“Make People Live with It”: Sound, Suture, and Transgender Embodiment in Punch Line

In a recent interview for the Underground Cinema festival on their film Punch Line (dir. Becky Cheatle, 2022, Ireland), the interviewer suggests to director/co-writer Becky Cheatle and co-writer/actress Allie O’Rourke that “It’d be a really good film that you would bring to a school,” with “Q and A sessions,” presumably for the kind of educational impact this film, which deals with a transphobic attack, could have on cisgender young people in Ireland and their sense of sympathy with the transgender community. The interviewer imagines it as part of a series of films that, along with Tom Berkeley’s An Irish Goodbye (2022), deals with “issues,” and that secondary school students would be “keen to see.” After a brief moment of silence, Cheatle responds: “Before we bring it to schools, we’d probably have to edit out the fisting joke.”¹

Several points are asserted in the interviewer’s remarks. First, that Punch Line is to be valued as an educational tool (rather than only as – or in addition to – a work of art) presumes that its audience is or ought to be made up of cisgender people. Perhaps because of the depiction of physical violence suffered by a trans person in the film (which is based on O’Rourke’s personal experience), this imagined audience would also feel sympathy toward a marginalized group they either thought about with antipathy or not at all. Cheatle’s response undercuts these presumptions by pointing to the film’s specific queerness on the levels of both sexuality and gender: the film’s reference to sexual themes at all – let alone queer sexuality referenced by a transgender person – would probably not be tolerated in a secondary school. This exchange, then, sheds some light on the ways “transgender films” – their status as artworks, their purposes, and their audiences – are variously perceived by people on either side of a cisgender/transgender binary. Where the interviewer’s suggestion defines Punch Line as an educational sympathy piece for cis people, Cheatle’s joke saves the film from a reductive liberal logic of identity politics – wherein the function of artworks made by the oppressed is to educate the non-oppressed– by reasserting and recentering its specifically trans and queer perspective.

It is on these terms—defined by Punch Line and its director/co-writers—that this essay will engage with the film. In doing so, I want to reconsider some assumptions about film as public pedagogy as well as the aesthetic and political implications of cinematic suture, especially in relation to sound. Punch Line is a rare example of a film that allows suture through the explicit and well-defined alignment of the spectator with the point-of-view of a transgender person—a character who is not only the central focus of the narrative but who is also, and more importantly, our window into the film’s ethics and politics. Through its use of voiceover narration that guides us through flashbacks to a traumatic act of violence, the film puts the narrative in the control of the transgender protagonist who experienced, and fought back against, a transphobic attack. Furthermore, rather than rest in the well-worn tropes of totalizing victimhood or victim-as-heroine, the use of internal diegetic sound sutures spectators into the film through physical internal identification with the protagonist in moments of trauma that recur for her (and by extension, us) after the attack. The result is a film that is less about eliciting sympathy for the on-screen “other” and more about creating space for transgender perspectives and transgender selfhood through innovative techniques of suture.

Cis-Produced Trans Images as Bad Education

While transgender or gender non-conforming themes and characters have been present in European and US cinema nearly since its inception (see Thomas Edison’s 1900 Old Maid in a Drawing Room featuring female impersonator Gilbert Sarony, the cross-gender performances in Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1906 Les Résultats du féminisme, or the gender non-conforming character in D.W. Griffith’s 1914 Judith of Bethulia), films that center transgender perspectives are rare. Rarer still are films made by transgender directors. Indeed, to this day, cultural narratives about transgender lives that are created, reproduced, and circulated in cinema have largely been controlled by cisgender people. This inequality is reproduced where scholarship on transgender cinema is concerned as well. Cáel M. Keegan and Laura Horak describe the implications of this scenario for the current state of cinema studies on so-called “trans” topics, most notably that “A handful of well-known and mostly cisgender-authored works” come to “stand in for transgender cinema and media writ large,” ignoring many works by lesser known trans-identified filmmakers—works that oftentimes do not rely on the same stereotypical tropes found in cisgender-authored films.² Some of the best known cisgender-made films dealing with transgender issues or featuring transgender characters have variously posited trans people as perpetrators of murderous violence (for example, the cross-dressing kidnapper/killer Buffalo Bill in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of the Lambs or Michael Caine’s turn in Brian De Palma’s 1980 Dressed to Kill as a closeted and mentally ill psychiatrist who murders women as a result of his transsexual identity) or as victims of violence (perhaps most famously, Brandon Teena as played by the cisgender actress Hilary Swank in Kimberley Peirce’s 1999 Boys Don’t Cry). Such films tend also to problematize transgender bodies and subjectivities in particular ways, either by “fix[ating] on the gender transition process,” as trans filmmaker Isabel Sandoval has noted, or by making the trans body itself a plot point or spectacle, as in the well-worn trope of the gender reveal shock in films such as the aforementioned Boys Don’t Cry or Neil Jordan’s 1992 The Crying Game.³ Not only are all these films directed by cisgender people, star cisgender actors in the roles of trans characters, and posit “transgender” as violent, mentally ill, and/or spectacular; moreover, their various statuses as major award winners, box office successes, and sources of much sensational public attention mean that they have come to occupy the place of “transgender movies” in popular culture—even decades after their release.

