Written by Amanda Rodriguez
A friend of mine turned me onto the show Hit & Miss, which is a six episode British series currently streaming on Netflix. Hit & Miss follows Mia, played by the ever-talented Chloë Sevigny. Mia is a transgender hit woman who finds she has an 11-year-old son, Ryan. When Mia’s ex-girlfriend and Ryan’s mother dies unexpectedly, Mia must balance the demands of her brutal, secretive work while trying to build a family with her son and his three other siblings of whom Mia is also now the guardian.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpJzeGdlC0U”]
My strongest critique of the series is that the producers did not choose an actual transgender woman to play the role of Mia. Sevigny is, no doubt, an ally and advocate for trans rights as is evinced by her involvement with Hit & Miss as well as Boys Don’t Cry, and while her rendering of Mia is nuanced, strong, and sensitive, it’s just not enough. On Homorazzi.com, Sevigny is quoted as saying, “I was worried people would be angry that they didn’t cast a real person who was transitioning, I asked why they didn’t, and the producers said they didn’t find the right person. It’s a big responsibility toward that community, and I wanted to do them right.”
All I have to say is: bullshit. Bullshit they couldn’t find a capable transgender actress to give authenticity to the character and agency to the transgender community. Look at how amazingly gifted Laverne Cox is as Sophia on the women’s prison series Orange is the New Black. Cox’s portrayal has been successful, breathing life, humanity, and humor into Sophia, proving that there are plenty of transgender actors who are not only talented, but who audiences will receive positively. It’s time to give another under-represented and marginalized group the freedom to represent themselves. Blackface is offensive and is generally accepted as grotesque and hateful. In 20 years, how will people view our insistence that no transgender actors are capable of representing their own lives, struggles, weaknesses, and triumphs?
My second major critique of the series is that the camera is obsessed with Mia’s body. Her penis is shown in every single episode. She is often nude or getting dressed, and the audience is encouraged to stare at her body. The camera is fascinated with the incongruity between the curves of Mia’s female form and her (prosthetic) penis. It feels gratuitous and exploitative, objectifying an already marginalized character. The camera’s obsession with Mia’s body tells us two things: 1) Mia is her body; her body is her most important and defining attribute, and 2) Mia is abnormal. The way the camera lingers on her breasts and penis echoes carnival freakshows that insist audience members pruriently gaze at the Other. This isn’t a humanizing, inclusive technique. The camera should not internalize the judgements that Mia and much of the world put on her body because we, the audience, are effectively the camera, it guides our gaze, which should be one of acceptance of the integrity and beauty of its heroine.
My third major critique is the show’s rendering of Mia’s sexuality. She identifies as a straight woman trapped in the biological body of a man. That would be fine, but she also insists to the kids that she loved Wendy, their mother, and that they were happy together, claiming, “We’d probably still be together if I weren’t a transsexual.” (The use of the word “transsexual” makes me cringe…maybe it’s a British thing?) The idea seems to be that Mia was a straight man, and now she is a straight woman. That decomplicates human sexuality, not to mention trans sexuality, in a disappointing way. Why can’t Mia’s sexuality be fluid? The underlying assumption seems to be that it would make her less of a woman to be attracted to both men and women. That is deeply problematic not only to queer sexuality, but to trans sexuality.
I appreciate that Hit & Miss, however, allows Mia to be more than a gender stereotype. Though she is a very feminine woman (wearing make-up, dresses, lingerie, and cute cowgirl boots), Mia is skilled in weaponry and hand-to-hand combat. Some of the most touching sequences in the series are when Mia and her son, Ryan, work out together, bonding as she teaches him the discipline of fitness and boxing for self-defense.
Not only that, but Mia is gratifyingly self-possessed when it comes to threats against her person. Watching her beat the ever-loving shit out of the waste-of-space, misogynistic, pedophile, rapist, dumb fuck landlord, John, as he threatens her and the kids is one of the most satisfying scenes of all time. He soooo had it coming.
