The Beauty, Ryan Murphy’s new series, explores a world in which an STI gives people beauty and then death. Between body horror and dystopia, the series offers a queer flash of insight in the sixth episode.
Always allergic to the very idea of vacations, Ryan Murphy is already back, barely a few months after the broadcast of his All’s Fair which had not found an audience. This time, no Kim Kardashian awkwardly trying to pursue acting, but something almost as terrifying: The Beauty, a genre series in which a sexually transmitted infection (STI) turns anyone who contracts it into a sexual bomb… before causing an premature death in an explosion of flesh and blood.
Adaptation of eponymous comics published by Glénat and to be streamed on Disney+, the series is co-created by Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson, who had first worked together in the early 2000s on Nip/Tuck, which dealt with the excesses of cosmetic surgery. Under a veneer of science fiction, The Beauty summons similar concerns: the fear of aging, the perpetual quest for perfection, the need to be desirable in a society with narrow beauty standards. To treat these themes, Ryan Murphy does what he does best, oscillating between earnestness and grand guignol, offering fans of the genre particularly exquisite displays of body horror.
A Trans-Positive Episode
The series gains more depth when it temporarily abandons the investigations of its two lead investigators who are trying to crack the mystery of the disease. Particularly in the sixth episode of the season, released on Thursday, February 12. This prequel chapter revisits the origins of the STI: caused by a virus manufactured in a laboratory, it should not have spread. But when an employee discovers that the virus markedly enhances his physique, he steals two doses. One for himself, with the aim of ending a bachelor’s life as lived, the other for a friend: Clara, a transgender woman.
“And if it goes wrong?”, the character, played by the trans actress Rev Yolanda, first worries. “And if it transforms me into a man? My hormones are running wild. The estrogens and the testosterone feud. I don’t know what’s happening inside me. But I don’t care. I must try…” For, she reasons, “if I am the woman I know I am, that’s what I will become. For once in my life, if given a chance to be seen from the outside as I feel inside, I must seize it.”
After a laborious metamorphosis process that inevitably evokes The Substance, Clara’s new body shell is indeed that of a cisgender woman, embodied by Lux Pascal, Pedro Pascal’s transgender sister. Revelation: the virus does not offer a simple aesthetic improvement, but allows one to become physically who one truly is. Through this plotline, The Beauty delivers a not-insignificant trans-positive message: gender transition is first and foremost a path to meet oneself.
