In Vox Lux, a personality is formed either out of trauma, or despite it. In a sequence of events that reflect many facets of modern-day American society, the character of Celeste becomes a star out of victimhood. It’s a complexly layered film that pits a harsh world against mainstream escapism, and both look villainous. In this backdrop, there’s plenty to talk about, but I’m going to focus on a detail that I couldn’t shake.
☞ Spoilers follow.
The killer psychopath and… that other trope
The first person we see depicted on screen is a boy on a mission. He walks in the middle of the road, at night, unaffected by his surroundings. He’s clearly not well. We see him again, this time from behind, as he first kills the music teacher, and then proceeds to shoot up a classroom full of students. Cinematically it works incredibly well, and paired with the Scott Walker soundtrack it’s likely to stick in your mind for a while.
In my mind, mostly, is the makeup that Cullen Active, the shooter, is wearing. Eyeshadow, false lashes. Celeste asks him to stop it all. He says he’s killed too many people now, and it’s too late to stop. He takes off one of the lashes as Celeste tries again to stop him. He shoots her in the neck.
It seems unfair to focus on the makeup. Ostensibly, Cullen wears makeup because he’s into emo music. There’s nothing wrong with men wearing makeup. There’s nothing inherently anything about makeup, but there are a lot of associations. One of the first associations for me is Jame Gumb, also known as Buffalo Bill, in The Silence of the Lambs, the serial killer who kills women so he can wear their skin as a suit. He is labeled as a transsexual psychopath, a pairing of diagnoses that runs deep in society12. With that in mind, it feels like more than just makeup. And Cullen, surprisingly, wears false lashes, which is more makeup than I believed typical for emo.
That makes me wonder why. In absence of an actual backstory, as the film doesn’t provide one, the only thing we learn about Cullen Active’s personality is that he wears makeup. He, and it is almost always a he when it comes to school shootings, is essentially a blank slate. That’s fine: the men that shoot up schools are so plentiful that we now see a reliable statistical average. On a blank canvas, however, any mark will stand out, beg for interpretation, and come loaded with meaning.
After the film, I got a chance to speak with the director, but I decided to focus instead on an interesting piece of ambiguous grammar that, for a few seconds, gave the movie a decidedly magic-realist twist. I never said I wasn’t a nerd. But as we’re discussing this, a woman is walking out of the cinema, spots me, points at me, and shouts he’s the killer!
I didn’t want to bring it up at the time, but, doesn’t that just make my point for me?
I recognise why people can perceive me as a man in makeup. I understand it, even if I don’t like it and if I think that people could think slightly longer before they speak. I don’t, however, understand why Brady Corbet gave his movie’s killer the Buffalo Bill treatment and me, subsequently, an uncomfortable night as a random woman calls me a killer, however jokingly.
Corbet himself tried to put me at ease. Some people see a man in makeup and they freak out.
I didn’t want to protest, again. It’s difficult to have to tell people something you know to be true, but that they refuse to believe. Sadly, what many people are willing to believe is that that would make me so angry that I’d walk into a school with an automatic rifle. That story has been told a million times before, and every telling of it comes down on transgender women and gender-variant people all over the world. In a movie as depressing as Vox Lux, it’s the only thing that really got me down.