Lana and Lilly Wachowski
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THIS IS THE WINNER CONTEMPORARY FILM DIRECTORS Lana and Lilly Wachowski Cáel M. Keegan Lana and Lilly Wachowski Contemporary Film Directors Edited by Justus Nieland and Jennifer Fay The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise, well-written introductions to directors from around the world and from every level of the film industry. Its chief aims are to broaden our awareness of important artists, to give serious critical attention to their work, and to il- lustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema. Contributors to the series include an array of internationally respected critics and academics. Each volume contains an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview with the director, and a detailed filmography. A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book. Lana and Lilly Wachowski Cáel M. Keegan UNIVERSIT Y OF ILLINOIS PRESS URBANA, CHICAGO, AND SPRINGFIELD © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved “Interview with Lana Wachowski” appears by permission of Lana Wachowski. Frontispieces: Lana Wachowski (courtesy of Karin Winslow Wachowski); Lilly Wachowski (courtesy of Lilly Wachowski). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Keegan, Cael M., author. Title: Lana and Lilly Wachowski / by Cael M. Keegan. Description: [Urbana, Illinois] : [University of Illinois Press], [2018] | Series: Contemporary film directors | Includes bibliographical references, filmography, and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018022138| isbn 9780252042126 (hardcover : alk. paper) | isbn 9780252083839 (paperback : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh Wachowski, Lana, 1965– —Criticism and interpretation. | Wachowski, Lilly, 1967– —Criticism and interpretation. Classification: lcc pn1998.3.w33 k44 2018 | ddc 791.4302/33092273—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022138) isbn 978-0-252-05087-9 (ebook) Contents Acknowledgments ix sensing transgender | 1 Trans Opt: Received 6 “You Can Believe What You Feel”: Bound 8 Ecstatic Passages: The Matrix 23 Redpill 47 Adventures in Transreality: The Animatrix 48 Heroic Ends: The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions 55 Revolutionary Guises: V for Vendetta 65 Sensorial Assault 75 Fixed Races: Speed Racer 76 Escaping History: Cloud Atlas 87 Speculative Heights: Jupiter Ascending 100 Epilogue—Event Horizon: Sense8 106 interview with lana wachowski | 131 Filmography | 153 Bibliography | 161 Index | 177 Acknowledgments Nothing could have happened without the cinema, and so this work is indebted to Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s sensational artistic vision. I am equally grateful to Karin Winslow Wachowski and the Ravenswood Kinowerks staff, especially Dave Walsh, for their generous support of this project. I thank Meredith Freeberg for the delicious vegan lunch, and Xoe Wise for saving me when my phone crashed. Appreciation to Belinda McClory for helping me finally understand Switch. Heartfelt regards to the cast, crew, and production team of Sense8 season two, with special thanks to Lana Wachowski, James McTeigue, Aimee Allegretti, and Ethan Stoller for their warmth in sharing their work. Jennifer Fay and Justus Neiland were inviting and insightful edi- tors whose suggestions and questions were crucial to the growth of this book. Danny Nasset was a superb guide who ensured this project found its final form. Cindy uW and Girish Shambu gave gracious feedback at the proposal stage, and Alex Wescott provided expert bibliographic and indexing support. Kristine Krueger at the Margaret Herrick Library sup- plied archival materials, and a grant from the Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) provided key funding. Kevvo Gierman made the images beautiful. Gratitude to my interlocutors at the National Women Studies Association, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, American Studies Association, WisCon, the Trans* Temporalities Conference, the D.C. Queer Studies Symposium, Stanford University, the University of Turku, Sonoma State University, and especially the International Trans* Studies Conference, whose spir- ited engagement gave the ideas here life and shape. This book was inspired by Susan Stryker’s lecture “Disciplinary Kinship,” delivered in 2013 at the Queer Method symposium at the University of Pennsylvania, and would not exist without her intellec- tual example and caring mentorship. Early encouragers included Mat- thew Holota, Diana Elrod, Geoffrey Babbit, Kathryn Cowles, and Anna Creadick. Jason Laker and Caetlin Benson-Allot were indispensable sources of advice. My Queer Theory students were an enthusiastic sounding board, pushing me to an ever finer grasp of the material and my own thoughts. A