Kent and Wonder discuss the experimental film Desire Lines, which boldly explores transmasculine identity and sexual expression, moving back and forth between archival footage, interviews, and a fictional narrative exploring the themes. Other emerging themes include the importance of archives and the preservation of them, the ways that scholarly insights can provide necessary contexts for marginalized identities, the utility of recognizing the limits of a taxonomy, and the profound awakening that occurs through the experience of naming one’s desire. Astrologically these themes relate to the 1st, 5th, and 9th houses, and the planets Mars and Venus.
Distribution: Currently on Theatrical Run, Video on Demand/Streaming by Feb 14, 2025, more info
Director: Jules Rosskam
Run Time: 80 minutes
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.456] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of all of the documentaries that we were able to watch at Sundance 2024. Today's episode is with a piece called Desire Lines, which is a part of the Next category, and it actually picked up a special jury award for Next. So yeah, wondering if you could read the synopsis for us.
[00:00:36.874] Wonder Bright: Desire Lines: Past and present collide when an Iranian-American trans man time travels through an LGBTQ plus archive on a dizzying and erotic quest to unravel his own sexual desires. Leading trans academic and scholar, Jules Rosskam, makes his Sundance debut with this daring, sexy exploration of the interdependence of gender expression and sexuality. Deploying a hybrid approach, Rosskam blends a deeply intellectual interrogation of the archive, a sharp erotic imagination, and a series of breathtakingly intimate interviews to create this layered document of transmasculine sexuality and its profoundly social roots and ripples. Executive producer and frequent advisor to the Sundance Institute's Native Labs, Jennifer Reeder returns to Sundance after her 2015 short, A Million Miles Away. Lead performers Theo Germain (of 2019 Sundance Film Festival Indie Episodic breakout Work in Progress), and Aden Hakimi share a cerebral and physical chemistry that enlivens and enriches this examination. Desire Lines is an urgently needed contribution to a socio-political landscape in desperate need of empathy, understanding, levity, and freedom. And that synopsis comes to us by way of Sundance programmer Adam Montgomery. (*update, it came from Ash Hoyle)
[00:01:59.126] Kent Bye: Yeah, I really enjoyed this piece because there's a lot of stuff that's going on, and there's a lot of experimentation of the forms of how the story is being told because you have traditional documentary interviews of people who are transmasculine, gay identified, who are talking about their sexual desires, sexual experiences in a way that I don't normally see a lot of representation of the transmasculine gay identity and experience. And then we have this other strand, which is more of a scripted narrative, that has a lot of characters that are amplifying the different themes that are happening within the context of those interviews. But it's happening with this kind of dual locations of on the one half, it's an archive of lots of LGBTQ plus histories. And so you see a lot of like flipping through clips, and it's a way of weaving in this actual historical document of these communities, but in a narrative like fictional context. But it's got this interesting, like they're in this archive and they're doing this research, and they come across these videos of Lou Sullivan who is a transmasculine gay activist who was interviewed talking for the first time publicly about this transmasculine gay identity and experience. And so those documentary clips are also woven in. And then there's this whole other dimension of, like, the gay bathHouse scene that they're digging into as well, and some of the experiences of that, but also in this fictionalized context. So there's a lot that's happening in this film, but I kind of see a lot of really intriguing parts, but I'd love to hear some of your initial thoughts on this piece.
