A Very Necessary Trans Reading of Face/Off (1997)
I want to take the gender… off
I don’t know if Face/Off (1997), directed by John Woo, is a good movie. I love it too much to be able to judge it on its own merits. That’s partly because of the bizarre plot, and mostly because of the way that Nicolas Cage and John Travolta feed off each other, collectively creating two performances so genuinely weird neither could have conceived them alone. But also, it’s because the movie is a powerful representation of the trans experience and the joys and struggles of transition.
You probably want me to defend that claim. And I’ll start by admitting some of the shortcomings of this theory. First, we’re going to have to accept that John Travolta’s character Sean Archer and the international terrorist he hunts, Nicolas Cage’s Castor Troy are both the same person. That’s not so hard. In addition to the obvious body swap, the characters are often framed as similar. Each of them knows only the other one could possibly defeat them, and this leads to an obsession that, the film itself notes, makes it possible for one of them to pass himself off as the other. If that’s not enough, in one memorable scene, the characters shoot at each other through a mirror. It’s hard to find a clearer way, cinematically, to tell us these are both one man.
The second problem is a little bigger. In the world of Face/Off, women are pretty much a form of property. A major theme of the movie is men subverting other men by gaining sexual control over their women. Frankly, this movie is not equipped to portray womanhood or femininity as complex and interesting. Instead, we have to accept that the two genders of this world are cop and criminal.
I’m gonna acknowledge that’s a bit of a leap, but hear me out. First of all, I think cop and criminal fit onto traditional gender roles pretty well. Cops are masculinity. They represent, ideally, strength used to protect the weak. Criminals are femininity. They are irrational, chaotic, and yet, there are no cops without criminals. The intended order of the world is one in which Cops control criminals. And of course, criminality is, within this framework, inherently shameful, a lesser life than being a cop.
I also think this fits onto the movie. None of the criminals in this movie are desperate. They haven’t been pushed into crime by circumstance. In fact, they’re quite rich and can get basically everything they want. Why do crime rather than legitimate business? The answer, at least for Castor Troy, seems to be a matter of identity. He wants to do crime. He was assigned criminal at birth.
Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about what is trans in this movie.
First and most obviously, this is a movie about using surgery to alter your identity. Do I have to explain why that’s kind of trans? Every trans person has wanted to have one of these machines at some point. And we’ve thought about the questions that come with them. So do the characters. They have to deal with the question of how they relate to their body in the context of it being something that can be changed. That’s a trans question. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, but in a world that allows, or forces, most people to call their bodies “normal”, we’re often the ones left to answer it.
There’s all kinds of fun little moments that take on new meaning when you start looking at this movie from a trans perspective. Characters talk about how much they hate their bodies. A character screams at the sight of their own reflection and breaks the mirror. The villain tries to hurt the hero by trapping him in a body that he is uncomfortable in. But the heart of a good interpretation is not in the plot elements or devices that a film contains. It’s the characters, and the struggles they undergo. With that in mind, let’s take a look at supercop, Sean Archer and supercriminal, Castor Troy.
The first and most important thing we learn about Sean Archer, our cop, is that he is joyless. The movie wants to associate this with the grief that he feels for his son, but that doesn’t really work. We meet Sean Archer as he successfully defeats and captures the man who killed his son. He only later learns that Troy has planted a secret bomb he has to become Troy to defuse. This should, by all rights, be a moment of triumph and catharsis. But it isn’t. When everyone else is celebrating, he gets mad at them. He reels off a list of their dead colleagues until everyone is sullenly quiet.
Sean Archer, in other words, is not happy as a cop.
This characterization carries forward. We learn that his relationship with his wife is failing. Things with his daughter are little better. He shows no passion for either of them. We learn that he has consistently sacrificed his relationship with both of them in favor of work. But we just saw that work doesn’t make him happy. We are left to understand Sean Archer as a character whose life is defined by an empty sense of duty. Performing his duty brings him no satisfaction, no joy. And yet, his shame at not meeting his duty gets in the way of all his genuine relationships and human connections.
This describes a lot of trans people before they realize they’re trans. They may see that duty as being to religion, to social justice, to society, or it may be vague and undefined. But at some point, they learned that a very fundamental piece of who they were, their gender, was meant to be hidden away. It’s hard to learn that without learning a broader, even more toxic lesson: that you’re not supposed to define who you are. Other people are. You are supposed to be, not yourself, but the person that the world demands you should be. The world told Sean Archer he should be a cop, and he learned to ignore the piece of him that said something else. He learned to listen to the world but silence himself.
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And then there’s Castor Troy.
