Joseph Baken | Mailman / 2021

special delivery

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Baken (screenwriter and director) Mailman / 2021

 

The young US mail carrier, Phil (Joseph Baken) loves his job and attempts to live up to the cliches written into his job description. But what he really wants to be is a writer, although he is not yet sure just what kind of writer, and spends much of free time trying to churn out his first sentences.

      Many days, he stops by the home of Mrs. McGillicuddy (Jack Plotnick in drag) to share coffee, and, on this particularly day, birthday greetings from the loveable old lady who complains that her son and daughter-in-law never keep in touch with her and are just waiting for her to die so that they can inherit her modest home.

      Phil’s only other friends seem to be is fellow postal carriers, Tanya (Miatta Lebile) and Earnest (Paul Vogt). To Tanya, his best friend, he attempts to describe his “novel”: “It’s about a writer, but it’s not really about him being a writer. It’s kind of about solving climate change, but it’s a comedy, though it is a drama. I guess at the end of the day I just want it to be kind of a good old-fashioned story, so think ‘Game of Thrones,’ does that make sense?”

      Although, the mixed and contradictory genres might indeed define the film itself, which gradually moves from its comic postman story to a dark comic drama that includes possible murder in which its major characters, when not involved in their postal duties become detectives who sing cute musical ditties—all before they become involved with the underground secret Order of the Red Baboon, whose members like to rub their extended asses together—Tanya is nonetheless not at all sure it makes sense.

      Even Phil’s mentor, who just happens to be Mrs. McGillicuddy, suggests that he write more about something related to his own life, Phil replying no one would be interested in the life of postman. Meanwhile, for his birthday she has knitted a long blue scarf which he hardly gets the opportunity to wind around his neck before observing the arrival of car to the old ladies’ house, from which a man jumps out, leaving within a crying woman. Are these the son and daughter-and-law of whom Mrs. McGillicuddy has made reference?

      Not really connecting the pieces, Phil tells Tanya of his new image: a woman in tears. To get his mind off writing, she invites him over to house to meet Ronnie (Navaris Darson), a boy she’s convinced might be right for Phil, since she, like Mrs. McGillicuddy is convinced Phil is gay—that is until he makes it clear that he is not at all gay, singing what might be described as a kind national anthem for the many new queer individuals who live in a world, as Phil puts explains, in which “Sexuality…has evolved, it’s not like putting people into binary boxes, like gay or straight.”

 

I’m not gay, I can’t be gay

Because gay is a construct, and anyway

Labels are ideas, they are not human beings

My generation evolved to do away with these things.

 

We’re pan-poly-fluid-non-bi.

Sex for us is not about a girl or guy.

…..

 

But I’m not gay, I can’t be gay

Because gay is not a person, just a word you say.

Name one thing in nature that is just this or that.

I can’t be gay because gay is old hat.

 

     Meanwhile, the very next day on his visit to his elderly mentor, Phil is met at the door instead by Carl (again Jack Plotnick) who explains that, while baking Phil’s birthday cake, one end of his  mother’s pink-knitted scarf fell into the garbage disposal that “somehow got turned on,” and you know? —he makes chocking sounds.

     Slowly it dawns on the slow-minded carrier, “She’s dead?”

     “A Tragedy. A bizarre way to go.”

   Phil needs a repeat of the explanation, which Carl supplies in marvelously black comic song beginning with the lyrics: “She was baking the cake…a red velvet cake was the cake that she baked, she leaned over the sink to get a drink, a drink from the sink that’s indeed what I think….”

     Carl explains that he and has mother had mended things, and now sadly she is dead.

     Phil returns to his truck and breaks down into tears, perhaps realizing his own sorrows or perhaps in imitation of Carl’s wife the day before. Why was she crying before Mrs. McGillicuddy’s death, he wonders? Phil’s nemesis, the delivery dude, Kyle Kooter (Derek Petropolis), who works for a company like UPS, catches him in the act suggesting that if he wants to talk….he’s there—the presumption being that nobody could be happy working for the USPS.

     Phil also observes Carl entering the yard to bury Mrs. McGillicuddy’s pink scarf before performing a strange dance in which sticks out his butt and waves it in empty space.

     That evening he shares his suspicions about the old lady being murdered with his friend Tanya and Ronnie, Tanya particularly skeptical about Phil’s scenario.

     Nonetheless, she and Ronnie join Phil on a trip in the dark to the old woman’s house, where she continues to admonish Phil for his unfounded suspicions, all reminding us of how everyone attempted to dismiss Jeff’s interpretations of what he has seen from his window in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).

      Having to pee, Tanya goes behind the car and discovers there the old lady’s pendant upon which they discover a listing of a location, tangents in space: 118.23 W and 34, 13 N.

