Dylan Mascis and Natalya Micic | Screwdriver / 2018

keeping hold of your man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dylan Mascis and Natalya Micic (screenwriters and directors) Screwdriver / 2018 [30 minutes]

 

The half-hour long British film, Screwdriver is yet another work on young gay men being severely bullied in schools, ending tragically—as far too many of these films do—in the central character’s suicide.

    Clearly the young 17-year-old Michael (Kent Ibe) has tried hard to adjust to his gay life. Living alone with his mother (Norma Dixit), as the movie begins they have moved to yet another school in order escape Michael’s being bullied.

      Somehow despite the bullying and their moves, the mother seems to remain clueless about her son’s sexuality, somehow imagining perhaps that he might have something to do with his being black (she is white). Michael, still fearful about coming out to her, records a sort of verbal blog about what being a gay black man in his late teens is like and how painful it is. She, however, can only repeat her desire that he bring him a nice girlfriend from the school. And speaks at one moment about a neighborhood that is “sadly” filled with too many gays.

      In his new school, however, Michael quickly meets a gentle young man, Josef (Matt Blin), who not only seems to take a liking to Michael, quickly trying to teach him to play the piano, but also develops a close relationship that seems to accept his sexuality.     

     So close do the boys become that Michael feels comfortable sharing with Josef his voice- recorded diary. The boys seem to be developing sexual feelings for each other. And finally, Michael seems to have found some of the acceptance he has so long been missing, determining to hunker down and finish out his school days without major suffering.

    The fly in the ointment in this case is that Josef also has a girlfriend, a rather dominant figure who, like many young women who fear their male partner’s may be straying over to the opposite sex, keeps a close watch on him, attempting to reign him away from the new student.

      I’ve seen such behavior up close, meeting up at one point with an old college friend who was clearly close to coming out or perhaps to recognizing that he might be bisexual back in our college days. At lunch, years later, despite the fact by that time I had been in a relationship with my partner for a couple of years and represented no possible threat to his sexuality, he immediately reported that his now wife would have been horrified if she’d known he was having lunch with me. It is a vision of homophobia at its worse, stemming from of fear that she might lose her man if he even rub shoulders with a gay man. Popular culture used to describe this as “keeping hold of your man.”

      Certainly, Josef’s female friend, whom he claims to love, is precisely this kind of controlling woman, a woman not unlike Michael’s own bigoted mother. And when Josef tells him that despite his growing love for him, he “cannot” leave his girlfriend, Michael perceives it for the kind of homophobia it is, realizing that any hopes of getting closer to Josef are impossible and that, in fact, his only real friend may soon also be forced to keep a distance from him as well.

      The two meet up in Josef’s truck to talk it out, Michael breaking down into tears as his implores Josef to become man enough to stand up to such a controlling woman. But such young men as Josef seldom are able themselves to fully admit to their sexuality and look to the societal norms of behavior in order to survive. Some of these men often awaken later in their lives to discover themselves sexually entrapped and wreak havoc as they attempt to correct the situation.

       Almost broken, Michael almost angrily leaves his would-be mate. But he soon discovers than other schoolboys have observed them in the truck and are now ready to take revenge on the intruder who might be trying to sexually sway their classmate. They beat him brutally, first emptying out his bookbag and discovering his voice recording which talks about his difficulties with being gay. They not only destroy his books, the record of his life, but almost the man himself in slugging and kicking him into submission.

 

      Michael staggers home to pass his sleeping mother on his way to his room, where in complete confusion and hopelessness he attempts to wash away the blood on his face.

       Josepf meanwhile does not immediately return to his girlfriend, realizing perhaps that much of what Michael has argued is right and that he too has fallen in love with the new student. He rushes to Michael’s home to tell him, presumably, that he does love him. But when he awakens the mother who goes to upstairs to bring down her son, discovers that Michael has hung himself. The love proffered Michael has come too late from everyone who might have washed away the hate.

       Mascis’ and Micic’s short work is extremely powerful. They have attempted to even further experiment with the numerous viewpoints being expressed by presenting the entire film in split screen so that we might watch two different individuals at the same moment and perceive their interactions.

       Two problems, however, weaken the effect. First—at least in the print of the film I saw—the lighting is so dark that we cannot actually observe the faces of the characters as they express their viewpoints, particularly in the important scenes in Josef’s truck.

       Secondly, as critic Jack Cameron argues in his LGBT Film review: “The writing over-labours the drama and the split screen begins to rely too heavily on effects created by the framing rather than by the content that’s in the frame.”

       Nonetheless, the young directors have created another powerful statement about the terrible effects of bullying and homophobia that seems never to end, even in societies that proclaim to have come to accept LGBTQ differences.

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).