Is Nicolas Cage’s New Movie Longlegs “Queerphobic”? An Investigation
NEON
This article contains spoilers for Longlegs.
Transgender representation was so scarce in my adolescence that Psycho was one of my first exposures to the concept. To be clear, Norman Bates, played to creepy perfection by Anthony Perkins, was not written as trans. As a psychiatrist explains in a painfully expository monologue at the end of the film, the motel killer was not “a transvestite,” but rather a lost boy who was “simply doing everything possible to keep alive the illusion of his mother being alive,” including impersonating her. But on a visual level, like Silence of the Lambs after it, the 1960 Hitchock classic sent a stigmatizing message that transfeminine expression was somehow inherently villainous. Also like Silence of the Lambs, it’s one of my favorite movies. As a trans woman, if I excised any visual media that associated queerness with monstrosity, I wouldn’t have a lot of horror left!
Longlegs, the new film from Anthony Perkins’ son Oz, is in conversation with Psycho and Silence of the Lambs, but in a decidedly metatextual and referential way. Early on, an FBI agent instructs his team to go door-knocking “just like they do in the movies.” Later, our protagonist, the psychically sensitive bureau newbie Lee Harker, says that her first choice of career was to be an “actress.” As Lee pursues the titular Longlegs — a serial killer who somehow manages to convince families with young daughters to murder themselves without being physically present — references to horror cinema staples abound. Suffice it to say, this is a film that knows it’s a film, made by the son of a Hollywood legend, and there’s no separating it from that context. Which is why the debate that’s emerged on X, formerly Twitter, and elsewhere about whether Longlegs is “queerphobic” leaves me feeling weary, and worried for the media literacy of moviegoers.
I won’t recap how the conversation emerged as I have no interest in arguing directly with specific posters — go read a few of their takes if you’d like! — but the argument is that, because Nic Cage’s serial killer character Longlegs has long hair, wears androgynous clothing, and looks sort of like a waterlogged British glam rocker, the film is playing with transphobic visuals. There’s reason to be suspicious, given horror’s long history of using transfeminine-coded bodies to repulse viewers. But to the extent that Longlegs is referencing that trope, it’s not doing so straightforwardly, nor in a way that’s as overtly pathologizing as Silence of the Lambs. Longlegs knows what it’s doing, and so does Oz Perkins — and even without knowing his biography, I’d give this one a pass: Your mileage may vary, but I didn’t feel like my audience was creeped out by Longlegs because he looked “trans,” but rather because he was a pasty stranger talking to little girls about their birthdays.
As many film critics pointed out in response, however, it’s important to understand the film in relation to the director’s family background: Anthony Perkins, a screen legend thanks to his role in Psycho, died from complications of AIDS in 1992 — and his wife, Berry Berenson, helped keep the actor’s sexuality hidden from their children, according to Oz’s account.
“Everything that I try to do, I try to make it about myself from the beginning,” Oz Perkins told People of his filmmaking process. “What’s the simple truth that I can use as a kind of a North Star? In my case, I grew up in a household with a very famous, visible father who was living two lives, at least, and was a closeted homosexual or bisexual man.”
*Them* contributors hand-picked their favorite queer horror films.
Although I put a spoiler warning at the top of this article, I’ll put one more here for good measure because this pertains to the ending of the film. (Seriously, stop reading if you want to be surprised!) But in the third act of Longlegs, we learn that Cage’s serial killer character has an accomplice in the form of Agent Harker’s mother, Ruth, who spends most of the film up to that point urging Lee to say her prayers. The scheme is thus: Longlegs makes an evil doll, Ruth impersonates a woman “from the church” to smuggle it inside a family’s home ahead of their daughter’s birthday, and then a devilish force hidden inside the porcelain skull of the toy motivates the father of the family to commit murder-suicide. What started as an FBI procedural in the vein of Silence of the Lambs becomes a full-on Satanic panic flick by the time the credits roll.
Does Oz Perkins believe that his father’s queerness, and his mother’s complicity in concealing it, was akin to devil worship? It’s clear from his many thoughtful interviews on the film that he does not. It’s also obvious from how closely the film follows Lee — tracking her facial expressions and catching each downturned corner of her mouth as she talks with her mother on increasingly awkward phone calls — that Oz knows what it feels like for parents to keep things from you: It can feel evil, like there’s some festering darkness hidden behind their closed bedroom door at night. Oz Perkins is a smart, savvy filmmaker, who I knew previously from his appearance in the Shudder documentary Queer for Fear discussing his father’s legacy. I’d argue that the son of Anthony Perkins is probably more aware than most of the relationship between horror and queerness! With all that in mind, the Satanic panic that defined the era leading up to his father’s death serves as a compelling framework for the unspoken truths that eat away at families from the inside. Oz is not saying homosexuality is evil; he’s saying well-kept secrets possess an almost otherworldly power.
It’s important to remember that films can use metaphor without making a direct comparison, that they can play with imagery without endorsing it, and that they can use old genre tropes to tell subversive new stories. I won’t tell you how you have to feel about Longlegs, but I would recommend experiencing it because of — not in spite of — the film’s intersection with queerness. There’s a lot going on beneath its creepy surface.
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Originally Appeared on them.