      Suddenly the mailman’s life wherein, as he sings “He always played it safe,” is now filled with complications. He finds himself attracted to Ronnie, also he still refuses to admit that he might get an erection for a male as opposed to a female.

    On his route he runs into Zoe (Lauren Burns), Carl’s wife, who openly flirts with him, perhaps also trying to make him forget her crying episode. She demands he come to help her lift up a sculpture of female torso in bright red legs (reminding us somewhat of the Red Baboon incident early in the story), afterwards, bending down to recite a strange, gibberish chant. Carl comes downstairs with a stack of mail fliers he’s received, including an add for “Moon Boy,” about which Zoe especially concerned, asking Phil to take them back, suggesting that all important mail these days aren’t delivered by “snail mail,” a statement which triggers a response in Phil as well.

      Alas, it is almost at this moment when the charming dark musical grows dark, with Phil first writing a fiction about the events but absolving the couple under suspicion. Excited to share his first novel with his friends, he is hurt and frustrated by their criticisms about a story in which, as they observe, ultimately nothing happens. And he accuses Tanya of having no commitment to anything.

      Finally realizing that he has not truly resolved the situation about his elderly customer, Phil revisits the empty lot in Glendale designated by Mrs. McGillicuddy’s necklace and, falling asleep, is awakened by the voices of Carl and Zoe, who admit to themselves that on this night before the lunar eclipse, they have buried the blanket (the offering from Mother Earth), charged the crystal, and cleared the space of all iconography. Now, as the Red Baboon cult has predicted, Karl must impregnate the granddaughter, Zoe, of the recently died head of the group under the lunar eclipse to bear their future leader; the only problem is that Karl is impotent, and as Zoe puts it, “we’re doomed.”

      Phil makes a quick cellphone call to Tanya, begging her to please not hang up, that he believes Mrs. McGillicuddy is perhaps not dead; Tanya hangs up and, at that very moment, Karl and Zoe stand over him, Karl with a huge bat in his hand which he quickly lowers upon Phil’s head.

      He awakes tied up in the back of a small truck, face to face with his old customer who cannot comprehend how he could come to be there. They consider throwing him into a trash compactor or into an incinerator, but Zoe finally suggests that he may be from the Santa Cruz chapter. Phil insists he is a member, and to prove it, he sticks out his butt and shakes it around, Zoe now convinced that he is a real Baboon.

      McGillicuddy’s kindness, she admits, was merely and act like the many others as the queen of the cult she is forced to play. Since he, a Leo, may now have to take over for Karl, they again demand to know what his sexuality is, poor Phil trying to sing a soulless reprise of his “I’m not gay” song. The old lady insists that he’s going to help them complete the ritual if she has to milk him herself.

      Now back in the house, McGillicuddy performs a sprechstimme work about the cult’s tradition and history. She hands each of the disciple’s a large plastic dildo which they wave at Phil’s face, setting one large black dildo upon his head like a jester cap.

 

    Zoe seats herself upon him, but alas Phil can’t get an erection. Theoretically, he admits he’s into “polyamory, group stuff, I’m supportive of it. I just can’t….” I’m not a gay boy, he insists, I’ve never done anything!

     Suddenly discovering that Phil is a virgin they realize that they might take the alternative method, “the virgin sacrifice.”

     Just as McGillicuddy is about to put the knife into his heart, Tanya and Ronnie burst through the door announcing “Special Delivery,” before they can help his escape, they too are subdued, strung up, and trapped in a small space. There Phil finally admits that he was afraid of saying he

 was gay because he has never been a joiner, and he felt he would suddenly “have to do musicals or something like that.” But now it looks like he will only be “hypothetical” gay who life ends, appropriately, in a closet.

 

     Ronnie kisses him and Phil, not quite sure of what he feels, asks him to it again, Phil deciding most definitely that he likes the experience and deeply engaging in their kisses.

      Bringing the trio out into the center of the room, the baboon group prepare to kill them. But at that very moment, the doorbell rings. It is the Delivery Boy, Kyle with a box. It is a record by “Moon Boy,” presumably the record album by rapper and singer Yung Bleu with guest appearances from John Legend, H.E.R., Moneybagg Yo, Kodak Black, Kehlani, Big Sea, Jeezy, Drake, Gunna, Chris Brow, 2 Chainz, Davido, and A. Boggie Wit da Hoodie, which was released the same year as this film, 2021.

     Its existence sends the Baboons into such a frenzy that Tanya, Ronnie, and Phil escape. Soon after, Phil and Ronnie obviously a pair, the mailman finishes his story, but with mention of the Baboon cult. He now realizes, expressed again in song, that “the investigation has to be an inventory of the things that make you you.”

      Tanya has taken up with Kyle, their rather stupid savior, and is now taking courses in paleontology.

 

Los Angeles, November 30, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).