Reclaiming personal memory through Hollywood fantasy in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

Fig. 1 - Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005).

In the first act of Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005), a tale of a young transgender woman growing up in small town Ireland during the height of the troubles in the 1970s, there is an extended fantasy sequence in which Kitten (Cillian Murphy) imagines her own conception by her parents. It is one of many fantasy sequences that are scattered throughout the film, and one that relies heavily on manifesting a fictional memory which most likely did not happen. In one of the film’s opening scenes, Jordan signposts his intentions to infuse elements of fantasy into a narrative that is otherwise very authentic and gritty in terms of its depiction of the realities of life during the troubles and the treatment of transgender people at the time. As a baby Kitten is dropped off at the doorstep of a priest (we later come to learn this is in fact Kitten’s biological father) by her mother, two CGI animated robins appear and, via subtitles, comment on how Kitten is going to be trouble. Whilst indeed Kitten does become a rebellious teenager and later adult, it is quite a shock to find two talking robins in a film about gender identity during the troubles however the use of animation here is a purposeful foreshadowing of the kind of narrative that is about to unfold. In fact, talking animals have long had a place in tales of the oppressed (Hovanec and Lauro 2022, 116). As the authors explain, “the speaking animal can be used as a stand-in for oppressed, underrepresented, and subjugated peoples in a manner that is valuable both for our understanding of marginalized humans and for our appreciation of the animal life with whom we share the planet,” (2022, 117). Their presence here then seems purposeful. An attempt to link a trope that Hovanec and Lauro note is often associated with forms of resistance to black oppression to the oppression of those who do not conform to traditional notions of gender. Many of the fantasy sequences that will follow in Jordan’s film carry this subtext of oppression.

For this blog I am going to focus my analysis on two pivotal fantasy sequences in the film. One has already been briefly addressed above and, much like that one, the second also focuses on a false memory. If memory has, as Paul Grainge puts it, been a “means of expressing, and holding in balance, particular ambivalences and equivocations about identity and cultural value,” (2003, 8) then how can we read the fantasy sequences in Breakfast on Pluto as being an attempt by Kitten to reclaim her own identity which is constantly being censored by her heavily catholic community? Indeed, Grainge goes on to note that in the twentieth-century and beyond this expression of identity and cultural value has been explored through the sequences of fantasy in popular film (2003, 8).

Fig. 2 - Kitten’s perfume.

As Jordan’s film reaches its final act, Kitten finds herself being interrogated by police following her arrest on suspicion of being a terrorist. Interestingly, it was Kitten’s gender identity, as well as her national identity, that lead to this suspicion, painting her as not only a political deviant but a gender deviant also. Here Jordan seems to link the oppression the Irish have faced from their English neighbours with the oppression trans people have faced from dominant society. During the interrogation the officers push Kitten to reveal how she planted a bomb in club populated by British soldiers, which of course she had no involvement in. Kitten’s false but detailed account is manifested on screen in the form of a noir-inspired romp involving Kitten as a femme fatale infiltrating the ranks of the IRA and taking them out one-by-one with her trusty bottle of perfume (Fig. 2). Here, Kitten is using the language of cinema to paint herself as a powerful woman - whose sexuality is so powerful it can be used as a weapon – in an event packaged as a memory. After all Kitten expresses very early on her desire to be a famous movie star. Much like the earlier sequence involving her parents, Kitten uses the opportunity to imagine a past event where she not only controls the narrative but, in this instance, controls how she is seen.

Kitten’s use of known Hollywood motifs and genres within this memory is intentional. Film after all “wields a tremendous amount of power in its ability to shape popular opinion regarding transgender individuals” (Alberda 2018). Furthermore, mainstream genre cinema, with its far reach and overwhelming popularity around the world, holds ideological sway over how trans identities are formed in the public consciousness. Via a fantasy memory Kitten is reappropriating a mode or form of representation which for much of its history has portrayed trans identities in negative stereotypes (see Ford 2021, Richardson 2010, Serano 2007, and Phillips 2006 among others). Here Kitten is using that same language to reinvent her identity, imbuing it with undeniable femininity and sexuality that so many trans characters, and indeed real life trans women, are denied. She does this not only for her benefit but as attempt to change the minds of those around her and by extension the spectator’s. The earlier fantasy sequence, in which Kitten imagines how her parents may have met and then subsequently conceived her, plays out like a Carry On inspired raunchy comedy. Whilst this not only provides Kitten an opportunity to allow herself a memory she was robbed of, the sequence also goes some way to normalise her experience, and therefore her identity, through the means of a familiar and light-hearted language. In the sequence, Kitten’s father – Father Liam (Liam Neeson), a vicar – meets Kitten’s mother (Eva Birthistle) who has come to clean his house and make him his breakfast (Fig. 3). As the scene goes on, Father Liam becomes increasingly more and more aroused and smitten with Kitten’s mother who it is said bears a striking resemblance to movie star Mitzi Gaynor.

