Ethan Fuirst | 1781 / 2020

the voice no one else can hear

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ethan Fuirst (screenwriter and director) 1781 / 2020 [10 minutes]

 

A young Patriot soldier, William (Josh Fulton), after seeing his friend (Mark Ashin) die, determines to desert his unit. Terrified by the situation, he carefully begins to gather wood to start a fire, only to find a very young fellow soldier, Sam (Ryan Meyer) also on the run for his unit—although he bluffs that his unit is near and soon to return.

     Yet, after having his musket taken from him by William, it’s clear he’s as determined to desert as William is, responding to the other’s suggestion that he run back to his unit with a series of desperate possibilities that he would prefer to serve rather than return. His pleas are as moving as they are representative of his fear of returning to his unit: “I can stand guard. I can build a fire while you stand guard. You can build a fire while I fill the canteen with water. I can look for firewood while you sit here.” His desperation is so obviously painfully it hurts, presented in an almost surrealist language of alternate possibilities.

      Clearly, William has taken compassion on him as we see the young man carrying the firewood back to his new commander, while William drinks freely from his canteen. Like an impatient child, Sam asks it they might now light fire, but William judiciously insists they have to wait until the sun goes down.

      They sit eating cold corn on the cob, finally admitting their equal plans for desertion, Sam, planning to return to Massachusetts, William, from Virginia, not planning on returning there but to move on to eastern New York for the obvious reason that he is black man who will have to return to slavery if he heads home. But in order to do that, William will have to swim across a wide river, a voyage which Sam is not sure he can survive. 

       But Sam, in their brief interchange, says something quite provide, “Say what you want, I hear it in your voice too.” Dark falls, and they start the fire, William suggesting that they might both leave from the same place, his friend heading to Connecticut from there. Like the desperate cowboys in Brokeback Mountain, in the deep of night they finally express their lust for one another.

       Can you truly hear “it” in another man’s voice, as Sam has insisted? It’s not an affectation he’s talking about, but a call for another being that speaks in tongues. Yes, you can hear it in another gay man’s voice in a way most straight men could never imagine. It’s not an effeminate mannerism but a plea for reason and desire, for the sexual over the violence which so many heterosexuals seem to have learned is their in-born right, their very expression of their sexual identity. Yes, there is something in voice, a plea, a sense of resistance to what others have defined the male to be that can be heard by any other sensitive being, male or female, the very reason why these men have determined to desert, to leave a cause which they felt was once worthy of perusing only to realize, with the death of other boys and men with whom they felt love and empathy, that made them realize they were not that kind of “soldier.”

 

      The dogs of war, quite literally in Fuirst’s short film, awaken them from their sleep. They run in slightly different directions, Sam suddenly being shot and killed, straight-on by a British soldier while William hides behind a tree.

 

    William finally reaches the truly treacherous waters of the river, now forced to face the decision whether or not he can truly swim across the wide reach to temporary freedom.

        Director Fuirst’s film is a tough work that does not provide any of its figure’s simple answers.

The two gay men get only one desperate night together, and the black man surely will find no easy solutions to the identities he faces even in New York State if he is able to make to across the river.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2024).