I want to be careful to clarify that I am not positing a transgender/cisgender binary where trans directing corresponds to “good” or “positive” representations and where cisgender directing corresponds to “bad” or “problematic” representations. In fact, I would concur with queer-trans scholar Dan Vena that even when discussing the most ostensibly egregious of the above listed films (namely, The Silence of the Lambs and Dressed to Kill), the critiques of their stereotypical representations do not fully undermine “the political utility of the very active monstrous, anti-normative (and yes, often problematic) trans and trans-read characters.”⁴ Furthermore, to my mind, one of the most nuanced films to center a trans character in the last couple of years is Monica (2023) by cis male director Andrea Pallaoro. His script (co-written with regular collaborator Orlando Tirado, also a cis man) neither shies away from nor makes spectacle of its titular character’s lived experience of being trans in a story that deftly and subtly explores Monica’s relationship with her estranged family as well as to herself. The film’s greatest achievement is showing how Monica’s being trans is something that, in confluence with a host of other factors both known and unknowable, affects those relationships in ways that cannot always be neatly and summarily explicated. This sense of complexity is no doubt bolstered by the strong lead performance by Trace Lysette (who was also an executive producer on the project), a trans woman who is best known for playing the role of Shea in all five seasons of the Amazon series Transparent as well as the feature film Hustlers with Cardi B, Jennifer Lopez, and Constance Wu. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it received an eleven and half minute standing ovation. Yet despite early critical praise, buzz in major arts and culture publications including Variety⁵ and Vanity Fair⁶, multiple media appearances by Lysette and co-star Patricia Clarkson, as well as a campaign by distributor IFC to get the film nominated for an Academy Award (no openly trans performer had yet been nominated for an Oscar), distribution was limited, bringing in just $182,000 at the US box office, and it failed to garner any Oscar nods. All of this bears out a bigger point about trans representation in film: where care is taken to capture a trans-informed perspective, whether by a trans or cis filmmaker, that effort is not rewarded in the same high profile ways as films by cis directors and or/starring cis people in trans roles, even in 21^st-century films (see, for example, Jared Leto’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as a fictional trans woman in the ‘based on a true story’ film Dallas Buyers Club [dir. Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013]). The material conditions of trans representation—from inequalities at the levels of production and distribution to those at the levels of popular and critical reception and academic inquiry—warrants more nuanced discussion.

The 2020 documentary Disclosure, which offers a history of transgender representation in US film and television, interspersed with commentary from several transgender activists and film and television industry professional, acknowledges the bad education that popular film and TV has provided for American audiences, cis and trans alike.⁷ While informative, the documentary maintains the narrow view that artistic representation functions in one specific educational mode. As actress Laverne Cox notes, “According to a study from GLAAD, 80 percent of Americans don’t actually know someone who is transgender. So most of the information that Americans get about who transgender people are, what our lives are and are about, comes from the media.”⁸ Nick Adams, GLAAD Director of Trans Media and Representation elaborates:

We’re [trans people] not raised, usually, in a family where other trans people are around us, so when we’re trying to figure out who we are, we look to the media to try to figure it out, because just like the 80 percent of Americans who say they don’t know a trans person, that’s often true of trans people as well. We don’t know a trans person when we’re trying to figure out who we are, so we’re looking to the media to figure out, like, “Who’s like us?”.⁹