Fig. 3 - Kitten’s father – Father Liam (Liam Neeson) – meets Kitten’s mother (Eva Birthistle).

Kitten’s obsession with reclaiming her memory via the tropes of popular cinema echoes the postmodernist intentions of modern film, which too seeks to utilise genre memory to tap into the nostalgia and tendency towards the familiar of movie-going audiences (Grainge 2003, 9). Reading Kitten’s similar use of genre motifs as a way of promoting herself makes sense when put into this context. She is not only reclaiming her identity through familiar terms, but making her identity more accessible and acceptable to those spectating that may otherwise be in opposition to trans identities. This also ties into the concept of prophetic memory, which, as Grainge describes, details “the ways in which mass media (especially cinema) enable people to experience as memories what they did not themselves live” (2003, 102). Judith Butler’s work on the critical promise of fantasy helps us understand how the use of these sequences in Jordan’s film, and indeed in the wider field of transgender cinema itself, plays a vital role in actualising the possible via imagination. Butler proposes that fantasy is to challenge reality and the actual by offering a demonstration of the possible. It allows for imagination to embody the elsewhere and defy the norms that dictate our understanding of reality (2004, pp. 28-9). In Breakfast on Pluto, Jordan uses fantasy as tool for making possible, via onscreen representation, the act of reclaiming and normalising trans identity. As Butler puts it, “fantasy is part of the articulation of the possible; it moves us beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility, the not yet actualized or the not actualizable” (2004, p. 28). Through fantasy then, Breakfast on Pluto gives its central trans character agency and lays bare the lack of control trans people have over their own representation, and the means by which their identity is formed. Kitten, unable to express her gender identity throughout her childhood, is given the opportunity to reimagine her past where she is able to present as a woman through her fanciful reconfiguring of cinematic memory.

The use of fantasy in trans cinema would then appear to be intentional. With its obvious benefits of imagining alternative possibilities and escaping from the limitations of reality it allows for an exploration and celebration of an oppressed identity. This appropriation of fantasy as tool for good could be heralded as a direct response to the trans community’s critics. Transgenderism has long been called a fantasy by some of the more outspoken voices in opposition to gender identities which deviate from the norm. Kitten’s foray into fantasy shows how this word which was once used to oppress can now be used to liberate.

**Article published: March 24, 2023**

Bibliography

Alberda, David. 2018. “Transgender Representation in Popular Cinema.” The Journal of Comparative Literature at Fordham University, available here.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge.

Ford, Akkadia. 2021. Trans New Wave Cinema. New York: Routledge.

Grainge, Paul (ed.) 2003. Memory and Popular Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hovanec, C. and Lauro, S. J. 2022. “Speaking Animals: Fables of Resistance in Get Out, Sorry to Bother You, and Atlanta.” Black Camera 13, no. 2: 115-134.

Phillips, John. 2006. Transgender on Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Richardson, Niall. 2010. Transgressive Bodies : Representations in Film and Popular Culture. Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis Group.

Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Emeryville: Seal Press.

Biography

Luke Brookman is a second year part-time PhD student whose research centres on fantasy sequences in contemporary transgender film and television. Guided by the concepts central to recent transfeminist discourse, this research aims to explore how fantasy is utilised in on screen trans narratives to disrupt traditional ideology on femininity, sexuality, and gender and imagine new possible experiences for trans people. Luke’s research is very much concerned with the different kinds of fantasy we see in fiction, how it can be used politically disruptive force, and how it is adaptable to different types of genres and narratives.