You have in your hands – or on your screen – a collection of chapters about body swapping and screen media. It is the result of years of conversations about what body swapping is, how it functions, and what it affords in film, television, games, and other digital and online media. These conversations rarely followed the same path and almost never had a natural endpoint. Some deviated into body swapping hypotheticals (‘if you could…?’), others to the boundaries of what a ‘swap’ entails (‘is VR a form of body swapping?’) or to dream-scenarios (‘I dreamt I was my sister…’), while other conversations proceeded from sharing experiences with specific body swap texts. Yet, common to most of these exchanges was a starting point: ‘which films are you writing about?’ Through the recurrence of this invitation, we became increasingly aware that in spite of body swapping’s long and rich history across folklore, theatre, television, and literary traditions, inter alia, many people, if not most, consider cinema to be its home base. Indeed, most colleagues and friends had particular film examples ready to hand: Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee-Curtis’ mother-daughter swap, Freaky Friday (Mark Waters, 2003), Nicolas Cage and John Travolta’s off-the-wall identity-switch in John Woo’s Face/Off (John Woo, 1997), and Tom Hanks playing a thirteen-year-old in the corporate world of Big (Penny Marshall, 1988).
These examples are no doubt revealing. Of course, they benignly indicate our, and our colleagues’, approximate ages and viewing habits, but more importantly they show up Hollywood as the presumed location of the body swap film’s quintessence. Perhaps this will come as no surprise given that, in spite of various claims as to the effects of transnational production, distribution in the digital age, and globalization at large, North American popular culture remains globally dominant – or at least it remains so in our respective national contexts, Australia and Norway. And yet, as the chapters in this collection will attest, body swapping is neither born of cinema nor confined to Hollywood film. Indeed, it is a trope deployed in many national contexts from across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and particularly Asia.1 While we readily acknowledge that the majority of chapters in this collection draw on popular North American examples, our aim is to understand and situate the associated, dominant body swap genre script (a shorthand assignation we will colour in anon) within both the trope’s longer history and broader cultural and media contexts. From their varying vantage points these chapters answer one question: what political, cultural, and social meanings does body swapping afford in screen media?
To moot any answers, we must first address another question that routinely arose in our conversations with colleagues and friends: ‘what is a body swap film?’ Or, more specifically, ‘how will you define body swapping in a book bearing the title The Body Swap Film?’ To many readers, the formula of a typical Hollywood body swap film will be familiar. In this tradition, a body swap film begins with a situation that foregrounds some kind of interpersonal conflict (most typically gender or generational conflict), after which a magical intervention forces protagonists to unwittingly swap bodies (often the next day, after waking up). The bulk of the film follows the protagonists as they search for a ‘cure’, and learn one another’s perspectives through the trials of their embodied, quotidian experiences. In the final act, they locate the means to return to bodily norms, after which a denouement exhibits the characters’ newfound intersubjective empathy. Popular examples of this variety include Freaky Friday (Gary Nelson, 1976) and its multiple remakes, Turnabout (Hal Roach, 1940), Goodbye Charlie (Vincente Minnelli, 1964) and its later adaptation Switch (Blake Edwards, 1991), Big (Penny Marshall, 1988), All of Me (Carl Reiner, 1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (Francis Ford Coppola, 1986), The Hot Chick (Tom Brady, 2002), and Family Switch (McG, 2023).
Immediately a few objections to this formula-as-definition arise. If body swaps involve a one-to-one trade of fleshy forms, then Face/Off – in which Cage and Travolta’s respective visages are sutured onto the other’s body – would be, at best, an uneasy fit. Big would resist the ‘body swap’ label entirely, so too Peggy Sue Got Married, 13 Going on 30 (Gary Winick, 2004), and 17 Again (Burr Steers, 2009), which all take the premise of a mismatch between a character’s mental and bodily age. It also excludes ‘host’ body films like the eccentric indie Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), to say nothing of the huge corpus of sci-fi, thriller, and horror films that employ the trope on entirely different, and often villainous or perverse, grounds. And yet, that trajectory from inciting conflict into a body swap, and then to intersubjective understanding facilitated by ‘living in another’s skin’, is so persistent that it has become a default demarcation to the point of genre association.
