Damon Laguna | Headlock / 2020

the fine art of forcing another person to lay on his back

by Douglas Messerli

 

Damon Laguna (screenwriter and director) Headlock / 2020 [16 minutes]

 

Diego (Alejandro Akara) is a high school wrestler, whose father just happens to be the wrestling coach. Even when Diego wins, he is criticized for having momentarily been on his back, and a dinner he is told to be careful in eating his full meal since he is not allowed to gain weight. We can’t quite tell, at first, if Diego is resentful about wrestling, his father’s absolute control over him, or both.

     We do perceive, even in these very early scenes, that he is close to his friend Travis (Eduardo Alexis Peña), his friend calling him “baby Diego” and both listening at other ends of the head phone to music on Travis’ machine.

      Everything else appears to be centered around his physical condition, as he runs early each morning, checks out his body in the mirror, and practices wrestling with the other members of the team as if it were a dance, the coach shouting out “Tempo, tempo, tempo,” instead of a struggle for bodily control of the another.

      Travis is clearly popular with all the other boys, whereas, simply because of his day and night regimen, Diego is quiet and removed. But it’s clear in the showers, that Diego is overwhelmed by the handsome body of his friend, who tries to convince him to attend a party that night.

 

      But finally, after a later phone call, Travis convinces him to join him: “Come on, I want to sit with you.”

       We don’t precisely know what those words mean until we actually see the two boys leaving the party to sit on a nearby stair case on East Los Angeles, looking toward the startling beautiful nighttime skyline. There in confides in his friend that he has a feeling and he knows the feeling is right, but he can’t positively get himself to react to that feeling. “Every time you don’t go with it you’re pretty much lying to yourself.”

       Travis argues, using a metaphor from his first night of wrestling, that the fear of the unknown just holds you back. Those simple, coded sentences, are enough to bring the two into a near kiss, just at that very moment, friends from the party interrupt.

       Suddenly Travis pulls back, demanding to know what Diego is doing and slugging him, as he shouts “Get off.” Travis, alas, is doing what any boy threatened with being outed does to deny his involvement, even attacking his best friend to protect himself.

      The results for the less self-protective Diego, however, are devastating, as he loses his next wrestling match, and discovers a stack of male physical magazines in his locker, a fellow team player responding “I figured you could use those instead of getting off on us.”

        Diego attacks the young man, an assault stopped only by the sudden appearance of teachers, in particular Diego’s father, the coach, who wants to know “What’s going on?”

        If there was ever a being trapped, metaphorically speaking, placed in a “headlock,” it is Diego, who cannot escape his father, the sport, nor the sexual situation. He is trapped so it seems.

        Diego walks away without answering.

        The father looks down to see the mags from Diego’s locker spread out on the floor.

        The boy retreats to his bedroom, now even allowing his father entry and refusing to answer his ringing cellphone.

        Suddenly, as in the most romantic of rom-coms, there’s a knock on Diego’s bedroom window. Travis lifts the window from outside and crawls in, totally wet from the rain. We have entered the fine fantasy of gay romance.

        He puts out his hands to embrace his former friend, Diego quickly battling them down. But Travis breaks down in tears and in only a few moments Diego is embracing him, having surely to realize the temporary cowardice with which his friend reacted in his fears. The two finally get their long-delayed kiss.

 

     Come morning, Diego’s father knocks before entering his son’s room to find them both in bed. Unlike some hysteric fathers, however, he simply leaves, Travis soon after, having dressed, walking past him as he escapes the house.

         Either times truly have changed or author/director Damon Laguna is perfectly willing to ask us to provide a willing suspension of disbelief as Diego tells his father that he “can’t lie anymore.” “I just wanted you to be proud of me.”

         Unlike my ex-coach father, who surely might have denounced me on the spot or even turned to pretend that I no longer existed, this coach hugs his son to him assuring him that he loves him always.

         Diego leaves his house to find Travis waiting for him as they head off to school, this time presumably to deal with their homophobic peers as a pair, one of them most popular boy in the class. What can they do but recognize that that’s how it is these days.

         The only question that remains for me is “Does Diego get quit the wrestling team?” But then, perhaps he doesn’t want to.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Review blog (December 2023).

