Passing: On Identification and Latent Desire
Or, Queer Silence and Destruction
This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe, and share it with your friends!
I’ll admit that the first time I watched Passing, a new movie currently streaming on Netflix, I didn’t think of it as a particularly queer film, so awash as it is with thematic complexity and aesthetic beauty. But upon reading more about it and watching several interviews with the director and cast, my perspective on the film deepened. Passing was adapted from the book of the same name by Nella Larsen, which was originally published in 1929. The film was written and directed by Rebecca Hall, an actor readers of this newsletter might know from the Angela Robinson film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Hall was inspired to adapt the book after she learned that her grandfather was a black man that passed for white in the early 20th century, a fact that remained a secret in her family for many years.
The film stars Tessa Thompson as Irene, a middle-class black woman living in Harlem in the 1920s. Her world is suddenly shifted off its axis when she runs into Clare (Ruth Negga), an old friend who is now passing as a white woman and is married to a white man (Alexander Skarsgård). The two women have an incredibly complicated relationship, with both of them seeming to desire what the other has, a relationship defined as much by attraction as it is by repulsion.
The film is intentionally ambiguous, delving into a number of complex themes without offering any easy answers. Passing is shot in black and white, which, as Hall has noted, is not actually black and white but rather just many shades of grey. In addition, the film’s 4:3 aspect ratio highlights the constrained nature of the characters and the world in which they live. Though these visual elements give you a sense of the themes present in the film, they don’t make the questions it asks any clearer. “It’s my intention that the film doesn’t do much work for you,” Hall has said.
Upon a second viewing, the film’s queer vibrations begin to reveal themselves more fully. The film starts out muted, both visually and aurally. The sounds of New York City are muffled, and the images in the frame are blurry. Such a portrait reflects Irene’s state of being – she is someone who is in the world but not of it, existing on the periphery of things without ever really digging deep. Her paradoxical counterpart, Clare, brings the world quite energetically to her door.
As Thompson has described it, their first meeting in the film is a highly sensual moment, with Irene smelling, hearing, and even feeling Clare before she actually lays eyes on her. Indeed, it’s Clare’s familiar laugh that causes recognition to finally flash before Irene’s eyes. During this initail encounter, when they reunite after many years apart, they both stare at each other with something unspoken in their eyes – adoration, curiosity, longing, perhaps? It is here that we learn that Clare is passing for white, and Clare mistakenly assumes Irene is passing too because they have met in the very white (literally, it's an oppressively bright space) Drayton Hotel. They both reassure one another that they are happy with their respective lives, though this, we quickly learn, is far from the truth.
In many ways, both women want “perfect” lives and are simultaneously pretending that the lives they already have are perfect. This, of course, is not true, partially because such perfection is not really attainable and mostly because they are denying something deep and defining about their own selves. These secret desires are not queerness as such, but rather manifest themselves in the decidedly queer relationship Irene and Claire form with one another. They each recognize these hidden longings in each other, and this results in the uniquely loaded relationship that emerges between them.
Later, Irene is in bed with her husband Brian (André Holland) when he inquires about the letter Clare has sent her, which Irene has not yet responded to. When Brian starts to read the letter out loud, something subtly shifts between the three of them. In the letter, Clare describes how she longs to see Irene, admitting that maybe Irene’s life is preferable to her own. “I wouldn’t feel this wild desire if I hadn’t seen you,” Brian reads, pausing after he reads the phrase “wild desire,” as if just now beginning to contemplate the nature of his wife’s relationship with Claire. “Wild desire,” he repeats, putting the note on the bedside table. When Brian questions Irene’s satisfaction with the life she has chosen, Irene murmurs “I am satisfied,” into the darkness. “I am,” she repeats, as if to convince herself.
Some time later, Irene rebuffs Clare’s advances after she encounters Clare’s husband, who she discovers is horrifically racist. When Clare comes to visit Irene and tells her how distraught she’s been not hearing from her, Clare quickly changes her tune, and the two women share a moment of intimacy on the couch. As Hall has noted, this is one scene in which Clare subtly glances at Irene’s mouth while they are speaking, which only further destabilizes the already uncertain Irene. As Negga puts it, the relationship between the two women is very complicated. “For Clare, it’s love, it’s like just a sort of adoration, and for Irene, I think it’s very dangerous because when she feels loved by [Clare] it’s like the world will fall apart, because what is she meant to do with that?”
In one of the most pivotal scenes in the film, Irene has taken Clare and her husband to a dance put on by the Negro Welfare League, an organization for which Irene volunteers. While there, she meets her friend Hugh, a white gay man and a successful author. Hugh asks Irene about white women’s attraction to black men, and Irene shares her perspective with him. “It’s just plain exoticism,” Irene says. “An interest in what’s different. A kind of emotional excitement, something you feel in the presence of something strange, and even perhaps a bit repugnant to you.” Though she is describing white women’s attraction to black men here, her gaze is directed squarely at Clare when she says it, alluding to the fact that such emotional excitement is felt by Irene herself, perhaps right at this very moment.
