Red Without Blue
Directed by: Brooke Sebold, Benita Sills, Todd Sills
Duration: 74 mins.
Studio: Cinema Libre, 2006
Growing up in Missoula, Montana, identical twins Mark and Alex Farley seemed indistinguishable, except for their respective blue and red matching outfits. Now in their early twenties, more than clothing sets them apart, as Alex begins living as “Clair” and considers sexual reassignment surgery. The documentary Red Without Bluefollows three years (2003-2006) in the lives of the Farley family and how Alex/Clair’s decision forces her parents and Mark to transform as well.
Since the screening of The Christine Jorgensen Story in 1970, the subject of transgendered identity has become more familiar to American viewers, especially with Oscar nods for such films as Boys Don’t Cry(1999) and Transamerica(2005). Television also acknowledges that transgendered men and women do not reside on the margins of society but are, in fact, our spouses, siblings, and children. For example,HBO’sdomestic drama, Normal(2003), imagines a scenario in which a wife must reinvent her role in her husband’s life, when after 25 years of marriage he undergoes sexual reassignment surgery. Red Without Blue introduces us to an actual family trying to redefine itself, and as the Farleysconfront their religious upbringing, social prejudice, and individual fears and insecurities, viewers are witness not to a family falling apart, but as Mark says, one learning to “evolve toward each other.”
Our first glimpse of Mark and AlexFarley is a photograph of theboys hugging Mickey Mouse in Disneyland. “It was such a happy time. They were just so happy,” muses the mother, Jenny Farley. But when the camera abruptly shifts to the adult Mark, we hear a different version of their childhood: “We don’t fit into that white picket fence.”By middle school, they bravely announced their homosexuality to classmates, but the bullying they faced only alienated them from their parents and community. Their teen years were marked by heavy drug use, sexual assault by a pedophile, and a failed joint suicide attempt, until their parents forcibly separated Mark and Alex for over two years. When we meet the adult twins, they are living on opposite coasts, Mark an art student unsuccessfully searching for “unconditional love” in San Francisco, and Alex/Clair, living in New York, eager to find a transgendered community to welcome her. The camera follows the twins back to Montana, capturing awkward reunions with their Christian Scientist grandmother and parents who keep hoping Alex/Clairis only “going through a phase.”
But this is not just the twins’ story. At times brutally candid, Jenny Farley acknowledges her rejection of the twins whose sexuality has turned them from sons into just “young people that I know.” Alex’s transition to Clair, in particular, forces Jenny to consider her own sexual and gender identity. Divorced and living with a woman, even sharing a bed with her, Jenny nevertheless insists that she is “not gay.” Shunned by her lifelong friends who tell her that her problems are “just too big”, she is torn by guilt, having, she believes, failed as a wife and mother. Reluctant to talk to the camera, the father Scott Farley, we later learn from Alex/Clair, has offered the most emotional and financial support, paying for her hormone drugs and expensive sexual reassignment surgery.His expression of guilt over the twins’ attempted suicide is so painful to observe, as are several of the stilted conversations between Mark and Alex/Clair as they try to regain the “connection” they once felt.
While both parents “mourn the loss of Alex,” Alex’s decision to live as Clair causes the most conflict for Mark, who regards this as a severing of “the chord of twinship”: “I don’t look at you and see myself.” He also resents Clair’s rejection of masculinity, which he says as a homosexual is already a tenuous but still necessary part of his identity.Without Red, he no longer knows how to be Blue. Although the film seems to promote the notion of the fluidity of gender and sexual identity, the experiences of the twins and Jenny reveal just how difficult this is to achieve.
Red Without Bluemarks the directorial debut of Brooke Sebold, Benita Sills and Todd Sills, but as the multiple awards it has received at independent film festivals attest, this is no amateur production. The juxtaposition of the Farleys’old home videos and photo albums with recent individual and group interviewsnot only exposes family secrets but helps the family reunite. Thebackground music by transgendered performers, with lyrics that express the unspoken sentiments of Alex/Clair, complements this moving, sometimes tragic, yet ultimately honest and hopeful story. Though their neighbors may shun them, their story, as Scott Farley points out, has a universal theme: “A family has to be adaptive and supportive.”
Julie Anne Taddeo
Department of History
University of Maryland, College Park