Cam Archer | Wild Tigers I Have Known / 2006

the sleepwalker

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cam Archer (screenwriter and director) Wild Tigers I Have Known / 2006

 

Wild Tigers I Have Known is a fairly interesting fantasy film about a gay middle-schooler Logan (Malcolm Stumpf) who has befriended an equally unpopular nerd, Joey (Max Paradise), only to quickly recognize that his friend is just that, a fairly self-conscious nerd, while his own loneliness and school abuse emanates, perhaps, from something even deeper. Soon in their friendship, even Joey grants that Logan is not just unpopular, but actually “weird.”

 

    Logan’s painful experience of that between-state just before the full-out abuse of gay recognition of the high-school years is certainly worth exploring, but the problem is that by 2006, the date of this rather experimental work, we all knew the unhappy results and director Cam Archer takes an enormous amount of time and fruitless psychic energy getting there.

     Like many a young boy (or girl) gradually perceiving that their queerness is not just eccentricity or a difference of values, but actually has something to do with a sexuality that has not even been fully thought out about much less experienced, Logan is vaguely attracted to the fairly popular 9th grader with the unlikely name of Rodeo (Patrick White), far too mature for his age and already engaged in a kind of studied ennui of  the world around him that will surely later make him popular with either the bored intellectuals of high school or the drop-outs which by that time he may have joined.

      The important thing that he is “cool” and beautiful in a way that even as he matures into gayhood, Logan will never become. Moreover, he’s not embarrassed, like almost everyone else, by hanging out with a younger dork who his girlfriend and most others already sense is “queer.” Besides, he too lives in a kind of fantasy world which, like Logan, he’s woven around himself in the utter boredom of his educational experiences. The fact that in the Santa Cruz neighborhood where their school is located, mountain lions have been spotted—which predictably school and local authorities have exaggerated into a major crisis worthy of even creating a school alert signal in case of a viewing of such a beast—also provides them with a kind of imaginary jungle which as a team up they can together explore. Neither boy, younger or older, seems fazed by possibly encountering such a beast and both concur that the “wild tigers” (the tiger being the name of their school sports mascot) they daily encounter are all more dangerous than a real mountain lion seeking out food or just someplace to sleep.

     Archer uses the metaphor, somewhat predictably, as representing the threatening outsider world which both Rodeo and particularly Logan signify for the others with whom they daily must make their peace. But Archer, stretching the metaphor rather beyond belief takes the younger boy into a kind of transsexual world as the boy attempts to find a way to take his friendship with the heterosexual teenager into the world of bodily sensual satisfaction. While it’s certainly possible that a young boy in such a situation might be curious about why a girl attracts someone like Rodeo instead a boy like himself, or even might imagine ways that he might replace the female attraction in his older friend’s life, it’s difficult to believe that, without any history of transsexual behavior, Logan suddenly takes on a persona of a female. As a girl named Leah, the 13-year-old nightly makes phone calls to his daily friend in a highly sensual female voice that would be difficult for even for the best of drag queens to imitate.

     But then, Archer’s film does not attempt to in any respect make claim to realism. For much of the film, Logan simply tunes out everything around him, dropping into a kind trance while the boys around him go through their gym swimming heats or the entire school gathers in a heated auditorium for a rally to support their mountain lion eradication efforts.

 

    For far too much of the film, Logan simply lies in bed contemplating the world he dreads or lays down in the fields and beaches to pretend to be dead—actions, which the director might have been warned by his elders tend to send audiences into their own trances or, if nothing else, distance them from any involvement in the film.

      Perhaps the most exciting moment of the movie is when, pretending to be Leah, Logan actually agrees to meet in a nearby cave to have sex with Rodeo. Turned away from Rodeo, the mysterious form asks Rodeo to take off all of his clothes before turning to reveal itself as his friend Logan. The meet-up, a shock to older boy, ends as vaguely as everything else in the film. At first it appears there is simple shock and rejection, but then, as Rodeo turns back to look there perhaps at least the possibility that something might happen. Later Archer teases us with another clip, reminding us of the event. Did something actually occur between the two after all? We never know since the scene itself becomes a kind of fantasy, although we have to credit Logan, if nothing else, for his bravery, which he reveals evidently again when he actually comes upon a mountain lion on the school ground, facing him down without hesitation, while behind him some “caring” authority shoots the animal dead.

      Presumably, in that act, Logan realizes himself that he is actually a similar beast, something that others would rather get rid of instead of accepting and sharing the world in which they live with them. And in that act, we presume, Logan accepts being gay without having to bend his reality in playing out a fantasy to fulfill someone else’s notions of proper sexual gender.

      Unfortunately, by this time Archer has so distanced us from his central character that we can’t fully discern what is going on in the young boy’s mind. All we can do, is worry for him as he moves forward into the even crueler world of the mid-to-late teens. As The New York Times critic Stephen Holden put it, “As you watch the movie, you pray that, in the language of Tea and Sympathy, the future teachers of Logan’s life lessons will ‘be kind.’”  But by this point in the movie we’re no longer certain who Logan actually is, particularly when the film closes as he walks away from us over the horizon, waving goodbye.

      Perhaps most of us half-sleep our way through those difficult years, but watching it in a motion picture is a bit like being seated before the screen about to embark on Andy Warhol’s more than 5-hour 1964 film, Sleep. Even as cute as John Giorno is, I promise you I’ll sneak out after the first 5 minutes. I stayed for all of Wild Tigers, but there were moments, I admit, when I was tempted to doze.

    

Los Angeles, November 21, 2023

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (November 2023).