Max Emerson | Hooked / 2017

impulsive jack

by Douglas Messerli

 

Max Emerson (screenwriter and director) Hooked / 2017

 

There’s something so important about the themes writer/director Max Emerson explores in his 2017 TV film Hooked, and its central characters, Jack (Conor Donnally) and Tom (Sean Ormond) are so likeable that despite the film’s many flaws I found it totally watchable, even if it finally becomes painful to view a character like Jack who is so self-destructive.

  

   Jack is a prostitute, but unlike those portrayed in so many films, does not deny his gay sexuality and is happily ensconced in a solid relationship with Tom, a younger youth who aspires to be a photographer and who is attempting to escape his father who threatens, when he finds him, to lock him up until he’s of age or, even worse, to ship him off to a conversion camp. Jack, far brighter than his behavior suggests, apparently suffers some form of “attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD), and is severely maltreated by most of clients. Yet for all that he seems absolutely happy in his role of Tom’s lover/protector, their only source of income. Together they share a bed in a Manhattan youth hostel in a room with a supposedly straight boy, Matt (Jared Sandler) while trying to save enough money to live a better life together.

      Tom seems to be the far more stable individual, who attempts to control the wilder impulses of his friend; but he after all just a kid, and it’s difficult to contain his good-natured lover who insists they make raids on unsuspecting straights with tubes of mustard and catsup, spraying their spiffy business clothes with the condiments.

       Although some of Jack’s clients move close to violence and one horrific female forces him into a play role as a baby who sucks her sagging tits, the real other dangers such as infection of HIV-AIDS or the problems most young male prostitutes have with their pimps are basically glossed over. Tom demands Jack wear a condom. And Jack seems quite able to find his own clients through his cellphone and ads on Craigslist.

       Indeed, this film, if it continued in the manner in which it begins, might almost have been a comedy; but we know there’s far too much that’s being withheld or that Emerson just doesn’t know how to fully develop the cute caricatures he’s created.

       One of the major questions that is never answered is how did this odd couple first hook up, and what keeps them together other than the frailties of their situation. Spencer Cole, writing in Film Inquiry brings up these very questions:

 

“Emerson doesn’t provide us with much in the way of context regarding Jack and Tom’s relationship—instead, we are left with the task of making sense of their past. We know that both come from broken homes, but how did they meet? How long have they been together? They speak vaguely of the future, but what exactly are they looking for?

     It’s not necessarily the filmmaker’s responsibility to spell all of this information out for the audience. That said, the two characters are like puzzle pieces that do not fully come together. And because of this, there is little to grasp onto in the story. We are given very limited time to feel a connection to these characters….”

 

      A fuller knowledge of the central characters matters because almost as soon as we meet Jack and Tom, we’re also introduced to an older man, Ken (Terrance Murphy) who represents an even more complex stereotype. The wealthy Ken, who we first encounter on a high-end shopping spree, seems to have made all the right decisions in his life, particularly when it comes to his career, his marriage, and his beautiful son. Except that he forgot to take into account his latent homosexual urges and is now trapped in the world which he created perhaps to escape those very desires. Trying desperately to control himself for so very long, he is now at that age when he can no longer resist the beautiful youths around him, and when he spots the impulsive Jack—and is bathed in mustard for even noticing him—he can no longer resist the pull. Meeting up with the prostitute in a pricey restaurant ready to throw the boy out the moment he enters, Ken attempts to explain to him his situation. But even here Jack cannot resist mocking both the waiter and customers, which perhaps is what makes him even more desirable to Ken.

      Jack agrees to travel to Miami for a week with Ken, but is wary of Ken’s seemingly almost selfless motives. And Ken lies about his relationship, making it seem that he has long ago divorced, a fact that later makes Jack feel betrayed despite Ken’s generosity. Ken not only takes the virtually homeless Jack on a shopping trip for new clothes, puts him up in his expensive Miami condominium, and suggests he will not require sex from the young hunk. Ken, in fact, is impossible for even the film’s viewer to believe, to say nothing the doubts it rises in his own wife’s mind and even Jack’s, who also refuses to take any money for his “services,” while providing the desperately trapped married man a few smooches and a bedroom interlude for free.

      Unable to contain himself for his amazing luck, Jack further complicates things but secretly inviting Tom to Miami, presumably to demand that Ken put up his own lover. Both man and boy, however, haven’t though out their vacation escape very carefully.

      But then, once again Emerson has not so very carefully thought out his story. As Gary Goldstein comments in his review in the Los Angeles Times—much in the manner of Cole’s questions I quoted above:

 

“What exactly Jack expects from Ken is a bit fuzzy. Less clear is why the confused, self-hating Ken (he wishes a pill could remove his “urges”) takes the bratty and volatile Jack under his wing so quickly, wholly and expensively.”

 

       Ken’s wife, Jess (Katie McClellan) quickly discovers that her husband has traveled to their Florida home not just for business but that there is a boy involved, and much like the wronged wife of Arthur Hiller’s 1982 film Making Love is utterly devastated by the fact that her husband has virtually abandoned his family, determining to meet up her competition and her husband head-on.

       When Jack discovers the truth of the situation, that he not truly someone special in Ken’s life but is merely a route of escape for a married, middle-aged man, he stupidly takes off, refusing the money Ken offers once again, while stealing his would-be client’s gun. Although he permits Ken to put him up at a hotel, Jack is still faced with the fact that he doesn’t even have money to eat, let alone take in any the joys of the magical city he’s witnessed from Ken’s high rise. 

 

    It doesn’t take much time for a greedy pimp to bring him into his control by first offering him a job to masturbate on film and then assigning Jack a man so notorious that even his other “boys”

won’t go near him. Jack takes him on simply because of the possible $600 that he may be paid; besides, having “fucked up” yet again, he’s now nearly suicidal, at one point taking up Ken’s gun and momentarily directing it to his face.

       By this time, moreover, Ken has been served divorce papers by his wife, and may even be denied permission to regularly see his own son. What’s more Tom, after having been nearly raped by his roommate, is now on a plane to Miami, which again inexplicably, Ken has agreed to meet.

      Jack’s encounter is with a truly violent man who loves to beat-up his tricks. And when Jack reacts and even threatens him with a gun, he goes truly mad and begins to beat the boy to a pulp which will surely end soon in his death.

      Somehow on the plane Tom has been contacted by Jack signaling him of his desperate situation and demands Ken take him immediately to the hotel room in which Jack is being beaten. He arrives with the punk bent over his lover, and grabbing the gun up from the floor where Jack has previously dropped it, shoots the brute dead, ironically saving the boy who believed Tom needed his protection.

      Ken, perhaps just by instinct, tries to imagine a way to cover up the situation. But Jack refuses, demanding Tom and Ken leave as he himself calls downstairs for the police.

      A letter from Jack tells Tom that the police knew all too well the rap-sheet of the murderer and have even high-fived him for having ended the monster’s life. He imagines that he won’t have to spend too much prison time. But then Jack is not known for his level-headed thinking.

      What becomes of Tom or even Ken, if we still care enough to wonder about the latter, Emerson fails to explain. Too bad, because this freshman writer and director (a former model and social media star) has brought up two or even three important issues that truly need further exploration: gay homelessness, prostitution, and the almost always sad late coming out of an older gay man—all problems that no matter how vast LGBTQ+ acceptance grows, still plague the queer community.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).