The effect of this insistence is, as we have anecdotally experienced, that Hollywood – the system of genre cinema par excellence – is placed at the centre of all body swap cinema in geographic, industrial, and formal terms. Indeed, Hollywood’s entries in the trope’s deployment have come to define, by default, what is and is not readily considered a body swap film – denying such a substantive role in consecrating body swap conventions would be counterproductive. So, across The Body Swap Film, Hollywood’s body swap genre script functions as a point of orientation within a wide field unfenced by geography, historical period, or formal conventions. Indeed, in spite of the definitive article in its title, The Body Swap Film is not a project that aims to taxonomize or even put a name to a film type, but to understand the affordances of an enduring but under-considered trope as it recurs across screen media of the past and present, and whose range of meanings are culturally contingent. While far from exhaustive, The Body Swap Film invites readers to meet bodies that swap, switch, morph, and mutate wherever, and however, they occur.
So far, we’ve evaded the question: what is a body swap? In this volume we take as our starting point the premise that the body swap is an enduring conceit whereby one or more characters find themselves entering into – and often, but not always, trapped inside – a body that is not their own. Body swap narratives suggest a Cartesian dualism whereby human beings are understood as comprised of two separate but associated substances: the mind and the body, with the mind being essential to individual identity and thus fully transportable and transposable.2 In a practical sense, this distinction facilitates the economy of conventional storytelling as it allows viewers to quickly understand when, and between whom, a swap has occurred, as characters retain their established gestural, behavioural, and attitudinal traits even when transplanted into different bodies. For the body swap conceit to ‘work’, so to speak, it is assumed necessary that viewers register, for instance, Tom Hanks’s behaviour as belonging to the tween they meet in the opening of Big and not to a bizarrely nonconformist adult; or, that the usually uncool highschooler Dong-Hyun’s sudden assertiveness is the result of the elite gangster, Jang Pan-soo, temporarily ‘being him’ in The Dude in Me (Kang Hyo-jin, 2019); and, that this spectatorial knowledge constitutes a form of dramatic irony, sitting in contrast to characters within the diegesis who are baffled by such out-of-character conduct.
In instances like Freaky Friday, where the swap is accompanied by voice-over exposition, the mind-body dualist premise is made abundantly clear. And yet, there are many body swap narratives across screen media where no such scene takes place. Or, as the recurring example of Big suggests, even more within our corpus where no actual ‘swap’ takes place at all.
This issue of terminology has been taken up in earlier investigations into body swap media. Indeed, while ‘body swap’ remains the most common designation in popular media for all manner of body-mind transgressions, other writers have put forward alternative names for the trope that foreground its different features. Some make a distinction between body swaps and ‘body switch’ movies; in the latter, ‘a human’s soul is transported into a new vessel without reciprocation.’3 On the other hand, Sandra Meiria and Odeya Kohen-Raz turn to the more psychoanalytic terms of ‘body character breach films’, emphasizing the imaginative nature of contraventions in character performances that are central to the entertaining fantasies of the corpus, which they see as reflective of the double nature of desire/fantasy and its conscious/unconscious dimensions.4 A breach in character also breaches the spectator’s immersive fantasy of proficient actors embodying internally consistent characters, on which film art is so often predicated. Meiria and Kohen-Raz explain:
Viewing the two actors (stars) while having to imagine the character swap (breaching the match between body/actor and character) necessarily involves tampering with fantasy … in cinema, because of its unique devices (mainly the close-up), the body and persona of the actor matches in more than one way the character, aspiring to comply with what the spectator’s fantasy might be in regard to this embodiment on screen. Behind the wish to achieve utmost correspondence between casting and roles is an attempt to guess what the Other (the audience) wants in relation to the embodiment of characters by actors.5
Meiria and Kohen-Raz categorize the sources of breach into a number of different stock scenarios, including switches, the classic scenario in which two protagonists switch bodies, such as Freaky Friday or The Change-Up (David Dobkin, 2011); reincarnations whereby a deceased spirit enters another’s body, such as All of Me, Switch, or Down to Earth (Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz, 2001); sudden bodily transformations, such as Big or 17 Again; more peripherally, films in which one character is represented by multiple bodies such as I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007) or Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004); and body host films such as Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) or The Cobbler (Tom McCarthy, 2014), in which characters are able to take on the perspectives of different people by entering their bodies. Although Mieria and Kohen-Raz’s focus is on the empathy-inducing strand of body swaps, we note that this aim is not requisite and that many of these formats afford alternative, and indeed opposite, aims and relations, particularly in the horror, science fiction, and thriller genres. In this volume, both Kaitlin Lake and Bruce Isaacs approach alternatives to the body-swap-as-empathy narrative in analysis of Jordan Peele’s fantasy horror features, and Julia Ducournau’s body horror film Titane (2021), respectively. In each example, the body is configured as a container that can be filled by different minds.
