{"id":2013,"date":"2023-04-19T16:48:31","date_gmt":"2023-04-19T23:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/?p=2013"},"modified":"2023-04-19T16:50:54","modified_gmt":"2023-04-19T23:50:54","slug":"the-assignment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2013","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Assignment&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Director Walter Hill&#8217;s &#8220;The Assignment&#8221; is not a good movie but, hey, I kind of like it. It has a great premise: a deranged doctor, played by Sigourney Weaver, performs a &#8220;forced&#8221; sex-change operation as revenge on the hitman, played by Michelle Rodriguez, who killed her brother. It&#8217;s a wacky idea. Somehow I missed it back in 2017, but I finally saw it the other night. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Assignment Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips Trailers\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/iH1H4Ph4CEo?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The movie has a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rottentomatoes.com\/m\/the_assignment_2017\" target=\"_blank\">Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> score of 21 percent and loads of bad reviews and the inevitable controversy over the subject matter. But I was a little tipsy when I watched it last weekend and, you know, it was perfectly enjoyable for a silly movie night. Of course, I kept thinking if a sex-change operation were forced on me &#8211; or on many of you reading this &#8211; I suspect we&#8217;d all be okay with it if we were going to come out looking like Michelle Rodriguez! <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I do understand that it&#8217;s no longer called &#8220;sex reassignment&#8221; or &#8220;sex change&#8221; surgery but rather gender confirmation surgery. Apparently, an earlier draft of the script was titled, &#8220;(Re)Assignment.&#8221; And to be honest I think that would have been an even better title since it would suggest more the forced nature of the procedure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Probably my favorite scene is when the hitman, now a &#8220;she,&#8221; goes to a doctor to see if the operation can be reversed and is told no &#8211; the doctor did too good a job. Later she muses, &#8220;So that was it. This was the way it was going to be. I was going to be a chick, except for in my head. So get used to it.&#8221; Yeah, I think I could get used to it pretty quickly!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another favorite moment was a brief shot of the girlfriend of the hitman walking up a staircase. The way she moves and tilts her head at the top of the stairs was so feminine that I was transfixed. It was an otherwise unextraordinary moment, but I probably backed it up five times to watch her walk up those stairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I always like to read reviews of movies after seeing them, and the thing I found most annoying, though not surprising, is how much controversy the movie stirred up regarding trans issues, with many critics calling it transphobic and even hateful and dangerous. <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/2017\/04\/the-assignment-most-offensive-lines-moments-michelle-rodriguez-1201802486\/\" target=\"_blank\">This one <\/a>on Indiewire was particularly harsh. To me it seems like a typical overreaction and a misreading of the movie. In no way does the director equate what happens to Frank Kitchen, the hitman, to the transgender experience. It&#8217;s simply a crazed act of revenge that he&#8217;s forced to endure, and yes, anyone who&#8217;s comfortable with their gender and who wouldn&#8217;t want to undergo such an ordeal would be horrified to wake up with a forcibly altered body. Regardless of what some critics wrote, the director certainly isn&#8217;t saying that trans people are the subject of wacky experimental surgery or that women are inferior to men. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But I also think the objections of these critics are kind of irrelevant. Controversy is good for online clicks and traffic, so it pays to be offended. It is just a silly movie, though, and there&#8217;s such a tendency nowadays to demand that entertainment not be offensive and not delve too deeply into problematic territory. But the problematic material is often more interesting. I also like William S. Burroughs quite a bit (&#8220;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2009\/10\/08\/113610846\/burroughs-naked-lunch-still-fresh-at-50\" target=\"_blank\">Naked Lunch<\/a>&#8220;), and he&#8217;s problematic AF, but you wouldn&#8217;t expect him to be otherwise. Who wants to be safe all the time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ll admit part of my reaction to the critics &#8211; and I&#8217;m not comparing myself to Walter Hill &#8211; is due to the controversy I mentioned in the last blog post over the word tranny. (And thanks to everyone who&#8217;s emailed me about possible name changes, pro and con!) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Apparently, Walter Hill was somewhat surprised by <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.etonline.com\/movies\/214569_exclusive_walter_hill_on_the_assignment_controversy_michelle_rodriguez_prosthetic_penis\" target=\"_blank\">the reaction<\/a> he received, especially from people who haven&#8217;t even seen the movie. I still don&#8217;t fully understand the intensity of the objections. It&#8217;s one thing for a movie to be tacky, or just plain bad, but how it&#8217;s supposed to be &#8220;dangerous&#8221; to trans people is beyond me. Then again, someone might argue that my website is dangerous to trans people too. Myself, I don&#8217;t get that much pushback on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Sandra_Gibbons\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Twitter<\/a> since I really don&#8217;t have that many people following me but there have been a few. Over the years though I&#8217;ve heard many comments about the t-word. But I never reply to online attacks &#8211; it&#8217;s not worth it and only leads to escalation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So that was my weekend, and this is my little rant. Let me know what you think if you saw the movie. And if you have any other gender-swap movies you enjoyed, or didn&#8217;t enjoy, let me know. I&#8217;m always looking for interesting stuff in the genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Director Walter Hill&#8217;s &#8220;The Assignment&#8221; is not a good movie but, hey, I kind of like it. It has a great premise: a deranged doctor, played by Sigourney Weaver, performs a &#8220;forced&#8221; sex-change operation as revenge on the hitman, played by Michelle Rodriguez, who killed her brother. It&#8217;s a wacky idea. Somehow I missed it &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2013\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;The Assignment&#8221;<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,21,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sandra-here","category-los-angeles","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tranniesintrouble.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}