After a series of negative and outlandish clips (trans women playing the roles of sex workers who are murdered and whose “true” sex is revealed post-mortem or hospital patients whose hormone replacement therapy has made them ill or complicates their treatment for a different condition), the conclusion that Disclosure leads us to is stated succinctly by actress and writer Jen Richards: “We just need more [representations], and that way, the occasional clumsy representation wouldn’t matter as much because it wouldn’t be all that there is.”¹⁰ Whether or not this is true seems less important than acknowledging that this landscape of “clumsy” representations is shaped almost exclusively by cisgender directors for cisgender audiences. If we consider film and other popular visual media as a form of public pedagogy, to my mind the most disturbing aspect of this bad education is not the association of transgender with violence, mental illness, or spectacle. Rather, it is the circumscribed nature of this education, which involves the twin erasure of transgender creators bringing their lived experiences and diverse perspectives to their artwork and the transgender audiences to whom those creators speak. Even after the so-called “transgender tipping point” in popular culture, filmic representations of transgender people and of the issues affecting us are overwhelmingly made by cisgender people.¹¹ Thus, the perspectives—political, personal, and aesthetic—of actual transgender people are few and far between. While there are certainly trans-identified filmmakers presently making films, their works are exceedingly difficult to access outside of the small festival circuit. Almost without exception (the US-based trans filmmaker Isabel Sandoval is a recent standout), these works lack distribution, are low-budget, and have not been screened outside of festivals or, more commonly, via the filmmaker’s own channels on sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Without access to this range of styles and perspectives of trans-identified filmmakers, “transgender” becomes something of an imaginary category—a signifier without a material referent—in spite of, and obscuring, the real existence of transgender people.

This worldwide aesthetic trend mirrors a worldwide social trend: in most countries, the right to claim a gender different from that assigned at birth is either prohibited or subject to a series of costly, time-consuming processes involving assessments, treatments, and testimony from medical and psychological professionals speaking on behalf of transgender individuals. Even though Ireland in 2015 became one of (then) just four legal jurisdictions in the world that allow people to legally change their gender “by statutory self-declaration,”¹² access to affirming trans health care is quite limited, instances of anti-trans violence remain among the highest in the European Union,¹³ and anti-trans rhetoric is something of a staple in popular Irish media outlets. In this social and political context, it might make sense to read Punch Line in a similar way to the abovementioned interviewer. Centering on a transgender protagonist on the night of a transphobic assault, Punch Line makes direct reference to real issues facing transgender people in Ireland, most notably street harassment, violence, and the lack of response from authority figures such as the Gardaí. Considering these factors alone, Punch Line could be called “educational” if we presume a cisgender audience. And indeed, as O’ Rourke notes, some cis male screeners of the film remarked that they found unbelievable a scene in which O’Rourke’s character is dismissed by the Gardaí.¹⁴ One hopes that these viewers had occasion to be disabused of the notion that the police are generally helpful toward trans citizens – but, short of handing out questionnaires to audiences post-screening, viewer responses cannot in all cases be confirmed.

Certainly, films, like all art forms, and indeed like any other form of experience, have the capacity to educate. But there is never a guaranteed cause and effect relationship between viewing and learning, nor can one predict either the sorts of lessons (if any) audiences may learn or the manner of action (if any) audiences may be inspired to take. Jacques Rancière points to this erroneous “assumption that art compels us to revolt when it shows us revolting things…. [an] assumption that implies a specific form of relationship between cause and effect, intention and consequence.”¹⁵ Such an assumption leaves unspoken that “intention” and “consequence” function within the prevailing social norms of a given time and place, which necessarily define the parameters within which the work of art can be understood. Asking a film to bear the burden of being an educational endeavor in addition to, or perhaps in place of, being a work of art flattens and forecloses its possible meanings, and in the case of Punch Line, risks totalizing the film’s meaning under the rubric of “what it can do for cishet people.” Viewing the film primarily through an educational lens – which in this case would mean a cisgender lens – further risks overshadowing (if not erasing) transgender perspectives, in terms of the aesthetic techniques that guide our attention and affective responses in ways that align with the trans perspective both on-screen and behind the camera.

This issue of perspective is one that is of central importance to Punch Line. The film’s alignment of the protagonist’s point of view with the audience is complex and multi-layered, utilizing the relay of looks as well as voiceover narration, flashback, and sound to control the degree of that alignment, which is at turns painfully close to and distant from the transgender body on screen. The film’s narrative and editing techniques give the transgender protagonist control over her story while sound and camera techniques control our degree of suture and identification in ways that work against familiar tropes of cis-produced trans stories that typically use sensational violence against trans bodies to elicit pity (what O’Rourke refers to as “misery porn”).¹⁶ Instead, Punch Line speaks from a trans perspective to an audience that includes, and validates the experiences of, trans people.

