Christian Zetterberg | Machopojkar (Shower Boys) / 2021

man or mouse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Albin Abrahamsson and Christian Zetterberg (screenplay), Christian Zetterberg (director) Machopojkar (Shower Boys) / 2021 [9 minutes]

 

Swedish director Christian Zetterberg’s Shower Boys very much shares the same concerns as Lukas Dhont’s film of the following year, Close: What is the moment in which young boys are told by society to stop showing affection for one another, demanding they shift their relationship into a far more removed situation in which there is no possible bodily (or sexual) contact? Dhont argues it is around the age of 13 or 14, while Zetterberg would probably argue it might happen even earlier. Whenever it occurs, it is without the boys actually seeing it coming, and within a period of a few days or even hours.

     In this short film, it begins in a locker room where hockey teammates Viggo (Lucas Andreasson) and Noel (David Ramirez) have just returned with the others from a match, having lost it as they apparently have most of their other such matches. Twelve-year-old Viggo, a blond boy who obviously is not one of the team’s star players, suggests that they will never win. The coach, overhearing his assessment, asks him quite hostilely what he means, and before the boy can even assimilate the words he has just spoken, the coach as riled up the entire team into a macho-pitch shouting match as they shout out whether they are “man or mouse.” Even Viggo and his friend Noel are forced to join in this toxic declaration of male virility.

     And as the boys leave to take a sauna at Noel’s house, they continue their discussion of their salient male features, the kind of talk in which many boys of their age engage in determining whether they’re now growing into manhood. But these boys are too young to even imagine comparing penis sizes. They play competitive games defined by height, hair-growth, their abilities in sports, and who can win a hand-wrestling bout. Noel is ahead, but loses at hand-wrestling. Viggo is taller. But when Noel asks has Viggo ever kissed someone, Viggo, the weaker of the two knows that he has lost the competition, and suggests that not everything should be seen as a competition, something we quickly discover Noel has not been encouraged to perceive life as.

     But loving his buddy, he suggests that Viggo try out kissing on him, as the two bring their lips together in the sauna without much magic happening. Viggo still can’t comprehend after kissing his friend what the excitement of a kiss is all about, Noel wondering whether it has to be someone special.

      The two continue their rough-horsing in the shower, battling the way small boys do for momentary dominance. Incidentally, they sit out the sauna bath and take the shower still dressed in their swimming trunks.

 

     We hear Noel’s father call out to quiet them down as they play in the shower. But he also wonders, quite seriously, if they are showering together, the fact of which they somehow realize they should deny. Indeed, that denial suddenly means something to Viggo, who immediately pulls away from his friend, suggesting it’s time for him to go home. When Noel asks if he’ll see him tomorrow, Viggo is seriously silent, hinting that his family has other plans. But we recognize he has now suddenly and sullenly move off from the intimate world which moments before they had inhabited.

      The movie begins with the ring of a cellphone, as Noel’s father calls Viggo’s, suggesting the two have something they must talk over. Viggo’s father, disturbed by the tone of père Noel’s voice is disturbed by the call, and wonders whether he need come over. Is it something his son as done? Has he been hurt. But when he hears that the issue concerns the fact that the boys have possibly been showering together, something which Noel’s father is very disturbed about—“I just find it a bit intimate for two boys.” Viggo’s father responds, “I think it’s up to them to decide.” Noel’s father goes even further in his perverse concerns: “Using the sauna is one thing. But for two boys to behave like that.” He doesn’t explain what “like that” might mean, but Viggo’s father has figured him out: “I understand what you mean, but…I don’t agree with you. Perhaps we should end the conversation here.”

      The trouble is that even voicing his concern as he has to the boys has had dreadful effects. This man with his toxic views of young male friendship has just destroyed something which cannot be restored, an innocence about sexuality and gender that when lost isolates and corners off boys like Viggo, who sense they have truly lost something which they may seek to find for the rest of their lives. 

      Zetterberg’s clear revelation of this intense moment in his young boys’ lives, has long been a subject in short gay LGBTQ films such Lasse Nielsen’s The Kite (2015), Eyal Resh’s Boys (2016), and Farbod Khostinat’s Two Little Boys (2020), the latter with the most terrifying results. These films reveal—whether it’s the parents, peers, or society itself that steals the innocence from young boys in its zeal to turn them into standard notions of heterosexual men—it doesn’t even have to be carefully taught. A couple of quick words such as those by the coach and Viggo’s father, a horrified parent observing an innocent kiss as in The Kite and Two Little Boys, or even a boy’s own discomfort with feelings he’s been told are not quite proper, as in Boys, is enough to sever deep childhood friendships forever with disastrous results.

 

Los Angeles, March 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).