Anybodys’ Many Bodies: Finding Authentic Power in Trans Tragedy
by Ash Rice
A properly tragic narrative always involves a broken promise: the reader identifies strongly with a character, that character’s desires are revealed, then those desires are dashed, and we are left wanting. In the tragic genre, this feeling of want is purposefully evoked on purpose to make us think in ways we wouldn’t normally think. West Side Story is one such example of transformative tragedy, which builds a complicated message and forces the viewer to feel that message viscerally. Except, for me, there’s one major problem: the tragic character I identified with most was not Tony, it was Anybodys.
A quick note before I begin: I have elected to use he/him pronouns for Anybodys throughout the piece. I chose to do this in accordance with the character interpretation of the transmasculine actor, iris menas, who played Anybodys in the 2021 remake of West Side Story. menas argues that though alternative pronouns were not feasible for the era in which West Side Story is set, Anybodys may have explored nonbinary identities in the present day.
There are now two different movie versions of West Side Story, the first by Jerome Robbins in 1961 and the second by Steven Spielberg sixty years later. The 2021 remake was largely a revisionist project, filling the gaps in plot and character while attempting to prune away the more distasteful aspects of the original. The very fact that the new story “actually believ[ed]” Anybodys’ transness, rather than simply using that aspect of their character as a source of comic relief, was enough to hook me on the character immediately (Butler). Anybodys’ transness featured in the plot in ways that built tension rather than diffusing it. However, despite this new Anybodys’s dynamism, the fundamental problems with his character arc remained. In the remake, the tragedy of the original character has not been transformed into a positive depiction of trans life but has rather been truncated to become a superficial depiction of queer success.
The problem of Anybodys is, at its heart, a problem of inhabiting space. As a starting point, Ali Madanipour notes that “barriers to movement are intertwined with social exclusionary processes” (205). This can refer both literally to physical movement and metaphorically to movement through social space. Exclusion is, therefore, “an institutionalized form of controlling access” to social or physical spaces (Madanipour 206). Building on these ideas, Sara Ahmed borrows the concepts of ‘orientations’ and ‘lines of movement’ from Phenomenology to describe the lived experiences of divergent identities. These are not the colloquial idioms we are used to, in which ‘orientation’ refers simply to a set of people one can be attracted to, but are instead concrete metaphors whose full connotations should be taken seriously. For Ahmed, “orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitants, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward” (Ahmed 3). More literally, an orientation is just the direction we face. When we face a particular way, in a concretely metaphorical sense, certain people and objects come into sight and/or reach while others move out of one or both. The directions we face on a social and mental level - the things or people we spend time seeing, doing, and being - facilitate certain futures and impede others. It is this extension of an orientation into the future that Ahmed refers to as a ‘line of movement.’
Identities and their development therefore play out in both physical and social space, and gender is a particular way of uniting the two. If gender is a space defined by conceptual boundaries, then exclusion must necessarily take place within it. An individual cannot simply access a gendered space - whether that space is physical or social, or whether that space is a particular gender itself - they must be allowed access. For cis people at large, who are constantly in the process of being allowed to remain exactly where they are, the work necessary to reproduce such a system is, for the most part, invisible. Gender-divergent identities, by contrast, understand the work of social reproduction because it is constantly working against them; gender is a social structure that provides for some and denies all the rest. In general, social structures provide “access to decision making, access to resources, and access to common narratives, which enable social integration” (Madanipour 208). But gender is somewhat unique, as it primarily provides access to a symbolic world of communication and connotations. This is because the main barrier to the tertiary social and physical spaces is a primary symbolic space of “codes and signs, preventing us from entering some spaces through outright warning or more subtle deterrents” (Madanipour 208). Gender, which facilitates access for some and impedes access for others, exists in this symbolic space.
The fact that gender holds primary power over physical and social space is omnipresent in the original West Side Story. When Chino is asked to enter the dress shop, he is hesitant at first because it is, as he sees it, “a shop for ladies” (WSS ‘61 31:00). Whenever the Jets or the Sharks discuss the rumble, they make all the women leave first. Most importantly, when the Jets and Sharks are asked to form two circles at the dance with boys on the outside and girls on the inside, everyone falls neatly into place, with the notable exception of Anybodys, who stands off to the side (WSS ‘61 34:35). The two circles are a prime example of the dual-directional nature of exclusion. While exclusion seems to be visible as a stand-alone phenomenon, “these exclusionary processes work in close relationship with inclusionary activities to maintain a social fabric…. exclusion without inclusion would lead to a collapse of social structures” (Madanipour 206). The exclusion of Anybodys’ divergent body occurs only because of the inclusion of all ‘normal’ bodies on the dance floor; it’s not just that some are included while others are excluded, but rather that one always implies the other.