Sound, Suture, and Transgender Embodiment

We first see the protagonist, Sorcha (played by co-writer O’Rourke), in a medium long shot standing in front of a mirror in the women’s bathroom at a comedy club. Laughter from the crowd slowly fades to a menacing non-diegetic score as we cut to a close-up of Sorcha’s bloody face. After spitting blood into the sink and taking stock of her injuries in the mirror, she punches the wall in front of her, then uses a tampon to staunch her bloody nose. A fellow comedian enters the doorway to let her know she’s up and inquires about the injury, Sorcha replies “Don’t ask,” and the two engage in joking banter about why a trans woman has a tampon (“I know you’re new to this whole being a woman thing, but you know that’s not where it goes, right?”). The joking continues amongst Sorcha and her fellow stand-ups, defusing the tension of the first shots, but Sorcha’s relative comfort doesn’t last long. Taking the stage for her set, she is misgendered by the comedy club’s emcee, and she takes this opportunity to make a joke about transphobia: “It’s not the first time a comedian I look up to has misgendered me… One of my favorite comedians has an incredibly transphobic bit. But it is about watching trans porn, so at least I know he’d go down on me.” The audience laughs, and then a cis man in the presumably all cisgender audience heckles her, replying “Well, I fuckin’ wouldn’t!” At this, the audience goes silent, and we hear a sound something like feedback or a ringing in the ears after a shock, aligning us briefly with Sorcha’s perspective. This technique, which will be used again later in the film, operates as something of a punctuation mark, drawing attention to itself as an interruption of Sorcha’s narration of self. Secondly, that it mimics a sound many of us are likely familiar with from moments of extreme stress cues us into Sorcha’s experience of post-traumatic stress, and it does so by forcing the audience to have precisely the same physical experience as the character: all of us are hearing the same thing. As O’Rourke confirmed in a recent interview, the idea behind this sound effect was precisely to “recreate a little bit of a PTSD flashback,” noting also that the experience of this sound is akin to being “punched in the head.”¹⁷ If we read this scene through Robert Bresson’s and Mary Anne Doane’s respective assertions that “The ear goes more toward the within, the eye toward the outer”¹⁸ and that “… the ear is precisely that organ which opens onto the interior reality of the individual,”¹⁹ then this particular combination of sound and image thus gives us the inner and outer experiences simultaneously. As viewers aligned with the perspective of the camera, we experience the same image as the diegetic audience – the outer image of Sorcha. Simultaneously, the shared experience of sound sutures us into the film through fantasied access to Sorcha’s interior bodily space. Similarly to the workings of Chantal Akerman’s News From Home, as described by Stephen Heath, this scene also “has no shot/reverse shot sequence” on which it relies to suture us to Sorcha, and, likewise “the Absent One [the imagined figure who is “seeing” for and with us] is not resolved”; rather, image and sound must be understood as working in conjunction to guide our identification.²⁰ This alignment with traumatic interiority and the simultaneous ability to see the outward expression of trauma – as though we were aligned with a Sorcha who can also see herself – has unique and important implications in the context of trans-ness.

Figure 1:

Sorcha takes stock of her injuries]

Figure 2:

Medium close-up on Sorcha as sound signals trauma response]

The dual experience of interiority and exteriority can be read in at least two complementary ways. First, we can read it as a moment of extreme self-consciousness akin to an out of body experience that often accompanies extreme stress or trauma – the kind of hyper awareness that, as O’Rourke remarked, happens when one is bombing on stage and can hear one’s own voice as if spoken by someone else.²¹ Like Sorcha, we are placed both inside and outside the body at once. Second, the image of Sorcha’s stunned face is coupled with the ringing ears sound effect in such a way that the ideological hierarchy that privileges the visual over the aural is briefly challenged, with the aural getting the upper hand in guiding our attention – a tactic that is enlightening in the context of transgender subjectivity. Transgender subjects are often judged on our external visible qualities – our “success” as subjects who can “pass” as male or female depends on (cisgender) others’ ability to see a man or a woman based on the presence or absence of external bodily markers that are traditionally understood to align with either sex. We’ve already been introduced to Sorcha’s character as a trans woman (thereby foreclosing the possibility of the trans “reveal” trope typical of cis representations) watched by a cisgender audience on stage and under a spotlight. The intrusion of a jarring and uncomfortable sound suddenly forces us to hold that image (and the importance placed on an imagined revelatory power of the visual) off to the side and align more fully with the sound – that is, the physical feeling – of panic.

