Samantha Light | The Neighborly Thing / 2005

logical assumptions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Simon (screenplay), Samantha Light (director) The Neighborly Thing / 2005 [11 minutes]

 

Samantha Light’s The Neighborly Thing is surely the darkest depiction of neighborhood relationships that I write about here, and it is also one of the most confusing. We don’t really know what the relationship is between the upstairs owner of the building, Kevin, and his downstairs tenant Sebastian (Michael Simon) who describes himself as an archeologist.

     Clearly they have been close, Sebastian telling the renters who have temporarily rented Kevin’s apartment that he visits him regularly several times each day and he knows the apartment intimately.

      We can only suspect, given the intensity with which he speaks of his missing friend and a quick image that slips by in-between frames of Sebastien, a full cooked turkey in front of him, waiting for someone to show up to eat it with him, that they may also have been lovers. Presumably, Kevin has stood him up for a celebration. But where is Kevin, a question he now asks of the new renters, Beca (Samantha Light) and Richie (Joseph Paneno) who vaguely reply he is traveling on business in Europe, a fact that Sebastien clearly knows to be a lie.

      In fact, in a very brief period of time, we quickly to suspect that they have simply taken over the apartment perceiving Kevin’s absence. 

      But Sebastien, himself acts strangely, seeking, it appears, any excuse to further check out the apartment. At first, he accosts Beca because of smoking, she simply blowing more smoke his way and insisting that she, after all, out of doors. He pretends to be more cordial and she as well, mentioning the problem she’s having with the unit’s disposal. Sebastian, in turn, uses her casual statement about the disposal as a further excuse to intrude, promising to fix it.

 

      When Richie returns from wherever he’s been, he seems terribly angry and offended not only by the neighbor’s presence but that he dare even ask them questions. But when Sebastien begins to leave, Richie suddenly apologizes, Sebastien reiterating his close connection to Kevin and demonstrating sudden anger about his departure. His comments “I feel so comfortable here, like it’s my second home. I can’t believe he just up and left like that!” are posed almost a kind of dare to both Richie and Beca and to his missing friend, made even darker by his next statement, “I don’t believe I can forgive him for that,” which sounds like a true threat.

       Even more inexplicable is the fact that, a moment later, we witness Sebastien taking up a hatchet before he returns to the couple, sniveling out a few tears for a second and shouting, “I think you should go!”

       Richie turns with a gun in his hand—possibly the one Sebastien has previously mentioned as Kevin owning—and shoots him dead.

       Beca begins screaming and crying, we imagine, at first, because of the terrible and seemingly meaningless deed Richie has just committed. But we soon discover that her real reason for her reaction has to do with the fact that it was “her turn,” her prerogative evidently to kill someone, further evidence that the two are on a killing spree.

       The last few frames simply have to do with Richie’s comment that now they have to clean it up, as we see Sebastian now lying on the floor, a pool of blood gathering around his body.

        Has this couple already killed Kevin? But if so, how has Sebastian not known about it, living in such close proximity. And what does he mean by his angry threat of never being able to forgive his former friend and possible lover? Did Sebastian kill Kevin for his abandonment? Is his current intrusion upon the couple related to his profession of digging up the dead?

        Or, to put the question slightly differently, is it Beca and Richie’s territory that is being invaded by Sebastian, with Sebastian possibly being attracted to Richie; or is it Beca and Richie who have invaded Sebastian and Kevin’s territory, with Sebastian demanding a fuller relationship with Kevin perhaps than he has been willing to offer? Certainly, it appears that Beca and Richie are squatters and serial murderers. But perhaps Sebastian is also a serial murderer, stopped before he can commit a second crime.

       In short, it is nearly impossible to make sense of this film. And finally, we have no real evidence that this is even a queer cinema, although it is written by the same figure, Michael Simon, who wrote the comic gay film, Is One of You Eddie? I write about below.

      Whatever you want to make of this fairly gruesome murder story there seem to be only dead ends, either a flaw in the storytelling or an intentional ruse that forces you become as suspicious of these figures are about one another, the work metamorphosing into a kind of formal check mate without logical escape. If his 2006 work is fable about physical stereotypes, perhaps this work is a fable about logical assumptions.

 

Los Angeles, March 20, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2022).