Movie Review: The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson *** ½ / *****

Directed by: David France.

Written by: David France & Mark Blane.

 

The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson is most effective when it looks at the larger picture, and a little more suspect when it tries to zoom in on the details. The film uses its title figure – the famous drag queen Marsha P. Johnson, a figure in the Stonewall riots, and a gay activist her entire life, until her mysterious death in 1992, to tell the complicated history of transgender people in the gay rights movement. While today, the LBGTQ community is overall very supportive of trans rights, that wasn’t always the case – and director David France has the footage to prove it, as a large rally for gay rights in the 1970s features trans activist Sylvia Rivera giving a speech, where she is essentially booed and shouted down. She left the movement after that – and had a complex relationship with the movement for decades after – going through her own struggles, before dying in 2002 herself. When the film looks back at the movement in those earlier days, or focuses on the current situation – which is better, but far from good – the movie follows a murder trial where a man admits to beating to death a Trans woman, but says he did so out of “panic” when he discovered she was trans – it is excellent. When it focuses on the personal story of Victoria Cruz – a trans woman herself, from the same generation of Marsha and Sylvia – it is also quite good – giving a more personal side to the movement. But it’s on shaky ground when it examines Marsha’s death itself – coming up with very little other than shaky conspiracy theories.

 

Marsha’s death is undeniably strange – she was found in the water off the Christopher street pier in 1992 – and the cause of her death was drowning. There doesn’t appear to be any trauma on her body – she wasn’t beaten, stabbed, shot, etc. – and the police essentially rule it a suicide, and move on. But was it? It also could have been an accident. It also, of course, could have been murder. Cruz is convinced that it was murder, and does everything she can to try and prove that. She goes to Marsha’s surviving siblings to get them to give her permission to get the autopsy report from the medical examiner, she reaches out to the original investigating officers, with little success, and she digs through the records of the organization in which she works – the Anti-Violence Project. She reaches out to those who knew Marsha – her roommates, her friends, etc. What she discovers in this investigation is, honestly, not that much. The original officer won’t talk to her – but a cold case detective eventually does, saying he looked into the case a couple years ago, and couldn’t find any evidence that she was murdered. Part of the autopsy record is missing – but it is 25 years old, so that’s not that unusual (on the phone, Victoria asks the woman in charge of the records “So you’re saying that out of all of your records from 1992, this is the only one missing” and the reply “No, I’m not saying that”). There is a witness that says she saw Marsha at 4 am the day before her body was discovered – and she was being followed by two men and looked scared. There is also an anonymous phone call, warning Marsha’s roommate away from his then current mission of trying to wrestle the local gay pride festival away from the Mob – but that’s about it. By the end of the documentary, the feeling I got about Marsha’s death is that I still don’t know what happened – with murder, suicide and accident all still being possible. The biggest problem may well be that the police didn’t do more of an investigation back in 1992 – but unfortunately, we cannot go back in time and do that now.

 

Everything around this investigation into what happened to Marsha in regards to her death was so fascinating however, that I didn’t much care that the crime aspect just went in circles. The film was directed by David France – whose debut film, How to Survive a Plague, was an even more impressive doc – about ACT UP in the 1980s, and their struggle to get people to take the AIDS epidemic seriously. This film is another important one, looking back at the history of the gay rights movement, and documenting how contentious it once was. For someone like Marsha, there was no hiding she was – and being a “drag queen” at that time was a day in, day out form of activism. The trans community were outliers then, and they remain the most picked upon, abused and mocked members of the LGBTQ community to day. This documentary acts as a reminder of how far we have come as a society in these matters – and how much farther we have to go.