[00:03:34.258] Wonder Bright: Yeah, this is another film where in less confident, competent hands, it could have been just really difficult and hard to watch. Everything that you just described, these different threads or these different strands of a braid are actually woven together in such a way that it does end up leaving you with this very holistic experience. And in addition to that, because the sequences that are narrative are quite dreamlike in many ways, like, the two leads keep referring to The Archive, as if we all knew what that meant, when it's, you know, this fictionalized experience that I think we all of us have some kind of, like, experience of an archive. So the idea that it would be The Archive as if there was this, like, historical vault of transmasculinity in the world that we could all have access to, in itself, is just extremely evocative and hopeful. And so by situating so many of the scenes in that dreamlike space, I feel like Jules Rosskam really situates us in a space of possibility, rather than what we typically might expect from a documentary where, like, and here's the facts, and these are the facts. So actually not dissimilar to what we spoke about when we were talking about the last film, Seeking Mavis Beacon, we're being situated into a space where, in the absence of the facts, the journey of seeking the story actually becomes the story in a way that is really meaningful. Rosskam is doing something different than what Jones did in Seeking Mavis Beacon because Rosskam is actually creating a narrative component to the film where the characters are enacting that dreamscape. But it's a real testament to his writing and his vision that he could trust that dreamscape to give us that space of possibility to interrogate some questions around gender and sex that I haven't seen articulated in quite this way before. And by anchoring it around Lou Sullivan, who I had never heard of, and now I'm just like, oh, my gosh, who is this man? Like, I just am so - the clips that Rosskam selected for this film and where he placed them were so perfect. I just really was electrified by Sullivan's presence, and ability to place himself in a time that didn't know what to do with him. But he seemed to have real compassion for both himself and his culture, which is extraordinary, and that presence just imbues this entire project in a way that is really luminous and evocative. Because I think essentially we are living in a time where we're in a collective conversation about what sex and gender even are. So when we have trans people situating themselves at the intersection of that discourse, and really boldly asking questions that we haven't maybe asked ourselves as a species in this way before, it's really powerful. And I feel like this film does that in ways that are really original, and really compassionate, and really curious, and joyful.
[00:07:19.022] Kent Bye: Yeah, and starting to think about some of the astrological significations, there's this interesting relationship between 1st House, 5th House, and 9th House where they're in this trine relationship. So with the whole sign houses, they'll always be the same element. But the 1st House usually being around identity, 5th House with the original significations being a lot around children. Because it's the joy of Venus, then it's good fortune. So children were seen as good fortune. And then I want to read this section from Demetra George in her book, Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice, A Manual of Traditional Techniques, because there's been quite an evolution of the 5th House, also meaning sex. So she says, “while the sexual activities of Venus lead to the procreation of children, the Hellenistic texts did not explicitly associate the 5th House with sensual and sexual pleasures. The range and variety of sexual activities were described by Venus and Mars as planetary significations rather than as a 5th House topic. However, that would change with the advent of the Arabic tradition, which started to assign the 5th House to love, delights, seeking a woman, and desires in sexual intercourse.” And then we have, with the more modern astrology with Alan Leo, Demetra says that the signification of the 5th House being sex, as saying, in 20th century England, the more psychologically oriented approach of Alan Leo set the stage for a shift of emphasis in the 5th House interpretations. In his book of How to Judge Nativity in 1904, he mentions children almost as an aside. The bulk of the significations for the 5th House are sexual and include love affairs, courtships, affections arising from emotions, and the seat of physical and magnetic attraction between sexes. So I wanted to just read that because this film is called Desire Lines, and we're talking about sexual expression. So there's a lot of what we, in modern perspective, think about the 5th House, but also Venus and Mars. When I look at the traditional texts, when I look at the significations for desire, a lot of times Venus comes up. Venus, Aphrodite, the Greek God of sexual desire, as well as Valens assigned desire to Venus, and that's both from Demetra George and Chris Brennan's book. And then the 9th House has a lot of ideas, your philosophy, the archive, the higher knowledge. So there's a lot of 1st House, 5th House, and 9th House being explored amongst those three different braids of identity in the 1st House, the sexual expression in the 5th House, and then this archive, and history, and research, and evolution of these ideas from this 9th House expression. So this film is this nice expression of each of those houses.