Moreover, the particular way that sound is coupled with image here also has implications for considerations of suture and transgender subjectivity. In “The Transgender Look,” Jack Halberstam identifies in the film Boys Don’t Cry a mode of complicated looking, which shares some similarities to the structure of looks and the elements of suture found in Punch Line, but with a crucial difference.²² Writing about the ways trans characters have been deployed in film, Halberstam describes a mode in which viewers are meant to see with the transgender character: “In a second mode that involves embedding several ways of looking into one, the film deploys certain formal techniques to give the viewer access to the transgender gaze in order to look with the transgender character instead of at him.”²³ The violent sex reveal scene in Boys Don’t Cry, in which the young transgender man, Brandon Teena, is stripped naked by his two killers, serves as an example of the transgender gaze as “a look divided within itself, a point of view that comes from two places (at least) at the same time, one clothed and one naked.”²⁴ In this surreal scene, time slows down as Brandon’s out of body trauma response is literalized: the camera is aligned with Brandon’s point of view and we see through his eyes, by way of a shot/reverse shot, a crowd of onlookers, among which is another (clothed) version of himself. Through a second shot/reverse shot, the point of view is then transferred to this projected double who watches the violence continue. The clothed Brandon, Halberstam writes, “is the one who survives… he is the one to whom the audience is now sutured, a figure who combines momentarily the activity of looking with the passivity of the spectacle.”²⁵ Similar to the scene just described in Punch Line, the out of body experience is felt by the audience and acts as a suturing device. However, while in Boys Don’t Cry, we are sutured into the trauma response through the shot/reverse shot system that is central to the theories of Daniel Dayan²⁶ and Jean-Pierre Oudart,²⁷ Punch Line relies on both visual elements and sound for an experience of suture – an expansion of the possibilities of suture that falls more in line with Stephen Heath’s theorizing on the subject.

What makes Punch Line’s cinematic grammar uniquely different from Boys Don’t Cry is not only the use of sound in this regard but also how this act of suture places us in proximity to the transgender subject. In Boys Don’t Cry, we identify with the victim’s projection of a fantasied self looking on as his embodied self experiences abuse – an act made possible by the film’s deviation from the classic codes of cinematic realism. Punch Line does not stray from these codes – we are kept firmly aligned with the protagonist through the trauma response in ways that Boys Don’t Cry does not permit. My point is not to argue that one representation is more powerful or affecting than the other; rather, I want to draw attention to what transpires for the spectators of these respective films. In the first, we are given access to and aligned with the trans victim’s psyche so that, just like the victim himself, we are allowed distance from the act of violence, as we are aligned with Brandon’s literalized defense mechanism – the fantasied clothed and uncompromised self that looks on and, thus, in Halberstam’s estimation, lives on. In this regard, we, too, are allowed to experience a defensive position, in which the violated body is put at a distance from us, and we are left some measure of comfort: we can identify with the uncompromised self and, as spectators of someone else’s trauma and eventual murder, take solace in this notion of a true spirit living on while “the naked Brandon… will suffer, endure, and finally expire.”²⁸ Punch Line’s visual elements do not create this same kind of distance because the out of body experience of trauma is never literalized in the same way.

We do not get to see Dayan’s “absent-one” in the form of a projected self.²⁹ Rather, the audience sees the protagonist from the perspective of the camera with no accompanying reverse shot (of the protagonist’s double or anyone else) to close the loop; it is the addition of the sound understood as issuing from within the body of the on-screen protagonist that puts us in Sorcha’s place, feeling as though she/we are looking at herself. We are outside looking in even as we are, via the internal diegetic sound, simultaneously inside. If Sorcha becomes, through suture, the ego with whom we identify, she remains “a bodily ego” whose projections powerfully demonstrate in this moment of trauma her (and thus our) inability to separate body from psyche.³⁰ If the “imaginary of the spectator” is “liberate[d],” as Dayan’s account of suture describes, it is only within the confines of a trans embodiment unable to escape the moment of trauma.³¹ Thus, unlike Boys Don’t Cry, the audience is never given distance or defense from the onslaught of trauma but must simply, as O’Rourke says, “sit in it.”³²

