How The Wolf Man Understands Transmasculinity

Because the thing that’s interesting about the Chaney Jr.—perhaps the thing that’s always interesting to me about sad sons begrudgingly following in their very famous fathers’ footsteps—is that he always seems so put upon, as if the decision to live in his father’s shadow—in the shadow of the horror genre’s past greatness—wasn’t a voluntary one. And maybe, in some cases, it wasn’t. What chance did Frank Sinatra Jr., for instance, have to be anything—anyone—but Frank Sinatra Jr.? Even Nancy couldn’t quite get out from under a shadow that large. There is the impulse, among sons, to emulate what they can’t quite achieve. The father looms large in every son’s life: there is both the fear and the desire to repeat his history in one’s own life. Or perhaps this repetition is the only way we have of feeling close to, of knowing, a figure as essentially unknowable as the father.

Sometimes, this impulse can yield fruit: right now I’m reading John Lahr’s—one of my favorite critics of all time—biography of his father, the great vaudevillian Bert Lahr. What it achieves is great specifically because of the prickly closeness between the two men. Lahr breaks the narrative at times to describe what his father’s face is doing as he’s interviewing him. He tells the story straight, until he hits on a gap, and there he fills the text in with his own hard-won knowledge of the man he grew up with. “I know what he’s thinking,” he says more than once after his father will not, or is simply unable to, answer a specific question. Sometimes he’ll just leave us with that blank space, to great effect, as when describing the death of his father’s first marriage and first vaudeville partner and wife, a dancer named Mercedes. Lahr writes simply that: “my father stayed up for three straight nights. He refused to talk.”³ The use of “Lahr” in combination with “my father” reminds us that we’re reading a straightforward biography, in some ways, and a living history in others.

In the same way, it feels like watching Lon Chaney Sr. when you’re watching Lon Chaney Jr., even though the two performers couldn’t be further apart in style. It’s more that the son’s work feels like a helpless continuation of the father’s. And this works, this feeling of being unable to control one’s actions, in the case of The Wolf Man most of all. Because it’s so much a movie about masculinity, our fears around it, which of course are in dialogue with father-son anxiety. It’s a movie about the fear of not being able to become your father, as well as a fear around becoming only the worst parts of him. In the film, Lon Chaney Jr. is to the manner born: his brother recently died in a mysterious hunting accident, and his father, played by Claude Rains, clearly thinks his living son is insane. How could he not? He keeps talking about werewolves, and how he might one. More than that, Chaney is rather feminine about it. He always looks on the verge of tears, terrified of what he doesn’t know about himself, desperate to be able to control his worst unconscious impulses. And the performance works, because the Wolf Man is not a fearful figure, but a tragic one.

“There’s something deeply tragic about that man,” someone says about Chaney’s character at one point, and it’s true even before he gets the telltale wolf bite that transforms him into the creature. There is something deeply sad about him, something desperate and hopeless in his face that even a smile can’t hide. Even in the moments when he’s trying to be normal, he seems like someone whose sadness will always irrepressibly rise to the surface. His eyes seem incapable of communicating anything apart from “help me.” And his transformation into the Wolf Man is something he very much doesn’t want to happen. When he dies in this film, it’s a happy ending. Not just because the creature who’s been terrorizing everyone is dead, but because the life of the person in the most pain in this universe is finally, mercifully over. It was his father who killed him with the silver-handled cane, and that same father is the only one left to mourn him.

I’ve feared that testosterone will turn me, physically, into the Wolf Man, and my father, and Max on “The L Word.” That my body will become a Pigpen-like cloud of hair and emotions the instant the first T shot hits my bloodstream. This is in keeping with my general fear of becoming too visibly “male.” Because even if there’s a way for me to be perceived as male by others, that’s not exactly what I want. It’s still hard to know what I want from T, if anything. Maybe I still have a fantasy that T will make me beautiful, even though I know that’s not at all how it works.

When you’re a gay man, you don’t always want to look especially masculine. You just want to be beautiful. Hair is the enemy of male beauty, the culture tells you. Even though there are plenty of men who love bodies that are not what the culture celebrates, it’s hard to shake the feeling that nobody wants you when you’re Lon Chaney Jr. A little flabby, sad-looking in your undershirt, a little too emotional, and hairy against your will.

But maybe that’s who you are anyway.♦