It has only been a few hours since the official trailer for Laxxmi Bomb has reached the interwebs and the distaste for it has been running strong since Akshay Kumar first posted a teaser of the film back in September on his Instagram. Laxxmi Bomb is the remake of the 2011 Tamil Horror- Comedy film Muni 2 : Kanchana by the same director, Raghava Lawrence. The film deals with the ghost of a trans woman who possesses Akshay Kumar in order to seek vengeance. Turns out, that 9 years is too short a time to expect cis filmmakers to grow beyond their transphobic tropes.
The film is problematic with its very premise of making a ghost out of a trans person played through a cis person and the image and representation that is portrayed through this.
The issue of not casting a trans person in the role is problematic as well, but seems to be less of a problem in this movie because of the character of the trans person that has been written up itself. In 2020, with so much information readily available, shouldn’t it be obvious that trans people are people with very real lives? (Not for Bollywood, we guess)
The movie just milks the same transphobic tropes that kill us on the streets through hate crimes, as ‘comedy’ that has always been used to get laughs out of cis folks by portraying trans women as just “men in dresses”. That someone who is not a cis woman showing mannerisms that would be read as feminine is inherently funny. That wearing bangles is somehow supposed to be the biggest insult to a cis man. When will cis people realize that trans persons are humans too and try to portray them as human beings with human experiences and emotions. Not as comedy, not as ghosts occupying cis person’s bodies, just human.
The very decision to make a trans person visible only through a cis-persons body marks another instance of convenient erasure. It is important to remember that this doesn’t only affect the trans community, but anyone whom the society perceives as threatening the binary.
It is 2020, and we should be treated better.
Or is that too much to expect from cis people?
-@bluebleu with inputs from @nofiltersassy