Punch Line thus goes some way toward offering a cinematic experience that makes audiences aware of “how it feels to be trans” rather than, as Eliza Steinbock writes of Boys Don’t Cry, “how the reveal [of a “true” sex] feels.”³³ In so doing, the film places a stronger emphasis on the discovery of affective feeling than on the acquisition of knowledge about transness so often found in cisgender representations of trans characters/bodies. This strategy is invoked by the filmmakers intentionally, to take audiences through that interior experience and also to foreground the ethical and political stakes of trans storytelling. As O’Rourke explains:

We [O’Rourke and director/co-writer Becky Cheatle] see the movie being about trans people controlling their narrative…. [As a stand-up] I always felt like at that stage, a couple of years in [to transitioning], I felt like what I was doing was actually packaging trans pain for a cis audience in a way that they could understand. So the decision to strip back that sound and the music and just make people live with it was always kinda something that we wanted to do. And especially contrast that with the stand-up club and the noises being made there, and then just let people sit in it. Just like, oh yeah, this was funny, she’s made something, she’s taken control, but at the same time you need to actually sit [with] this and see this reality and see what you have to do to make something so horrible accessible to a cis audience.³⁴

The imagined or hoped-for “educational” role comes via the insertion of scenes from the attack coupled with Sorcha’s voiceover narration, which, while it doesn’t minimize the violence, also doesn’t convey it as brutally as the images themselves are able to do. Sorcha’s ability to turn that pain into a comedy set for an audience of paying cisgender customers is thus on display for those of us in the non-diegetic audience. It’s this process of translation, and the physical toll it takes on the artist, that the film makes central, precisely through the aforementioned coupling of external image with internal diegetic sound. Regardless of whether we members of the film audience take away this lesson, we have nonetheless experienced alongside Sorcha the physical sensation of the aftereffects of trauma – we’ve been made, as O’Rourke says, to “live with it.”

Trans Storytelling

The violence recalled by this moment of heckling also propels the narrative forward: the PTSD response spurs Sorcha to recognize the disruption to her narrative and to snap herself out of it by finding a new path forward over and against the heckler while keeping the rest of the audience engaged in her set. Sorcha is silent for just a few moments before firing back with another joke at the heckler’s expense and then making the furious accusation to the heckler that he is “fucking basic” – a line that, because it is delivered without a smile or laugh, stuns the audience into silence. After an uncomfortable few moments, the heckler asks what happened to Sorcha’s nose. She replies “Skateboarding accident…. Do you wanna hear about it?,” which receives enthusiastic (relieved?) applause from the audience. The bulk of the remainder of the film consists of Sorcha relaying this story in voiceover, with shots of her delivering her standup routine intercut with long flashback sequences of the events she’s narrating. The coupling of images from the traumatic event with Sorcha’s controlled, skillful, and humorous storytelling at once puts on display what O’Rourke sees as the real work that goes into packaging one’s pain and also makes an assertion that is exceedingly rare among trans-themed films: that a trans person can speak for herself, control her own narrative, and “win” the fight—all on her own terms.

She begins her story by acknowledging the street harassment she faces all the time precisely because of how she stands out as trans—not the idealized hyperfeminine trans woman more often the subject of popular film and media representations, who conforms to white Western cishet beauty standards and other measures of “passing,”³⁵ but an identifiably genderqueer subject: “As a six-foot tall trans woman with a Midlands accent, I attract a lot of unwanted attention.” Here, Sorcha describes how the visible markers of gender and the perceived incongruence between markers such as her height and her gender expression, lead to a negative form of hypervisibility in a transphobic context. But in narrating her own experience, Sorcha undercuts the privileged place of visuality in subject formation. What Sorcha brings to the stage for the diegetic audience is at once an acknowledgment of the transphobic gaze and an emptying out of its power through the force of her own narrative of self-assertion. For the audience of her comedy set, the only visible element is Sorcha herself; the details of the transphobic attack, which the film audience can see through flashback, are invisible to this diegetic audience and mediated by Sorcha.

