November, 2002

Jennie Livingston has won the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, the first Independent Feature Project's Open Palm Award, and the Women In Film Crystal Award. Her movie Paris is Burning was listed as one of 1991's 10-best films by the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Time magazine, and National Public Radio. And on Thursday, November 7, 2002, she will show excerpts of her new, unfinished film Who's the Top? with Steve Buscemi of Fargo and Marin Hinkle of ABC's Once and Again for the Colony's third installment of MacDowell Downtown.

Livingston describes Who's the Top? as a musical sex comedy, but talk with her a little longer and the film's universal themes are easily revealed. “Sex is rarely about sex. To me, sex is about two things. It's about creating a home and love with someone. But it's also about having an adventure, stepping out into the world.” The compatibility and divisiveness of those two forces is what's front and center in Who's the Top? Focusing on a female couple, the story begins when one of the women confesses to her partner that she would like to spice up their relationship with more exotic intimacy. Her partner is reluctant, and so the film begins its probe of an essential relationship question: What happens when a couple's physical and emotional adventures are not in harmony?

“I'm trying to show the humor in sex, the exploration, and the lightness, and whether, in a relationship, you can have the combination of security and feeling free,” says Livingston. Using the conventions of the musical, Livingston infuses her movie with that sense of humor and lightness. “The musical numbers are a way to get inside the mind of the characters, to show our projections, our fantasies.” But, in addition to acting as gateways to interiority, the song-and-dance routines also serve to oppose the “real world,” which, in Livingston's work, is not a Broadway fantasia at all. Her “real world” is often the thing that oppresses lightness and exploration, suppresses sense of humor, and more severely, an individual's identity and spirit.

It wouldn't be wrong to say Livingston is a filmmaker focused on identity. Paris Is Burning, her most acclaimed work, was about black and Hispanic competitors in drag queen balls in New York. But once again, it exposed common struggles, the most poignant being the friction between what we imagine we can be and what life has given us. “You're born into a system,” Livingston says, “and you're either comfortable conforming to that or you're not. And if you're not, how do you find experiences or sustenance in a world that's pretty rigid?”

If one were to find a single theme among many in Livingston's work, it might be the clash between who we want to be versus what is foisted upon us, a particularly resonant issue in America where re-invention is the watchword and one can ostensibly be anything one wishes. For Livingston and her films, that uniquely American promise is not so simple. Some realities cannot be trumped. Men can never experience life as women, and women can't be men; poor people rarely become rich, and the rich rarely understand the plight of the poor. Love offered is not always love received. Our born identities are not necessarily the ones we'd choose and, even more bleakly, those identities are virtually impossible to break free from. Realizing this lesson could arguably be called an American tragedy. It is no coincidence that in Paris Is Burning, the fantasy life of the drag competitors is intercut with their poverty and street life disquietude.

In Who's the Top?, Livingston treats the same theme, but the trajectory of the story is more personal. In choosing sex, she explores the most private theater an individual has to try out a different identity. And in presenting it in the structure of a loving relationship, she asks if the way we identify ourselves in the context of partnership can ever change. After all, love is often an adventure that can radically alter our identities, and yet what Livingston seems to be posing is why, as members of a country that greatly esteems self-invention in all areas, we often run from it in love?