Entertainment
Jennifer Finney Boylan on Trump's 'two sexes' executive order: 'I woke up surprised to learn that I was a man again'
On the Shelf
Cleavage
By Jennifer Finney Boylan
Celadon Books: 256 pages, $29
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“I hope people don’t think it’s a book about the history of breasts,” laughs Jennifer Finney Boylan via Zoom from her New York City apartment ahead of the publication on Tuesday of “Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us.” Her latest memoir comes on the heels of President Trump’s executive order proclaiming that the U.S. government will recognize only two genders — male and female.
“I call the book ‘Cleavage’ because, to some degree, it’s about a separation: before and after,” she says. “Cleavage is a wonderful word. It’s what linguists call a contronym because its definition contains its own opposite. It means division, but it also means coming together. It also means the space between things.”
Boylan also toyed with the titles “Both Sides Now,” after the Joni Mitchell song, and “He’s Not There,” a “bookend” to her first memoir about coming out as trans, “She’s Not There,” in 2003.
“When I came out 25 years ago, nobody had yet been given formal instructions on how to hate me,” she says. “In some ways, things are easier 1738668740. The path that was, for me, so obscure is now fairly well-blazed. But in some ways, things are harder because with increased visibility comes increased blowback.”
Boylan talked to The Times about Caitlyn Jenner, religious hypocrisy, her trans daughter and “Emilia Pérez.”
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
How does it feel to have your book coming out at the current political moment?
That’s the question, isn’t it? Is it the very best time to publish a book about the transgender experience or is it the very worst? I’m hoping it’s a good time because the topics are in the news. On the other hand, there are a lot of topics in the news. I hope people will take a moment to consider the stories that I tell because storytelling, I believe, is the best method for opening hearts and enabling people to have empathy.
What’s your response to Trump’s “two sexes” executive order?
I woke up in my own bed surprised to learn that I was a man again and my wife was back in a heterosexual marriage. What’s odd is that nothing seemed to have changed, at least nothing close at hand. Maybe that’s the lesson to follow: They can make all the laws and proclamations they want, but nothing is going to change the truth. It’s not for someone who has never met me to declare that they know my soul better than I do. I think I’ve become a pretty good expert on who I am over the years.
It does make me feel sad because what we’re facing, among other things, is a failure of imagination. To understand transgender people requires a certain amount of imagination and willingness to understand the lives of people who are different from ourselves. It makes me a little cross because it doesn’t seem to me to be such a heavy lift.
The language you use to describe your pre- and post-transition existences is pretty frank and plain. Are you worried at all that it could be used as ammo for far-right extremists who deny the existence of trans people?
They can bend anything out of shape. Everyone knows what I’m talking about when I say pre-transition and post-transition. I recognize that there are lots of ways of looking at this. There’s not a singular transgender experience. The wonderful thing is that we have so many different ways of being us.
I talk about my own experience the way I see it and the way I think is easiest for people who don’t know anything about the transgender experience to understand. How I talk about these issues to a general audience might be a little different from the way I discuss it with a group of my peers. My main desire is to tell a story and to provide people who’ve never thought about this stuff with a way in.
Right-wing folks will bend whatever I say out of all sane context, but in the end, do they understand that conservatism ought to mean leaving people alone? Do they understand that the command from the Bible is to love one another even as I have loved you? Do they understand that Jesus himself said, regarding trans people, let those who can accept this who can. “Some are eunuchs because they were born eunuchs, some are eunuchs because they were made eunuchs by others, and there are some who were made eunuchs in order to better serve God. Let all who can accept this who can” [Matthew 19:12]. You want to quote scripture, you want to bend my words around — have at it. But in the end, all we can do is try to love each other and understand each other. I’m going to be saying that as I’m carried off to whatever prison they have in store for me.
On that note, what do you make of Bishop Mariann Budde calling for mercy and the backlash that has ensued?
Oh no, not a backlash to mercy! What a controversial thing to say, that we deserve mercy and that the job of the president of the United States is to protect the vulnerable and the needy in this country. What an incredible controversy, that an episcopal bishop should be calling on us to have mercy and to love one another. We’ve reached a world in which the idea of mercy is political. It’s going to be a long four years.
It was a great sermon and it’s a shame that we didn’t hear more of that during the campaign because Mr. Trump, in addition to being a deeply unserious person, is a cruel person, and his policies are designed to pick on the weak and to get everybody else to hate each other.
You also write that “People coming out as trans now aren’t apologizing for who they are. They aren’t begging for forgiveness or understanding.” Do you think that will recede in light of more anti-trans bills?
