A Series of Viole(n)t Cisnormativity

Spoiler warning for A Series of Unfortunate Events, book series by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), and for A Series of Unfortunate Events, television serial by Netflix.

You can find my previous writings about this series here and here.

In my second post about this series I wrote a bit about the Baudelaires’ privilege and it is here that I want to start for this post. ASOUE is predicated on the assumption that Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire know more about the world they inhabit than any of the adults around them do.

Multiple times in conversation throughout the series an adult uses a word and stops to define it for the Baudelaires. Violet or Klaus will say, “We know what [word] means.” But if the adult had thought that the children might not understand that word, wouldn’t they possibly have used a different word? This deliberate othering sets up a world in which the Baudelaires are told that they don’t have the agency to determine their own truth and in which they retaliate by determining the truth of others. Their response is rooted in white supremacist and cisheteronormative cultural norms. The vast majority of marginalised people I know want justice, not revenge.

The most obvious example of this is Count Olaf and his multiple disguises. It’s presented as good that the Baudelaires always see through the disguises and bad that other adults take Olaf’s false identities at face value. But who are we to determine the truth of his identities? The author places Olaf in a box and writes “villain” on it and we take that as permission to make assumptions about his motives. Just because those assumptions usually end up being true doesn’t mean it’s fair to make them. Part of Olaf’s villainy might be that he feels he’s expected to be one, that his choice has been made for him by the VFD schism.

The Miserable Mill is where this first comes to a head for me. Olaf disguises himself as a receptionist, Shirley. The Baudelaires see this as cross-dressing. It’s one thing for the book to present a single perspective (or three sympathetic and related perspectives) but television is not an objective narrator. When I watch the Baudelaires tell Shirley that she isn’t who she says she is, I don’t see a man in drag. I see my transfeminine friends. If misgendering a villain is acceptable, how long will it take before every trans person is a villain?

Netflix cast actors of colour in A Series of Unfortunate Events even though the books didn’t explicitly describe any of the characters as nonwhite. This is good. And they didn’t extend that to trans actors. The only character who isn’t cis is described in the books as the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender; they are also referred to as “Olaf’s overweight accomplice” and Handler uses it/its pronouns for them in The Hostile Hospital. They aren’t explicitly nonbinary in the books. In the Netflix show, this henchperson is played by Matty Cardarople, who uses he/him pronouns (not necessarily an indicator of gender identity; Cardarople hasn’t said anything publicly about gender that I can find) and who is roughly the same build as most of the other actors on the show (i.e. not fat).

Some relevant topics for further research:
intersections of transphobia and fatphobia
queercoding villains

I have loved this series for about half my life. It’s uncomfortable to confront its issues. But it’s necessary.