When I saw Tristessa was a man, I felt a great wonder since I witnessed, as in a revelation, the grand abstraction of desire in this person who represented the refined essence of all images of love and the dream." Elsewhere in the same cinema, pairs of queers watch the same actress, identifying with her sadness, pain and suffering. Her gender doesn’t matter to them. She captures their feelings accurately:

Dream life might be personal and subjective; it reflects what we are, especially when it involves a mirror. However, film, viewed in a dark room, in a cinema, might be more social, if not necessarily more objective (if there is such a thing). Eve and Tristessa escape to the desert where they embrace their sexualities and fall in love with each other. However, they are then approached by a gang of young mafia boys who shoot Tristessa and ‘save’ Eve. She manages to escape the gang and then encounters Lilith who is actually Leilah posing as the new rebellion gang leader. Lilith takes Eve to the coast to be reunited with Mother and here they witness an old lady who acts as a metaphor of aging superficially with her fake hair, heavy make-up and bad hygiene. Eve comes to the realization that Leilah was a manifestation of Evelyn’s corruption and lust. This leaves the question as to whether Eve can “become” a woman (in the sense meant by de Beauvoir). An Englishman named Evelyn moves to the States: he's supposed to work in a NY university and plans to tour the country, but things get terribly wrong for him.

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So hypocrites that we were, we spared ourselves the final hypocrisy of love. Or, I saved myself from that most brutal of all assaults, the siege of the other." He is a cruel male cult leader with only one eye and one leg. Zero hates Tristessa because she made him infertile. He is hideous in both appearance and inner world. Mother Here, he encounters a radical women’s movement headed by a woman who calls herself "the Great Parricide…the Great Emasculator…Mother," although her followers label her “Holy Mother”, a god-head to rival the masculine Christian God:

Beulah, the “Woman’s Town” in the desert, is a place where ”contrarieties are equally true…where contrarieties exist together.” Her name itself whispered rumours of inexpressible sadness; the lingering sibilants rustled like the doomed petticoats of a young girl who is dying."

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Eve doesn’t get far; a masked woman kidnaps him. She takes him to a mysterious town called Beulah. Men are not allowed inside Beulah, but the woman makes an exception for Eve. She has special plans for him. To Eve’s horror, the woman introduces him to Mother, the Queen of Beulah. She transformed her body so that she looks like an ancient goddess with many breasts. Before Eve can run away, Mother rapes him, collects his semen, and performs a sex change operation on him.