Louis Norris | Scene from the Men's Toilets at a Ceilidh / 2018

the right place

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Norris (screenwriter and director) Scene from the Men's Toilets at a Ceilidh / 2018 [10 minutes]

 

In the middle of the Ceilidh, a social evening of Scottish music and dancing, Rory’s (Ben Walsh) boyfriend Dan (Joe Sefton) has retreated to the men’s bathroom, a sad affair where one of the toilet bowls is obviously filled with something fowl and one of the pissoirs is turned up, obviously unusable.

    

     Moreover, everyone who comes into the room knows Rory, whose father is performing in the band as the fiddler. It’s made even more difficult since Rory hasn’t told anyone that the boy who has locked himself away in the one useable toilet is his boyfriend who has traveled from England to be with Rory at his Scottish home. It’s what you might call a prickly situation.

     Rory’s forced to beg, “Just come out and fucking talk to me, Jesus Christ. I can’t read your mind.”

    Dan is angry because when he came over, evidently to ask Rory to dance, his friend gave a quick look about which Dan summarizes “I’ve never seen you look so scared.” It’s apparent that even though Rory’s invited his lover to his home, he hasn’t yet come out to his family, let alone is he willing or perhaps even able to announce his love at a public social event by dancing with his boyfriend.

      Dan’s anger clearly is justifiable.

  

   But as Rory also rightfully counters, this is not the time a place for such a conversation.

   On the other hand, so Dan righteously points out, when will there be the right place and the right time, given what Rory has already hidden from him?

    In films from of the second decade of the 21st century, the issue of coming out has often shifted from self-acceptance to the problem of telling the parents and others, to sharing the individual’s sexual identity with the larger community. This is a very different issue indeed from coming out of the closet personally. What the new “openness” of gay issues has led to, clearly, is a kind of gay hypocrisy, an open acceptance of one’s own sexuality in places and situations where it is openly permissible—where open-minded people easily accept such things as in a university setting or in a large city—while keeping it secret from the social situations of family and small-town homelife environs where it might be met with disapproval and even shock.

      A bathroom at a Scottish Ceilidh is indeed a strange place for a showdown, but in terms of the larger issues at stake, perhaps it is the most perfect place, the ideal challenge to closed notions of patriarchal power and conservative values: the sacrosanct all-male space where men touch their own genitals and release their bodily fluids, while even, at times, taking note of their friends’ nakedness, is perhaps the perfect place, so to speak, “to let it all out,” exploding the myth of male heterosexual isolation and privacy. 

      Or, as Dan adds, two months ago when Rory asked his friend to come and stay with him: that might have been an even better time to discuss the “situation.”

     But here they are, Dan having just endured, the day before, an endlessly long conversation with Rory’s father about “fly fishing,” a long conversation he might have thought would be interrupted eventually about a question about his and Rory’s friendship or relationship. But the elder just keep talking about fly fishing, which ultimately Dan found rather odd but still endearing given the situation, a most valiant attempt, one might suggest, to ignore the situation at hand.

       Dan has been deluded, feeling that he and Rory might have danced to his father’s music, the two of them, the father’s son and his English lover enjoying the event and sharing the father’s artistry. But he recognizes now it has been a total delusion. Why, Dan pleads did Rory bring him to the dance without him being able to participate. As he puts it bluntly: “What in the fuck am I doing here?”

      Finally, as more and more individuals enter the bathroom at an event that includes a great deal of alcohol, Dan begins to introduce himself to them as “a friend of Rory’s,” he turned to the pisser, Rory turned away to the sink. Accordingly, the film gradually shifts from the accusatory dialogue to the comic. But then, just as suddenly, it also turns bitter as Rory reacts with embarrassment and his own special sense of righteousness: “Oh, come to Robbie’s 50th, …you mean ‘Rory and Dan’s coming out parade, fucking Stirling Pride,’ is that what you thought I meant?” Apparently, the party is for a man named Robbie.

        It now becomes an issue of tradition, as Rory insists, two lines, one for women and one for men. Unfortunately, Dan, although insisting that he respects the culture, plays it easy with an aside to the fact that everyone is in skirts (kilts), an interesting gender issue, but not appropriate for the argument they are having with one another.

