If Warner Bros. Pictures had successfully intimidated trans filmmaker Vera Drew into releasing her little pop-punk biopic The Volksjoker, it’s possible it could have quietly disappeared: another small, personal indie film chasing an audience in an oversaturated market. Instead, Vera’s hallucinogenic memoir – an energetic, raw personal coming-out story for transgender people crowdsourced digital animation – became international news.
The Volksjoker premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, but a sharply worded letter from Warner Bros. Copyright concerns prompted Vera and the TIFF organizers to cancel further screenings and remove them from the market. Vera retreated to fine-tune the film while looking for a simpatico distributor who wouldn’t bury the film with a straight-to-streaming release. Since then, the film has been shown at a handful of regional festivals, but has largely been unavailable to the public.
That’s what’s left The Volksjoker as an intriguing mystery to some potential viewers, and a topic of concern to others. The film explores trans identity as a parallel to Todd Phillips’ villain origin story joker, among many other Batman-adjacent films. Vera filters her life through well-known fictionsubverting and channeling popular characters to show how she dealt with abuse, toxic relationships, finding an identity through stand-up comedy and the search for a happy ending.
Image: Innocence changed
Because so many people theorize about the film before they even get to see it, that framing has raised some concerns. With the lives and rights of transgender people in mind turned into a political battleground nationally, and an increasing number of legislators openly defaming transgender peopleThe argument goes: Is this really the time for a film that associates a trans woman with a character known as a mentally ill mass murderer?
Vera’s film uses that metaphor in a richly layered way, using the Joker—and equally his sidekick turned independent antihero, Harley Quinn—as a kind of extreme jester who laughs at socially accepted norms and turns them on their head. In an extensive interview with Polygon, move forward The Volksjoker‘s theatrical release on April 5, Vera says she understands people’s concerns about the film, but she hopes that once people see the film, they will understand why it is, as she puts it, “one of the most joyfully strange films is’. ever made.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Image: Innocence changed
Polygon: There is a lot of complicated symbolism in this film surrounding Batman and his rogues’ gallery. But perhaps the most complicated bit of symbolic language is the way that the version of you we see in the film is both Joker and Harley Quinn — her stand-up comedy stage name is literally “Joker the Harlequin.” Did that mix come from struggling with your own gender? Of grappling with different aspects of Joker, and what you wanted to take in and what you didn’t? Or something completely different?
Vera Drew: I think it was both: I struggled with not knowing who I was at any level for most of my life. I find it funny when I hear bad transphobic people, TERFs or whatever, talking about groomers, or the trans experience being forced on people, because I came to being trans by trying out every identity under the sun. For me, comedy was also about that. It was a place where I could wear a dress if I wanted to, because Hey, a man in a dress, isn’t that funny? It was also a place where I could be anyone I wanted to be. Sometimes to my own detriment – I think it was one of the things that lost me, the vagueness of who I was.
My experience coming out – and I think this is a lot of experience with trans women – was that I was moving into a space of I have to be hyper feminine, I really have to lean into that side of a binary. And that quickly fell apart. It especially fell apart in the relationship I describe (in the movie). Because I was with (a trans man) who did that on the other side of the binary, and embodied a fair amount of toxic masculinity. So I wanted to talk about both aspects: toxic masculinity and toxic femininity.
I’ve already seen some discomfort with this film about associating being trans with mental illness or even psychosis. But it’s clear that this is an element you’ve thought about and are working on with purpose. How do you advocate for a trans villain character to people who are nervous about this film?
For starters, I just love strange villains. I always have. I’m not a Disney adult, but I grew up watching Disney, and I think all those villains – especially: Ursula is simply divine from the canon of John Waters, and Jafar And Scar are two of the gayest villains of all time. I think it’s a trope worth exploring, if only because we often see queer-coded villains. Or not even coded: Scar is just a gay lion who wants to be king, and is very catty about it.
But I think it’s our job as gay people to reclaim some of these tropes, just as many marginalized communities have reclaimed these tropes. I’m thinking specifically of people like Jordan Peele, who focus on things like you, Hoooo, maybe we shouldn’t talk about this? But no, he can talk about that. He should! By the same imagination, I live in a country that villainizes transgender people. I get called a groomer every day on Twitter.
Even just making and releasing this film, I received pushback from some pretty transphobic alt-right accounts. The Daily Wire pop culture podcast can’t stop talking about this movie. It’s so funny because they keep saying, “It looks so bad, but people are going to embrace it just because it was made by a transgender person.” What a funny idea, that being trans somehow makes me more agreeable to people! It’s laughable. That’s why that shit doesn’t even hurt me. Because I live in a country where I’m treated like a bad guy just for walking down the street and being who I am. So why can’t I make a film that explores that directly?
Image: Innocence changed
Were there other aspects of your story that you wanted to specifically address because you didn’t see them in other stories about trans coming out journeys?
I didn’t really know this was a thing until I started taking the film to festivals, but I’ve heard a lot of queer filmmakers say that we need to tell stories that aren’t too traumatic; we need to embody queer joy, or trans joy, or whatever. It just seems like assimilationist nonsense to me. Every time I hear it I think: I’m sorry, my life has been quite traumatic, and I want to make honest art! So I sometimes process my trauma into that art.
And you know what: it can still be joyful! I think The Volksjoker is one of the most joyfully strange films ever made. I know I’m biased, but that’s true. It’s just like that! It’s colorful, vibrant, gay, irreverent.
I think there’s definitely a place for queer films that are more family-friendly or more down-to-earth. Aristotle and Dante was one of my favorite movies last year, and that’s one of the happiest, sweetest gay love story movies I’ve ever seen. I love H. also – I always want to shout that out, just because I think it’s a great movie. But there is also room for films like this that explore the nuance and ‘more problematic’ aspects of being queer.
Queer art used to be like this. John Waters is one of the nastiest people of all time. I remember discovering his films quite late in life and thinking: Oh my god, this is it, this is what I needed. I finally feel represented by this. And all his characters are addicted to whippets and murder.
If you watch a movie like this, where there is a very clear main character, I will hijack your brain for 92 minutes and force you to look into mine. So don’t you want to see someone change and grow? Don’t you want to see someone start out as a villain and either become a bigger villain by the end, or become a hero by the end, or fluctuate somewhere in between? That’s what storytelling is. That’s what mythmaking is. I understand the feeling. Representation matters. But I think the way to properly represent transgender people is to treat them as human beings in the film, and not as perfect angels or disgusting perverts. Somewhere in between.
The Volksjoker will premiere in theaters on April 5 and roll out across North America in April and May. Click here for participating theaters.