We identify many more traditions within the broader body swap corpus, as well as closely related bodily displacement or inhabitation fantasies. Non-exhaustively, these include:
Operation films in which one part of the body thought to be essential to selfhood is swapped, such as the face or heart, as in Face/Off, Return to Me (Bonnie Hunt, 2000), or The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024). The operation is often performed by a mad scientist, as in La piel que habito [The Skin I Live In] (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011) or Tusk (Kevin Smith, 2014). Operation body swap films are addressed in David Kelly’s chapter on ‘American Metamorphoses in John Frankenheimer’s Paranoid Trilogy.’
Recurrent body swaps, such as Every Day (Michael Sucsy, 2019) or The Beauty Inside (Baek Jong-yul, 2015) and its JTBC television adaptation of the same name (2018), or The 7 Lives of Lea (Netflix, 2022-), in which a protagonist wakes up in a new body each day and must deal with the consequences. This format appears particularly apt for television given the potential for serialization inherent in recurrent or ‘serial’ body swapping. There is also often a time travel component in these works, as in the second season of Russian Doll (Netflix, 2019-).
World swapping, in which a character is displaced into another world with different rules, such as Je ne suis pas un homme facile [I Am Not an Easy Man] (Éléonore Pourriat, 2018), in turn working from the gendered world-swapping fantasy of the early Alice Guy-Blaché film Les Résultats du Féminisme [The Results of Feminism] (1906). Or, the variation in which a protagonist wakes up in a different body in the past or future, such as 13 Going on 30. Intriguingly, this ‘world’ or ‘worldview’ displacement has also served as the premise for proclamations about VR technology’s capacity for eliciting empathy as both Kim Wilkins and Jane Stadler note in their chapters in this book.6 Likewise, this premise has persisted across representations of extended reality through media history, such as the Star Trek holodeck.
Supernatural inhabitation texts, in which a supernatural being such as an angel is despatched in human form to deal with problems confronting humans on Earth. These include It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), Der Himmel über Berlin [Wings of Desire] (Wim Wenders, 1987), Meet Joe Black (Martin Brest, 1998), and Fallen (Gregory Hoblit, 1998).
Less supernatural role reversal, such as Trading Places (John Landis, 1983) or The Princess Switch (Mike Rohl, 2018). These perform a similar function to classic body swap films – identities are interchanged so that each protagonist must learn from the embodied experiences of the other. Many of these films self-consciously derive from Mark Twain’s 1881 novel The Prince and the Pauper.
The metacinematic body double, which considers the role reversals inherent to filmmaking, such as Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984), Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), or, in the romance tradition, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze, 2021).7
Human-animal swaps, which range from switches between human and animal bodies, such as The Shaggy Dog (Charles Barton, 1959) and Nine Lives (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2016), to human-animal shapeshifting, such as The Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles, 1994) and Ondine (Neil Jordan, 2009), both about selkies (humans who transform into seals), and more unsettling or horrific body swaps in speculative films, from The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958) to The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015). Margo DeMello addresses the folkloric origins of these stories in her chapter ‘Wearing the Skin of Another: Human-Animal Shapeshifting in Contemporary American Film.’
The body inside-a-body film, such as Innerspace (Joe Dante, 1987), in which one human body explores the inside of another human body.
The body swap-in-a-dream film, such as Testről és lélekről [On Body and Soul] (Ildikó Enyedi, 2017), where bodies are only swapped with other identities in dreams. Or, in another variant, in altered mental states, as in My Old Ass (Megan Park, 2024), where a teenage girl encounters her future self during a psychedelic drug trip.
Avatar body swaps, including the complex experience of video gaming, as Rune Klevjer makes clear in his chapter ‘Ellie and Me: Self-Embodiment and Cinematic Storytelling in The Last of Us.’ Representations of video gaming in other narrative screen fictions also play on the avatar body swap form, whereby one character enters a new body, as in Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982) and the recent Jumanji films.
All manner of exchanges that implicate the body as-container that is displaced and ‘swapped’ with another, including face swaps (Face/Off), soul swaps (Soul [Pete Docter and Kemp Powers, 2020], Chances Are [Emile Ardolino, 1989], Heart and Souls [Ron Underwood, 1993]), possession films (The Exorcist [William Friedkin, 1973]), and isolated brains (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die [Joseph Green, 1962], The Man with Two Brains [Carl Reiner, 1983]), as well as the disembodied memory film, such as Abre los ojos [Open Your Eyes] (Alejandro Amenábar, 1997) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), in which memories can be extracted or switched out, changing characters’ perspectives, experiences, and identities.