       Or perhaps it is. Perhaps that is precisely the problem, the traditional way of seeing things, the bilateral lines of flowing men and women coming together to recreate heterosexual normativity. So, as Dan projects, their dancing might have shaken things up.

        Rory argues that he didn’t bring Dan there as a “statement,” but Dan as quickly counters, “Why have you brought me here?”

        “Brought you here tonight, or brought you to Scotland?”

         Dan wants answers to both questions.

         “I wanted you to see where I’m from, and I guess I brought you here because I wanted to see you, because I want to see you, like, all of the time [italics mine].”

       Dan tries in interrupt, but Rory continues, “You being here, in Scotland, with me, does that not mean anything to you?

        Director Louis Norris, breaks up the sentences with cuts between each of the commas, bringing the narrative from a vague “here,” to a specific place, to the individual himself that says it all, taking a long trip from the subjunctive, something wished for, to the specific, the now and immediate “me”—a voyage which he has asked his lover to take without being able yet to take for himself.

 

      Finally, recognizing that it is truly love that has brought them to this impossible entanglement to this very strange place, they hug, deeply, without embarrassment. And improbably, nearly impossibly, they dance to Rory’s father’s fiddle in the loo, Rory instructing about the proper steps as the two move together in a Scottish jig.

        The issue of Rory’s coming out to his parents appears to be put on temporary hold.

        London-based director Louis Norris’s film might appear as an art-house dialogue film, but its effects are aimed straight at the heart, and its issues resonate with the structure of the entire tradition of gay coming-out movies.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).

       

Yuanhao Zhao | 两个人 (Two Men) / 2017

the marks of a society

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yuanhao Zhao (director) 两个人 (Two Men) / 2017 [9 minutes]

 

Chinese director Yuanhao Zhao’s Two Men is basically a dance piece performed under a remarkably constructed circular iron cage that might be read as a metaphor for a house, a workplace, or a prison.

     Both within and out of this massive cage are men, workmen it is apparent covered with grease and tar, the result of the machinery with which they are engaged, represented in a series of quick images in the early frames of the film, a circular piston that looks almost like a dildo and whole chucks of solid tar. A man with a bucket provides grease to the men who are still free from its bodily smears.

     In the middle of this construction, however, are two men, washed free of the black substance, who proceed to perform what can only be described as an intense dance of love, beginning with the simple entwining of legs and arms, but soon moving to embraces, kisses, and a series of wrestling-like encounters suggesting sexual copulation.

 

     Throughout, the other men watch in complete awe, a couple vaguely imitating the gestures of the central couple, but most of them simply watching with wide-eyed wonderment as they slather on more layers of tar over their bodies.

      Who is this special couple and why are they seemingly exempted from the rest of the work force? The very question we as the audience ask, seems to be the same query of the on-screen observers who suddenly begin to encircle the pair, moving around them rather threateningly in a ring. But they soon move in, pressing upon and leaning in on the pure unmarked pair, discoloring their bodies with the grease and tar from their own torsos.

      The procedure does not appear as violent as much as it proceeds out of a sense of forcing those who are different to become one of them, workmen with the marks and signs of their occupations.

       One of the lovers escapes, moving toward the camera. A huge laugh upon his face can be interpreted in at least two ways, the smile seen as an expression of having been freed from his difference or, and far more likely, as a kind of hysterical smile of horrific recognition of the specialness, pleasures, and joys of what he has just lost.

       Two Men, performed with full orchestra, is otherwise a silent movie in which everything is expressed in bodily movement and in the set. But what it says is a powerful as a loud spoken drama of shouted-out homophobic slogans. Among mankind, there is inexplicably almost always a need to destroy what appears as difference. The marks of a society must be painted upon every man’s face.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).