A second later, Hugh wonders about whether Clare falls into this category of someone who desires exoticism, and Irene responds rather surprisingly. “Things aren’t always what they seem, Hugh,” she says, essentially “outing” Clare as a black woman. Hall has spoken about her decision to make this scene significantly more overt than it is in the book in order to highlight the “latent homosexuality” that both characters seem to be alluding to in this moment. Irene feels comfortable speaking like this with Hugh and sharing this with him because she knows his secret. “We’re all of us passing for something or other,” Irene says, a moment later. “Aren’t we?” Irene will never be this honest again for the rest of the film.
Later in the evening, there’s one deliciously loaded shot where Irene is glancing up at Clare’s undulating back while she sways to the music that’s being played. Overcome by some sort of unspoken desire or affection, Irene reaches out and grabs Clare’s hand. Clare turns around, surprised, and Irene gives her a smile, perhaps the only truly sincere smile we see on her face in the entire film. Seconds later, the moment is broken when Brian returns with a new dance partner for Clare. What are we to make of this scene? Like many in the film, it’s up for interpretation, and the meaning of this moment is perhaps not even understood by the characters themselves.
In bed that night, Brian tries to come on to Irene, but she can’t stop talking about Clare. “Isn’t she extraordinarily beautiful?” Irene asks. “Don’t find yourself responsible for that kind of happiness,” Brian warns. Too late.
In one quiet scene – aren’t all the scenes in the film quiet, laden as they are with words unspoken and feelings unexpressed? – Irene comes home and finds Clare sitting in the backyard with her bare feet exposed, so she takes off her own jacket and covers them up. What are we to make of this – a moment of domesticity, of friendship, of care, and affection? Like many moments in the film, it is both loaded and indescribable, something felt but not uttered. Irene often silently glances at Clare, her gaze inscrutable.
Time and time again, we find ourselves confronted with the idea that Irene’s perspective is not quite reliable. In an early scene in the film, Irene comes down the stairs and sees Clare and her husband standing suspiciously close together in the parlor. When she rounds the corner, we see that Clare and her husband are actually standing a very respectable distance apart. In a later scene, she comes down the stairs once more and this time they do actually seem to be standing quite close together. But are they, really?
Certainly, we can read this jealousy as a manifestation of Irene’s own insecurity and concerns about her relationship with her husband, but it’s quite probable she’s jealous of both Claire and her Brian. The closeness she perceives them having is something she desires for herself.
Later, Irene and Brian get into a fight about Irene’s stubborn refusal to teach her kids about the realities of racism in America. As indicative of how intimately involved she has become in both their lives, the conversation abruptly turns to Clare, who has recently been traveling in Europe. “It seems to me you are a lot less content with what you’ve got when she’s not here” Irene accuses. Brian seems to know in this moment that it is not just him she is speaking of – Irene, too, feels Clare’s absence rather acutely.
At the last party in the film when the women are once again reunited, a look passes between Clare and Irene that, like all of the glances between them, is extremely charged and difficult to decipher. The look on Clare’s face is one of wistful acceptance. Does she know what’s to come? Irene's face appears similarly knowing, like she finally understands Clare fully for the first time. Too late, of course.
The final scene in the film is quite shocking and only further serves to mystify the more ambiguous elements of the work. I will not discuss the ending here because, while it’s certainly important, I don’t want to spoil the experience of watching it for you, especially since it’s probably the moment in the film that most clearly asks the viewer to make up their own mind about things.
This, too, was one of Hall’s intentions with the project, to leave the film’s questions unanswered so viewers each walk away with a unique perspective and their own experience of watching it. According to Hall, there is no singular, “true” meaning of the film.
“There are some of you that are gonna think it’s all about repressed homosexuality, there are gonna be some of you that think it’s all about adultery, there are gonna be some of you that think it’s all about internalized self-hatred that’s born out of racism and patriarchy, and god knows what else. They’re all true, and they’re all meaningful.”
Thus the queerness of the film is certainly present, so to speak, but it might emerge more clearly to those already familiar with this perspective or experience. Certainly, one could argue that all same-gender friendships are a little bit queer, especially when they are divorced from or push up against normative expectations of heterosexual coupling and the nuclear family. But for Irene and Clare, their relationship is also about desire and identification, those impulses that often go unspoken in connections that exist outside the boundaries of language.
The twin feelings of love and hate go hand in hand for Clare and Irene. “Their differences and similarities create this chemistry between them. You know, they both want to be each other and want to destroy each other at the same time,” Hall suggests. Such a dynamic is keenly illustrative of a particularly queer feeling wherein jealousy and desire are intimately connected. To be them or to be with them, one often wonders. “That’s love isn’t it?” Negga asks. In Passing, such intimacies are not just about sex and desire, but also about race, class, and gender, making any accounting of the “true” feelings of each character all the more difficult to reconstruct.
For Irene, it’s not that she’s silencing her own queerness, but rather that she’s not really conscious of it at all. For this reason, because it’s ostensibly told from Irene’s (rather hazy) perspective, the film itself cannot explicitly speak to this queerness. As Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Indeed, as Hall herself has put it, Irene cannot put into words the depth and the complexity of her feelings for Clare, so nor can (or should) the film itself. Transmitting such a desire that is not only unspoken but also unconscious is certainly a difficult task, and one the film pulls off with stylish poise. It’s unspoken, until it’s not.
