Necropolitics and trans poetics never quite become one in Zackary Drucker and Kristen Lovell’s The Stroll, which recounts the history of the titular area of New York’s Meatpacking District where trans women went to make a living as sex workers between the 1970s and ‘90s. The documentary’s activist ethos takes up all of its space, and while Drucker and Lovell attest to the resilience of trans women in the face of relentless violence, they unfortunately opt for the most formulaic kind of visual storytelling. Which makes it difficult for ambiguity, the very stuff that desire is made of, to ever creep into the mix.
Apart from a few animated sequences dramatizing a predictable pattern of trans living that begins with a sex worker’s police arrest and ends with her returning to the streets, the film’s stylistic commitment is rooted in an apparent will to pass for routine streaming fare. That’s evident in everything in the polished nature of the interviews, the cutaways to images meant to illustrate the experts’ accounts, and how it’s all stitched together by a manipulative soundtrack. The reality of queer homelessness, transitioning, and the impossibility of passing for cis are all accompanied by sentimental piano notes and black-and-white stills.
Of course, even the most anodyne of filmmaking aesthetics can’t dilute the power of the stories of dehumanization being relayed here. A depiction of the perverse and ever-so-creative misuses of the law to target trans women is a highlight of this documentary. “I just can’t believe how many times I had to go to jail for the highline park to be built,” Lovell, a former sex worker herself, tells us. We hear of one girl being arrested 68 times. Others went to jail either for suspicion of sex work or for just “walking while trans” on the way to get bread, and at least one for giving head to a cop who proceeded to arrest her only after he had ejaculated.
The experts who appear in The Stroll, both in archival footage and as talking heads, include not only the trans women of color who worked “the stroll,” but neighborhood activists, gallery owners, photographers, sex worker advocates, trans icons Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, even RuPaul. And because we hear from so many people, it becomes difficult to forge an affective bond with any of them. The film may suggest that each of these figures represents a crucial piece of transgender history, but it never goes deeply into anyone’s individual story.
Instead, something of a hagiographic and nostalgic collective portrait is sketched—overtly broad, detached, and full of ready-made empowerment rhetoric, from “We all look out for one another” to “Our sisterhood still thrives.” At one point, Lovell speaks of her sex-worker sisters, and mothers, teaching her how to survive back when “we just took our punches.”
With The Stroll, Drucker and Lovell aim to tap into a hyper-specific site of trans camaraderie in the midst of terror and end up trying to teach the viewer about the entire history of all things trans in America from the 1970s to the present. And that, at times, means drawing links to subjects like Matthew Shepard’s murder, Rudy Giuliani’s savior-like clean-up of New York City’s streets, Mike Bloomberg’s own dubious politics, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and how Sex and the City changed the mythology of the city. The Stroll’s scope is so enormous that it comes to feel distracted, and as such it’s easy to imagine the much more streamlined documentary that would have reoriented the focus on, say, the fight for an inhabitable world for trans individuals.
There are interviews here that acknowledge the Meatpacking District as a place that was full of butchers, where flesh was cut and sold, perhaps with the same banality that trans bodies were surreptitiously consumed in the back of parked semi-trucks. But The Stroll isn’t interested in exploring that metaphoric connection, let alone harnessing cinema’s queering properties.
Elsewhere, Lovell is glimpsed in the editing studio, and the artifice of filmmaking is laid bare ever so briefly. Only promising to be a reflection on gender and cinema as assemblage acts, where bodies—of work, of bones—are cut, recut, and resignified ad infinitum, the film ultimately settles for performing a hyper-accessible pedagogy, and with an aesthetic that scarcely mirrors the chaotic and rough world that its trans subjects experienced when they walked “the stroll.”
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
Thank you for your review. If I might share, as someone in a flyover state who seeks to be an authentic ally to transgender people; I appreciated the introduction presented by this documentary. Maybe it is only an elemental overview. My state has some of the most restrictive laws against transgender youth. It is also rural do I have to try and seek out information, histories and personal stories to broaden my understanding. This documentary is just one example but it was touching. I work closely with a transgender female colleague in a public library. She is a wonderful person and I will fight harder for her rights having more understanding of the biases against her and other transgender people.
With all respect and only love, from Kentucky.