Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl
Post-Production
Short
Digital/16mm
Color
A lush 1950s palimpsest where Shirley May Holmes’s ultimate sexual fantasy manifests into Dorothy: the Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl. They plan a date to the drive-in movies, but Shirley has much to conquer if she wants to land a kiss from Dorothy’s candy lips. Transphobic greasers, hetero-nonsense, and the nuclear blast itself will all come crashing down upon Shirley on this pivotal night... She may just need a little help to make it to sunrise alive.
Written & Directed by
KYLIE MUNGENAST
Produced by
LIZ DAVIS & DESTINY GREER
Starring
ZOEY LUNA as Shirley May Holmes
ABBY LANGH as Dorothy Pearson ‘The Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl’
Director Statement
Following a bender consisting of embarrassing disasters at lesbian bars and dating apps, I weaved queer loneliness with my crippling fear of the crumbling world around me to create a 1950s pastel palimpsest - a tale of a waitress and a pinup girl in a luscious lesbian love bomb which I call Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl.
As an emerging filmmaker in the Trans New Weird movement, I originally wrote our vessel into the world of Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl, the ditsy dyke Shirley May Holmes, as a self-insert. We share the same food allergies, the same love for an Almond Joy, and the same attraction to straight passing femmes. That all said, I became interested in casting someone who felt like the opposite of me to play Shirley in hopes that it may aid in crafting internal tension within the character. Zoey Luna and I are both transgender women, but we embraced the aspects of our identities which make us unique from one another as we birthed Shirley’s character. For example, Zoey is a trans woman of color - I am not - and the two of us express our femininity in very different ways. “Passing” became a critical part of our narrative conversations within relation to how “transvestigation” endangers all women. Shirley’s reading of ‘Acidic Rain, Acidic Rain,’ a poem by my late friend, John Blomquist, marks the turning point in Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl where the seemingly-whimsical world on screen shares haunting commonalities with our own devastating reality. Zoey Luna’s notoriety as a scream queen manifests in Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl’s harrowing third act, where the literal and metaphorical mutilation of transgender rights entertains violent men while nuclear annihilation beckons.
The world in Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl feels just as apocalyptic as the one we inhabit in Fascist America, but the film features a sole beacon of hope: a peppermint-clad pinup girl named Dorothy, hence the title. Abby Langh, who portrays this deuteragonist character, shares a mutual passion with me for traversing the female gaze. In a sensually-charged sapphic recontextualization of the “manic pixie dream girl,” Abby’s own background as a queer model and her intuition as an actress inform Dorothy’s vibrant agency in an experience of embodied identification. Despite Dorothy’s internalized homophobia upon becoming the subject of a woman’s gaze for the first time, when she’s more used to being on the receiving end of a male gaze, Dorothy grows to foil the sexually suppressed men in this world as she chooses to put her life on the line in an act of allyship instead of receding into self-preservation.
I had no choice but to dedicate over a year of my life to making this short film. I hope this entry into the Trans New Weird cinematic consciousness provides an equally poignant catharsis to its queer audience, as well as much to ponder and reflect for any cis-hets who happen to stumble upon this lesbian pulp extravaganza.