[00:09:55.501] Wonder Bright: Yeah, it’s, I think, for me, when I think about astrological signatures in this film, I get really excited about the fact that it seems clear that we're talking about Mars and Venus, and it's totally not clear what those things mean anymore in relation to this film. And I really personally love that and I'm going to say what I think, but, like, I 100% am so much more interested in what transmasculine and transfeminine and non-binary people might think about this than anything I could say because I'm an outside observer to this conversation. So anything that I say can only come from that space. And it's really, like, for me, this is a moment, almost more than any other conversation we've had around this, where it's like, Mars, Venus, question mark, question mark. I just really want to know what other people think more than what I think. Having said that, like, one of the main themes that shows up in this film is that trans men discover at some point in their journey towards realizing their identity that they are trans men who are attracted to men. And that becomes a defining feature. And this is one of the reasons why Lou Sullivan is featured because he identified this. You know, he hadn't expected it, and yet he had to name it. And so that ends up being a feature of the conversations, both the narrative conversations, and the conversations that Rosskam has with his interview subjects. And I was not aware that that would, I mean, I have transmasculine friends who are attracted to men, but I wasn't aware that it was such a strong component of that journey for some people. So it was a really interesting piece of this film for me because people on this journey end up having this experience of, like, this deep interrogation around what their sex and/or gender is, and then in the midst of that they find themselves also questioning their desire. And so their identity enters into this really mysterious space that Rosskam does a lot of justice to in the dreamlike way that he posited so many of these sequences, both aesthetically, but also tonally, across the board, because that space of mystery is something that really I think, you know, the dominant cultures really want everything to be tied up and T's crossed and I's dotted. And actually, I think there's a lot more mystery available for us as humans across the board. So people who are at the crosshairs of really having to have these questions are showing us how to do it in a way that that has a lot of integrity. So, you know, the way that the dominant culture tends to frame “Venus as desire”, is that women are sex objects. So it's this very flat expression that is one dimensional, and actually punitive for female identified bodies, potentially punitive, often punitive. And it also completely denies masculine presenting bodies of that same expression of desire, and being desired. So, yeah, I think as the last few minutes of me speaking illustrates, I really have more questions than I have answers around this. But I feel very confident that this is a Mars / Venus question mark question for sure.
[00:13:47.414] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that this film is deconstructing a lot of the traditional binary ways that we think about gender and sex and sexual attraction. I mean, just the fact that someone could go from female to male, you would expect that if you're going from female to male, then you would then thereby, as a male, be attracted to females. Here we have female to male, and then they're attracted to males. So then one of the very early questions would be, like, well, why don't you just stay a female if you're going to be with males? And, as is evidenced in the many, many interviews, it’s, like, this is totally different for many different reasons. But there's this brilliant part in the film where the filmmaker, Jules Rosskam, he is doing his interviews and then he kind of, like, breaks out of the fourth wall and you see his computer screen as he's navigating all these media objects. And so he's having to categorize each of these different clips into different categories. And so you see him listening to a clip and then zooming out and then editing the metadata of that clip to kind of delete all the tags that he had put on there, and adding completely new tags that hadn't existed yet. My favorite moment. I love that bit so much.
[00:15:01.152] Wonder Bright: I think I was, like, crying, and shouting at the same time. It was so good.
[00:15:05.913] Kent Bye: Yeah. So there's this kind of, like, going beyond the existing categories we have in our mind and taking this binary and turning it into more of a nuanced spectrum. And I think this film does a lot to try to speak to the nuance of those spectrums. And I think that when I went to the very first Queer Astrology Conference at the California Institute for Integral Studies, it was back in 2013. And, you know, one of the things that was really coming up at that very first conference was looking at how gendered a lot of the historical astrological texts were where Venus was a woman, and Mars was a man. Even in the clip that I read from the ancient Arabic times was assuming that whoever was getting the reading was going to be a man, because the 5th House represents women, because men are attracted to women. So even with the significations of the houses and even within the significations of the planets, there's been this cultural binary mindset that's been applied to astrology for millennia. And I think we're just now starting to break out of that gendered perspective. So as we start to talk about the astrological significations of a film like Desire Lines that is really on the frontiers of pushing past what those existing binary ways of thinking about things, we are, in some ways, struggling around what the historical planetary significations might be, and also reflecting upon how these significations have to adapt. I'll throw it back to you. This is a big ask, and a big question, but if you're trying to break down the dynamics of Venus and Mars down to its core, without having any gendered preconceptions around how that is associated with male, female, or anything, but how would you describe the difference between Mars and Venus?
