I’ve seen a post—it was widely circulated, so you may well have seen it too—where a woman showed pics of herself before and after her transition to highlight how miserable she used to look, how enervated, lifeless, and scared, compared to how happy, vibrant, and unselfconscious she looks now. The first photograph looks like a candid shot, with an unhappy deer-in-the-headlights stare. The second looks like a selfie. There’s a kind of happiness, one most of us too rarely find, that comes on as a genuine celebration of the self. Some days you can be so happy to be you, and so pleased with what being you looks like.
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is not a progressive masterpiece, what with it being a 1971 Hammer Horror picture. It was a pun that unexpectedly got greenlit, and I’m sure the studio embraced its salacious potential—one more woman for a little softcore Hammer nudity!—before anything else. The genderbending let them spice up a familiar Victorian tale, and that was good enough.
But movies can be a kind of alchemy, first in the collaboration between all their different creative forces—screenwriter Brian Clemens, director Roy Ward Baker, and actors Martine Beswick and Ralph Bates, to name of the most major—and then in the more gradual and distant collaboration between the film and its various audiences. And sometimes this ends with nuggets of gold.
Here, there’s an exquisite contrast between Jekyll’s pallid, buttoned-up chastity—he is shoehorned into having a love interest, his upstairs neighbor Susan (Susan Broderick), but he doesn’t court her so much as he’s chased and worn down by her, like the fox in a fox hunt—and his body-denying life of the mind and Hyde’s (Beswick) vibrancy, her obvious euphoria at being in her own skin, her bright colors, her lustful wanting that easily matches Susan’s brother’s. It’s the before and after photos all over again.
And the truth is, Hyde is no more monstrous than Jekyll, whatever he believes. The transformative elixir is made from the bodies of murdered women, but Jekyll is the one who starts the killing. In fact, in this muddled mash-up with Jack the Ripper and Burke and Hare1, he begins as he will go on, by denying his part in it all, contracting out the deaths and willfully deciding to know nothing about them. His rejection of his own body, conscious or not, is so completely rendered here that even when he must eventually do his own dirty work, he’s absolutely horrible at remembering to wash the blood off his hands—and of course those hands, bloodied or not, will become one of Jekyll and Hyde’s ways to see when an unwilling transformation is kicking in.
Again, it’s not fair to make the argument that this is some shining beacon of pro-trans sentiment: that the elixir comes from the bodies of murdered women, and that Jekyll at one point willingly transforms himself into Hyde so his victims will think themselves safe with her, is all probably enough for transphobic viewers to watch this quite comfortably. But it’s easy to find trans people who have embraced it2, especially for the strength and vivacity of Beswick’s performance. She commands the screen, and when her Hyde insists that she is real and it is Jekyll who must fade away, it’s impossible for me not to agree with her.
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is streaming on Tubi and Amazon Prime.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Arguably one of the best Twilight Zone episodes, and definitely one of the most Twilight Zone episodes.
Anthologized
A late night horror in an in-between kind of place.
Year of the Month
Winning the numbers game.
Department of
Conversation
What do we watch?
Serial Experiments Lain, Episode Four, “Religion”
What a strange, beautiful show. This has the arthouse aesthetic of long pauses – infamously overtaken by the ‘prestige’ model of television – but it makes it fully work, where characters are constantly making decisions both in terms of pushing the plot forward and in the micro, as they decide how to react to each other. These agonising pauses are less about filling time and more about empathising with agonising insecurity or frustration. Specifically, Lain has become more confident and less likeable to the people around her as she becomes actively aloof and more curious about computers and the Wired.
There’s a fascinating thing where each episode has its own episodic premise, but that premise is often elliptical; this one has young men being haunted by a young girl that turns out to be their violent video game being interfered with by kindergartners, which leads – possibly? – to one girl getting killed out of fear. This does remind me of how easy it is to forget that someone who looks foolish can easily be a child; at the very least, the very way websites are designed will flatten and anonymise people, making it harder to see their individuality.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Season Eighteen, Episode Nine, “Frank’s Team: A Dark Day For Baseball”
Insanely quotable – probably the most quotable episode of the season. I’m particularly amused by Dennis teaming up first with Frank and then with the random kid announcer, who he has extraordinary comedic chemistry with. It was also kind of a shock to realise all the main cast are floating around fifty (aside from DeVito, obviously).
There was a lot of stuff I liked in this Sunny episode, but I do kinda feel like they might have overstuffed it with ideas and not gotten enough out of those ideas. Dee’s lightning arm kinda came out of nowhere (and the loophole to get her on the team was some pretty lazy first-draft stuff). The team of lawyers didn’t amount to much. And I wish they’d have had Frank try to do even weirder, more exploitative shit with the team than just eat a bunch of overpriced chocolate (though I did laugh at the shoddy “Owner’s Box” sign).
The kid announcer was great and Dennis was great with him. Charlie’s insistence on having a “Lucky” was fun, too, even if they ripped off the ending from “Homer at the Bat.” And the ending twist is dark enough that they could have done something really fucked up with it and kinda didn’t, though Lucky #2 whaling on the cops is pretty funny.
Twilight Zone, “A World of Difference” – hmm, definitely a step down from the last couple of episodes, but not without its charm. More tomorrow, probably.
Hacks, S4E7 & S4E8 – I wonder if this season should be 13 episodes if only so there’s a little more breathing room; the scene where Deborah and Ava figure out how to make the show more of a hit is a fun, effective montage. Still, it’s a montage, and it solves things very quickly in part because they have two episodes left in the season. I did like how Deborah semi-inadvertently gets Winnie fired and it’s fast because this appears to be how things work in show business. You piss someone off in power and you’re gone. (Smart that Winnie kept pressing about the spin-off because TV is in free-fall; you can’t be number one on a sinking ship.) The show is overall so good with how the characters grow and change. DJ makes bad jewelry but she’s already a good mom and puts down clear, very understandable boundaries with Deborah. (Deborah for her part has changed enough to agree to them, though she still doesn’t grasp why a child being pen pals with Dennis Miller was weird.)
Ted Lasso, “Being Alive” – Season 4 finale. I’ll have more to say on a future Thursday, but there is a great irony at the heart of this season. It’s better than 3, but still prone to some of the same fundamental storytelling mistakes.