Despite this formal exclusion from the Jets, Anybodys is still allowed to hang out in the group most of the time. But he is not content, and much of his screen time is spent asking to join in the violence. “[Y]ou gotta let me in the gang,” he says to the Riff in his first appearance on screen, “didn’t you see me? I was smash, I’m a killer, I wanna fight” (WSS ‘61 18:00). Being a Jet has to do with being masculine for Anybodys, who argues that the Jets are “gonna need every man they can get” (WSS ‘61 1:04:20). His speech, therefore, gives some insight into what he thinks are the characteristics of socially acceptable masculinity - specifically, that masculinity is defined by violence. However, this conception of masculinity did not develop in a vacuum. Though Anybodys has access to the (allegedly) straight community of the Jets, he does not appear to have a queer community in which to develop his masculinity. There is nowhere else for him to turn for affirmation of his identity; it would not be enough for Anybodys to say he is a man because the Jets have made the word ‘man’ mean something particular. The Jets are both a club made up of boys and a club that gets to decide which people count as such. Anybodys must look and act like a man according to how the Jets think men look and act, which requires a certain amount of violence. This is a form of gendered social coercion in which trans people in a cis world must choose between assimilation to an assumed standard or rejection from society at large.
A spatial analysis can be applied here to better understand the specific social coercion of the Jets. Though the streets are supposedly a public place for individuals and groups to congregate and express themselves, the Jets work to ensure that on their streets, only certain people and certain expressions can make an appearance. They therefore draw physical spatial power from the process of exclusion, and this process mirrors the way they draw social power from the territorial policing of gender as a symbolic space. Moving into the realm of the concretely metaphorical, masculinity is a space that Anybodys only has social contact with through the Jets. This gives the Jets monopolistic power to police the borders of masculinity. Though Anybodys follows a divergent line of identification, the pure absence of a queer community means he has only two options - be a woman and beat it, or be a man and kill. Gender is a symbolic space, but Anybodys does not have freedom of movement through this symbolic space, and he must use the language, expressions, and other signs provided to him by the Jets in order to be socially accepted. Anybodys’ divergence is twisted back into conformity by the Jets’ tyranny; therefore, he is a tragic character from the very start.
However, the true tragedy of Anybodys lies in the fact that he cannot even follow through on this forced conformity. Though it seems he is accepted in the end by Ice - who says he has done a good job and refers to him with masculine terms - this is not really the case because the masculinity of the Jets is and will always be defined by exclusion. Masculinity has power because it excludes divergence. In order to be socially accepted as masculine, therefore, Anybodys would have to paradoxically exclude himself from manhood. Even the two options Anybodys is given are really one since assimilation involves exclusion in the end anyways. Tony’s quip at the end of the movie that Anybodys should “be a girl and beat it” is just as inevitable as Chino’s gunshot just a few moments later, though I confess I cared far less about the second.
The 2021 West Side Story remake can be defined in large part by its attempts to fix the mistakes of the original screen adaptation. Brownface is refreshingly absent, the Romeo and Juliet subplot is more plausible (at least to the degree that it was salvageable at all), and violence is experienced by the characters in a way that makes sense - that is, violence is taken seriously. However, the revisions I care about are those made to the trans protagonist of the story. To begin with, Anybodys faces significant and explicit violence and exclusion. He is physically pushed away by the Jets repeatedly (WSS ‘21 15:21) and called slurs (WSS ‘21 31:30). In the dance scene, it is not comedic awkwardness preventing him from taking part but rather police and a school attendant (WSS ‘21 35:00). Responding to this structural spatial exclusion, Anybodys is in turn far more violent. This culminates in an argument at the police station between Anybodys and the Jets - in which he is (finally) allowed to deny womanhood on-screen - immediately followed by a physical fight with a police officer (WSS ‘21 1:13:40). All of these changes provide a more realistic and cathartic depiction of what trans life might have been like before our existence was to any extent normalized. In fact, as I watched the remake, I held no significant issues with Anybodys’ character arc up until its resolution.