[00:16:53.573] Wonder Bright: I think that's a great question, Kent. And I just want to underscore the humility that we're undertaking, and asking that question together, because I'm going to answer it, but it's still open question mark, right? Like, I also have that question. So this is really a question for anyone who's listening. But for me, there is a clue in Demetra's book, Astrology and the Authentic Self, that she wrote before she wrote her more recent book, but she describes Mars as that capacity to act on what is desired, and Venus as that capacity to receive what is desired. And so for me, I think there's something interesting in that. And I don't know if Demetra would stand by that now that she’s, like, done this investigative research into the original meanings, so that's the question for Demetra. But to me, there is something, there's a clue in there around that space of going after and receiving. And if you just think about the basic astronomy, where Mars is the first planet beyond the orbit of the Earth, and Venus is the first planet between the orbit of the Earth and Mercury, so Venus is the first planet moving towards the Sun and Mars is the first planet moving out towards the rest of the universe, and just in that simple astronomical description, we can see that one planet, Mars, operates as a kind of, like, boundary forming planet. It's like the sentry. It's guarding the perimeter of the Earth's orbit. And it's also on the way out. So it's got a bit of an exploratory aspect to it. And Venus is that first planet between the earth and the sun. And so it's sort of moving back towards that light source in some ways. And I always think about Venus in terms of, you know, like one of the first things that humans do when they honor their gods, or they discover their god, is they create a church. They create a temple, they create a space where they can worship. And depending on their flavor of religion, most of us try to create something that's beautiful, because we want to experience some experience of things being sacred and hallowed, and beauty is one of those ways that we do that. Beauty is one of the ways that we experience that. And I think that also speaks to Venus between the earth and the Sun, right? It speaks to that aspect of us that opens up to divinity through an experience of love, through an experience of beauty. And so that speaks to that receptivity, that capacity to receive what is beautiful, right? So when we create something that's beautiful, we can receive the gods. When we can create ourselves as beautiful, we can receive what we're drawn to. And, at the same time, we all have this explorer in us. We all have this fighter. We all have this place in us that is capable of saying, no, not that. This. This is what I want. This is what I'm going to go after. So there's something really powerful about that tension, that axis between Venus and Mars, between Aphrodite and the war god Ares, where we have this dynamic between us, this tension between reception and going after. And so for me, personally, that's the root of the Venus / Mars dynamic. And that is not something that has anything to do - I've managed to do that without talking once about gender or sex, like we all have that space inside us. We all have those longings and those desires and that need to act, and the need to receive. And so much of our problems in our culture today come down to the fact that we have decided that only some people get to act, and only some people receive. And not being able to actualize our true destiny of being able to do both is really causing a lot of harm. And this is a film where we get to see people interrogating that in ways that I've never experienced before, and I loved it.
