Panties = happiness

26 Jun 2024 -

Paul & Trisha: The Art of Fluidity is a portrait of a 77-year-old British artist named Paul Whitehead. He has a small studio in a California strip mall and just seems like a nice old guy with a bizarrely painted truck parked outside. Apparently he designed record album covers for Genesis back in the day, so I’m not sure why anyone would want to make a movie about him. 

But there is a reason. He has a female persona named Trisha Van Cleef, who is also an artist but with a very different style of work. Whitehead was a product of the Age of Aquarius when genders first started blurring in the midst of free love and the sexual revolutions of the '60s and '70s. One night he tried on his wife’s panties and it changed everything. He’s straight and single and now hangs out in queer spaces for a sense of community. He does clarify that he tried taking estrogen and it made him bitchy, and he rejects the idea of being born in the wrong body. To him, transitioning is a mental state, not requiring surgery.

There was a time, not too long ago, that most ‘queer’ movies were about gay men coming out. Now everything is trans. Paul & Trisha: The Art of Fluidity is a documentary that provides no other perspective and only one other person is interviewed so we’re stuck listening to Whitehead for 75 minutes. It’s an intimate portrait to be sure, but in the end, the only thing that matters is that Paul Whitehead is a happy person and he knows it.