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Accatone / 1961

dark destiny

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sergio Citti and Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay), Pier Paolo Pasolini (director) Accatone / 1961 

In 1961, when Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first film Accatone premiered, critics from both left and right were shocked, some going as far as to deem the film a “scandal.” Today, watching this remarkable movie, it seems difficult to comprehend their reactions. But if you think back to many cinematic conventions of the time, it becomes apparent that most read the film as a kind of new neo-realist presentation, arguing, presumably, through its bleak almost cynical scenario, presented an Italy made up of a world of pimps, thieves, and never-do-wells, who beat upon women and basically were self-destructive.

 

     In fact, the seemingly “realist” aspects of this film does precisely show that. The friends of  Vittorio Cataldi, the “Accatone” or “scrounger” of the title (the beautiful Franco Citti) and he are non-working pimps, thieves, and simple lay-abouts who spend most of their days (and presumably nights) at local bars in the slums outside of Rome, boasting, squabbling, and fighting one another—when they’re not busy beating up hookers and their own wives. Accatone (the name Vittorio almost proudly has given himself) is a married man, whose wife has left him; he serves currently as a pimp to Maddalena (Silvana Corsini), who early on is hit and hurt by a motorcycle, hardly able, but forced, nonetheless, to hit the streets to bring in more money. She is mercilessly beaten by three men for her involvement in the arrest of a notorious pimp, now in prison. 

      At moments Accatone and his friends seem almost like less comic versions of the figure of the American TV series of the same period, Maynard G. Krebs in The Loves of Dobie Gillis, who, whenever he encountered someone involved in labor, pitiably screeched out the word “work!”

   Yet, from the very beginning of the film we are forced to perceive these same figures as something far more noble, violent, and even sacramental than their slightly comic personas. In the very first scene, they argue about the death of one of their group who had bet he could eat three plates of potatoes and wine and then swim across the river. He lost the bet, one of them proclaims, because everyone knows you can’t eat and then go in swimming. Accattone attempts to disprove that old wives’ tale, repeating the same actions—miraculously achieving the feat, bringing him fame among the ragazzi and hangers-on throughout the region.

       Moreover, there is clearly something else going on in their daily gatherings. Although they talk endlessly about women, they are a society of men whom Pasolini’s camera endlessly portrays in frontal framing, as if scanning, over and over, their rough-hewn beauty. If Accatone is surely the most attractive, the others all present a kind of earthy handsomeness, chosen by the director from figures he actually encountered on the streets.

     The little male society, moreover, despite their heterosexual bragging, is most definitely misogynistic, and when they do fight, Pasolini presents it much like the American artist Robert Longo did soon after, as a slow-motion wrestle with one another that more closely resembles the coils of lovemaking. As in several Pasolini scripts, there is not only a completely homoerotic sensibility to their gathering, but a suggestion that they cannot exist without one another, that they have embraced one another for life. And if we never see evidence that these boys participate in group sex with one another, as a similar gathering did in Mauro Bolognini’s La notte brava (The Big Night)—also with a screenplay by Pasolini—we surely can imagine it happening.

       It is for that very reason why, when Accatone even attempts to pull away, they dismiss and taunt him, as he does to himself in robbing a gold chain from his own small child in his attempt to  turn the innocent, yet willing, Stella into a whore. 

      As critic Peter Bondanella has noted, Accatone can be seen as a kind of inverted Christ, with his local friends serving as his disciples. One might even suggest that when he turns from his Magdalene (Maddalena) to Stella (Franca Pasut), symbolic of his destiny (his star), he raises the ire of his disciples. Indeed Maddalena, in this underground version of an anti-Christ’s life, becomes his Judas, denouncing him to the police, who follow his activities even closer, contributing to his death.

       For just one day, joining his brother, Accatone attempts to redeem himself through actual labor. But he, quite literally (and, of course, spiritually) is too weak. Forced to rejoin in the petty thievery of his friends, he dies in a police chase—just as his dream had vaguely predicted. 

      In the end, accordingly, we read Pasolini’s film as a kind of morality play instead of as a piece of realist fiction. Today Accatone—although just as forceful in its commendation of bourgeois and governmental leaders with regard to their treatment of the Italian peasants—appears far closer to a film such as Teorema, a kind of theorem about our needs for a Christ-like love and sexuality, than it seems to be a projection of everyday life—which, in turn, lifts Pasolini’s work from a presentation of the everyday to a cinema of great significance.

 

Los Angeles, May 29, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2016).