[00:21:29.177] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's a really beautiful description, because it reminds me a lot about the Chinese philosophy principles of the yang versus the yin, where the yang is much more that outward expression of energy going outward, and the yin is much more of the receiving of that energy. And you have the metaphors of the Sun that radiates the energy that is associated with the day, and the yang, and then the night is associated with the yin, and that's more of the reception or reflection of that energy with more of the lunar expression of that. I did want to mention one other planetary signification, which is Uranus, which is the first planet that's outside of what we can see with the boundary being represented by Saturn. Saturn representing the boundaries, and then Uranus is that thing that is beyond Saturn that also represents this revolutionary rebellion and changing up of a lot of the structures, and a lot of the existing ideas that we have. I'm going to read this section from Richard Tarnas from Cosmos and Psyche where he described a little bit about Uranus because I feel like there's a lot of this film that has this Uranian signature as well. “Every major theme and quality that astrologers associate with the planet Uranus seems to be reflected in the myth of Prometheus with striking poetic exactitude. The initiation of radical change, the passion for freedom, the defiance of authority, the act of cosmic rebellion against a universal structure to free humanity of bondage, the urge to transcend limitation, the creative impulse, the intellectual brilliance and genius, the element of excitement and risk.” So, there's this aspect of this film that is really trying to go beyond the existing structures of all the boundaries of how we define what it means with our identity and our desires. And this is really exploring at the frontiers of that, but may not have a lot of other prior representation. Lou Sullivan did an interview in the 80s about his experience of being a transmasculine gay activist. Since then, there may have been some over time, but not that I can point to as a canonical reference to capture many dimensions of this experience, and it's multifaceted. There's lots of different perspectives of what this experience is. There's not going to be one uniform one. But as we think about this film, Desire Lines, I'm curious, who would you prescribe desire lines to as a remedial measure?
[00:23:47.308] Wonder Bright: I would prescribe this film for anyone who has real questions about what Mars means in their chart and what Venus means in their chart. Not because this film might answer that, but because it might help them form better questions. There's a quote in the film from Lou Sullivan where he says, “our best weapon against our situation is our imagination.” Which, in some ways reminds me of the Cheryl Dunye quote at the beginning of Seeking Mavis Beacon, which was, “sometimes you have to create your own history.” And, in both of these two strategies for carving out identity, there's this element of, don't rely on what you're being told by your culture. Dunye is saying create your own history. Sullivan is saying our best weapon is our imagination. Use your imagination. Create your own history. And this is something that is a strategy for the creation of identity that is really, really critical. And I think the hot point of that access between Mars and Venus is a really critical place where astrologers can start to interrogate that more deeply. So yeah, I would say anyone who has an interest in understanding Mars and Venus in their own chart.
[00:25:18.456] Kent Bye: Yeah. And as I think about what I want to bear witness to in this film, there's a thing that came up in the Q&A, both in this film and also the previous film of Seeking Mavis Beacon. In Seeking Mavis Beacon, it's either Jazmin or Olivia, said that, rather than thinking about these narrative structures as just the hero's journey or the heroine's journey, but this gender non-conforming journey, and how there's going to be new narrative structures that are emerging that are, by its very nature, have to adapt the way that we tell stories in order to tell these broader stories of non-gender conforming stories. Jazmin or Olivia were talking about this process of queering the documentary. I think Jules Rosskam made a similar comment, that I recall from the Q&A, where he was saying something along the lines of, if we're going to tell the story of these transmasculine gay people, then we need to have the way that we tell the stories be reflective of this innovative, transgressive, going beyond the boundaries of what we knew before, with blending the best parts of the documentary with the best parts of the fiction narratives, and seamlessly blend them together in order to more comprehensively tell the story. I feel like this was well-deserving of the special jury mentioned for the Next jurors, because this is really successfully achieving that, which is to tell this really compelling story in a structure that is representative of the topic that they're covering within itself. And I thought it was just a really beautiful and moving way that all of this was put together.
[00:26:54.741] Wonder Bright: Well said. Yeah, I completely agree. I want to bear witness to Jules Rosskam's efforts here and in his efforts that he is actually pointing to futures that we have yet to experience. And I want to bear witness to what I hope is going to be the beginning of many more visions from filmmakers that help us start to understand our own humanity better in exploring the rich diversity of gender and sexual expression that humans embrace.
[00:27:34.227] Kent Bye: Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. And, that's all that we have for today. And I just want to thank you all for joining us on the Story All the Way Down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do, spread the word, and tell your friends, and consider signing up on the newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