In this collection, we use body swaps as an umbrella category for all of these traditions. The Body Swap Film thus considers a broad range of narrative formulae, while remaining grounded in the concept of minds that enter other bodies. From the empathic embodiment of other people’s perspectives to the fun of watching actors impersonate one another, from horror to comedy and everywhere in between, swapping bodies and the body-as-container for multiple minds are fantasies with substantive reach across global, imaginative screen arts. The chapters in this volume engage these philosophical, ethical, and political quandaries.
Films and television featuring body swaps have seen a resurgence in recent years. Over the course of this book’s planning, we would regularly text one another with alerts to new swaps coming to screens. This is, of course, not the first mainstream body swap cycle, as Dan Clarke’s chapter ‘Eighteen Going on Eighties: The Body Swap Comedy in 1980s Hollywood’ makes abundantly clear, but it is one with parameters no longer defined by location nor screen media type.
Television, in particular, has seen a recent flourishing of body swap narratives. While one could locate earlier examples of this predominantly cinematic set of conventions translated to television, such as Drop Dead Diva (Lifetime, 2009-2014) and Secret Garden (SBS, 2010-2011), more recent examples include the French series The 7 Lives of Lea (Empreinte Digitale, 2022) and the many Korean body swap series, including My Runway (C-Story, 2016), The Beauty Inside (JTBC, 2018), Abyss (tvN, 2019), and Mr. Queen (tvN, 2020-2021). Jinhee Choi addresses one of these series, Oh My Ghost (tvN, 2015), in her chapter on the politics of cuteness and smallness in actor Park Bo-young’s performances. Choi explores further examples of creative play with what has come before – body swaps that acknowledge their own history, relying upon the spectator’s understanding of genre conventions and meta-generic commentary on earlier examples. In this new, arch tradition of meta-body-swaps, one could consider the horror comedy Freaky (Christopher Landon, 2020), the franchise sequels Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Jake Kasdan, 2017) and Jumanji: The Next Level (Jake Kasdan, 2019), or Christmas body swaps including The Christmas Switch (Paul Lynch, 2014) and Family Switch.
While the body swap film tradition could in one sense be considered a subgenre of comedy in its own right, given a set of tendencies prevalent enough to warrant these ironic revisions, examples like Freaky are also spliced with another significant tradition of body swap horrors that straddle the border between the emotions associated with body swap comedies and body horror. Examples from The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) to Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg, 2020) are perhaps constitutive of a co-subgenre of ‘body swap-body horrors.’ This tradition also encompasses explorations on television, from The Twilight Zone’s ‘The Trade-Ins’ (CBS, 1962) and ‘The Who of You’ (CBS, 2020) to the many mind-body displacement horrors of Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011-2014; Netlfix, 2016-). These examples often draw on some of the oldest literary horror traditions, reaching back to formative works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The supernatural element of body swaps lends itself to other speculative fictions, as well – for instance, narratives featuring human cloning, such as Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009) and Living with Yourself (Netflix, 2019), or time travel narratives in which past, present and future bodies are fused, confusing the origins of selfhood to generate puzzles such as the grandfather, bootstraps, and predestination paradoxes. These are explored in films such as the Robert A. Heinlein adaptation Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, 2014) and television episodes such as Futurama’s ‘Roswell That Ends Well’ (Fox 2001). The third section of this volume features three chapters addressed to different kinds of body swap science fiction and horror.
Body swap narratives thus span affective structures and are blended with other proximate genres. This volume is likewise interested in comparing body swapping within narratives and a hybridization of genre forms that comprises narratives, itself a manner of ‘swapping.’ Contributors also address body swapping around cinema, including the labour of the actor who must ‘swap’ into new roles as part of their professional remit. Another subset of body swap films, for example, is explicitly founded on the appeal of watching celebrities embody or perform versions of other celebrities. These ‘celebrity swap films’ include Face/Off, Being John Malkovich, and the Jumanji films, as well as films in which one body is inhabited by multiple actors, including I’m Not There, Palindromes, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam, 2009). In many of these films, scopophilic pleasure might be derived not only from viewing narratives in which characters swap bodies, but from playfully swapped celebrity personas, actorly expressions, and audience expectations as thespians perform as one another.
The celebrity swap corpus in turn brings attention to other aspects of film production that in themselves rely upon varieties of body swapping: not only acting, in which one uses one’s body to signify another person, but celebrity body doubles, for example, or theories of documentary-as-ventriloquism, in which the documentarist ‘speaks through’ social actors.8 Also consider the substitution of various bodies across all manner of media traditions and digital trends, from pornography to catfishing, from deepfakes to virtual reality, and from avatar relationships to the swapping of online identities when one moves between social media accounts, each projecting different selves for different imagined interlocuters. The final chapter in this collection, Wyatt Moss-Wellington’s ‘Nic Cage as Everyone: Facing Off Against User-Generated Body Swap Memes’ addresses the extension of these tropes into digital media, including memes and AI video generators like Reface, considering their playful dance between comedically benign and consequentially violating connotations.