The character arc of the new Anybodys does not end in denial at the hands of Tony but rather in acceptance by the Jets. Ice says the same words to Anybodys that he said in the original movie, but that is the end of it, the last we see of Anybodys. If the ‘21 remake can be defined in part by the correction of mistakes, and the resolution of Anybodys arc leaves him accepted as socially masculine, then the original denial has been framed as a mistake in storytelling. Where Anybodys was made to fail in the original movie, he has now been made to succeed within the same context. The underlying problem, which overwhelmed all enjoyment I experienced from a more realistic trans character, is that ‘queer success’ has thereby been defined as assimilating enough to the whims of violent masculinities that those masculinities accept you as one of their own. This new Anybodys faces the exact same coerced dichotomy presented in the original movie, except the remake has simply sidestepped all the problems involved in self-contradictory assimilation. This is not a problem with Anybodys’ character directly but rather with the writers’ inability to contend with the social context in which Anybodys exists and with the connotations of his success. Anybodys still lacks symbolic and spatial autonomy in the 2021 remake, and he is left able to use only the symbolic world provided to him by the Jets. There is no hope for Anybodys in either exclusion or inclusion because both of those options take place on the terms of the Jets, and those terms will always be straight terms.
Trans stories created by cis writers can never fully address trans life, even when they receive input from trans folks. The pair of West Side Story adaptations can attest to that. In the first, Anybodys is tragic because everything he achieves is torn away from him. In the second, Anybodys is tragic because he gains everything he hoped for, and it means nothing. In both, tragedy is defined within a larger symbolic space that forces divergent identities to its periphery so that they can be policed. The character of Anybodys is representative of a wider trend of how cisgender writers and directors create and understand transgender characters. Trans characters, living in a movie made for a largely cisgender audience, must use language and follow social scripts that feel most familiar to that audience. Trans characters, in order to placate viewers and filmmakers alike, are almost never allowed to use their own symbolic world to express themselves. This is the structure of queer success in a non-queer world, which in turn operates as a functional definition of assimilation. Even iris menas’ input was not enough to fix this assimilation in the cis-run scripting of Anybodys, given the impossibility for Spielberg to think outside of the context provided by the original movie.
A larger point can be made here about how to analyze and depict trans narratives in fictional media; something deeply important about the nature of queer alienation from public sociality has been overlooked. The 2021 version revised the original based on the notion that it is social exclusion that forms the basis of trans oppression, but in doing so, they have recreated the same terms of symbolic oppression. Revisionist projects such as this one fail to recognize that the issue cannot be solved only by the inclusion of queer people since inclusion is predicated on terms of the exclusion built by straight society in the first place. Social exclusion cannot encapsulate the entirety of queer alienation, and attention must be given to the spatial symbolic tyranny of gender.
Only once we take care to notice the symbolic contexts in which gendered lives take place can we understand what happens “when bodies take up spaces that they were not intended to inhabit” (Ahmed 62). Though we don’t get to see this in the movie itself, it is important to think about what effects Anybodys’ masculine inhabitance will have on the Jets and what effect inhabitance within the Jets will have on Anybodys. The movie breaks to credits right before the most important part of Anybodys arc: the potential for him to risk “departure from the straight and narrow” (Ahmed 21), to realize that the symbolic world he has been given by the Jets does not really belong to him, and to finally deny the Jets’ violent conception of masculinity in favor of his own symbolic agency. This would still be tragic, in the sense that everything he worked for would still have ended up meaningless, but it would be a tragedy that provides real transformative power to trans viewers. Trans lives are not all tragic all the time, but neither are they simple linear arcs that eventually lead to success. Rather our lives are complex, and that complexity cannot be captured through a simple dichotomy of failure and success.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006.
Butler, Isaac. “How West Side Story's Anybodys Went from Tomboy to Trans Character.” Slate Magazine, Slate, 15 Dec. 2021, https://slate.com/culture/2021/12/west-side-story-anybodys-2021-movie-trans.html.
Madanipour, Ali, et al. “Social Exclusion and Space.” The City Reader, New York, London, 2003, pp. 203–211.
Spielberg, Steven, director. West Side Story, 20th Century Fox, 2021
Wise, Robert and Robbins, Jerome, directors. West Side Story. West Side Story, United Artists, 1961