Oliver Zel and Hunter D'Ancona | Blister / 2022

not among the survivors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oliver Zel and Hunter D’Ancona (screenwriters and directors) Blister / 2022 [18 minutes]

 

The second year of the COVID crisis has produced a truly inordinate number of movies, both short and feature, that represent the unhappiness, break-ups, and break-downs of gay relationships and the individuals involved in them. Even some of their titles—Hideous, Infested Hearts, I Wish I Never Fucking Knew You, The End, and Spoiler Alert (“he dies at the end”)—clue us in to fact that something has gone wrong in the gay world.

     US directors Oliver Zel and Hunter D’Ancona’s Blister is one the nastiest of these. As one of the usually generous IMDb commentators observed: “Yet another short showing violence as a means of sustaining a relationship and of resolving problems. There seems to have been a rash of these sorts of films lately - nasty and brutish.”

     In this case we even have confirmation in the director’s statement, something I don’t usually quote, and never at the beginning of my essays. But here it alerts us to what is coming:

“To us, Blister is a disturbing tone poem about how toxic masculinity profoundly and often unconsciously permeates the queer man’s ability to love and be loved. 

     Each with distinct perspectives on masculinity, our mutual understanding of the queer man on-screen was narrow and warped. As longtime friends but first-time collaborators, we set out to tell an intimate, homonormative story that conveys an emotional complexity that queer men rarely embody on screen. With a shoestring budget, a crew of six, and daily temperatures approaching 100 degrees, we set our production sights on the vast California desert and its endless dunes to evoke the abrasive and mountainous distance between our protagonists.

      In post-production, Blister underwent notable changes. We chose to boldly exclude context and exposition to reimagine a once more traditional narrative into a spare, emblematic one with hopes to better unravel this unique dysfunctional dynamic, not uncommon in hyper-masculine partnerships.

      In simplifying our story, we were better able to explore the vicious cycle of abuse - both physical and emotional - inherent in our troubled lovers. We believe that Blister tells a beautiful yet unforgiving story about man's struggle to love against the masculine need to dominate.”

 

     It begins with Keith (Brian Loud) washing off the bloodied, blistered back of his roommate Maxwell (Hunger D’Ancona). No words are spoken as Maxwell takes a shower, and it clear that neither man has any desire to share his experiences with the other. And when do speak, it is in clipped short sentences, their mouths half-full of food, making it difficult to even comprehend what they are saying about “a job,” a former roommate, “trying to keep up,” etc.

     In the morning, facing the landscape in which their seemingly comfortable apartment exists (the film was shot in Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, Glamis, California), we recognize that their small safe-haven is in the middle of a desert from which they evidently have no escape, waiting of Keith’s friend of whom he is no idea of when of even if he might arrive to save them.

    Their cellphone doesn’t work and the landscape looks as forbidding as the world in which Gregg Araki’s characters find themselves in The Living End (1992) or Israeli director Guy Sahaf’s 2015 short film Thirst, in which to keep his friend with him, one of two weekend desert campers purposely empties their canteens.

     Their situation becomes a vague sort of Waiting for Godot trope, as the two frustrated men are now forced to wait, not even knowing if anyone is coming to save them. Keith wants to “look around,” but it is clear, given the surrounding landscape, that he is crazy. There is nothing more to see but the astounding desert world that, to give them credit, directors Oliver Zel and Hunter D’Ancona have brilliantly captured on screen.

      As Keith moves forward into the world of nothing, Maxwell asks the important question: “And what if he shows up while we’re gone?”

 

     Nonetheless he follows as they crawl among the dunes. They do, finally, spot something, a man almost entirely buried in the sand, with only his purple head unburied, his heart still beating. They can do nothing for him and walk away. Was he their “godot? or simply a remnant of another victim who Keith has destroyed in previous relationships.

       Keith tells a story: “There was this kid I knew. Some guys thought it’d be fun if they tied his hands back and dragged him all the way clear out here. They humiliated him. Pried his mouth open and pissed in it. They branded him. Held my face in the sand as they did it. And then they just left. I felt I’d feel different coming back…but I knew I deserved it.”

 

      Maxwell seems to intuit that even back then Keith loved the young man more than he does him, that their relationship, whatever is left of it, is over. The two brutally wrestle, slug, and kick one another as if, given the metaphorical landscape, they weren’t already dead men.

       After, however, Keith still crawls back on his knees to the finally defeated Maxwell, kissing him even as blood and saliva run from their mouths—a second later, only to spit in the younger man’s face and walk off.

       Because of their self-hate, we recognize, these men can never be survivors.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).