The Christine Jorgensen Story

published in Fatal Visions No.6, Melbourne, 1989

Once in a decade, Channel 10 decides to screen the Christine Jorgensen Story. I didn't have a video recorder 10 years ago, so catching it this time around was well worth the wait. The Christine Jorgensen Story is purely and simply a very straight docudrama about America's first sex change operation recipient. Well, perhaps director Irving Rapper thought it was straight, but the end product is a little bent - if not totally twisted. To say that the film has dated would be an understatement.

Consider the date: 1970 - the big 70; when permissiveness was synonymous with bra straps, velvet jackets, chunky moustaches. Everyone's best friend was black; Hugh Hefner was cool. The Christine Jorgensen Story could hardly be told. Not exposed, nor ridiculed. Just the true story. For some reason, Rapper and company thought the story should be told with pathos. The end result is pathetic. Swelling orchestral strains spill and bleed all over the soundtrack, always at full Steiner-like intensity, making you wonder what the drama is all about, especially when the acting is so hilariously wooden and the script is so unbelievably blunt. This is the film the Kuchar Brothers always wanted to make! The film's lead character, John Hansen, is a riot. As Chris the man, he is so effeminate in a repressed sort of way it's hard to concentrate on any other details about the film because he always looks so uncomfortable. Then, when Chris becomes Christine, he/she seems so pathetically camp the whole film becomes absurd. And just when you think you can't take much more of it, he starts having an affair with a hunky dude reporter - all to even more orchestral swelling.

But all of this helps make the film truly unique. I can't think of another film that so pathetically fails by impregnating facts with romantic sentimentality - except for Glen or Glenda, which this film often uncannily recalls, especially via the Angora jumper shared by both films' central characters. The Christine Jorgensen Story doesn't so much make you cringe as it leaves you in awe at how deadpan are its attempts at such extreme emotionalism. In a weird sort of way, the film - I would say unintentionally, though it could be argued otherwise - reflects the dilemma of transsexuality, that of the right being trapped in the wrong body. This film is not unlike a 40s kitsch romance trapped inside a 70s telemovie, or the other way around. Whatever the case, it's badness is intriguing in an unusual way.

Text © Philip Brophy 1989. Images © respective copyright holders