D. W. Griffith | Taming a Husband / 1910

further possibilities

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stanner E.V. Taylor (screenplay), D. W. Griffith (director) Taming a Husband / 1910

 

Outwardly, D. W. Griffith’s 1910 comedy Taming a Husband seems to be a rather standard tale of tricksterism in its intentions to make a rather inattentive husband jealous of his scorned wife. At least Lady Margaret (Elinor Kershaw) perceives it that way, believing that her husband’s love has grown cold and he himself indifferent. Certainly, the short scenarios director Griffith shows us demonstrate that not only is this husband (the handsome Arthur V. Johnson) oblivious to his wife’s subtle pleas for attention, but is far more interested in his business affairs and, in particular, his relations with his close male friends.

     The story has been told hundreds of times since the birth of cinema, and was one of the favorite film subjects of the 1950s and early ‘60s, when women were, as in this 18th or 19th century period story, delimited in their housebound activities and choice of friends. Strangely, however, Lady Margaret has another possibility that the poor housewives of the “cold war” angst hadn’t thought about.

      To resolve her situation Margaret calls up her best friend Lady Clarissa (Dorothy Bernard) who appears to be without marital ties and spends her time fencing with her teacher and servants, winning many a duel. Bernard plays her with an athleticism which reads of not only independence, but a kind of “I don’t give a damn” attitude and a derision of men that hints at not only an early feminist stance but possibly of a lesbian sensibility. She puts on her cloak and rides over to Margaret’s home the minute she gets her letter of distress.

       Together, the two hatch a plot wherein Clarissa will dress up like a man, befriend Margaret’s husband, and pay an inordinate amount of attention to Margaret upon his regular visits. Indeed, their plot plays play out nicely, the husband greets the good-looking young man with enthusiasm, the young man showing great deference to his friend’s wife. The imposter is asked to drink and smoke to their new friendship, reminding one a bit of what Viktoria as Viktor had later to go through in Reinhold Schünzel’s 1933 film.

       In fact, as the mock relationship between the two women develops, it almost appears that Clarissa, in her continued gentle embracement and kisses, is enjoying the fantasy a bit more than playing simply an actor. She mocks the husband, refuses to leave when he demands, and even accepts his challenge to a duel, neither Margaret nor he evidently aware that she might, in fact, win such a battle.

       Throughout the entire time Clarissa is “wooing” Margaret, Griffith oddly parades pairs of heterosexual couples through the room. It is somewhat difficult to even know what to make of this. Is he showing us the normality of the majority of relationships as opposed to Margaret and Clarissa’s “pretend” coupling? Is Margaret’s husband entertaining large dinner parties throughout the period when the two, the male pretender and his wife are engaging in their mock relationship? Might Margaret, in fact, have found plenty of conversation and friendship within the confines of her own home had she simply been a better hostess and not so concentrated all of her energies of the parody played out for her mate? Perhaps it is Margaret who has become indifferent to the affairs of her husband, focused as she is on her friend Clarissa’s sexual enactments. 

      “Sir” Clarissa’s sexual attentions to Margaret are noted even by the husband’s best friends, who are to be his seconds in the duel. What they observed, they claim, was so brazen and blatant that the man deserves simply to be killed outright as opposed to the courtlier opportunity to defend one’s honor.

      Finally, when the trio come to get the scoundrel, Clarissa realizes she is in trouble and, for a moment or two, she attempts to hide; but suddenly she seems to recall that she is, in fact, really a woman, reverting—almost as a statement of defeat—to her feminine attire.

      The moment the husband sees his foe in a dress he realizes what has happened, and asks Margaret’s forgiveness, showing her all the attention she has been craving. The trick has worked, and heterosexual orthodoxy has been restored.

       We can only wonder, however, what the relationship will now be like between the two women. Has Margaret truly enjoyed the special attentions her friend has provided; is Clarissa really ready to give up her seeming sexual ministrations to the beautiful Margaret? The husband may have been tamed only by arousing the emotional potentials of his wife.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

 

Lewin Fitzhamon | Tilly the Tomboy Visits the Poor / 1910

girls gone wild

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lewin Fitzhamon (director) Tilly the Tomboy Visits the Poor / 1910 

British film Tilly the Tomboy Visits the Poor may not truly be an LGBTQ film at all, since nothing sexual is even hinted at in this work, which evidently was one of 20 films produced by British film pioneer Cecil Hepworth between 1910 and 1915. Although it’s quite clear that Tilly (Alma Taylor) and her friend Sally (Chrissie White) are not the typical models of feminine behavior of the day, one might describe them as simply having an enormous demonic energy in the manner of the troublesome Zazie in Zazie dans le métro in Raymond Queneau’s fiction and the film directed by Louis Malle in 1959. In fact, Malle’s film has several queer issues involved with her adventures. But in this case they are just girls out for a wild time, future feminists perhaps who won’t be ruled by the patriarchal society in which they exist.

