 Starring: Cillian Murphy, Eva Birthistle, Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson
Director: Neil Jordan
Year Of Release: 2005
Plot: Breakfast On Pluto shows us chapters from the episodic life of Patrick ‘Kitten’ Braden, who’s brought up by his relatives in Ireland after his mother leaves for London and never returns. However he can’t stop thinking about her, and when he grows and becomes a confused transgendered young man/woman, he heads off to London to find his mum, getting mixed up with the IRA, meeting all sorts of unusual characters and working in a peep show along the way. |
2005 was quite a year for actors trying out a different gender on the big screen. Cillian Murphy got in touch with his feminine side as Kitten in Breakfast On Pluto, Chiwetel Ejifor played a flamboyant drag queen in Kinky Boots, Chris Williams was a transsexual hotel clerk in The World’s Fastest Indian, Angel (Wilson Jermaine Heredia) in Rent sang and danced her way round New York, Roger De Bris (Gary Beach) turned up in a dress in The Producers and Felicity Huffman was Oscar nominated as a pre-op male-to-female transsexual in Transsamerica. Even animated movies were getting in on the act, with Fender (Robin Williams) in Robots gradually revealing his cross-dressing tendencies.
However while it’s certainly become a lot commoner and less controversial in recent years, men dressing as women and vice-versa has a long history on the silver screen. It’s believed to have first arrived in Hollywood through stars like Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin, who imported it from the British music hall tradition. In these early days it was largely used purely for comic purposes, as what could be more hilarious than a man dressed as a woman, or somebody thinking a woman wearing trousers was a man?
From the 30s to the 60s cross-dressing largely disappeared from the screen, due to the strictures of the Production Code, which pretty much tried to banish anyone who wasn’t wearing their correct idea of gender-specific clothing. There were of course a few notable exceptions, such as Some Like It Hot in 1959, and Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda?. However normally the only way to be allowed to feature a man dressed as a woman was if it was a sign that they were a deranged killer and their transvestism showed how they had gone against nature and were mentally unstable. This tradition gave us the likes of Hitchcock’s 1930 film Murder! and 1960’s Psycho, both of which had male murderers with a penchant for putting on a dress.
Indeed cross-dressing as a sign of a killer’s sick mind in a decaying society continued long after the end of the Production Code and featured in the likes of Brian De Palma’s 1981 Dressed To Kill, where by the time the killer gets his/her comeuppance, it’s done in such a way that it feels as if they’re being punished for wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes as much as being a serial killer.
Thankfully the serial killing transvestite has largely disappeared from the cinema screen (Breakfast On Pluto even comments on it, with the police assuming Kitten is an IRA bomber simply because she’s Irish and cross-dresses), to be replaced with transvestite and transgendered characters who comment on and explore modern society and identity politics. For example in Breakfast On Pluto, Kitten is a rather lost character trying to find love and acceptance, and the very episodic structure turns it into a film about how different people react to someone who comes into their life and doesn’t fit into an easily understandable box. Some accept her, others are shocked and angry, while many simply don’t know how to deal with someone they have no frame of reference for.
There’s also Boys Don’t Cry, where the point is bluntly hammered home about some peoples’ inability to accept those who are different to them, when Hilary Swank female-to-male transsexual is brutally murdered. Both Tootsie and Yentl deal with sexual politics in very different ways through a character pretending to be the opposite gender than what they actually are. Through this they explore the differences between the sexes and the position society puts men and women into and their expected roles.
There’s also a wave of modern movies about cross-dressing as a form of self empowerment, and showing people being themselves no matter what society tells them. One of the first of these movies was The Rocky Horror Picture Show, while it’s also popped up in films like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Kinky Boots and Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert. There’s also a skein of films where women dress as men in order to take on a more dominant role and show themselves to be the equal of any man. So you have Elizabeth Swann in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, who first dresses as a man so she can go to sea and pursue Will Turner, and then takes on increasingly male attire as she tries to become an ass-kicking pirate herself.
While cross-dressing has been used in cinema in many forms and for many reasons in recent years, probably the most common is still the one that brought transvestism to the silver screen in the first place – it’s done for comedy. Whether it’s Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire or Robert De Niro in Stardust, putting a man in a dress strikes a lot of people as automatically funny (whether that’s right or not), especially if it’s someone normally seen as very masculine, like De Niro. There’s a seemingly endless series of comedy films about a man dressing as women for one reason or another, like White Chicks, where Shawn and Marlon Wayans dress up as white women, or Tyler Perry’s Madea character, who pops up in all of his movies.
Cross-dressing, transvestism and transgendered characters certainly seem to have become a lot more popular in cinema in the last couple of decades. Thankfully few modern depictions are as judgemental as they used to be, back when most cross-dressing characters were killers whose non-traditional attire was a sign of a society gone mad, and who needed to be killed in order to reaffirm old-fashioned gender roles.
Nowadays it’s more likely to be used to talk about society and sexual politics, but largely it’s there to show characters pushing their way forward and living their life the way they want to live it, irrespective of what society may be telling them, and how other people react to that. Even while gender roles have changed a lot in recent years, putting one sex in the clothes of the other is still a powerful way to challenge preconceptions and create characters who can explore the prejudices of society. It’s something Kitten certainly does in Breakfast On Pluto.
TIM ISAAC
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