Telvision Criticism - Univ. of Iowa

Analysis:

The title sequence to Amazon’s Transparent uses editing techniques and home video style footage to evoke a sense of nostalgia while suggesting change. Through dissolves and handheld video footage, the viewer is presented – albeit in abstract terms – with Maura’s transformation. The juxtaposition of familial images with images of women dancing alone also suggest Maura’s bifurcated world in terms of the separation of her life as a transsexual woman and her life as a traditional family man. Transparent’s title sequence is also important for how it establishes the show’s tone. The melancholic, minimal piano music, which evokes a sense of nostalgia, corresponds with the show’s muted color palate and somber tone. And while the opening differs significantly from the show in aesthetic terms, the use of  “home video” footage foregrounds the importance of “memory.”

After the Amazon title, pixelated home video footage appears on the screen accompanied by a minor-key piano melody that creates a sense of wistful nostalgia. In a medium shot, a young man is playfully covering the eyes of a young woman in front of him. The image is playful and nostalgic, evoking the viewers’ own memories of childhood. Yet the identification is with an unrecoverable past, of a time of youthful insouciance that has passed, and the image, like a memory, quickly disappears and is replaced with another. The sequence then cuts to a group of people at a wedding reception. This cut, in which the two scenes are clearly demarcated, is one of two cuts that do not use a dissolve.  This clear demarcation suggests distinct phases of life and evokes a teleological progression: After childhood comes marriage and so forth.

The majority of cuts, however, are done through the dissolves that rhetorically suggest change. Like a palimpsest, footage is placed upon footage, dissolving into each other until the first image disappears. Yet, despite the erasure of the preceding shot, the two images are briefly placed upon each other, occupying the same filmic space.  Thus a young man dissolves into an abstract palate of lights, shapes, and textures only to emerge as heavily made-up woman. The two shots are neither incongruous nor clearly bifurcated. Rather, they dissolve into each other, creating a seamless transition. This, of course, suggests Maura’s own transformation from a man to a woman. And, while the footage in the title sequence is not of Maura, the viewer is oriented towards the show’s diegesis and placed within Transparent’s filmic world through the implication of transformation.  Sharp, clearly delimited cuts between the boy and the woman in make-up would create a clear sense of bifurcation. However, the dissolves implicate that the images are the same: They exist within each other just as Maura embodies separate gendered identities within the same body.

The ordering of the shots, though, creates a sense of conflict that the dissolves cannot obviate. In particular, the juxtaposition of images of family life – in terms of the wedding and vacation footage – with images of women dancing alone engenders a narrative tension. The most direct reference to the show’s narrative is, perhaps, in the image of the women with heavy make-up. Her makeup casts her as an “other,” and she exists separately from the other images of middle-class family life. In the preceding shot, a woman wearing a gold lamé dress is shown dancing alone. Initially, it seems that she is part of the wedding ceremony, and the viewer is able to ignore her ostentatious outfit. The racking focus, which slowly brings her into focus, also creates a sense of disorientation. Yet the dissolve into the woman with make-up, accompanied by the title of the show that appears in multiple lines that eventually fill the screen, creates a connection between the two images. These two women exist for themselves, outside the context of family life. They are free to wear garish makeup or ostentatious dresses that may violate middle-class notions of “good taste.”

The remainder of the title sequence returns to images of family life, but these images have been complicated and destabilized. The image of the woman in the heavy make-up suggests an alternative to the family life of the wedding footage, and her interpolation into the family footage creates a sense of intrusion. Maura’s own transformation from a respectable, middle-class family man to a transsexual woman will create a similar sense of intrusion into his family’s life. The title sequence, then, suggests that middle-class family life, as represented by the wedding images, masks a less stable, furtive, and often ambiguous reality.  This suggestion, although more implicit, can be also be read in the remaining shots of family life. In a fast dissolve from an abstract, low-angle shot of a women in a dress to a man with his children, the viewer is presented with another moment of tension and ambiguity. The use of the dissolve, as I have argued, is important in creating rhetorical connections between seemingly disparate images. In this sense, the man with family is connected with the women in the dress, although it is difficult to understand the nature of this connection and something is slightly amiss.  The man is sitting, smoking a cigarette, and occupies the bottom right of the frame. His children, in contrast, are in the center of the frame, and the camera zooms in on the young girl. She is the focal point of the shot, and the men that surround her – her father and brother – become less important. From what we can see of the man, he looks disinterested as his children wave excitedly at the camera, and it is fitting that the focus of the shot is on the more engaged child. Yet it is this man’s lack of interest in his life as typical family man that will become the focal point of the show. The young girl, who is perhaps Maura’s daughter, will be decentered and left to make sense of this reframing.