sex after death
by
Douglas Messerli
Eldar
Rapaport (screenwriter and director) Steam / 2009 [15 minutes]
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If
it would have ended there, we might only describe the short film as an erotic
soft-porn flick—although we know something else has to happen, and we wait to
see what that might possibly entail.
Clearly the darker-haired figure is
somewhat troubled, and begins to quickly demonstrate signs of great stress,
particularly when he can’t seem to find the door the leave the steamroom, the
other simply pointing to a spot, “over there.” But there doesn’t seem to be a
way out, and we now wonder whether the work isn’t metaphorically expressing the
fact that once he has entered into and participated with pleasurable sex that it
might not be a statement of his discovery that there is now “no way out” of his
sexual realization, that this sexual release has proven to him that he is, in
fact, gay. And in that sense we might imagine it as a kind of coming out film.
Although the dark-haired boy suggests they may be in hell, our fair-haired boy
counters that it may, rather, be heaven.
But soon, the fair-haired fellow also can’t
spot the door, and although he remains calm while the other gets more and more
disturbed and frustrated, we sense something else going on, particularly when,
looking at the increasing hysterical behavior of the troubled man, he suggests,
“Oh, you’re one of those.”
Zeitouni’s character understandably
demands to know what he means, Hislop’s figure responding “religious people,”
hinting at the fact that the man with whom he has just had sex feels
immediately guilty for having participated in something he still cannot fully
accept. But that doesn’t explain the “no exit” situation, nor the counter response
by the more troubled figure, describing the blond now as another type, in this
case an experienced homosexual who has apparently seduced him.
But neither accusation explains the fact
that the men are beginning to become overheated and truly cannot find a way of
escape. We soon begin hearing voices. Are others coming for them? But we
recognize these are both males and females speaking in a public place. Zeitouni’s
character finally asks the other what he does for a living, the fair-haired boy
admitting he’s a writer, suggesting that, in fact, this might make a good story—if
only he had something to write with. But then, as again the voices raise in
volume, he suggests that he has the feeling that he has already written the
story.
And now we hear a female friend asking if
he wrote anything or was just cruising the boys at the very moment when we
begin to recognize the sounds of a coffee shop. He says he finished a story,
but has also been cruising, pointing out a man who presumably is the dark-haired
beauty with whom he has just had sex. But suddenly they see something in the
dark-haired man’s hand and at the same moment Zeitouni’s character presses the
trigger of what he realize is a gun which goes off.
Whether this is truly a hell in which
the darker man, through his homophobic act has just sentenced himself and the
other he’s killed or whether it’s simply a metaphor of what happens in Hislop’s
just-created fable, the result is the same. It has explained the terror of the
other, desperate for a sexual encounter but so terrorized by the possibility
that he must destroy the person to whom he is attracted as if he were the
seducer, the cause of his personal emotional distress, often the situation
behind homophobic acts. Such fear ends almost always in destruction, either
figuratively or real.
Los
Angeles, January 22, 2024
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).
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