 

     Yet, director Lewin Fitzhamon’s title suggests another possibility, that these girls simply have a hormonal imbalance, and accordingly, given their “tomboy” status, act more like boys than girls, hinting at their future break with society as a whole as sexually identified lesbians.

       And in many respects Tilly is another version of Al Christie’s Rowdy Ann of nine years later. But Ann is old enough that her rejection of all male admirers truly means something, and her wild ways are based on a strong moral code which she enacts like a punishing god in a manner that generally is inappropriate to the situations.

       Tilly and Sally are determined only to do bad, or at least botch up those in society who attempt to help it properly function. They begin the six-minute piece by nastily torturing the poor sick bed-ridden woman to whom they have evidently been sent to read books and comfort. 

       Seconds later they tie together two working men, one with a long ladder and the other with several baskets piled atop his head, the girls tying a rope to the ladder at one end, and to the basket carrier on the other, resulting in everything coming down in a crash. Once they recognize that they have both been subject to the girls’ stunt, the men on the chase after the two naughty girls, who on route, completely vandalize a bakery and all its cookies and cakes causing a volcano of flour to erupt in the faces of everyone involved. The bakers join the delivery men on the chase as the girls steal a small delivery truck, mostly filled with new laundered clothes which they merrily toss out on route, angering not only the laundry driver but several of the women who were waiting on their fresh linens and clothes. All join in the race to capture the villains.

       That these girls obviously know what is truly expected of them, despite their chaos they have wrought, is obvious when, almost captured, to hurry back to the poor woman’s room, pick up their books and, when the others arrive, appear to be beautifully performing their charitable duties.

        Whether these girls might later develop more traditional feminine ways and wiles is truly doubtful, and even if they eventually find young men to permanently bedevil in matrimony, there is truly something queer about their behavior.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

James Young Deer | The Red Girl and the Child / 1910

the indian cowboy

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Young Deer The Red Girl and the Child / 1910

 

One of the most explicit of early LGBTQ films concerning race, James Young Deer’s The Red Girl and the Child, is itself conflicted regarding racial relationships.

     The film begins with the arrival of villain Bill Duggins at the local store, part saloon, post office, and grocery run by a black man, performed in blackface. Duggins and his gang take out their guns and, after ruffing up the store clerk, proceed, to use the euphemism for shooting at an individual’s feet, “make him dance” in a high unpleasant scene of abuse.

      In the midst of this melee, Princess Red Wing (Lillian St. Cyr) of a local Indian tribe, enters to pick up some goods. Immediately Duggins and others turn their attention to her and begin to grope and pummel her as well.

 

     Meanwhile, cowboy Dick Sutton kisses his wife and baby daughter goodbye as he also intends to visit the store, only to discover, as “The Moving Picture World” synopsis describes it, “the jollification” within. Startled by what he observes, he immediately sets Red Wing free and slugs out Duggins, ordering him to leave. The rest of the men, who now come to Sutton’s support with regard to his protection of the Indian Princess, still busily abuse the symbolic man in blackface. Red Wing (who the synopsis incidentally describes as “an Indian squaw, hinting that the publicists still saw even an Indian Princess as something to denigrate*), expresses her deep appreciation to Sutton for his protection.

      Sutton’s young daughter toddles off into the fields with her water bucket to get some water from the well while her mother works in the house. Duggins and his partner encounter the child on their return to their camp. They lure her toward them and kidnap her, leaving a note on the Suttons’ door reading that Duggins has kidnapped the child in revenge for Sutton’s treatment of him. When Sutton’s wife finally discovers the note, she immediately rides into town to report it to her husband, who quickly rallies a posse.

