Sea Monsters are Trans, I Don't Make the Rules
Reflections on Pixar’s Luca
by Zeyn Joukhadar
Luca (Pixar/Disney)
Long before we realize Luca and Alberto can't swim at the beach, we are half-shown the sleek length of the first creature, the sparkle of the lanterns on the scales as it arcs over the skiff. We claimed all the fish movies ages before the fisherman with his harpoon had time to stammer, What a monster! Horrifying! The gramophone sinks to the seafloor and becomes ours, along with every other treasure. Ariel, longing for legs, longing for her voice. Ursula glammed up in Divine's makeup. Protect the children, they screech, driving us to the cave with their tridents or scribbling over our outlines with (frankly bodacious) tentacles. The more the merrier when it comes to appendages. They know perfectly well that the gender binary and heteronormativity are held together with prayer and scotch tape. Get them wet, and real bodies, families, and marriages unfurl into the messy monstrosities they've always been. The monsters are not hiding among us, they are us.
Luca asks Alberto, You’ve been to the surface and done the change? As in: you begin here, and you get, somehow, there—there being a place where happiness is a thing with legs. The first time Luca is pulled to the surface, he thinks he's dying. The sun on his shirtless body, the sound of the gulls. I could go on with the transmasc metaphors: a boyhood lost and found, a phantom tail in place of a phantom dick. When he dreams about the moon-fish and the flying Vespa (for only a few thousand euros, you, too, can buy your very own gender!), his daydreams are more vivid than reality. The real world is the one that lives inside him. The sky exists only when reflected in his pupils.
The contest judge scoffs, They can’t be the winners, they’re not even people, and even in his dreams of the surface, Luca isn't free. He is trapped by the surface tension of the water. He pushes against it with his webbed hands, and the bright world pushes back. Even the little old ladies have fins and tails, strolling these Ligurian alleys under an umbrella so they can hold hands in the rain. Some of us leave strings of boys behind who later come out as gay, arms-length lovers who sensed the sadness but could not follow. There is a weight to possession, to desiring something in place of oneself. Alberto clings to Luca because he is the key to his vault of little honesties; Luca is free when he's with Alberto, but he's also the only one who has the freedom to choose. Alberto keeps his mouth shut when Luca sells him out because he knows that Luca, unlike him, can hide.
Watching them build that Vespa, though? They have to hold the thing together with their bodies, but they only hit the safety of the water because Luca lets go. The surface wasn't made for us. Still Alberto says everything good is above the surface and this includes the stares and the harpoons, the warmth of you clutching me tight on the downhill, our wheels soaring through the sting of the rain.