In narrating the story of the young men who attack her, Sorcha works in numerous jokes at their expense. When she gets to the part of the story where the lead attacker calls her a transphobic and misogynist slur, Sorcha’s voiceover gives way and we hear the slur (“tranny cunt”) from the attacker’s mouth. A second boy punches her, and then we smash cut back to Sorcha on stage, the laughter having faded again to uncomfortable silence and briefly giving way to the ringing ears sound again in Sorcha’s head while Sorcha’s face is held in slightly out of focus extreme close-up. This sound suddenly stops and we see Sorcha in medium close-up from a slightly lower angle (as though we were looking up at her from the audience), and she resumes with a punch line: “And I just said, ‘nah, but I’m savin’ up for one’.” She and the audience both laugh. Sorcha continues to narrate in voiceover, peppering in jokes throughout, while the scene of the brutal attack, and her successful self-defense, plays out. “But don’t worry guys,” she tells the audience, “this tranny bashes back. I brought a skateboard to a knife fight and I won.” The audience laughs, applauds, and cheers and the voiceover ends.

Figure 3:

Extreme close-up on Sorcha as sound aligns with her trauma response]

Figure 4:

Sorcha delivers the punchline]

We next see Sorcha in flashback slowly walking through Dublin as night falls. Crying and bloodied, she passes a disinterested straight couple, then approaches two Gardaí who smirk and wave her along. Eventually, the image and sound fade back into her set, mid-joke, where a reverse shot reveals that the heckler is now laughing along with the rest of the audience. An over the shoulder shot behind Sorcha now gives us her point of view, standing powerfully above the audience, in contrast to the beginning of the set, where many shots are from the audience’s level. Finally, Sorcha joins her fellow comedians at the bar, where she declares, laughing, “Well, that felt fucking terrible.” One acknowledges this, putting a comforting hand on Sorcha’s back, but rather than rest on this moment of sadness, we hear Sorcha and others poking good-natured fun at another fellow comedian, Kevin, who, trying to make light of the performance, says “You’re always fucking terrible.” “She could’ve died tonight, Kevin,” says one; Sorcha joins in, “Like you do on stage every night, Kevin.” The film ends on this note of humor and support from Sorcha’s community.

Figure 5:

Sorcha laughing with her fellow comedians]

The Possibilities of Trans Aesthetic Experience

Punch Line’s themes and formal elements – particularly editing and sound – center a transgender perspective in important, rarely seen, ways. Ultimately, the film makes good on Eliza Steinbock’s assertion that “trans cultural production enables the imaginary to process new images, which have material impact and influence on the possible range of embodiments we can imagine ourselves doing.”³⁶ Firstly, the issue of anti-transgender violence in the public sphere is brought in`to sharp focus, validating the real experiences of transgender people, not just with the film’s depiction of a transphobic attack, but also in how the film frames the lack of response from bystanders as well as from public servants and representatives of the state—the Gardaí— who laugh and refuse to help. These representations strongly echo real life issues of anti-trans violence in Ireland where, according to a 2014 EU Fundamental Rights Agency study, “13% of trans respondents in Ireland reported having been physically or sexually assaulted or threatened with violence, in attacks either wholly or partly motivated by transphobia,” making Ireland the country with the “second highest rate of hate-motivated violence against transgender people in Europe.”³⁷ Secondly, the use of voice-over narration and editing allows us to hear Sorcha’s telling of the events as we see them in flashback: thus, we are not simply guided by an objective camera showing us violence enacted on a body, but rather we are guided by the person experiencing violence toward the moments where she speaks back to the attackers’ slurs, fights back against them, and ultimately escapes – in short, she controls the narrative for us. Finally, and most powerfully, the use of sound to align our perspective with Sorcha’s forces something beyond a mere sympathetic position: we are literally experiencing, if only for a brief moment, the fear response she experiences in remembering and telling her story. Through the combination of the interior PTSD-triggered sound and Sorcha’s ability to narrate her story despite this physical response, the trauma and its effects are acknowledged, but so is the ability of the trans subject to work through them and to take charge of the story. The flashbacks let us know what images remain in her head from the traumatic incident, the interior diegetic sound clues us in (and makes us share in) the effects of trauma, and Sorcha’s comedic voiceover acts as the assertion of self that is so often denied in narratives about trans experience from cisgender perspectives. This set of tactics evokes a more complex emotional and intellectual reading than the rubric of art as education would allow, insofar as we’re not merely invited to contemplate but rather forced to experience these moments of trauma as part of a constant level of anxiety experienced by trans people (and trans women in particular) on a daily basis. The film’s final scene also offers a much welcome representation of a trans person who has the support of a community defined, appropriately, by comedy rather than tragedy. Punch Line’s structure, its technique of suture through sound and image, and its advancement of a non-tragic trans narrative allow for a unique aesthetic experience of, rather than simply an education on, transgender embodiment.