January 12, 2026
I watched castration movie in the way which it was truly meant to be viewed; on a large screen in an university movie theater populated by me, my cinemaphile friend, an older and younger t4t couple, the director of the cinematheque with an unidentifiable accent, my partner’s ex, a seventy year old man making soft snoring noises at infrequent intervals (while still awake!), and a guy who happened to know far too much about queer culture. To add to the experience of this menagerie, I was doubled over in pain during the entire five hours of the movie, going through the motions of either food poisoning or a hypertensive crisis brought on by the combination of MAOIs and muenster cheese (the low-quality footage of an orchiectomy did not settle the stomach). This is what David Lynch intended when stating that the ideal movie experience was not via phone.
Incel Superman (part one) concerns an emotionally detached man in his first relationship, unable to communicate with his girlfriend of three months as their relationship and his general life circumstances begin to slowly dissolve. He and his girlfriend seem to be dating just to stave off loneliness; they have nothing in common and negative chemistry, already talking past each other in their introductory diner scene. He displays a remarkable inability to relate to or read others as evidenced by his frequent rants and rambles. When Brooklyn (his girlfriend) finally breaks up with him, he proceeds to get fired from his job and breaks into her apartment, where she is in bed with another woman. After a drawn-out fight, he posts a fundamentally flawed description of these events to r9k (a 4chan board for incels? I’m going to be honest and say that I’ve only ever used lit because I’m very pretentious).
A generous reading of the character attributes his emotional unavailability to some more sympathetic problem – there are points at which his actions reminded me of my worst behaviors in prior relationships which may have resolved in part due to an acceptance of queerer parts of myself. In particular, while he may accurately be able to recall his own mental state, he is unaware of the state of his relationships and motivations behind them; this ability to read relationships comes with experience that he does not yet have. He knows he is hurting but cannot name the reason why – he is fundamentally alienated in an interpersonal way. In this, he could be justifiably be compared to James’ character in Nevada, who can accurately depict his own mental state, but fails to connect to prior versions of himself to create a coherent life narrative. This is likely far too sympathetic. There exist a great deal of cis-het men unable to relate to their emotions due to the lack of cultural expectation for them to do so! To attribute this disconnect to a lack of recognized queer identity is a mistake.
Rather, the better reading of his character is that he is truly an incel (who does not help himself in the matter). By placing such a character in a trans* anthology compares the similarities between many celibate groups and “eggs” (trans people who have not realized they are such yet). There is little daylight between these groups from an exterior view. By doing so, the movie casts a harsher light on the behavior of many in their past lives. This is good. One cannot be truly in the present without accounting for the damage they have done in the past. One is not absolved of all past sin by changing presentation alone – they must realize and account for it. In this, part one, by displaying the way in which women are used as a means to prevent loneliness and avoid change among various groups is brought to the surface.
Part two is a series of scenes in the lives of various trans characters in constant danger of crashing out. This is a default mode of operation in many places I’ve lived; the movie does a wonderful portrayal of this. The characters themselves do not matter; rather, this half of the anthology is best viewed as a skewering of various archetypes which recur again and again.
Traps is a sex worker (dating a man who would not particularly like to be in a public relationship with her) concerned with being a mom toward her more recently-transitioned friend, Adeline. Whether she is good at the role is debatable – she seems more concerned with having an image of the caring mother rather than doing so. Regardless, she gets by with sex work. As always in situations like this (both fictional and unfortunately real), the natural question is “what comes next?”, for one can exist in these transitory skating-by existences for so long.
Adeline is an earlier-transition woman dealing with the common concerns of such a time: passing, surgeries, acceptance, and the like. Despite being constantly on the verge of a crisis, she tends to keep it together with her need for affirmation partially filled by Traps and her boyfriend. Unlike Traps, she has a productive outlet, music, that gives one hope that she may find a greater web of people in which to enmesh herself in. Though, in the snippets we see of her in the movie, she is more of a wallflower, existing on the outside of even her own performances. The director is in no doubt familiar with local artistic spaces and must know that this kind of existence, given the correct support, may blossom into something beautiful. The viewer can only hope that Adeline learns how to exist as herself.
Other types of guy in this sequence include:
Adeline’s boyfriend, a well-meaning but oblivious trans man who is coming into his own before his girlfriend, Though unintentional, his self-assurance and lack of ability to consider others’ feelings causes Adeline a good deal of distress, causing her to resume drinking.
A DIY HRT distributor also attempting to act as everyone’s mother. Naturally, she is less put together than Traps, shown in a scene where it takes ten minutes of on-screen time to give her a vial of E. More than any other character, she portrays the hyper-online archetype who must know and inform everyone else about the evils of the world.
Her girlfriend, who enjoys trying to (for a lack of a better word) out-woke her.
Her other girlfriend who is never shown sober.
