The Extra Man

[Imaginary Spiders]

The Extra man(2010)

Directed by: Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

Cast: Kevin Kline, Paul Dano, Katie Holmes

I recently saw a most intriguing film called "The Extra Man". It is about a young man who is a bit confused and lost in the world. He meets an older gentleman played by Kevin Kline. Kevin Kline's character is an extra man which is an individual who escorts older women usually quite wealthy at parties and so forth. Nearly all of the characters in the film are rather eccentric.

The main character in the film played by Paul Dano reveals in the film that during childhood he had a dream that he was a duck in a cartoon. In the cartoon the duck falls off a cliff and as he is doing so he suddenly transforms into a beautiful woman. As a result of this dream he spends his entire life thinking that perhaps he is meant to be a woman. The film has some interesting things to say about cross-dressing. The film shows how the character is constantly consumed by the idea that he may be transgender and how he constantly searches for ways of exploring that possibility.

The film contains two cross dressing scenes. In the first scene he meets with a sort of prostitute that charges money in exchange for helping the client to learn how to cross-dress and intimacy. This character happens to be attracted to women. This film does well in debunking the myth that all gender variant individuals assigned male at birth are attracted to men. After this scene he continues to even more seriously think that he may be transgender. Also while all of this is going he meets a girl and develops a crush for her. He is unable to develop a relationship with her so he attempts to be her as a way to make up for this. In his second cross dressing scene he meets with another individual who does male to female makeovers. He asks that individual to make him look like the girl that he has a crush on. The makeup artist does an extremely good job at making him look like a beautiful woman. When he looks into the mirror he feels that it is "wrong". He realizes that he is not meant to be a woman. At that moment he feels as much of a man as he as ever felt. As a result he becomes more comfortable with his gender identity which is that of a man. He eventually is able to begin to develop the relationship that he desires with the girl that he has a crush on.

The important lesson of this film is that it is possible to mistake yourself as transgender when you really are not. It also stresses that it is important to explore these feelings that cross-dressing can be a very good avenue for doing so. There is a lot more to this film than cross dressing. It is a very intriguing artistic film which has the message that individuals who are sort of lost can find themselves by coming in contact with other similar individuals and that are eccentricities are what make us human and should be embraced.