Jazz



An ambiguously gendered character from a parallel world.

David Foster Wallace once wrote a piece about David Lynch. In the piece, he coined a new term: "Lynchian". Wallace described a Lynchian tone as "the unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal."

He described a husband beating his 1950s housewife to death because she bought the wrong brand of peanut butter. "I told you to buy the JIF," he'd say as he's clobbering her to death. This, he said, would qualify as almost perfectly Lynchian.

I think "I Am Jazz" enters into Lynchian territory. The .webm above shows a simple domestic scene. The women look like average suburban moms. They're relaxing on the couch. One imagines they might be discussing casserole recipes when we cut to them. But it slowly dawns on us that in the living room, with placid expressions on their faces, they're talking about the woman's transvestite son's genitals.

Despite the obvious subtext and the producers' hope to normalize this horror, the average person is totally disgusted. Nevertheless, the viewer is fascinated. We're drawn further into this. The sheer naked horror of what they're saying, the blase quality with which they're saying it, it creates this brutal paradox that almost rapes the viewer's basic sense of what is decent.