Caleb Cook | As the World Sets / 2023

calling back from the moon with regrets

by Douglas Messserli

 

Caleb Cook (screenwriter and director) As the World Sets / 2023 / [12 minutes]

 

Using a stop action animated toy figure, a space man on the moon, as the metaphor of a life chosen by character Jonah (J. Everett Reed), director Caleb Cook makes it quite clear that the young man, deeply in love with is friend Cal (Espen Brante)—like so many terrified young men who cannot accept their homosexual feelings—made the wrong choice in marrying his school girl friend Betty in order to finally please his father and family.

     In a long metaphoric verbal epistle from the moon and in a real letter sent to Cal, Jonah realizes that in giving up his own feelings he has, in fact, become a sort of plasticized action figure, an astronaut of the heart who has sent himself into deep space, preferring the symbol of young heterosexual lovers as an alternative to his darker and more frightening feelings for his schoolboy friend.

      By creating a cartoon-like alternative of the handsome young man we see at moments in this film, director Cook has made all too apparent what often happens when young gay boys refuse to listen to their hearts and attend to their real feelings, and instead attempt to enforce themselves into the constrictions of heteronormativity.

     Usually when they finally realize their mistake, it is far too late and psychologically impossible to communicate their failures back to the young boy they once loved. That act, moreover, as we seen from the telephone game played out in Mart Crowley’s play, The Boys in the Band, brought to cinema in 1970 and 2020, is a torturous one for both parties, the original loved one and the one who refused his love, that seldom results in a resolution of the situation.

      Queer film is filled with men who finally come out in marriages that end in pain for the wife and their children. The consequences of such a mistake, accordingly, are enormous, as we observe in this metaphoric short work when, as he watches the world he once loved from afar, his artificial body turns into skeletal remains.

      In this case Noah sits at the dinner table with his two handsome sons and beautiful daughter, looking at any moment as if he were about to burst into tears and leave the table, perhaps the saddest of family dinner gatherings I have observed in a long while in cinema—a vision of a Norman Rockwell family dinner from the other end of the telescope.

     Yet, as sad as it may be for Jonah (now played by Steve Aaron), it seems just as devastating for the lovely young children and his now middle-aged wife Betty (Margaret Thayer) to have to suffer the distance he feels for his youthful mistake. They life in a real world with a father who feels he’s on the moon. They cannot comprehend his distance as surely as he cannot recognize their needs to help through perhaps similar dilemmas in their young lives.

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).