Douglas Messerli | Won't You Be My Neighbor? [essay]

won’t you be my neighbor?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Neighbors are not apparently a common theme in LGBTQ movies, and when neighbors do appear in gay films they generally pose serious problems. There are likely several reasons for this.

      For one, so many gays simply assume a turning away from family, hometown, and neighborhoods. The queer man or woman, facing bullying or general isolation in his or her community often as young people growing up, have every reason to move home. And that move is most often to a large urban center, away from the very concept of neighborliness, unless you live in the kind TV serial world of Friends or The Bang Theory were everyone seems to know everyone else in the apartment building.

      Of course there are a few LGBTQ films about neighbors that immediately come to mind, most notably Norman McLaren’s Neighbours of 1952 in which two neighbors play out their mutual enjoyment of a simple dandelion which turns from a kind of sexual interplay between the two before it is converted in a standard male heterosexual battle and repression which destroys both of their homes and families, only to end with them becoming neighbors for the rest of eternity as they lie in their graves, side by side.

       In the artificial neighborhood of a summer hotel, the young boy of Robert Siodmak  Brennendes Geheimmis (The Burning Secret) (1933) befriends the young elevator operator who gives a peak of the more robust and lusty world of the hotel staff members before he becomes infatuated with the handsome new hotel guest who uses his admiration and friendship as a route to become sexually involved with the boy’s mother. But such a notion of neighborhood, perhaps is far close to the kinds of relationships developed in educational and prison institutions which represent, at least for me, an entirely world that the one I’m talking about.

       In Evan Roberts’ lovely short film of 2011, 33 Teeth, a young boy is so totally fascinated by the sexual life of his handsome high school neighbor that he expands his daily voyeurism to a raid of the neighbor’s bathroom, steeling a couple of tines from the comb with which his neighbor measures his penis. For this child, the neighbor represents a desire that can never be quelled—unless he does move away to find someone to fulfill his urges when he grows of age.

      And Danish director Lasse Nielsen’s Fødselsdagen (Happy Birthday) (2013) features the next-door neighbor is just about to come of age so that he might attract and have sex with the hunky gay man who over the years has hardly noticed him, when he joyfully discovers that he’s been invited over his house to celebrate his 15th birthday.

      Eric Lima’s A Bela é Poc (2021) is the more typical of the dangers of neighbors for LGBTQ figures: the hero of the film has sex with a neighbor and is soon after beaten to death by the same man.

      None of these can compare, of course, to Alfred Hitchcock’s great Rear Window, which is all about neighbors, but oddly, particularly given Hitchcock’s fascination with sexual difference, thre are no gay characters in it.

      I am sure there are others to uncover before I am finished with these volumes. Nonetheless it is not an issue that comes up in LGBTQ works very often. Indeed, I was amazed to find a small cluster of three such films from 2005 and 2006 and a later short from 2016 which represent some of the queer neighborly dilemmas.

      The new films I write about include Samantha Light’s The Neighborly Thing (2005), Michael Simon’s Is One of You Eddie? (2006), Carlos Augusto de Oliveira’s Tre somre (Three Summers) (2006), and Eyal Resh’s Boys (2016).

Los Angeles, March 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).