Of course, most films do not fit neatly into one category. The body host film Being John Malkovich, for instance, ironically invokes imperatives of the conventional Hollywood body swap comedy not to enable other-oriented experiences, such as empathy or compassion, but to pursue a satiric account of appropriative self-interest.9 At the same time, Being John Malkovich explores the relationships between celebrity and other kinds of ‘disembodied’ performance, such as puppetry and ventriloquism. In her chapter in this volume, Jane Stadler addresses the empathic game of this film alongside Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), evaluating them as complex instantiations of the dominant Hollywood intersubjective variant.
So, body swaps constitute a wide array of texts, some that are so similar they have an identifiable formula or structure (the Hollywood swap comedy), while others employ the trope to almost opposite ends (sci-fi, horror, thriller). Body swapping is a trope that informs playful online media (the body swap meme) and is felt in and through participatory forms (video gaming) and the repetitions of serialization (television). The chapters in this collection therefore address body swapping as filmic convention, motif, trope, and tradition that cross between genres, as well as body swapping as a means to understand the more fundamental operations of performance on screen. As such, while in this volume authors often refer to body swaps as genre, unless specified otherwise, we intend this label as a pragmatic gesture that, in the context at hand, refers to a broad, malleable and porous corpus of screen media.
One final reason to push against conceptions of the body swap film as single genre is that it helps to draw attention to the cultural dominance we began anatomizing at the top of this chapter, as relative to the unbound geography of the trope’s deployment. Consider, as Choi does, the prevalence of the trope in Korean cinema and television. Indeed, the South Korean franchise film Miss Granny (Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2014) has been adapted into remakes in China, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India. Some of the more famous body swap films also appear to lend themselves to transnational adaptation and franchising. Consider the Hindi film Come, Make a Wish (Glen Barreto, 2009), or S.J. Surya’s Tamil-language New (2004) and Telugu-language Naani (2004), which all take Big as their source material. Other examples of original body swap narratives in Asian cinemas include the Korean drama The Beauty Inside (Baik, 2015), Chinese comedy Never Say Die (Song Yang and Zhang Chiyu, 2017), and the Japanese animated feature Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016). The popularity of Russia’s Lovey-Dovey (Aleksandr Ctrizhenov, 2007), Australia’s Dating the Enemy (Megan Simpson Huberman, 1996), and Egypt’s Made in Egypt (Amr Salama, 2014) all attest to the international appeal of this particular on-screen fantasy.
The global spread of these examples puts into question accepted notions of convention, genre, and the ‘home base’ of body swap films. Body swaps have been, throughout history, so much more than is suggested in their conception as a North American comedy genre – and will continue to be with the development of new media. With this volume, we hope to open up a conversation on the historical, transnational, and transmedial developments of body swap media.
Let us briefly return to the mind-body dualism that catalyses an empathetic experience, core to the classic conception of body swap film traditions. At first blush, the two substance non-physicalism of a classical body ‘swap’ might seem flagrant. Yet we note too that even in the most conventional body swap narrative arc, protagonists ultimately learn that identities cannot be removed from embodied experience. That is, there is another phenomenological component to consider in excess of the materiality of body or mind. In fact, ignorance of the other’s embodied experience – how their gender or age, for example, affects their being in the world – is precisely the empathy that is ordinarily acquired throughout the swap. Paradoxically, movies that imaginatively separate body and mind make a case that body, mind, and social experience – and thus one’s sense of self on which morality is predicated – cannot be so easily separated.
