Anger Without Apology: Queer Stories That Refuse to Yield
‘Don’t Interrupt While We Dance’ is a film about queer and trans joy that is interrupted by the police and state.
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Where do queer voices express their rage? Queer stories where the protagonists do not glow in the pitying light of victimhood and where the structures in power do not yield acceptance to them?
Don’t Interrupt While We Dance, a film in three scenes, is about joy that is interrupted, mundanity which is postponed, and anger which is not dialed down.
Who is allowed to be angry? And how much? This is the central question I attempt to answer through my film.
The Setting
One evening, in this queer household of six, one room brims with romance, another with bickering over cigarettes and leaking taps, and a small birthday party lurks in the corner. Noori, an 18-year-old trans woman, celebrates her birthday with her chosen family – joy drips down the walls, the friends drink their misery and hopes with cheap rum – and then the bell rings. It’s the police. Here to arrest them. Indecency, corrupted minds, abnormal, troublemakers these are all words thrown at them. The six melt into puddles in the police station. Except for one. The one that retaliates.
Until it pulls up its pant leg to not just show your bruises, but also the boot which will come down – sooner or later.
The onus of representation is best treated like a weighty wind – unnoticeable when swaying the correct way and destructive when left wayward. And this faulty representation is tied with the immortality of cinema itself – nothing felt, however brief, can be unfelt.
Scene 1: Unlikability
Unlikability is essential to love. We chance on thousands of people every day, not many would we call those ‘friends’, and much fewer would we call them people we ‘love’. Unlikability, unpleasantness is a part and parcel of the people we love, and this determination of love comes as much from the familiarity of experience as well as expansion of the known unknown.
The growth of the real – the facts that may not be apparent in our lives but in those of others. It is a common fallacy that we go to watch films to befriend characters. Or read a book to like a protagonist.
Stories, one of the most tightly knit experiences of humanity, are heard and paid attention to together, yet they are the most lone and the isolated of experiences. We know Hamlet in the moments where Hamlet is not speaking, and not in front of anyone. We know of Amy Dunne’s crude diary like a trusted listener, the evil plotting and the ruthless mechanisms. But it is only through knowing this ugly that we allow space for redemption, but this allotment of space is not very queer.
Characters that are kind, that are at the receiving end of hurt are more likable, are easier to empathise with. However, likeability has not been a feature of stories for a long time. Queer characters, DBA characters, Muslim characters do fill our screens in this era but often as set dressing. They are reduced to the circumstances of their identity and expected to operate within the ethos of ‘good personhood’ flawed only for their suffering.
A character who is not an oppressor caste cishet man are not allowed to have flaws, personal growth, or learn lessons. The questions of overcoming or growing as individuals are not afforded to such characters thus, neither is an enticing character journey.
Greed, jealousy, pride, lust, selfishness are all emotions not foreign to us, but for queer characters they become not only passing emotions but defining character traits which lead to their demonisation.
Second chances are seldom offered, neither is redemption – it is that queer people must already fully know how to be the best human and thereafter step into queerness with kindness, maturity and likeability. They do not have the safety net of being unlikeable – this accommodation becoming a price to pay. But what makes a great character is not whether the character is likable, but if they are alive – if they are being battered in life and battering the lives of others as they move.
Scene 2: Anger
What can anger be then? Grief postponed perhaps.
Gentle lives aren’t powerful without brutal confrontation. Meekness and forgiveness always makes for an easy protagonist, it is easier to root for – but for queer people to be allowed the ugliness of rage, the unlikability of confidence we have to be new kinds of heroes.
Anger is the primal form of self-preservation, which knows when you are mistreated, neglected, disrespected. It is valid before the conditioned form of ‘valid’ run into place.
Anger is not on the continuum of hate, rather on the continuum of grief and hurt. It may be the only thing protecting us from the guilt of taking up space. It may be better than guilt or tears. The ugliness of rage and how it is still ours. But anger grows, unattended, choking the angry themselves.
Revolution is the cumulative effort of several small acts of disobedience. The theatrics of a non-violent protest only go so far as its witnesses – and when has the state ever been a reliable narrator?
There have been many suggestions while I put together this film – perhaps a petition would make sense, perhaps an argument in a court somewhere, unfortunately justice isn’t a timekeeper, and the sweet promise of even-handedness comes with the robbery of time – time that makes life itself.
It is imperative all emotions be felt as deeply as they actually are and expressed as vividly as they should be. Unapologetic isn’t to say, unthoughtful, but rather to say – enough of second-guessing the way our lives ought to be, to not be unsure about what we know is to be true. We live with carefully curated justifications, formulated white lies, and practiced readings of the law. Do the people of the ‘mainstream’ know so much about the law? Are they forced into knowing? Do they too exist in a constant state of being at court?
Scene 3: Dancing
Speaking is futile – never joyous enough, when we’ve run out of smart things to say what can we do but sway with our friends?
Glee must erupt out of our bodies, the emulation of what the ‘big Bollywood films’ taught us, a cascading waterfall of emotion, their gyrating fragility. Precarious frivolity. Dancing only for those that are beautiful, that are correct, that are dainty, that are glowing at the end. For a moment we can try to hold the hand of this fragility, even though it is not beautiful, not dainty, not correct. And most of all, rarely glowing in the end.
There are raised eyebrows. Gaping mouths. But the music doesn’t die, oh no! The luxury of dancing, from inside out this time. Must we, must we? We must! We must!
Director's note
As a trans person myself, I see this film as a process of reclamation of joy as well as anger. Queer stories do reach several screens now, but often reduce queerness to a spectacle, and queer people to passive protagonists instead of agents of their own liberation. It is imperative there be stories where trans individuals are seen as vivid and multifaceted individuals who deserve mundanity and whose anger is reasonable.
Thus, through this ensemble of characters, I attempt to paint a landscape of multiplicity, where each character is different from the other. The state, its notions of gender and boundaries have been the cause of marginalisation and scrutinisation of several who lie outside the realm of gender – this film turns towards these structures – interrogating the interrogators, rather than bargaining with them.
(Anureet Watta is a filmmaker.)
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