If anything, I think people will have an increased sense of fury that their desire to be themselves should be anybody else’s business. I can understand if people are a bit more careful about who they share that information with because we are under attack as never before.
As a mother to a trans daughter, what advice or words of wisdom and solace do you offer to trans kids growing up now?
When my daughter came out as trans, she didn’t want my counsel. That should surprise no one — doesn’t that sound like what your 20-something daughter would want to do? [Trans kids’] experience is different enough from mine that it’s maybe not my place to be giving people advice about how to live their lives. When I do give advice, it’s pretty general. I use the acronym TRUE: T stands for therapy or talk. Find someone to talk to. Don’t keep it all inside. R stands for read. There are a lot of good books about the trans experience now. I didn’t write all of them, but I did write most of them. [laughs] U stands for you. Be yourself as best you can. You shouldn’t try to be Jenny Boylan. You shouldn’t try to be Caitlyn Jenner, God knows. E stands for euphoria. Find your bliss, with the caveat of accepting that you might not be able to have everything you want right now. Now I’m sounding like a parent.
It’s not an easy life. Right now it feels like it’s harder than ever.
What do you make of Caitlyn Jenner’s continued support of Trump, especially in light of the “two sexes” executive order?
I don’t understand it. She’s supporting someone who has just declared her male. The ultimate goal is to erase us from society. To support him only suggests that she’s more concerned with issues having to do with her personal wealth and privilege than she is with the lives of people like herself. Or it might be that she’s as dumb as a bag of hammers.
Everybody on [“I Am Cait,” the E! docuseries that followed Jenner’s transition and starred Boylan] put our reputations on the line to open her heart. As I write in the book, “no one could accuse her of becoming the transgender Encyclopedia Brown.” It’s a shame.
And I wanted to ask you about Karla Sofía Gascón’s historic Oscar nomination for “Emilia Pérez” — have you seen it?
I haven’t, but it’s on my to-do list. I wrote a piece for the Washington Post about “Will & Harper” and I was delighted by that film. I’ve seen a lot of transgender documentaries and films and they’re almost always horrible so I can rarely watch them anymore. What’s almost as bad is how frequently these movies that I think really misrepresent our experience are loved by a broader, [cisgender] audience. I need to buckle in and watch that movie. I’ve heard great things about it.
Boylan will be discussing her new novel at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena on Feb. 25 at 7 p.m.
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Entertainment
Universal Music invests $80 million in Bollywood production company
Universal Music Group is investing $80 million for a stake in one of India’s biggest Bollywood production companies, Excel Entertainment Pvt.
Universal Music India, a division of Universal Music Group, will acquire a 30% equity interest in the Mumbai-based movie studio. In the deal, announced Monday, the companies will work together on forthcoming films, series, music and emerging formats.
While getting involved in India’s local film industry, Universal Music will also now receive global distribution rights for all future original soundtracks attached to projects produced or owned by Excel. There are also future plans for the companies to launch an Excel-linked music label that will allow UMG and Universal Music India artists to appear in various Excel titles.
The investment underscores the rapid growth in the Indian entertainment industry.
India is the 15th-largest recorded-music market globally.
Founded by producers Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar in 1999, Excel is responsible for making over 40 different films and scripted shows. Its most popular titles include “Dil Chahta Hai,” “Don” and “Talaash.” The company is currently valued at approximately $290 million.
“India’s entertainment landscape continues to grow from strength to strength, and this is the perfect moment to build meaningful global collaborations,” said Sidhwani and Akhtar in a joint statement. “Together, we aim to take culturally rooted stories to the world.”
Universal Music Group, with its corporate headquarters in the Netherlands and another office in Santa Monica, was founded in 1996. The music giant behind artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish is valued at roughly $48 billion on the U.S. stock market, with shares selling around $25.80.