Given this central intersubjective conceit within much body swap cinema, it is perhaps unsurprising that the chapters in this volume address different politics that attach to notions of empathy. Indeed, the ways in which the term ‘empathy’ is used by our authors is as pluralistic as the term itself. And for good reason, as foreclosing any particular definition of empathy to the substantial – and thorny! – field of body swap media would be to protract, or even proscribe, its range of political and philosophical possibility. The moral emphasis on developing empathy for others’ circumstances, for instance, must be balanced with an understanding of the unequal power relationships that these films so often survey, giving rise to ethical questions: to what extent are fantasies of adopting and piloting others’ lives and experiences an act of appropriation, and how does this complicate potential queer and trans readings of the body swap film? When characters of different ethnicities swap, does the performance of a racial identity constitute a manner of minstrelsy? How might one address the connotations of body swapping to incestuous or taboo desires, particularly in age swapping films with romantic plots, such as Big?10 What other power imbalances and ethics are readable in the body swap corpus, and how do the films navigate its inherently complex politics of identity? Perhaps most problematic is the notion, sustained across so many examples of body swap cinema, that both individuals swapping bodies have an equal responsibility to learn from the other, despite any power imbalances that preceded the schism. These aspects of body swapping are highlighted in more experimental and intersectional films, such as the Australian film Pulse (Stevie Cruz-Martin, 2016), featuring a queer disabled protagonist and inherently critiquing earlier examples that feature a breach only to return its characters to a comfortable and proper ‘norm’ by the film’s end.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the oft-incestuous connotations in those narratives where close relatives swap bodies, such as Like Father Like Son (Rod Daniel, 1987), Le Sens de la Famille (Jean-Patrick Benes, 2021), Freaky Friday, or the innumerate wife-husband swaps, body swapping has lent itself to psychoanalytic readings, such as that offered by Meiria and Kohen-Raz or Roberta Gregoli’s specifically Butlerian account of gender swaps.11 Yet, problematically, within their list of six scenario types, Meiria and Kohen-Raz include films featuring trans identities and actors, casting transsexuality as a manner of ‘swap’ between fixed gender identities. On reaching for the central heteronormative metaphors of traditional psychoanalysis – in particular, bringing identity schisms back to an obsession with castration – the authors betray the limits of the preoccupations of Freudian and Lacanian film philosophy. For instance, it does a disservice to those undergoing gender dysphoria to label their experience a mere ‘fantasy’ of embodying an ‘Other.’ These accounts regress to the gender normativity of ‘castration anxieties’ extended from Freud, and their difficulty in admitting all manner of gendered identities beyond the binary renders such perspectives problematic. Cross-dressing films including Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), and Mrs Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993), which often involve cis male duplicity, must be distinguished from body swapping complications in what Chris Straayer called ‘trans-body films.’12 Indeed, as Thomas Sandercock notes, the body swap’s reliance on Cartesian dualism has often been mobilized precisely to perpetuate reductive and pathologizing narratives of trans experience as being ‘trapped in the wrong body’ – thereby asserting that ‘right’ bodies stably adhere to one (binaristic) gender identity.13 In this collection, Joanna McIntyre and Yves Rees address dynamics between trans studies, queer theory, and the body swap film in their chapter on ‘Redressing “Trans-Body Film”: Transing Dating the Enemy.’
In conducting a survey of body swap texts, what emerges is that the central premise is not so much about ‘being’ another person, but rather the ramifications, pressures, and promises of being ‘taken for’ by others. While some films like Being John Malkovich consciously play on this premise, most mainstream films knit together social identity perception and some manner of personal ‘essence’ to fairly conservative ends. Of the Hollywood variant, Gregoli writes:
The body switch sub-genre [is essentially] about social regulation and personal conformity; it presumes and establishes a norm to which individuals should conform as well as appreciate … It is thus not surprising that the film considered to have inaugurated the genre in Hollywood was created by Disney, a well-known manufacturer of gender role models.14
Gregoli here refers to Freaky Friday, but as Sabina Rahman clarifies in her chapter on Disney’s princesses and medievalism, this is a charge with far broader resonance. Indeed, one might consider how very rare it is to encounter body swap films that acknowledge any form of dis/ability, or employ disabled actors. Most often, body swaps occur between protagonists of able bodymind, who may experience the shock of having their consciousness catapulted into a new body-as-shell, but seem to experience no moral dilemma or more-than-fleeting physical difficulty in then piloting that body. As discourses on ‘cripping up’ in the film industry show, this is a problem that runs much deeper than body swap narratives.15 It is written into prestige performances, including Academy Awards earned by able bodied actors performing normative stereotypes of dis/ability.16 These performances, and the adulatory narratives that surround each actor’s apparent transformation to dis/ability and back again, appear to mimic the very essentializing narrativization of bodily norms put in crisis, and then recovered to an essential form, that underscores a typical body swap narrative.
