This documentary about a transgender porn star turns out to be a portrait of a divided self, but not quite how you’d expect. Two personalities vie inside Massachusetts-based adult performer Tara Emory: zeppelin-bosomed sci-fi sex kitten, and grease monkey/compulsive hoarder. Director Laurence Turcotte-Fraser’s intimate and ever-so-wistful study thankfully bypasses current trans-related bloodletting and even to a large degree questions of gender definition; instead this film concentrates on a purely individual problem: Emory’s battle with the “entropic” clutter threatening to overwhelm her life.
The lithe, rangy Emory is a mid-40s veteran of DIY internet porn, crafting bespoke photoshoots and making personal appearances in Victoriana, Barbarella and other shades of kitsch. But supporting her fantasy existence is real-world scaffolding: a trove of bric-a-brac and flotsam filling Wonderland, the rented barn-cum-studio where this intensely creative self-starter works. Emory apparently inherited this malady from her father, a Volkswagen mechanic who filled the family property with dozens of vehicles, nominally for use in salvage projects that never quite happened. (She still wears earrings made from Volkswagen keys.)
There doesn’t appear to be much discomfort or hostility towards Emory in her community, where she’s respected for her mechanic’s skills at the vintage car club. Turcotte-Fraser broaches her childhood as a boy when Emory’s mother, also an artist, pops by the house; and the matter of her transition during a trip to Guadalajara to rework her hairline (to her mortification, she began balding early). But the identity stuff only occupies a little space, compared with the multiplying hoard dominating her life as, with Wonderland up for sale, she faces eviction.
It’s not clear if the clutter – or the need to ceaselessly invent projects, such as Up Uranus, a eternally in-progress sci-fi film epic in the oo-er key of John Waters – links up in some way with Emory’s gender exploration. Maybe the accumulation of spare parts is sublimating the idea of future potential. Maybe there’s no link with trans issues at all – but it’s unquestionably part of her identity. One striking thing is that Emory seems, despite the collaborators on her film, largely alone in all this activity, though not lonely exactly. In its 21st-century way, this is a classic portrait of American resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.
• The End of Wonderland is available on True Story on 10 May.
