Gated reverb: Queering the pitch in Trade Queen

Director David Wagner says Trade Queen ‘was never intended to be a period film’. However, the suitability of black-and-white 35 mm for the story points to the inflection between markers of analogue and digital registration as one that also codes the boundary between queer and straight experience. This article argues that while Trade Queen is tagged as a film without dialogue, the use of sound design and music in the film is critical to a narrative told aurally as well as visually. Furthermore, it is the use of sound in this film – which ends with vinyl interference – that articulates the tension between analogue and digital, and between heteronormative and queer experience. In punchlines, the synthesized reverb of Ruby Treasure’s score, and in interiors heard from the gated picket fence, we hear as well as see the transitions between public and private selves.