The return to norm is, at the same time, a staple of problematic trans representations over the history of cinema, including body swap fantasies. One of the earliest examples of both a body swap narrative arc and transmasculine depiction in a feature film is A Florida Enchantment (Sidney Drew, 1914), which combines gender swapping with blackface performances. It is at once subversive in its queering of identities and positive depictions of female homoeroticism, and objectionable in the identity norms that anchor its masquerade.17 For example, Black characters are irrepressibly violent; the body swap does not undermine essential characteristics of race, rather those characteristics are reinforced by their persistence across identity swaps. It is thus possible to identify culturally distributed essentialisms when paying attention to those aspects of identity that appear fixed, those that are carried across a swap, and those that remain unstable and yet are not subject to the swap. Works like A Florida Enchantment presume a true, essential identity behind a performance of race or gender, and preface many more problematic examples of trans performances by non-trans actors, and films in which transgendered characters are depicted as duplicitous performers of a false identity that they fail to disclose, causing revulsion. These include gender ‘reveals’ that induce vomiting in examples from The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (Tom Shadyac, 1994).18 In these cases, trans identities are received as performative masquerade of a binarily opposed gender. The binary is reinforced by appropriative performances of cis actors ‘playing’ trans, which are then mapped onto the duplicity of antagonists ‘playing’ an opposite gender (rather than simply living or embodying a non-conforming identity). Body swap films can uphold this binary as much as they can challenge it. The return to norm that concludes most body swap narratives may also be represented as incomplete, as not quite whole when protagonists do not quite return to a former, stable selfhood, but continue to live with components of both identities. For example, the screwball comedy Turnabout uses an incomplete return to status quo as a punchline, leaving male protagonist Tim Willows (John Hubbard) pregnant.
Given these problematics, exchange in racial identities has been a far rarer occurrence in the recent body swap canon and is often restricted to less supernatural examples, such as the role reversal film Trading Places. An episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia titled ‘The Gang Turns Black’ (FXX, 2017) highlights the reasons for this aversion in body swap films. Characters comment explicitly on body swap tropes that elicit their racially stereotyping performances.19 The episode means to satirize the body swap film’s conventions of mutual phenomenological learning when the characters fail to exhibit any change in perspective by its close. Yet the episode’s cross-racial performances also evoke what Nicholas Sammond called ‘new blackface’, an alibi for problematic cross-racial performances within ironic devices that signal ‘the knowingness of its creators regarding the wrongness of their performance.’20 This knowledge is intended to both excuse the minstrelsy and elevate its status as satiric art. On the other hand, Jordan Peele’s works offer a critical retrospective of body swapping in the horror genre, explored in Lake’s chapter on ‘The Post-Neoliberal Gaze of Jordan Peele’s Swapped Bodies.’ Even though most body swap films attempt to avoid race altogether, many still draft in orientalist conventions while omitting nonwhite protagonists. Chief among these is the exotic artefact or magic racial Other that catalyses so many of the films’ supernatural events, ultimately serving the interests of a white couple who need to learn from one another’s perspectives.
As may by now be clear to readers, the questions raised in this book about race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and personal experience are posed from a moment in which identity is culturally and politically charged. Indeed, in her chapter ‘“I’m Turning into my Mother!” Freaky Fridays from Archetype to Anecdote’, Wilkins makes the claim that in the context of recent decades, demonstrative shifts toward singularization across Anglo-American and culturally proximate societal milieus, coupled with an aesthetic insistence on personal authenticity in the arts, political, and cultural spheres, mean that the body swap has emerged as an apt metaphor of our age. For Lake too, body swapping – or rather doubling, given her attention to Peele’s body of work – is indicative and reflective of a post-neoliberal age. And she’s not alone. Naomi Klein’s most recent book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, similarly diagnoses the bifurcation of contemporary politics and social interactions through the figure of the mirror-image body double (in her case, Naomi Wolf, with whom she has often been confused).21 Tellingly, Klein’s discussion is peppered with examples from film and literature.
So, the body swap is a metaphor of the present. But the present has a past. Probably the most significant progenitor text for the body swap film is the 1882 novel Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers, written by Thomas Anstey Guthrie under the moniker F. Anstey, itself adapted into film on multiple occasions. The book was the first outing of many of the tropes now familiar in filmic examples of the body swap comedy: an incursion of foreign, benevolent magic that impels the swap; a comedic, intergenerational learning experience that ensues; and a bodily return at the end of the narrative when the empathic exchange is complete. Body swapping could also be said to be one of the oldest of human arts: much early cave art depicts a fusion of animal and human bodies. These animal-human swaps recur across folkloric traditions that are then brought to film, the connections between which Margo DeMello makes clear in her chapter in this volume. Early literature, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, c.a. 8AD, has profoundly influenced literary and cinematic body swap history in turn. Body swaps follow us from antiquity to early modern literature, and on the stage through the many metamorphoses, masquerades, mistaken identities, and performances-across-gender of Elizabethan theatre that remain so influential today.
