allowed to be shitty. My problem was that it is doing weird thematic body-horror things, both with M_____'s supposed murders and with their body slowly wasting away; and it struck me as weirdly unvisceral. I was reading about this stuff, but I wasn't feeling it. I wanted it to be uglier, more provocative, to make me feel like I was wiping blood off my teeth. And it just... never got there for me.

So. How did I become someone who read a book about a trans character (ostensibly) stealing skins to facilitate a bad romance, and come out of it going "eh, not fucked-up enough"?

Thesis Talk

I don't talk about my PhD much, outside of locked accounts. This is because I'm doing pretty niche work, and combined with the fact I have an unusual name, I get paranoid about people being able to find me. But I will say that a major part of my thesis has been working with theories of embodiment - of what it means to experience being in a body, basically - and particularly trans embodiment. To condense my lit review on this stuff into something that isn't 11k words long: I'd argue that the core experience of being trans is a kind of bodily rupture, a kind of feeling-out-of-placeness, that can never be fully reconciled. It can definitely be made less bad, by hormones or surgery or changing name and pronouns - but it can't be eliminated. It starts at gender dysphoria, but it runs far more deeply, into a sort of constant friction as I move through the world. (In this way, trans studies is sympathetic to disability studies. They're both disciplines about theorising non-normative kinds of embodiment.)

Obviously, body horror is a natural match for this kind of idea. Not to pathologise transness, or to suggest it's horrifying, or anything like that; but because as a trans person, I think having a body is inherently awful! And I want the media I consume to acknowledge that. To be honest, most of the gender dysphoria I've experienced wasn't about wishing I was a man, but frustration (and outright disgust) at needing to have a body at all. That the price of getting to be in the world was having to be in a vessel like this, that required constant maintenance. It had to be fed, and watered, and exercised, and rested. That's a lot of effort to go to, for the privilege of being alive.

And, worst of all, it had to be perceived. Perceived, and then classified. And this only made the fissure widen.

Exegesis

Just to clarify: my relationship with my body has, in fact, improved. But that friction will always be there, and I'm mostly cool with it. And coming to terms with that has also helped me do the best creative work of my life. Actually, my novel stuff grew pretty cleanly out of my thesis? Reading theory about transness, and trans embodiment, pushed me to interrogate my own experiences in ways I wouldn't have otherwise. And on a more practical level, moving towards a model of transness as inherent bodily friction is really useful if you're both trans and a specfic liker.

There's this part of my thesis I wrote late last year which explains what I mean. Like so: suppose I woke up tomorrow, in a world where the cis/trans binary doesn't exist, had never existed; and I both had my ideal body, and would never be misgendered again. Would I still be "trans"? I'd argue yes. Because even if the terms were different, even if we had obsoleted gender completely, I would still have an oppositional relationship to my body. I would still not sit in it quite right. That, to me, is transness. And this visceral, nearly-antagonistic kind of embodiment became something I wanted to capture in my writing.

So then I made an awful space transmasc and went off to write his story. Two and a half drafts of it, actually. And when, desperate for a change of pace, I sat down to write fic again - I wanted to produce something that showed what I'd learned, what I'd gained. And part of that was process stuff, because I work best when I start on paper, and then do a full rewrite in a word processor. But the rest of it turned out to be that emphasis on viscerality. I know the written word isn't the best medium for invoking the body of its audience, but it's the medium I've got. I want to push back against the idea that having a body is inherently good. I want to publish fiction that makes my reader feel like they've been punched in the jaw, like they're tonguing bloody, broken teeth out of their mouth. Is it possible? I don't know. But I believe in that goal, and I want to keep working to rise to it.

In Conclusion

Please join me in writing weird, visceral body-horror shit as gay praxis. I've mostly talked about transness here, because that's what my work is about, but I think it can resonate with other kinds of LGB+ embodiment as well. I mean, the fic I'm working on is about being gay and overcoming heteronormativity, and it's still packed full of weird body shit; and there's a long tradition of gay ghosts and monsters and whatever else for a reason. Go nuts.

And, if you got this far - thanks for reading.