By Johanna Isaacson |

In the midst of the Greek debt crisis and Syriza’s initial attempt to defend the country from extreme austerity measures, Chris Giles wrote derisively in the Financial Times of the “problem child Greece.” [1] The grown-ups of the Troika, he asserted, are at a loss on how to cope with Greece’s toddler-like antics. The EU was united in considering Syriza’s behavior to be a “tantrum.” The only division among the camps was how to treat this deviant youngster. The options were either to act the disciplinarian, imposing further austerity, to patronizingly “treat them like grown ups,” presumably by modeling a stoic patience until the country collapsed and caved in, or to admit that they never wanted to “parent” Greece in the first place, and to “put the naughty child up for adoption” (i.e., exclude). This understanding of maturity—insisting that there is no alternative to harsh austerity for ordinary people (as large financial institutions are bailed out)—has become dominant in our moment.

Here, I want to make the claim that Tangerine—a film that follows Sin-di, a Black transgender sex worker on her first day out of jail (which also happens to be Christmas eve), as she pursues her cheating pimp boyfriend and his lover through the streets of West Hollywood—brilliantly presents an alternative to this pervasive cultural narrative. A collaboration of director/writers Sean S. Baker and Chris Bergoch with amateur transgender actors Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, this psychogeographic film maps Los Angeles as the site of tragic closure and utopian openings, as it follows our protagonists on a day-long dérive. Contributing to this experimental, diy feel, Tangerine is filmed exclusively with cell phones, giving it a grainy and jumpy look that suits its alternatingly frantic, lush, and squalid moods.

The film begins with the two women at a shop called Donut Time where Alexandra lets drop that Sin-di’s boyfriend Chester has been sleeping around while she’s been in jail (it later turns out that she actually went to jail for having agreed to hold his drugs). After a moment of hesitation, Sin-di decides to confront Chester and Dinah, the white “fish” (cis woman), he’s been sleeping with. At this moment, as at every other juncture in the film where Sin-di decides to pursue Chester and Dinah, it is clear that in addition to being motivated by anger, Sin-di’s quest is a way to counter the threat of stasis and poverty that surrounds her. The film, in fact, is driven by Sin-di’s refusal to passively accept conditions of stark survival. Her galvanized presence, at times, is fueled by violence, debasement, and pettiness; however, her activity is a source of friendship, love, and eros, pointing to the film’s insistence that she and her companions are entitled to demand more than bare life. This summons to mind a graffiti from the 1968 Paris uprisings: “Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.”

Despite Alexandra’s constant plea for “no drama,” she and the film’s other characters travel in Sin-di’s wrathful wake. As Sin-di seeks out information about Dinah and Chester’s whereabouts, Alexandra hands out flyers advertising her upcoming performance. Although she spends all day trying to draw interest in the show, in the end it is only Sin-di and her then-captive Dinah who attend. While Alexandra is singing at the near empty club (it turns out she has actually paid to perform there), a third key character is also experiencing the necessary disappointments of Christmas. Razmik, an Armenian cab driver, spends the day picking up downtrodden and difficult customers, and when he doesn’t have a passenger, pays transgender prostitutes for sex. His Christmas Eve will culminate with his mother-in-law and wife discovering his secret in a screwball melee with all the main characters, back at Donut Time.

The characters here are presented as “immature,” but this childlike belief in their own worthiness is their superpower, rather than something they need to fix.  Sin-di and Alexandra never capitulate to  demoralizing realities of poverty and oppression. They never “change” and “grow,” as in a disciplinary bourgeois movie. Instead, they mine the microclimates of their environment for moments of agency, reciprocity and transcendence. Alexandra’s potentially depressing performance of “Toyland” in a near-empty club unexpectedly becomes one of these utopian moments, in which the characters are lit up by a child-like enchantment, free from transphobia and poverty in, as the lyrics go, “little girl and boy land.” The general jumpiness of the film fades away and the scene becomes still and warmly lit, basking in Alexandra’s smooth voice. Sin-di harnesses all her restless energy and attention to fix an admiring gaze on her friend and this moment of recognition seems to project both women out of the frantic and wearying struggle that we have witnessed throughout the day. This respite is momentary, but it promises a world of what Kristin Ross calls “communal luxury.” Rather than “maturity,” it is the characters’ child-like spontaneity, scrappiness and imaginativeness that allows this reprieve from austerity’s mean streets.

Relatedly, the film reveals the masculinism and literalness of reducing L.A./Hollywood to a shallow tinseltown which should be compared unfavorably to the solidity of stable, Midwestern-styled family life. Instead, as in David Lynch’s cosmos, Hollywood is both nightmare and dream. The luminous Christmas lights that line the streets of West Hollywood guide the women’s magic journey, lifting them out of what Walter Benjamin calls the homogenous empty time of progress into an alternate vision of history. Razmik’s mother-in-law, Ashken, calls Los Angeles “a beautiful lie,” but this comes from a place of homophobic, pragmatic resignation and “maturity.”  Instead of a falsehood, Sin-di and Alexandra see LA is a not-so-beautiful, unfulfilled promise.

Here, we can view our protagonists as “angels of history,” combating “realist” narratives of progress, vowing to continue fighting the “unbeatable” authoritarian forces who now rule the world. Instead, they live in Walter Benjamin’s messianic temporality, in which struggling is always winning, proving that the “losers” of history persist with “confidence, courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude.” Living in the now-time, Sin-di and Alexandra, “call into question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.” [2]

This temporality counters “adult,” “mature,” tyrannical history of the victors with the spontaneous, ephemeral, future-oriented history of class struggle. In this “secret heliotropism,” Tangerine‘s hopeful, genderqueer horizon counters a defeated logic of “maturity” designed to promote passivity and entropy.

Works Cited

[1] Chris Giles. “How to Deal With a Problem Child Like Greece.” Financial Times. April 19, 2015. Web.Halberstam, Judith. “In a Queer Time and Place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives.” New York: New York University Press, 2005. Print.

[2] Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings Volume 4. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Print.