Castor Troy is chaos. He is unpredictable. He loves what he does, and he doesn’t give it a second thought. In his first scene, rather than dourly listing a bunch of dead people, he abandons his priest disguise in order to grind on a random girl in a choir while talking about Handel. In our vision of this movie, he is not a separate person from Sean Archer. He is the piece of Sean Archer that is constantly being suppressed. He is the joy and the passion that Sean Archer cannot find anywhere in his life.
This becomes particularly obvious when Troy starts to take over Archer’s family life. These scenes are kind of weird outside of this interpretation. Why is a supercriminal whose interactions with women include winning lines like “If I were to let you suck my tongue, would you be grateful?” suddenly a good family man? Why does a serial murderer know how to connect with a daughter who’s feeling unloved? There’s no good answer in the literal interpretation. But if Troy is Archer’s suppressed passionate side, then this makes sense. This is exactly the side of him that his wife and his daughter have wanted to see. Obviously, they’re happy when it’s finally there.
Okay, wait, I hear you saying. Isn’t Castor Troy, like, kind of the villain? Doesn’t he kill like, a lot of people, quite brutally? If Castor Troy is what Sean Archer is suppressing, then isn’t it good for him to keep suppressing it?
First of all, nothing is born without pain. Many of the people that Troy kills are people who are, in some way, trying to stop him from coming into the world and existing. But more importantly than that, Troy has been shut away for years. He hasn’t had the chance to develop normally. Archer has spent the time most people learn to manage the strong passions represented by Troy instead locking them away. Troy is, in some ways, only a child, and it shouldn’t surprise us that he acts with a child’s anger and impulsivity.
Trans people don’t become terrorists for hire when they come out (usually), but we often become emotional and passionate in ways that can be alienating to people who were used to the suppressed version of us. We have an enthusiasm for being us and for living that’s been hidden and hasn’t had time to temper itself with other parts of us. Ultimately, letting this piece of ourselves out is still right, but it’s not easy or simple.
The final confrontation of the movie begins in a church. Sean Archer is praying, and Castor Troy enters. As he does, he delivers what I argue is the most important line of the whole movie. Certainly, it’s the line that made me want to write this: “Isn’t this religious, ah yes. The eternal battle between good and evil, saint and sinners… but you’re still not having any FUN!”
Troy is framing the fight as Archer sees it. Archer is the saint, and Troy is the sinner. One is good, one is evil. But Castor Troy has pointed at the precise problem. If what Archer is doing is good, why is it miserable? If this is virtue, why does it feel like self-harm?
Closeted trans people are often surprised to learn that being your own gender isn’t a disagreeable task for most people. They don’t realize that other people are performing their identity in ways they enjoy, not ways they feel they have to. This is the central problem, and a hard one to realize, especially if you’ve become totally dedicated to duty. It’s easy to miss that you’re not having any fun.
In a literal sense, Face/Off ends with Castor Troy dead and Sean Archer returning to his old life. But I think this isn’t quite the case. Because the Sean Archer who comes out at the end of this is not the one who began. He is one who shows love and passion towards his wife and daughter and is spontaneous enough to, without warning, present them with a child to adopt. He tells the doctor he doesn’t need the scar from the gunshot that killed his son back. This is intended as a symbol of giving up grief, but I think it’s also one of giving up a duty to be in pain. It is the choice to allow himself happiness.
In other words, it’s not Sean Archer that survives, and it’s not Castor Troy that dies. Rather, the two of them become one person. Archer is able to integrate his sense of duty with his own passions and happiness. He is able to stop sacrificing one to the other and join them together into one self. This is what he’s always needed to do. He’s always needed to stop separating himself into the part that does his duty and that part that is hateful and wicked. As Castor Troy himself says before dying, “You are right, Sean. I misbehaved. I have to be punished. But remember… Every time when you look in the mirror, you’ll see my face.”
I think this unfolds a third meaning of the titular pun. First, they literally take the faces of both characters off. Second, the characters are facing off with each other. But third, if we are to understand these characters and events, we have to look below the surface, the face. We have to go beyond what seems to be happening between Archer and Troy and look at a deeper, more complex reality underneath. The face of things must come off.
Thematically, we have to assume that Sean Archer then goes on to become an international terrorist for hire rather than continuing as a cop. The movie doesn’t show this, obviously, but the film clearly implies that’s the next step for him.
So is Face/Off a trans metaphor? Obviously it wasn’t meant to be. But at least some of the themes of losing passion to duty were, I think, intentional. They were probably intended both as a part of the experience of grief and as part of the entire genre’s very weird and worth-discussing cosmology of criminals and cops. If anything, I think the lesson here is that trans stories are human stories. This means that, sometimes, human stories will be trans stories. No experiences are completely unique, and once they are shifted into the language of film, they can and will stand for things they were not meant to.
But that won’t stop me from ending this by claiming that Face/Off is a part of trans culture, and if you’re not trans, you’re not allowed to watch it.
