Grand Central Hotel may be only 20 minutes or so in length, and director Serge Garcia freely admits that he and subject Terre Thaemlitz set out to make an “anti-climactic” documentary, but nevertheless it is riveting stuff.
Maybe it’s Terre’s refreshingly frank, considered and downbeat narration on her dissatisfaction with contemporary mores, attitudes or modes of expression. Or maybe it’s the inherent symmetry within the work’s book-end structure. Or maybe it’s because Terre simply couldn’t give a fuck as she masturbates to what she sees on her computer screen, an object of our candid observation.
I write ‘she’ and ‘her’ about Terre on the advice of director Garcia. “I mean, that’s also like another interesting thing about Terre,” says the filmmaker, “that she kind of switches pronouns to make people feel the discomfort that she experiences with her relationship with identity structures.”
Terre clarifies in her narration: “I don’t feel any more male than I feel female. At the same time, I know that I can pass as male… but I’m no longer at this point able to pass as female. And I also know that when I’m dressed as male, I do not register as trans to anybody. I register as male, which is not a form of passibility that I find comfortable…I don’t really know why, but obviously it is a very difficult concept for people to understand that I really feel that whether I’m dressed in male clothes or female clothes, they’re both as unnatural and unpleasant and not fun for me.”
She adds: “I am anti-essentialist in relation to my own stubborn non-transitioning and…non-identification or multi-identification with gender.”
In pure structural terms, the film plays like a palindrome, opening and closing on Terre entering and leaving a hotel lobby, with a long central scene in her room when she masturbates and showers, her face never in shot.
“We wanted to focus on its anticlimactic tone and not fall for the bells and whistles of a typical documentary,” says director Garcia. “As Terre speaks about her relationship to boredom in the film, that was basically our guiding light. We wanted to basically shoot really banal moments that could reflect, more or less like a day in her life…That was kind of like the inspiration for wanting to evolve around these long takes. Also because she has really strong feelings about not falling into the tropes of creativity and authenticity, which also connects back to her troubled relationship with identity gender constructs…It’s basically about dismantling power structures. And so we felt that that was a good approach to let the photography sit within.”
In the film Terre says how she is “not so much of an online person. I’m not, anti-technology in some weird way, but like, you know, I don’t have a cell phone. So when I leave my house, I’m offline. I don’t spend my time on apps. I don’t do social media. I do get bored like everyone else. But the thing is, I just don’t feel compelled to have to avoid it. What is so strange about today’s world is this notion that boredom is something that has to be avoided as opposed to something that could be actually really appreciated as a kind of break from labour… Daily boredom is a kind of taboo in today’s capitalist culture. Right?”
Terre further eschews the contemporary “optimism” within the free application of nomenclature to determine or define gender status. “I’m really at this point where terms like ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ have so little critical use value anymore that like, I’m kind of at a loss for words,” she says. “You know, I find myself…having this kind of hopeful idea of reinventing or of inventing and coming upon the right language that will express to the world who I am. I just go deeper into terms that are awkward because, you know, something like ‘fag’ and ‘tranny’ are somehow more meaningful to me today than ‘queer’ and ‘transgender.’”
Garcia offers an interpretation of this aspect of his subject’s narration. “You know, in a lot of the discourse that we hear regarding identity politics and that bleeding into gender and sexuality… it’s within the context of a tone [that] is very optimistic and positive,” he says. “I think Terry uses pessimism and nihilism to critically think about these things in a way that doesn’t perpetuate this other notion of utopia and stuff. It’s a way to just stay in tune to reality and not lose sight of what’s happening in the moment and the violence, whether it’s physical or psychic. Because I feel like that’s what a lot of the rhetoric often carries – this optimistic tone for a better future.”
“What I find really interesting about Terry is just her relationship to nihilism and pessimism and how she uses that as a tool for critical thought to navigate social issues,” Garcia ends.