Mia’s new lover, Ben, accuses her of still having “too much man left in” her because of her penchant for violence. She rightly tells him to fuck off. Her life is fraught with violence because of her profession and because of her dark, abusive upbringing on the carnival Fairgrounds. I also wonder if the show is saying that violence is inherent in transitioning. It is true that many transgender people face violence and the threat of violence as part of their daily lives. Being who they are is, for some reason, perceived as a threat to hegemony, and fear, aggression, and hate are all too common responses. Hit & Miss also, though, plays with the metaphor of rebirth, and the violent struggle that accompanies it. In a montage sequence, as the children don their sleeping bags (reminiscent of cocoons) to play their favorite game, a butterfly flits across Mia’s sniper rifle scope, causing her to miss her target, which changes her life forever. Mia is in the process of being reborn from a man to a woman, a loner to a family member, and a father to a mother.
Her new lover, Ben, struggles with his own sexuality and masculinity as they relate to Mia’s transition. To prove his straightness, masculinity, and capacity for intimacy, Ben cheats on Mia. He makes a point of performing oral sex on his fling; the significance of which is obvious, but it is also important because Mia isn’t comfortable with Ben touching her penis (understandably so because Mia doesn’t feel her penis is part of her identity). On the morning after the woman has left, Ben finds a handful of hair extensions in his bed. This moment was very compelling for me as a feminist because it is saying that to some degree femininity is a performance even for cis women. This posits the query, “What makes a real woman?” This scene questions the validity that any such creature exists. It subtly asserts that genitalia is as arbitrary as hair length for determining who is and who is not a woman.
“Family’s got fuck all to do with blood.” – Mia
That is the best quote of the entire series, and it is one of the major themes of the show. If I had to pick one word to describe the series, it would be: bleak. Hit & Miss is full of violence, trauma, and despair. These are highly damaged people, but together they form a unique family and a new life. Mia pulls them together with her strength, her vulnerability, and her love. By the end of the series, Mia has drawn all the wounded characters together. She senses their need for love and safety, and she gives it freely, in spite of how many curses and slurs they hurl her way. In the depths of darkness, Mia’s indomitable spirit is a beacon, guiding all of them towards hope.
- Mia’s new family
This show has a lot going on; I even question whether or not it’s got too much going on. The primary characters have complex inner lives with myriad painful issues that stem from poverty, neglect, and abuse. A fledgling family getting to know and learning to love each other while navigating these landmine issues; a trans woman learning she has a son, owning her identity, finding romance and family in unexpected places; a hitwoman balancing her seedy career with a desire to give, belong, and build a wholesome life for her family…each of these could be its own storyline. Is it too much to make Mia a hitwoman? Is it purposely sensationalist in order to draw attention to the meat of its tale: family and identity? Is making Mia a hitwoman underscoring Chloë Sevigny’s sentiment that, “There’s a lot more going on with her than just her gender”? Or is an ambitious, often contentious, and always thought-provoking short series like Hit & Miss that’s packed with meaning, metaphor, and depth exactly what we need?
Actually Sevigny is not an ally of trans women. She thinks she is but she has proven herself to be a transmisogynist in her words and work many times over. Your critics of the show are very apt but they only scrape the surface, which isn’t your fault because there just isn’t enough room in a single article to cover all that is wrong with this show even if all we talked about was the trans issues. Hit & Miss is a terribly transmisogynistic program and I am one trans woman who is extremely bored of cisgender people’s ideas of what the lives of trans women specifically and trans people in general are like and about.
I did try to watch Hit & Miss, but had to stop after just two episodes. The exploitative camera work, the particular types of violence, the unexamined misogyny and transmisogyny was all just too much for me. As you say, Laverne Cox is doing an amazing job as Sofia on OITNB. There’s no need to keep using cisgendered actors to play transgender roles.