With the opening section on ‘The Body Swap Film as Genre’, this book begins with a grounding in the classic body switching formula – what one might ordinarily conjure to mind when prompted to think of a body swap film, beginning with the bellwether Freaky Friday films. Kim Wilkins launches the volume by directly facing tensions of authenticity in identity and experience these films surface. This is followed by Dan Clarke’s critical account of the conservative, Reaganite underpinnings of classic examples from the 1980s body swap film cycle. Joanna McIntyre and Yves Rees conclude this section by addressing trans implications in the body swap comedy using an antipodean example, the Australian film Dating the Enemy. Their concern with gender identities in the body swap film provides a bridge to the three chapters in the following section, ‘Bodily Transformation in Film and Television.’ These chapters move beyond the classic body switch formula to consider a range of other bodily transformations and media, beginning with Jinhee Choi’s analysis of the aesthetics of ‘cuteness’ in Korean television. Margo DeMello’s ensuing chapter speaks to another elephant in the room: nonhuman body swaps, including animal transformations, exhuming some of the inherent gender politics within the nonhuman bodily imaginary. Finally, Sabina Rahman offers a clear-eyed examination of the co-incident racism and sexism that characterize Disney’s catalogue of medieval-inspired body swaps, noting that almost all classic Disney integrates some manner of bodily transformation.
In the background of these chapters is a horror just out of view: for instance, the horrific folktales that are rendered benign in Disney and children’s media. At the halfway point, this book takes a turn to properly address the many ‘Body Swap Horrors’ of cinema, as a counterpoint to largely comedic media analysed in prior chapters. This section pulls forward through time, beginning with David Kelly’s slice of postwar American cinema history, and the political questions that motivate the body swaps of John Frankenheimer’s Paranoid trilogy. Kaitlin Lake then moves forward into the new millennium to consider Jordan Peele’s use of body swapping tropes to address contemporary entanglements of race and conservative politics in America. Finally, Bruce Isaacs takes a European example, Julie Ducournau’s 2021 film Titane, to unpack relations between the provocations of body swaps and body horrors.
The final section, ‘Body Swapping Technologies’, scouts forward one more time to consider new body swap technologies that are implemented and imagined through film and digital media. Jane Stadler looks at problems of empathy and performance arising from technologies for ‘puppeteering’ others’ bodies, from Being John Malkovich to virtual performances and AI in Blade Runner 2049. Rune Klevjer then makes direct comparisons between empathy, character, and avatar as they are experienced differently in cinema and video games, using The Last of Us video game series as a close analytical case. In the final chapter, Wyatt Moss-Wellington addresses continuities between cinema and comedic body swap memes, using the ‘Nic Cage as Everyone’ meme to explore the fundamental question: what makes participation in body swap media so fun? A final, conclusory chapter by the present authors rounds off the book, looking ahead to where more recent body swap film and media trends might take us.
The Body Swap Film thus investigates the relations between the body swap film and progenitor arts, literature, and narrative media, as well as concurrent related narrative forms, including television, video games, digital media, online identities, and avatar relationships. New technologies introduce a host of new resources for both filmmakers and media users to creatively swap bodies: meme cultures founded on photoshopping actors’ bodies into unlikely scenarios, such as the ‘Sad Keanu Reeves’ meme; refacing apps that overlay one’s face onto another body in a film clip; reanimating bodies of deceased celebrities and adding them into new works; deepfakes of celebrities used in films such as Sean Young in Blade Runner 2049; reconstructing celebrity bodies in AI; and the intrinsic displacements of VR journalism that aim to transport the user’s body to another place. This book follows a rough chronology, ending with Klevjer’s consideration of digital body swaps in video games and Moss-Wellington’s analysis of body swap meme cultures. The Body Swap Film uses its own format, hermeneutic scholarly writing that refracts creators and performers into new understandings for readers of film and essay, to request that its readers enter not into one other body, but many other minds; and, to think about what doing so might illuminate about a presumptive them and us, or an assumedly separate now and then.
Wyatt Moss-Wellington is Senior Lecturer in Digital Storytelling at the University of New England. He is the author of Cognitive Film and Media Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2021), Narrative Humanism: Kindness and Complexity in Fiction and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and co-editor of Refocus: The Films of Spike Jonze (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Kim Wilkins is Professor of Media Aesthetics at the University of Oslo. She is the author of American Eccentric Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2019), Gentrifying Scenes: Cities on Screen (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), Refocus: The Films of Richard Linklater (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Refocus: The Films of Spike Jonze (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), A24: Culture, Aesthetics, Identity (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming), Radical Auteur: The Cinema of Ari Aster (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), as well as numerous journal articles and anthology essays on contemporary culture, film, and television.