Body Horror and the Single Girl
Thrashing through dysphoria and suicidal ideation
[SCENE — Interior, somewhat barren apartment, unpacked boxes scattered around a couch in the middle of a largely undecorated living room. JUNE sits on the floor, she is crying and staring at her phone. A voice comes over the speakerphone.]
VOICE: Your call is important to us. Please remain on the line while we connect you to a representative…
[The voice is replaced by a sound that creeps into the phone’s speakers as if possessing it from a pit of pure hatred at the center of the earth, a cursed sound: smooth jazz. The on hold music spits terribly from the tinny little speakers. JUNE ends the call, slumps onto her side and continues crying]
We’ll return to that poor girl on the floor — don’t worry, she’ll definitely still be there when we get back.
Around Halloween a couple years ago, my friend Roz told me she was getting together with folks and having them show her their favorite horror movies. And my first thought was “ooh! We could watch Possession! …Jesus Christ June, are you fucking crazy?! You’re trying to get with this girl, not send her into an existential tailspin.”
If you haven’t seen it, Possession is a 1981 film by Andrzej Zulawski starring a very young and handsome Sam Neill and an absolutely unhinged vision of a woman named Isabel Adjani and it’s about the dissolution of their marriage. And it’s full of pain and tension and mental collapses, paranoia, violence, busted up bags of groceries, and a giant disgusting tentacle monster as a sort of romantic lead? It is a very weird movie. It’s not exactly horror, but it’s not NOT horror.
I suggested maybe we could watch Naked Lunch. The movie date never materialized.
I was going through some shit that October. I’d come out as trans earlier in the year and my marriage had dissolved. I was living alone (I still am but I used to too). And I was trying and failing to adjust to the life of a single middle aged girl in the city.
[SCENE — Interior, same barren apartment, same unpacked boxes. JUNE picks up her phone… okay, well she’s been clutching it in her hand this whole time, so not picks it up so much as draws it close to her tear-streaked face. She opens Twitter]
Realizing I’m trans at 40 years old has put a lot of my past experiences into new perspective. All my friends growing up being girls makes a lot of sense now. Another thing that makes a lot of sense: My love of body horror. I was really into Lynch in high school, Cronenberg too (fuck’s sake, i’ve got a Naked Lunch typewriter bug tattooed into my flesh). But my fascination with body horror wasn’t the grotesquery of it, it was the transformation. When I started writing stories of my own, again and again, grievous bodily harm was an avenue towards self-discovery rather than oblivion. Or maybe… okay, usually… both.
[JUNE, still lying on the floor, holds her phone in both hands and taps out a tweet. It reads ‘Doordash but for someone to come to my place and just murder the fuck out of me pls,’ She hits TWEET and dejectedly tosses the phone aside]
When Roz was asking for fav horror movies, my mind went immediately to Possession because like honestly? I’ve never seen a single Freddy or Jason movie 😬 Evil is not really that interesting to me. Or scary. But the kinds of shit we as ordinary people do to one another? What we do to ourselves? THAT shit is terrifying.
[JUNE sits up from her… I sit up from my spot on the floor. I stumble… clearly I’ve been drinking. I go to the kitchen and stare at the floor. I stare at the barren room, the unpacked boxes. I stare at the knife block on the counter. I pull the large carving knife from the slot and stare.
There’s an iconic image of Isabel Adjani in Possession. She’s having a meltdown in the Berlin subway. She thrashes around, she screams, she completely obliterates the bags of groceries she’s holding. And in a performance that is at once balletic and orgasmic and utterly horrifying, she collapses to the ground. On her knees, her eyes wide, mouth in a silent rictus scream, some… fluid, red streaked with white streaked with red… oozes from under her dress and out of the corners of her mouth. It can really only be described as blood and cum, and it soaks into her knees and her hands and it just won’t stop.
I’m holding the knife in my hand and I know my friends have been exhausted worrying about me, knowing I’m alone and in the most pain I’ve ever experienced. Spilling my self-annihilating wishes all over social media. My fixation on being dead had gone far past the grotesquery of it. It was the transformation now. Grievous bodily harm… self-discovery… oblivion.
[JUNE’S PHONE pings on the living room floor. She sets the knife down and goes to pick it up]
My friends were understandably continually pissed… concerned for me. The group chat admonishes me to find a psychiatrist to get me on more effective drugs. They beg me to stop drinking. They tell me when I post about suicide, it’s fucking terrifying and could I please knock it off. And it is embarrassing to hear your loved ones telling you “hey, we don’t want you to be dead” and feel yourself getting defensive and angry. At them. I am thrashing in a subway tunnel. I am spilling everywhere.
[JUNE returns to the kitchen. She picks up the knife and slowly slides it back into place in the block]
Transformation does not need to be a choice between growth and grotesque. Eventually, the science experiment I have made of my body begins to show results. Estrogen courses through me and slowly… I start to feel…? Good? About life? I try at every chance I can to tell my friends I love them. My skin becomes softer, my features rounder, my breasts fuller. And I continue to adjust… and fail better at being a single middle aged girl in the city. It’s not horror. But it’s not NOT horror.
This essay originally written and performed for Write Club at the Atlanta Film Festival, 3 May 2024
