In the Flesh: The Yellow Wallpaper

“I was moving toward something,” says Jo (J. Kiernan O’Brien) to her boyfriend Jack (Christian Clements), whose often intertwined coddling and micromanaging form the background of her struggle to form a cohesive sense of self in the wake of her gender reassignment surgery. Jo’s transition is, to mainstream thinking, “over”, or “complete”, but with no more mile markers to chart her progress she finds herself feeling adrift and unable to relax. “If this last big thing doesn’t stabilize me,” she muses aloud, “then what will?” Jack has little apparent interest in these questions. Instead he spends their time together chiding, correcting, and interrogating Jo, pushing her to unwind, to feel contentment, to eat food she doesn’t want and use a walking stick she doesn’t need. She has completed a metamorphosis of sorts, but into something soft and helpless in her boyfriend’s eyes, a doll to be complimented on its lipstick and dresses and otherwise dismissed as frivolous.

The stained and rumpled yellow wallpaper of the cabin the young couple repairs to in the wake of Jo’s surgery provides a different outlet for her confused emotions. Beneath its shifting surface resides another vision of femininity, wild and reckless to the point of derangement. This ever-changing image — at first a face concealed by an errant scrap of wallpaper, then a dancing figure smeared in paint on the wallpaper itself — transfixes Jo from the moment they arrive. When Jack dismisses it as “ugly”, his only apparent metric for determining the value of things, she snaps immediately that it isn’t. The figure, once emerged from hiding, begins to haunt Jo’s sleep. She slices a finger trying to peel it up; this femininity is sharp, jagged, and unadorned. It runs naked with its vulva flushed and hairy, its ribs standing out like stanchions. O’Brien’s large, expressive eyes and masterful control of her own facial muscles imbue the wallpaper’s woman with potent menace and a feeling of hypnotic abandon, a whiff of the sweat of maenads and wild women dancing in the hills.

When the short tilts at last toward violence, O’Brien shows canny restraint. With a slow, eerie smile she suggests violence more graphic and intimate than anything she could have achieved on such a limited budget. The loft in which the wallpaper is located, and the dormered space into which Jo crouches to claw at it during her breakdown at the film’s climax project a sense of childhood isolation and concealment, a primal desire to hide, or to stalk. Does she want to destroy the vision of the mad feminine locked within the wallpaper? Does she long to merge with it? Perhaps such distinctions are irrelevant. What we do know is that she rejects the confines of her “completed” transition and embraces something much more dangerous, erupting like some fearsome moth from the cocoon of her normative relationship and its quiet domestic rhythms of coercion and condescension. She becomes something else entirely.