Emory Chao Johnson | 默 (To Write from Memory) / 2023

breaking away

by Douglas Messerli

Emory Chao Johnson (screenwriter and director) 默 (To Write from Memory) / 2023 [19 minutes]

 

Although Emory Chao Johnson’s film is centered upon serious topics, most importantly their (the writer/actor/director Johnson uses the pronouns “they/them”) transitioning from female to male, there is something basically comic about the constant banter and series of commands coming from their computer and cellphone in the voice of Johnson’s character’s mother and perhaps equally in an AI voice that tells them how to keep up their regimen and maintain their body.

     If the film begins rather silently with the character Johnson plays checking their breast and other parts of the body to see how it is developing—from all outward signs they have mostly made the transition to male—there is hardly a moment after when machines and mother are not commanding them, in both the past and present, to check their weight, to be more gentle, to lose weight, to use half-and-half sugar, etc. as well as drilling Johnson on their daily diet, demanding to know precisely what they have for breakfast.

      Mother and machine speak of the pureness of their skin, about their “potential,” about what the mother herself did as a young girl. The mother’s constant repetition of “Hey, I’m talking to you,” as Johnson can be seen injecting themselves with hormones, makes it almost appear, at moments, like an endless conversation with the former comedian Joan Rivers. There is absolutely no let up.

      But as the film progresses it is difficult to know whether the comments were made contemporaneously or long before, since they are not always in sync with what is happening to the receptor of the messages.

      Especially at one point when Johnson’s character returns home with a soiled comforter, the mother seems to be talking at an earlier moment in their life, commenting on what appears to have been issues that emanate from long before the actual events in the movie: “We need to talk about what’s going on in your head. What’s wrong with your attitude? Why do you tell everyone that you’re not a girl.”

      Finally reaching home with the comforter in a bag beside them, Johnson’s figure seems to be faced with a dialogue that might have happened years before their current changes. “All these years I cooked, picked you up from school, even helped you with your homework,” the mother complains as have millions before her.

      Finally, the mother grants, “Okay you make [the] decision all on your own,” Johnson replying “I haven’t even started the testosterone.” But clearly at the moment we observe them, they have. The accusations and frustrations past and present conjoin in a manner that results in seeming violence, the mother demanding that her then daughter kneel down and Johnson insisting that they want autonomy over their own body.

     Only a few moments after getting out of the car to deliver up their washing, Johnson returns, stuffs the comforter neatly back into the bag, and drives off. They stop off at a carry-out to get a kind of mix of chocolate, milk, and coffee, Johnson commenting several times that it is “too sweet.” But nonetheless they drink a few more sips before declaring “It is really too sweet.”

     The film ends with Johnson’s character pulling all the empty medicine bottles from which throughout the film they have been creating Chinese words into one massive pile. It is a closure on the endless dialogue with their mother and their past, the film ending with the words by José Esteban Muñoz, “The past does things,” hinting that Johnson has finally brought the endless harangues to a closure. They have finally become who they wanted to become, even if they also will always retain memories of their fractious past.

 

Los Angeles, October 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).