 

       Red Wing, still evidencing her respect of Sutton, joins them, and when they finally find the girl’s water bucket, Red Wing points them in the right direction.

        In their run, the villains stop for a moment to make a small cut in one their arms, spreading the blood across one the child’s articles of clothing, leaving it behind with a note: “Follow and I will kill the kid.”

        Frightened for the child’s safety, Sutton and his friends ponder what to do. But Red Wing insists she will follow without them being able to notice. Dressing in cowboy garb, she silently follows, finding the encampment where Duggins has left the child in the hands of several apparently drunken, sleeping women of the group. Red Wing crawls under the wagons and snatches the child away.

 

    When the child’s absence is soon discovered, the entire gang goes after the “cowboy” as, with the child on his back, “he” climbs up a steep pile of rocks and down the other side before moving hand over hand on a rope stretched across a deep gully. When the “cowboy” reaches the other side, he cuts the rope, leaving those in pursuit to fall away or find themselves without the possibility of catching up.

        Crossing the rest of the plains with the child, the cowboy reverts once more to Red Wing, delivering up the child safely to Sutton and his wife, and establishing close relationships with the frontier townsfolk and Red Wing’s tribe.

        One commentator noted that the women in the villains’ camp seem to be wearing scarves, suggesting that it is a gypsy camp, and it certainly has that appearance, which, if so, adds yet another layer of racism (gypsies being the bad guys) to this film arguing for the respect of the Indian tribalism.

        Some of those conflicts may lie within the director himself. Born in 1876 as James Young Johnson in Washington, D. C., Young Deer identified himself as a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, the same tribe into which his wife, Lillian St. Cyr was born. But, in fact, Young Deer’s origins, as Angela Aleiss has explained in a fascinating article in Bright Lights Film Journal (May 2013) was much more complex. Perhaps without him even knowing the fact, he was part of the Nanticoke people of Delaware, variously described as the “Moors of Delaware,” a mid-Atlantic community of whites, African Americans, and Native Americans, sometimes described as “Delaware’s Forgotten Folk,” people of color who were identified as white if they looked white, and described as black or mulatto depending upon the hue of their skin. Young Deer’s Native American roots, according to Aleiss, “actually trace back to his father’s side of the family in 1881, when the Delaware General Assembly recognized the Nanticoke’s descendants as an Incorporated Body or a ‘special class’ with their own schools and churches.” Among the original 31 members was Young Deer’s great uncle Whittington Johnson. It appears that Young Deer was unaware of his actual Indian heritage, falsely claiming to be a member of Indian tribe of his wife.

       In any event the Indian couple made over 70 films together, most of them lost. And Young Deer, believed to be the first Native American filmmaker and producer had an enormous impact on the silent era for his portrayal of Native Americans in a positive manner.

       Starting out with Pathé Frères, the Jersey City based French studio, long criticized for their unrealistic representations of the Old West, sent him to Edendale in Los Angeles to make Indian-themed movies. He eventually become the head of the West Coast Studio operations in Edendale, acting in, writing, and directing over 150 silent films.

       By 1910, the date of The Red Girl and the Child. one-fifth of American films were Westerns, and due in part to Young Deer’s influence during those year most of them, as movie historian William K. Everson observes, most Indians were “generally portrayed in a positive way. During this period the Indian became accepted as a symbol of integrity, stoicism, and reliability,” while clearly at the same time Hollywood was generally mocking blacks, the Chinese, gypsies, and, of course, gays and lesbians.

        The brief, but important, drag transition that Red Wing makes in this movie has very little to do with a question of gender and almost everything to do with identifying and commiserating with the white male cowboy.

 

*As linguist Ives Goddard argued in the 1997 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, the word squaw, coming from the Algonquin tribe of Massachusetts, had a perfectly decent meaning, primarily indicating simply an Indian woman; and in the early Plymouth Colony, the early settlers such as William Bradford and Edward Winslow used it quite correctly, having picked up some Indian words from the local tribes. But over the years it accrued highly negative racist and sexist connotations that by 1910, the date of this film, were quite apparent. It is strange that James Young Deer and Red Wing did not protest, but perhaps they had no say in the publicists’ release of information.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).