Yet it’s not the sheer repetition of this trope alone that has naturalized it to that large portion of viewers whose only complaint about Dressed to Kill is that it’s a pale imitation of a masterpiece. “For years the ‘transsexual killer’ trope has haunted the trans community with a bad reputation.” Psycho (1960) “eople have always used horror stories to work out their fears around gender,” says Malic White in a Bitch Magazine article. Indeed the film participates in an even more specialized tradition of harmful representation. Elliott’s “masculine self.”ĭressed to Kill is hardly the first movie (and certainly not the last) to play off of and perpetuate transmisogyny-remember we’re talking about a riff on Psycho-which unfortunately may have to do with why so few viewers are remarking on the fact. So Bobbi got even,” the doctor says, gesturing expertly with his pencil, by killing a female patient who has aroused Dr. ![]() But as much as Bobbi tried to get it, Elliott blocked it. Opposite sexes inhabiting the same body-the sex change operation was to resolve the conflict. Elliott,” he goes on in a scene called “Sexual Pathology 101” on the DVD menu, “and there was Bobbi…. Yet what interests me, having viewed Dressed to Kill for the first time only recently, is the relative (not total) and conspicuous silence surrounding what should be a more important cinematic appropriation: the film’s representation of transgender identity.Īt the risk of flattening some of the genuinely interesting and complex commentary the film may be making about gender (see Sam Krowchenko’s recent post for a thoughtful reflection on this)-and at the cost of spoiling the plot-the most important detail for the present occasion is that Dressed to Kill is a murder mystery in which the killer is revealed to be a “transsexual” psychiatrist “about to make the final step” but whose “male side,” his own doctor explains to the police, “couldn’t let him do it.” “There was Dr. ![]() From IMDb message board shouting matches to painstakingly nuanced scholarly reappraisals, the debate (as part of a larger one regarding De Palma’s body of Hitchcockian films) survives in one form or another 35 years later. Depending on whom you ask, Brian De Palma’s 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill is either a brilliant reworking of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or a cheap style-over-substance rip-off.
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