Bit
2022; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.14321/qed.9.issue-2.0180
ISSN2327-1590
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoBrad Michael Elmor's Bit—a trans-inclusive, sapphic tale of vampires in Los Angeles—is, it should be noted, not another melancholy lesbian period piece. The aesthetic and narrative playground of the vampire serial is rich soil for allegory and subversion; if we can accept mythical beings, queer identities may relocate from premise to context. For trans audiences seeking representation and students of genre subversion, Bit provides a totally idiosyncratic experience.Bit opens in media res on a coven of femme vampires, led by self-labelled dyke Duke (Diana Hopper). They murder a newly turned male vampire; as his heart burns in her hands, Duke utters to the other vampires, and the audience, a critical rule: “No. Fucking. Boys.” Cue the title text, complete with neon pink mouth dripping stylized blood. Bit establishes early that it will foreground violence against masculine characters—a flipped script of anti-femme sexually violent undercurrents codified in much of the vampire canon.1In the ashes of Bit's cold open, protagonist Laurel (Nicole Maines), a newly minted high-school graduate, launches on a soul-searching summer pilgrimage from rural Oregon to Los Angeles. It should be noted that actress Nicole Maines was the plaintiff in Doe v. Regional School Unit 26, a landmark legal battleground against trans-restrictive bathroom legislation. Casting Nicole Maines clarifies Laurel's identity; Bit never uses the word “trans.” Instead, transness is imparted via subtext: peers who treat her like inspiration porn and family who allude to years of conflict. Laurel's California sabbatical is clarified by a conversation with brother Mark (James Paxton): LAUREL: “They're not gonna be all patronizing, right? Because I'm not really in the mood.”MARK: “People aren't like that here . . . as much.”Discomfort to name Laurel's transness juxtaposes with Laurel's comfort not to name it. She summers in the mundane disidentification metropolis provides refuge from her exceptionalism to a backwards rurality. Cinema consistently either erases transness or presents it as unilateral character motivation. Bit remembers that we exist separately from transition—the privilege of mediocrity is refreshing.Mark, and Bit, inaugurate Laurel's arrival with a driving montage of L.A. nightlife that ends in line to enter a music venue. When Laurel's ID is deemed illegitimate—common for both underage drinkers and transitioning folk alike—the bouncer is supernaturally persuaded by none other than Duke, emerging from the shadows with the rest of her coven—Izzie (Zolee Griggs), Frog (Char Diaz), and Roya (Friday Chamberlain). An unknowing Laurel and hunting Izzie hit it off in the bar, and head to a second location. Alternating sequencing flashes between two set pieces: the vampire's nest interior, where Duke seduces, feeds on, and kills two men; and the roof of the building, stage to flirtation, sexual aftercare, and suspense of predation between Laurel and Izzie. Here, boundaries of metaphor bleed together: Are they discussing Laurel's demographically lower life expectancy, or the fact that Izzie is inching closer to her neck? If transness is allegorically occult, the overlay is clear.Izzie inevitably bites Laurel. Before the predation can be completed, Duke intervenes, choosing to let Laurel live—if she joins the coven (one vampire later calls it “Bite Club”; the others groan before the audience can). After being tossed off the roof and into a dumpster—Bit is not above using its premise for occasional slapstick—Laurel begins another journey of self-discovery. Trans death is reinvented as a coming-of-age narrative. If cinema has a predilection for killing trans women, at least Bit resurrects them the morning after.Duke asks Laurel: “Shoveled a lot of shit in your life, haven't you? How'd you like to hold the keys to the kingdom for a change?” Duke later clarifies that consuming those who would consume her are justified reversals of patriarchal violence. Her call-to-arms is born of lived experience told via flashback: herself a refugee of rural queerphobia fleeing to 1970s New York (another metropolitan hunting ground), she was turned, glamoured (mind-controlled), and sexually enslaved by a male vampire, The Master (Greg Hill). Duke eventually turns on him, and now consumes pieces of his heart—his power—day by day. This backstory informs Duke's three rules: never glamour another vampire, kill what you eat, and do not turn a man into a vampire—“men can't handle power.” Karmic violence abounds in a montage violently flipping male consumption—an art critic mansplains feminism to Izzie, who promptly eats him—a fraternity brother begins to assault Frog's seemingly asleep body, before she turns the tables—Duke apprehends a peeping tom. Violence, to Duke, is the inevitable constitution of identity. “We're made to be monsters, so let's be monsters. Let's be gods!”Duke's hierarchy is radically coded, but Elmor invests time into subverting this expectation. Although her coven varies intersectionally along sexuality and ethnic lines, the cisgender, white Duke leads with authoritarianism. Violence and carceral punishment undergird one of Bit's minor twists: Duke has been glamouring her entire coven to ensure compliance (“I did it to make it easier to help you,” Duke pleads when discovered). When Mark ends up bitten, with no option for survival but to be turned, Duke would rather he die—prompting a chain of events that resurrects and releases The Master. Bit makes clear that the inverse of male violence, itself still violent, is a double-edged tool; Duke's reign equates to “new victims, same great patriarchal violence and coerced compliance taste.” It is apt that The Master's tools do not dismantle The Master's house, and a more equitable coven is only ensured when Laurel literally burns The Master down. As the film reaches denouement, a newly turned Mark, spared by new coven leadership, asks Laurel what comes next. She answers: “Maybe [we should do] what nobody with power ever does. Share it.”Bit's layered criticisms of radical violence and trans identification make it worth examination, but not unconditional praise. Vampiric feeding and murder is often presented in eroticized ways, often under the pretenses of consensual sex, in line with the vampire canon's thematic original sin: erotic vampires are literally sexual predators. Izzie and Laurel's romance—and the sexually suggestive nature of “feeding” holistically—feel toxic to audiences in ways Elmor's script could spend much more time reconciling. Related to this, a key moment reveals the limits of Bit's refusal to name transness: when The Master encounters Laurel, he stares at her lap and remarks “I suppose it is the new millennium.” Having preyed upon a 1970s’ post-Stonewall New York underground scene, that Laurel is the first non-op trans woman he has encountered is anachronistic at best. Here, Elmor sacrifices trans history on the altar of internally consistent trans representation.Bit offers these subversions—and challenges—to any queer media syllabus. Moreover, Bit provides more complex homophily than audiences like me usually receive, a trans politic of occult possibility: that, if we prefer, transition is allowed to be the least interesting thing about us; that we can flip the script of patriarchal violence without perpetuating it; that our arc is more than early death. Duke asks, “Does death scare you?” Laurel's answer justifies trans storytelling: “My life's already been kinda like a horror movie. So fuck it.”
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