Ma Vie en Rose

1.
Ludo vs. normalizing forces

In Ma Vie en Rose, Ludo is in constant battle with the normalizing forces of the society around him. There are constant attempts to get him “in-line” from a family and community who finds his behavior to be strange and peculiar. At home, his parents chastise him for wanting to dress like a girl. At school, he is mocked by his peers. He is even brought to a psychiatrist. These are all attempts to “fix” Ludo by the people surrounding him, to whom his actions seem unhealthy and bizarre.

The issue is that Ludo finds himself in a gray zone in the social conciseness, a no-man’s land (no pun intended) beyond the scope of popular consensus. He is, to use Judith Butler’s terminology, somewhere off the “grid of intelligibility”. As Butler explains, our society has a certain (if faulty) understanding of things such as gender and sexuality, and anything that doesn’t conform to that pre-conceived understanding is hard for society in general to digest. Ludo has fallen off the grid of intelligibility into a world where those stuck on the grid cannot hope to reach him. Faced with something they do not understand, the normalizing forces of his family and community respond the only way they know how: by trying to “correct” it. For those who have never seen beyond the grid, realizing that there is nothing to correct can be a hard pill to swallow.


2.
The World of Pam

In his daydreams, Ludo frequently retreats to The World of Pam, a world from a TV show of the same name that is basically a Barbie Dream House come to life. It is a world of idealized femininity, a world of pink houses and pretty dresses and wholesome relationships with men. This concept of pure femininity is also Ludo’s ideal world. He wants to be Pam – to like pink and dresses and boys in a world where all of that is not only accepted, but celebrated. And so Ludo wishes dearly to be swept away to such a world. It is his refuge from the harsh reality that forces him to conform to conventional ideas of male gender and sexuality.

Alas, this world is not for him – it is a world for little girls, not little boys, and sure enough when he shows up to school with Pam dolls he is mocked. The World of Pam remains a dream, an idealization just beyond his reach. Trapped as he is in his masculine role, the feminine world of Pam remains an unreachable goal, and it taunts him.