In the climax of the store, Traps has a self-loathing breakdown and responds to the 4chan post of the protagonist of part one while scrolling 4chan ad nauseam, telling him that he has borderline personality disorder and should “pinkpill” (aka transition to his advantage rather than out of a genuinely felt dysphoria). Said greentext also confirms the intense internal bias of part one’s protagonist and inability to consider the thoughts of his ex, as he misrepresents nearly every facet of their relationship. This relapse into using 4chan and cross-pollination with the incel reminds the viewers often uncomfortable similarities between both communities, the quality of being represented Online among them.
Generally, the film is shot in a slow, deliberate manner, with scenes dragging on almost perfectly opposed to the fast split-action scenes in most cinema made today, allowing the awkward lack of social grace between these maladjusted characters to slowly wear the viewer down, making one as uncomfortable as possible. This is especially harrowing during the dissolution of the relationship in part one. The slow filming style allows the movie to be more faithful to some of the uncomfortable instances one will run into while in people’s first social spaces and comes as a relief when compared to modern movies which demand viewers’ attention in second-by-second flashes reminiscent of short-form video clips. Also notable is Lex Walton’s music – as one who also grew up queer in Texas, the use of Shame Music II was a heartrending choice.
Having detailed the above there seem to be two threads running through the movie. First, a jab at the hyper-onlineness of many queer communities by tying them to incel boards and the like. The incel in part one shares several traits with early-transition women: a lack of self-awareness and self, being online, emotional volatility, and so one. One could speculate on the true status of superman but it does not matter; inside the film he is a sick person lost in his own daydreams of being a savior while harming those around him and reliving the few glory days which remain to him.
The second jabs at the general dysfunction of queer “community”. One is always in a state of crisis, there is always a broken step on the stairs, and I’ve seen the state of many of y’all’s houses. Damn, y’all really do live like this. Everyone is striving to fill an identity that they cannot yet maintain, let that be a mom, sex worker, employee, or artist. One will never be what they truly envision themselves as; any attempt at doing so requires authentic buy-in from both themselves and those around them. However, these sparse moments of desperation make it seem as if the characters are simply using each other. Adeline is the means by which Traps becomes a mother; her boyfriend is the means by which Adeline alleviates her alienation from others; Traps delivers validation unto others; the HRT dealer gets her kicks by out-woking everyone else. I’m not convinced that any of these characters like each other but rather exist in an adolescent state of precarity in which they’ve latched onto the closest people to them, which provide the bare necessities and call that community. They get a consistent positive amount of pleasure by being able to gesture at each other and use this exalted word, simultaneously experiencing a negative when they actually engage on each others’ terms. Traps does not console well; Adeline does not like her boyfriend; the HRT dealer is quite bad at it. To them who lack any other calling, this all is just something to do in the face of meaninglessness.
I quite enjoy the genre of “skewering a type of guy” but given by proximity to this type of guy it feels necessary to paint an alternative to this societal flailing. Skeptical of a one-size-fits-all solution, I simply have an outline of takeaways:
It is a beautiful experience to be fully recognized by another and those stemming from the same circumstances are much more likely to be able to do this for one another. However this means nothing. One does not need to be fully known to be loved or appreciated; one has various faucets by which others see them more than queerness alone. One should meet others on multiple levels of life.
There is a solidarity between those who have faced similar struggles; one sees it in the eyes of every woman who gets catcalled; those picking at a buffet with shame; those who ate the same meal every day between 2008 and 2010. It is not something to bond over – suffering is a shallow well. These struggles may correlate with certain positive commonalities on which to bond, but struggle does not make a family. Families have a wealth of differences to be appreciated.
I’ve been on Twitter and Instagram for nearly ten years. Twitter has been a net positive in my life being able to meet and befriend people around the world, as well to gain an audience which I would otherwise not have (though the site’s utility is limited these days). Despite that, the experience of living online allows one to (as in part one) misrepresent themselves to others at scale and gain affirmation for doing so. As well, it introduces concepts to the user which they would otherwise not have been exposed to, making them socially different from others (further alienating them), evident in the 4chan-adjacent words used in part two. This does nothing but harm. At the end of the day, we all exist in the real world and will die here. You are being fed ideas which scare the hoes.
Also while one can make friends via the internet, oftentimes those most interested in doing so are vulnerable by virtue of having a lack of real-life outlets, thereby being susceptible to false markers of community and togetherness that they would otherwise have been inoculated to by virtue of having had friends in high school.
Try as she may, Traps will never be a mom in the confines of the film. The incel will never be anything but. This is due to that society decides one’s role in life through actions perceived by others. Since Traps is acting-as rather that successfully mothering, she will never be seen as such. The incel seems like he’s never had sex and still posts on 4chan. If one does not fully inhabit the role they attempt to play in a way recognizable to society at large, they will never be that. Declare a status, it does not matter. Performance requires one perform in a way legible to society. The best these characters can do is dance for a limited stage. Their identities as they are exist as something to do while waiting for time to run out.