Jamieson Pearce | Adult / 2017

viewing the evidence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamieson Pearce (screenwriter, adapted from a short story by Christos Tsiolkas, and director) Adult / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

Jamieson Pearce’s short film Adult begins with a telephone call nearly any gay man can imagine, a voice saying “Mum” twice before the phone goes dead, the mother (or father in other cases) refusing to speak to the child because of his sexuality. But here the issue goes further, since the son his not simply homosexual, but is a 1990s pornstar on the adult bookshop gay porn tapes (no CDs in those days), perhaps the worse time imaginable to be regularly engaging in the unsafe sex of the AIDS era that the viewers of these tapes generally preferred.

      Australian director Pearce commented to interviewer Serafima Serafimova about how he came to adapt Greek author Christon Tsiolkas’ story Porn 1:

 

“I found it thrilling the way it incorporates such loaded ideas around motherhood, grief, sexuality, guilt and shame into such a tight dramatic premise. And this character of the mother… I found her heartbreaking. At the time of reading this short story, I’d recently lost a friend to suicide, the reasons for which were linked to his sense of shame of being gay. And so the depiction of grief in Porn 1 resonated with me particularly strongly and further motivated me to tell this story.”

 

     The mother in this case (played by Victoria Haralabidou), is a hard-working single woman who raised her son alone and whose conservative values are obviously are what made her life possible, but evidently had an opposite effect on her son, whose perspective is never represented in this film. Rather than the usual approach in such films wherein we see almost everything from the viewpoint of the gay child’s point of view, in this case we are left, as Serafimova puts it, with “his mother who, despite harboring prejudice[d] views, still manages to win our sympathy.”

      The action of the 12-minute film is simple. We see the mother waiting for a bus, and then walking the familiar site of so many adult porno stores, up a long lit-up staircase to a room filled with magazines and movies, dildos, and sexual devices. In the 1990s there was usually a back room for viewing films or for having sex with others, depending upon the restrictions of the establishment. Until the mid-1990s there were seldom any restrictions. For a conservative woman we might imagine this figure to be, entering such a world would be a bit like entering into the gates of hell.

 

      But the mother of this story has an even more daunting goal here, she must attempt to find a tape featuring her own son engaging in gay sex with others. After a painful search through heterosexual tapes, posters of cum dripping from a woman’s face, and violent scenes depicted on movie covers, she finally finds the right tape and pays $20 of her hard-earned money to the amused gay cashier.

       As she descends the stairs she almost runs into a young gay boy, who from the look on her face, might almost be the image of her own son.

       Memories suddenly flood her mind as she recalls the police telling her of her son’s death through a combination of drugs: heroin, Viagra, marijuana, and cocaine. Another officer asks her did she know what her “Did you know what type of acting work your son was doing here in Los Angeles?”

       She returns home, closes the blinds, and puts the tape titled “Men at Work” in the player. We see the players, and again her mind falls into the past, this time a memory of her scolding her very young son for playing with a child named Jason, reminding him again that only she loves him more than anyone else in the world. What she has against Jason is never revealed, but we can only suspect that she is responding to rumors about the young boy’s sexual proclivities or has caught the two playing innocent sexual games together.

        As she begins the porno film, she now takes out a cigarette. Watching this woman watching gay porno, her face constantly shifting from looks of pain, horror, and fascination, there is a strange temptation to ourselves, LGBTQ individuals like me, to want to turn away from the so familiar images of linguistic tropes, the employee apologizing for showering at work—unless, as he puts it to his boss, “you want me to come to work dirty.” Hot sex almost immediately follows between the boss and worker.

       Such images were never more apparent as pornography as in this film, the mother looking on at men engaging in male-on-male sex. But is the next scene that takes place in a public bathroom, where a plumber is fixing the sink and her son enters that is the most touching and horrifying simultaneously. Suddenly she looks up with deep love in her eyes in seeing her son, as he goes over the urinal, the plumber soon stripping of the boy’s shirt as they engage in sex. Memories of her own gentle love of her pre-teen son as she tickles him to his delight in bed, as she dries his with a towel, etc. come in a wave out of the past. Can the two variant worlds come together without an explosion of the heart?

 

  

   

      Putting mercurochrome on his childhood knee, she demands he not cry and be a man, as on the screen, her son is clearly now a hairy-chested man being sucked off, revealing ecstatic pleasure of the act. She puts her hands over her eyes.

       Does she see on the tape as an adult male receiving sexual satisfaction from another grown man, or does she perceive him as a freak, an effeminate figure which the image totally denies? It is impossible to say. But she is terrorized clearly by what she is witnessing.

       Images from the past collide: a return home where she is obviously violent scolding him for his behavior, the phone call in which he calls to her as she hangs up. She switches off the tape and breaks down into bitter tears.

       She sets the tape on fire. Sitting alone, she fondles what appears to be the only childhood photo of her son left, while a child’s hand reaches out to her. But the next moment it is missing. She is forever alone.

       We cannot know whether viewing the tape has been a sort of redemption or merely a confirmation of the horrors she has long feared for her son. But in watching that tape, in nothing else she has made an attempt to understand, or at least to discover the man into her son had grown up to be. And in that fact we can no longer condemn her even if she perhaps will forever condemn herself.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).