wonderful cluster of colleagues and friends opened around the project, including Laura Horak, Eliza Steinbock, Roxanne Samer, micha cárdenas, C. Riley Snorton, Lotta Kähkönen, Alexis Lo- thian, Ramzi Fawaz, Chris Straayer, David Getsy, Don Romesburg, Cam Awkward-Rich, Sheila Cavanagh, Deborah Shaw, Trish Salah, Jack Halberstam, and Dana Polan, all of whom provided feedback and encouragement throughout the research and writing process. GVSU colleagues Patrick Johnson, Lindsay Ellis, Jae Basiliere, and Karen Zivi gave stalwart motivation. Guin Thompson and Durwin Talon came through in the clutch, lending me their laserdisc player (which is still in my office and may never be returned). The lovely Anne Statton put me up in Chicago more times than I can count and showed me around with native zeal. I think we ate the whole city. To Laura, Roxanne, and Matthew especially, thank you. You were my deepest readers and made sure I kept finding what it was I had to say. To my wife, Marla Wick, I owe every word. This book is for her and for Violet—the ones who make it real. x | Acknowledgments Lana and Lilly Wachowski Sensing Transgender It is the day after the Orlando Pulse massacre, and Lana Wachowski is wearing black. I am as well, but this is purely coincidence. Rushing with the jittery nerves of a young researcher to the Sense8 shoot in Gary, Indiana, that June morning, I had not given much thought to the news or to the color of my T-shirt. When Wachowski arrives to begin the day’s work, I see im- mediately that she has: her black shirt is emblazoned with a pink triangle accompanied by what I learn are the words “Who’s next?” in Cyrillic. When I inquire about the language, Karin Winslow Wachowski (Lana’s wife) explains to me that Lana and her sister, Lilly, wore these shirts during their press tour for Jupiter Ascending. Knowing they would be screening the film in Russia, the siblings and longtime codirectors used the shirts and matching armbands to protest the anti–gay propaganda law instated there in 2013. Today, in the wake of the forty-nine mur- ders at Pulse,1 “Who’s next?” carries a renewed and terrible resonance. Quietly observing the crew’s unfolding preparations, the previous day’s news slowly catches my heels. I struggle to make sense of this scene in the face of such disaster for others. As the sun begins to arc high, we throng into a ruined Gothic Re- vival church, its ceiling caved in by fire. From behind my dust mask and hardhat, I watch Wachowski work for hours with the cast, crew, and codirector James McTeigue in beating, early summer heat. More than anything, I am struck by the remarkably touching nature of her process: She touches everyone—blocking the cast members, physically guiding her Steadicam operator from behind while looking past his shoulder into the camera. She stands side by side with an actor for nearly an hour, asking for a short set of lines again and again until the necessary emotion pours out. She even touches me in a brief hug. I notice how by simply wearing the shirt, Wachowski has wordlessly brought the violence of the massacre into the shoot as an acknowledgment and a challenge: these are the stakes of being queer, trans, and of color in America; this is what we are imagining against. In response, the shoot feels full of a fierce sorrow, a desiring strain toward something else. The next day, as I drive back to Michigan, tears will unexpectedly roll down my face. In a 2012 interview with the Village Voice, Lana Wachowski reflects: “Growing up, fantasy was the world as the world would never be, and sci- ence fiction was the world—filled with problems and ideas—as it could be. We were always drawn more to science fiction than to fantasy. But for [Lilly and me], science fiction has always been an experimental genre.” At the very bottom of the same interview, she touches again on this utopian theme: “I believe inherent in any artist’s work is an optimistic truth. That the very creation of art is in itself an act of optimism” (Abrams). Across these statements, Wachowski expresses a faith in the subjunctive quality of art to lead us elsewhere:2 if by art we come to sense differently, we might then arrive at another world. This is the thesis and animating philosophy behind all of the Wachowskis’ cinema. It is also a conviction uniquely attuned with transgender experience. Transgender phenomenology is rooted in the desire to make perceivable a feeling of gender that others have not (yet) witnessed. In his enthralling exploration of transsexual self- narration, Second Skins, Jay Prosser grounds transgender subjectivity in a felt imaginary that seeks “to recover what was not.” Sensing something others miss, the trans imaginary summons its own literalization, “its exter- nalization, its substantiation, in material flesh” (84–86). We could say that 2 | Lana and