Netflix
My name’s Eric Italiano. Old Norse first name and, if you couldn’t already tell, an Italian surname. I’m a 31-year-old white dude from New York City whose lived in this area his whole life. You’ve seen The Sopranos? That’s where I grew up before going to college at Rutgers and spending adulthood in the city. Not only is this the only experience I’ve ever known, but it’s also an incredibly common one, i.e., being a middle-aged white guy in the Northeast. Even in the world’s greatest and most diverse city, my worldview remains relatively narrow.
Expanding that worldview is ultimately the measure of life, though. Going to new places, trying different foods, meeting other people, immersing yourself in other cultures. It is what makes humanity a collective existence, providing an understanding that, actually, we’re not so different. That a rising tide lives all boat, and that at the end of the day, we all want the same thing, really: a warm bed, a full belly, and somebody to love. It’s also probably why traveling the world is so damn expensive.
But for all of humanity’s limitless potential for understanding and interconnectivity, there’s the pesky reality that is our inherent nature, which has only been exasperated over the last decade or so due to a culture war ping-ponging between the extremes of the major sociopolitical ideologies, leaving the rest of us in the middle to wonder exactly when, where, and how our world got flipped inside out into a cartoon version of itself. These days, to some, it seems, if you’re not us, you’re them — we is dead. To paraphrase Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, “Is that nostalgia f—— with us?” Or, truly, are things worse than they used to be 15, 20, 25 years ago?
This isn’t only the fault of the masses, as we’ve been intentionally isolated, manipulated, and lied to by the powers that be to keep us increasingly siloed and easily conquered. “United we stand, divided we fall” was true when it was first coined over 200 years ago and it remains so today. It’s in their best interest that our world views remain small, so we remain unaware of the true scope of the damage they’ve wrought, both to the structure and soul of this nation, all to further enhance their view of the sunset from atop their perch on our broken backs.
Luckily for all of us, though, there are still plenty of well-meaning human beings willing to get up each morning and fight the good fight — not by organizing charities or attending protests or backing political candidates, but simply by looking elsewhere, outward, into the corners of the world often unseen, walked by those whose shoes will never fit our own feet, realizing those are still the feet of another person on this Earth, bruised and battered just the same as your own. Those who educate themselves and understand that while we may wear different clothes as we travel divergent lands, we both deserve the means to get us there all the same.
Those like Will Ferrell, who have used his fame and the platform it provides to educate himself and others on what it means to be transgender in America, as he does in his upcoming excellent documentary Will & Harper.
Hitting theaters for a limited theatrical release on September 13 before streaming on Netflix on September 27, Will & Harper sees Ferrell and his pal, former head Saturday Night Live head writer Harper Steele, on a road trip through America’s heartland as Harper revisits all the place she used to love to go to prior to her transition.
Something I often think about when it comes to bigotry is Tom Wilkinson’s line in Batman Begins when his Carmine Falcone character tells a young and reckless Bruce Wayne that “You always fear what you don’t understand.” That is, perhaps, the most insidious flaw in our genetic code: that our instinct is to fear the other, not embrace them.
But the thing about code is that it can be rebuilt, improved, and maybe even perfected. We can teach ourselves, write our own reflexes. Just because I don’t understand what it means to be transgender doesn’t mean I, or you should fear it: it means we should learn about it, relate to it, empathize with it, and understand that of the 8 billion people on Earth, and the billions that came before and will follow after, virtually all of us have different interpretations of what it means to be happy, to be human, to be alive.
You deserve to be happy, I deserve to be happy — our Declaration of Independence deems it so, forever protecting our right to pursue it. Will Ferrell deserves to be happy. Harper Steele deserves to be happy and hopefully will be now that the world knows who she is, and always was. With Will & Harper, perhaps we’re all one small step closer to realizing that.
Will & Harper releases in select theaters on September 13 and begins streaming on Netflix in the United States on Friday, September 27,