Movie Reviews
UNTIL DAWN Review
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot of UNTIL DAWN puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Strong humanist worldview that twists the concept of modern psychology into a supernatural hellscape with unexplained time loops and reoccurring nightmarish horror filled with excessive violence and gore, but with unexplained pagan supernatural elements (such as a storm circling a house, the appearance of more buildings, the time loop itself, and many more), the time loop perverts the laws of mortality and implies that the consequences of violence, murder, suicide, etc., don’t apply, the psychologist controlling the time loop discusses the situation with modern psychology in vague circles meant to confuse and disorient the nature of the reality in which the victims are trapped, religion or God is not explicitly discussed, but there’s an unexplained cross in front of a house that isn’t explained and a character references the belief that a possessed person cannot become possessed through contact but rather weakness of faith, and some occult content where one woman is a self-described psychic and is into “woo-woo” stuff as another character describes it, she tries to amplify her psychic abilities with help from the others by holding hands and meditation, and she often has strong feelings and seems to have a sense the others do not have, but no worship or symbols are shown, plus a girl dating a guy is said to have previously dated a girl as well as other men;
Foul Language:
At least 101 obscenities (including 62 “f” words), two strong profanities mentioning the name of Jesus, and four light profanities;
Violence:
Very severe violence and gratuitous blood and gore throughout including but not limited to dead bodies, monsters, scarred masked psychopath, stabbing, beating, and people spontaneously exploding;
Sex:
No sex shown, but a person puts on a VHS tape and a pornographic movie is heard playing briefly but not shown, and a woman is said to date a lot of people and one time dated another woman;
Nudity:
No nudity;
Alcohol Use:
No alcohol use;
Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
No smoking or drugs; and,
Miscellaneous Immorality:
A psychologist is a callous antagonist whose motives are relatively unknown beyond having a morbid curiosity that led to awful experiments and playing games with other people, he purposely keeps people trapped for no known reason other than his sick and twisted observations that end in gruesome murder and unnecessary torture.
One year after her sister Melanie vanished without a trace, Clover and her friends look to find more information about her disappearance. Clues lead them to an abandoned mining town. This place of unimaginable horrors traps them all in a horrifying time loop where they will be murdered again and again.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances, but it has a strong humanist worldview overall with some occult elements is filled with gruesome violence, gore, lots of strong foul language, and a time loop that leads to an increasing amount of horrific murder and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
The movie begins with a woman named Melanie clawing her way through the dirt with an unknown monster chasing after her. Digging her way out, she looks up to a masked psychopath standing over her with a scythe. She begs him, “No! Please not again. I can’t!” He fatally stabs her without a thought. It cuts to the main title, and an hourglass is shown with a ticking clock sound and unsettling music.
Cut to a group pf people in a red car driving up a winding mountain, an obvious nod to THE SHINING. It’s been one year after Clover’s sister Melanie vanished without a trace. The group consists of Max, Nina, Megan, Abe, and Clover. Shortly after their mother died, Melanie had decided to start a new life in New York. Clover decided to stay, which created tension between the sisters before Melanie left.
Clover and her friends are looking for more information about her disappearance. Their last stop is the last place she was seen in a video message taken in front of a middle-of-nowhere gas station. Megan, a proclaimed psychic, wants to join hands outside and see if they can feel any mystical energy regarding Melanie. Their attempt is cut short when an RV blares its horn and almost hits them, scaring them all.
Clover goes inside the gas station for a cup of coffee while the others talk outside. Clover asks the man behind the register if he worked here last year. After confirming he’s been working there for years, she shows him a picture of Melanie from the video. He asks if she was missing and clarifies saying that Clover is not the first to come asking. When she asks if many people around here go missing, he says people “get in trouble” in Glore Valley. As their only lead, the group decides to go there and stick together.
Nervously driving to the valley in an increasingly dangerous storm, the group begins to question what they are doing. Suddenly the storm stops but is still raging behind them. They park in front of a house with a “Welcome Center” sign, with the storm circling around the area but leaving the house dry. Confused, they get out of the car and look around. Nina decides to see if there’s anyone inside so they can come up with a plan. Everyone goes in except Clover, who walks up to the strange rain wall.
Inside the house, they find a dated and dusty interior. The power and water don’t work, and they conclude that they are the first people to come there in years. There is a strange hourglass with a skull on the wall. Checking the guest book, Nina finds Melanie’s name signed multiple times, with increasingly shaky handwriting. In another room, Abe finds many missing posters with faces on a bulletin board and finds poster with Melanie’s face.
Outside, Clover thinks she sees a person in the rain. She also hears Melanie’s voice and runs after it. Concerned, Max calls after her and he pulls her back in. As Nina signs the guestbook, the sun suddenly sets and the clock starts ticking.
Inside the house now with the hourglass turned over, they try to understand what’s happening. The car is out in the rain now with someone revving the engine threateningly. Some of them go to the dark basement, where the lights don’t work. There is an eerie sense of dread as Abe goes to check out a noise, and Nina finds a scarred and masked psychopath standing in a room as the top half of Abe’s body falls to the ground.
Hearing the commotion upstairs, the others go to see what happened and Max spots the killer. They run to hide, and the apparently invincible psychopath horrifically stabs each of them as they try to fight back. The sand in the hourglass runs back, as each character returns to where they were when Nina originally signed the book (she now signs it a second time). They remember what had just taken place, and how they were all murdered. Clearly stuck in this time loop escape room situation, they will now have to figure out how to escape this terrifying hellscape as the situations get worse with every loop.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
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