‘Orlando, My Political Biography’ Review – Monumentally More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

“Why don’t you write your biography?”
“Because fucking Virginia Woolf wrote my biography in 1928.”

In November of 2019, Paul B. Preciado delivered a lecture at an annual psychoanalytic conference in Paris, the École de la Cause Freudienne. Entitled Can the Monster Speak?, the lecture builds on a combined inspiration of Franz Kafka’s A Report to an Academy and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. Kafka’s short story details the events in which a captured monkey named Red Peter learns to behave as humans do after being caught and placed into captivity. Making literary comparisons to global issues is a strength Preciado superbly exercises, drawing parallels to what authors are saying through their works to problems that lay underneath a society that ruling classes see as comfortable and thriving, but those oppressed see as festering and dire.

In Academy, once Red learns to communicate his thoughts verbally he speaks to scientists of how the subjectivity of humanity is as oppressive as a metal cage. The voice of the narrator reminds readers that he only learns how to adapt to human ways not out of desire, but as a method to quickly escape imprisonment. Preciado made comparisons from Kafka’s work and observations to the traditionally accepted societal human spectrum of gender, sexual identity, and expression. Just as Red Peter speaks once his transformation is complete, so does the wretch in Shelley’s horror novel, also denouncing the views in which his creator was motivated to pursue such an endeavor based in scientific hypotheses.

He argued that because the above standards have all been defined by a heteronormative worldview wielding psychoanalysis to label both transgender and nonbinary people as abnormal, himself included, the supposed reality of a binary system to classify people is not reflective of truth but a historical view built upon rigid & repressive paradigms. His call to action was to revise this ill-formed view of humanity throughout the psychoanalyst community to accommodate those who were and are still victimized and pathologized for learning how to express themselves and reject a conformist label thrust upon them. Not even a quarter of his speech was made before his audience booed Preciado off the stage, comprised entirely of Lacanian psychoanalysts.

Preciado’s full speech can thankfully be read in full through an official, definitive translation. But in very many ways his film Orlando: A Political Biography expands on the above issues and arguments. Based on the Virginia Woolf novel Orlando: A Biography, Preciado tells the story of Woolf’s titular character who, representing the Queen of England in Constantinople, undergoes a transformation of gender. Orlando leaves as a man and returns as a woman, sleeping all through the transformation while in serving as ambassador to the Middle Eastern country. During a period of unrest and riots, Orlando goes through an extremely deep sleep for days and wakes up completely changed in a different physical body.

Preciado weaves into his spirited retelling multiple different biographies of real people who have transitioned into another gender, all of them portraying the role of Orlando throughout different points of their adventure. In effect, his film is many things: a literary adaptation, a biographical documentary, and a political treatise on how psychiatry betrays human nature regarding established classifications within the gender construct.

The film is in itself trans and nonbinary, moving from what we expect a film to be in the fictional and biographical sense separately, to something not yet classified or labeled within constructs of genre or the language of film conventions. Portions of his adaptation take on an extremely bare-bones approach, with each subject portraying the character of Orlando introducing themselves as the natural performer we see in front of the camera and sharing their personal history with gender and how they see themselves, as well as where they want to be.

But then lines from the novel are blended together with these people’s real lives and histories. The scenes of the novel are staged as simply as placing a performer in front of a backdrop, crew members moving materials as the camera rolls to transform the black box theater itself into, for example, a winter landscape where Orlando sees a person whose gender they can’t discern but in interacting with them falls in love. It’s storytelling mechanisms like this that show us how the effort of changing oneself is a core tenet of trans-ness: that is, learning about yourself so intimately that making physical changes becomes about caring deeply about yourself to improve the corporeal aspects of your being and matching how others see you versus how you see yourself. Cisgendered people (that is, men who feel and identify as men and women who feel the same) receive this benefit more automatically and live comfortably in a world that accommodates the reinforcement of their gender roles without debate or issue.

Orlando as a film is as much a rejection of the gender binary as it is a spotlight on what trans people have suffered and continue to suffer, all while celebrating these nonbinary and/or transgender identities; Preciado puts forth the necessary argument that the history of transgender people cannot be told without the inclusion of nonbinary people too. He even examines Virginia Woolf as someone who could very well have identified as nonbinary were she alive in a time where these self-identifiers existed, at the very least queer in a world that is only slightly kinder to those who do not or cannot subscribe to a hetero lifestyle.

Preciado shows in each segment how the world’s present and seemingly distant history barely contrasts within gender politics. By using comparisons between medical treatments to transition in the present day, the setting of the book, and Woolf’s own time period to undergo the transition that each performer requires and what institutions grant based on the current worldview and access to healthcare, if any — we can see a barrier that has been bolstered over a long period of oppressive history against what society considers undesirable or too chaotic to properly operate within the boundaries it has set for what is deemed “normal.”

For what it sets out to do, Orlando: My Political Biography is brilliant, transcendent, and is effectively a superb living history of nonbinary trans people. Paul B. Preciado reminds us that when realizing our identities as outside the boundaries of what society labels “men” and “women” and transitioning into a different gender, it becomes something more than just personal. Our identities are inherently political, and intervention is a necessity for people who feel the gender labels they are given at birth do not fit how they feel they want to present in society.

Each segment is beautifully realized, and although the entirety of the novel is not completely adapted the arc of Orlando is honored. Focusing on the shifting identity of Woolf’s literary character honors her work and what she is saying through the character’s words and actions. The people who play Orlando also receive this honor because they share key components with Orlando’s experiences and are as deserving of respect as anyone Orlando represents today. The choices of music are extremely diverse and evoke different perspectives of experiences and moods within those who tell their stories.

The actors’ performances are strikingly natural and the direction Preciado provides grants an uncanny seamlessness between the fiction he adapts and the reality of every actor we see before the screen. Because we see aspects of the backstage in the production value of the film we are let in on the inner workings of film and theater, another comparison to the “behind the curtain” aspects of changing thoughts and feelings on gender and sexuality Preciado makes. The broad strokes of individual artistic choices may seem too much in a moment but when the film includes many such parts of the mosaic it becomes necessary to convey different attitudes and experiences people hold when making this journey.

On paper, none of what Preciado does should work at all but in his execution becomes much more than necessary for a section of humanity whose histories and visions are unceremoniously erased. Orlando: My Political Biography is an essential text for those within and without the underpinnings of politics and activism surrounding transgender and nonbinary issues.

It is an observation that many still have yet to make in the world, but by focusing on the stories of people who have been oppressed, not only because of their gender and sexuality but racial and cultural, we are presented with an opportunity to listen to what injustices are being committed against those who have no such plans or agendas of carrying out systematic terrorism or spreading fear within smaller communities; these are stories of people who just want what a large portion of people alive today enjoy in being able to exist comfortably and without fearing for their lives.

What Preciado creates is something much more than an adaptation and more than a documentary. Orlando is a living time capsule that shows where we’ve come from, where we are now, and where we could be headed by sparing no unsavory details. Regardless of your history with gender identities and the politics that come with them, this is an excellent film that enlightens and entertains, from its brilliant performances and narrative voice to its eclectic and electrifying soundtrack that argues history can and should be told by those subdued by reigning authorities.

Orlando, My Political Biography is currently playing in select theaters in New York courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films. The film will expand to Los Angeles on November 17th, and additional markets in the following weeks.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpGFplNRUmc]