Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl

Following a bender consisting of embarrassing disasters at lesbian bars and dating apps, I weaved queer loneliness with my crippling fear of the crumbling world around me to create a 1950s pastel palimpsest: a tale of a waitress and a pinup girl in a luscious lesbian love bomb which I call Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl.

I originally wrote the vessel into the world of Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl, a ditsy dyke named Shirley May Holmes, as a self-insert. We share the same food allergies, the same love for an Almond Joy, and the same attraction to straight passing femmes. That all said, I became interested in casting someone who felt like the opposite of me to play Shirley in hopes that it may aid in crafting internal tension within the character. Zoey Luna and I are both transgender women, but we embraced the aspects of our unique individualism as we birthed Shirley’s character. For example, Zoey is a trans woman of color, whereas I am not, and the two of us express our femininity in very different ways. “Passing” became a critical part of our narrative conversation within relation to how “transvestigation” endangers all women. Shirley’s reading of ‘Acidic Rain, Acidic Rain,’ a poem by my late friend, John Blomquist, marks the turning point in Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl where the seemingly whimsical world on screen shares haunting commonalities with our own devastating reality. Zoey Luna’s notoriety as a scream queen manifests in Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl’s harrowing third act, where the literal and metaphorical mutilation of women’s bodies entertains violent men while nuclear annihilation beckons.

The world in Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl feels just as apocalyptic as the one we inhabit in America’s current fascist state, but the film features a sole beacon of hope: a peppermint-clad pinup girl named Dorothy, hence the title. Abby Langh, who portrays this deuteragonist character, shares a mutual passion with me for traversing the female gaze. In a sensually-charged sapphic recontextualization of the “manic pixie dream girl,” Abby’s own background as a queer model and her intuition as an actress inform Dorothy’s vibrant agency in an experience of embodied identification. Despite Dorothy’s familiarity with the male gaze and her internalized homophobia upon first experiencing the female gaze, Dorothy grows to foil the self-repressed men in this world as she chooses to put her life on the line in an act of allyship instead of receding into self-preservation.

I had no choice but to dedicate over a year of my life to making this short film. I hope this entry into the trans cinematic consciousness provides an equally poignant catharsis to its queer audience, as well as much to ponder and reflect for any cis-hets who happen to stumble upon this lesbian pulp extravaganza.