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Film Review
Will & Harper
Director: Josh Greenbaum
Release year: 2024
Runtime: 1h54m
"here we go into another holiday season of uncertainty - suicidal thoughts, regrets, manic daydreams of a safe life in small hidden houses away from the world where I can create and live in peace." --Harper Steele's diary
"When Will Ferrell’s good friend Harper comes out as a trans woman, they take a road trip to bond and reintroduce Harper to the country as her true self." --Letterboxd description
is unicycling normal in iowa? --sarahmitch
It is so important for this film to exist.
I cannot make clear enough how good it feels to see celebrities in the public eye be normal about people like me.
It really just feels like watching two senior citizens who are good friends on the road together discovering what there is to re-learn about eachother. I'm not sure what else there is to say other than this will hold a special place in my heart.
It was incredible to be able to see the way these two people interact together. I mean Will Ferrell is always a gem, and to see him talk to and about Harper's journey and ask questions really made me appreciate his whole involvement. It lowkey was also nice seeing who outwardly supported her, seeing as so many celebrities these days seem to secretly hate trans people :(
hearing about her experiences, about what she wrote in her diary, how her therapist talked about it (and oh my gosh, the lady they met at the grand canyon talking about her guilt over how she held a patient back!!!) was all so incredible to see and priceless in understanding the intricacies of the trans experience.
I'm so grateful that Harper was able to share her story in a way that was both comforting, as in with her close friend, and out of her comfort zone to expand her horizons, as in the roadtrip around the US.
I mentioned this in my much more in-depth review of I saw the TV Glown (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024), but for my course in uni I wrote an essay about comparing TV glow and Will & Harper. i also talk a lil abt Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990) if remember correctly !!!! I personally am still quite proud of it, so I'd like to shamelessly link it here. its about 2100 words, and obvs absolutely no real reason to read it, but i like to think its kinda interesting :)
link to essay !!
link to reference list !!
u probs wont want to read the whole thing, so heres my fav bit i wrote about from it lol:
"the
presence of filming equipment alone disrupts the authenticity of Will & Harper: A study
by Santiago Tobon gives further credibility to the belief that public surveillance heavily
impacts behaviour (Tobon et al. 2021).
Operating under the assumption that people are
already much less likely to commit crimes under surveillance that will never be seen by
the wider public, it is also safe to assume that people are perhaps even less likely to
behave in perceivably unfavourable ways when knowing that footage of their actions
could be immortalised in a documentary and criticised by the general public
indefinitely.
This idea of consequence may mean that the people Harper and Will
encounter and interact with on camera are behaving in ways that are not necessarily a
true reflection of how they would have responded to the presence of someone
transgender under normal circumstances.
The presence of creates a gap between the
interactions on screen and known personal interactions the audience may commonly
have in the same environments (Robinson and Cooper 2024), which could possibly be
discouraging for transgender people as it might encourage this personal change not for
their own benefit but for the sake of others."
to conclude !!!!! Its so nice to see an older trans woman; its kinda like being told that there is a future in which i, myself, might be able to live to be that old and gray. and that is more comforting that i think most will be able to understand.
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