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Reviews
Glen or Glenda (1953)
Bad or Pathetically Bad?
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. --GK Chesterton
SCIENTIST: Bevare...bevare! Bevare of the big green dragon that sits on your doorstep. He eats little boys...puppy dog tails, and big, fat snails. Bevare, take care....bevare! --Ed Wood, Glen or Glenda (1953)
How to make sense of Ed Wood? There are six alternate titles for this film: Glen or Glenda: Confessions of Ed Wood, Glen or Glenda?, He or She, I Changed My Sex, I Led 2 Lives, and The Transvestite.
Spoiled milk, by any other name...
What is important to me is not THAT this film is bad, but WHY it is bad, and if there is anything salvageable from the experience of watching it. The most significant problem of the film is that it is so deeply personal, so internalized for Wood, that it is frequently incomprehensible. If there was ever a film that shows the risks of getting too close to the subject matter, this is it. Gestures, images and dialog from the film have prominence that far outweighs their impact on the viewer. One gets the feeling, after a few minutes, that the film was made by Wood to explain his own nature to himself, and the fact that it was to be seen by others became an unimportant afterthought. For Wood, Bela Lugosi reciting a nursery rhyme in a pathetically melodramatic fashion makes perfect sense. I also assume that it made no sense to poor drug-addled Lugosi, to any of the other characters, or to many of its viewers. A few examples of the film's too subjective, too Wood-centric nature: all of Lugosi's lines; the lightning motif that crashes in at random;the fake African tribal dance; the Betty Page antics in the last half of the film (including a pseudo-rape, which is accompanied by polka music). Many scenes indicate a general sense of fear, or transgression, but they aren't specific enough or clear enough to serve as part of the narrative. They are simply hapless gestures from someone desperate to feel personally validated in public. This makes the filmmaker the subject of pathos and not the characters. As a viewer, I empathize more with Ed than Glen. The inept filmmaking distances me from the character of Glen while at the same time eliciting pity for the man who is confronting a source of personal shame by broadcasting it to the world. At times, the film is a documentary, at times a police drama, at times a horror film, at times a love story. Wood uses expressionistic sets, dream sequences, and special effects, and crushes them up against images of traffic and steel mills, and World War II footage, interspersed with monologues by dry professors discussing the current scientific understanding of transvestites. Given all this ineptitude, one has to ask: is it worth viewing even as kitsch? I would say so. One learns as much by bad examples as by good. One could easily assemble a `how-to' book on narrative filmmaking using just this film as a negative example. Pick a topic with gravity. Consider your audience. Don't humiliate your actors by giving them nonsensical scripts. Pick music that supports the action. And never underestimate the power of a good laugh.