Oz Perkins responds to critics who say Longlegs is anti-trans

Ever since it crept onto the scene with that first heartbeat trailer earlier this summer, Longlegs was instantly raised to the level of Discourse Movie. Was it any good at all? (We gave it an “A,” so we, at least, say yes.) How can other movies learn from the masterclass that was its marketing campaign? And finally, from a smaller but still vocal group, is the film anti-trans?

The argument does make sense. (Slight spoiler alert if you haven’t seen the film already.) While the gender identity of Nicolas Cage’s eerie character is never explicitly confirmed, he does appear to be slightly trans-coded. In a certain light, his long hair and cakey makeup seem to play into some backwards tropes that have plagued the genre for years, not to mention the fact that he was clearly inspired by Silence Of The Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, a character whose queerness is far more textual. If this was the thought behind the character, Perkins’ film would be playing into a long and awful tradition of equating transness with villainy, one that has no place in any modern day work.

Thankfully, director Oz Perkins agrees. In a Reddit AMA this week, the filmmaker shut down speculation that his film contained any sort of intentional anti-trans messaging, writing, “anyone who is anti-trans is a fucking piece of shit idiot and it would be great to not be confused with a fucking piece of shit idiot.” 

While the film probably could have stood to make this a little more clear, Perkins actually attributes Longlegs’ fashion choices to a faded love for glam rock music—specifically the band T. Rex, who are quoted in the film’s epigraph and whose frontman, Marc Bolan, adorns a poster shown at one point over the character’s bed. “It just ended up making sense that I would make [Longlegs] into this glam guy who had sort of had his life disrupted in the Seventies,” Perkins told Rolling Stone. “He just wanted to be a glam-rock guy. He maybe plays a guitar kind of badly in his mom’s basement. And one day, his life changed, and he had to go to work for the Devil.” You know, as one does.

For some, however, the fact that all that backstory takes place off camera is a feature not a bug. In response to a Reddit user explaining that they usually watch movies “emotionally” without paying as much attention to the plot, Perkins wrote, “there might be two kinds of viewer for a picture like this: the one that wants to beat it and the one that wants to eat it. i’m glad you are you.”

You can read the rest of Perkins’ AMA (it’s pretty funny) here.