Jamie Travis | The Armoire / 2009

children’s games

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamie Travis (screenwriter and director) The Armoire / 2009 [22 minutes]

 

The young adolescent Aaron (William Cuddy) has met up after school with his best friend Tony (Ricardo Hoyos) and together with him gone to his house. There he asks Tony if he wants to play hide-and-seek, Tony saying simply that he didn’t want to, but nonetheless agreeing to it when his friend pleads with him to do so.

      Aaron closes his eyes and counts, but when he goes on the search for Tony, he cannot find him anywhere in the house, his mother calling later to report he’s missing and wondering if Aaron has seen him, so goes the boy’s simply, but mysterious rendition of events, turning eventually from a personal accounting, to a police report, and finally into national TV news.

       But in Canadian director Jaimie Travis’ remarkable film—the third in his “The Saddest Children in the World” trilogy*—the story doesn’t stop there. Inexplicably, Aaron keeps looking at his bedroom Armoire, one of the places he first checked out in his search for his friend, and eventually begins crawling into it to sleep at night.

       His caring parents (Tammy Isbell and David Keeley) are worried, and tell him that they surely can understand if he might want to stay home from school, but Aaron assures them that he is fine. The film, however, tells us that he’s not just fine, with the picture of his choirboy friend Tony appearing on the front page of the local newspaper, the camera zeroing in on the picture while the music whirls up a few darker chords.

       Moreover, at school, while a local policeman talks to the students, yet again, about the dangers of riding with strangers and the need for a “buddy system,” Aaron begins to have visions: two hands appear under his desk with a pencil inserted into a pencil sharpener, a whispered voice following. Aaron asks to be excused to go to the bathroom and there hears a voice speaking to him through the drain of one of the urinals.

      Back in the now empty classroom, Aaron opens his pants and sits down at his desk, apparently planning to masturbate or urinate, an act interrupted by the schoolteacher’s return. His parents attempt to comprehend why he has committed such an act, his father beginning a sentence, “You know you can come to us if you have any problems….” interrupted by the boy declaring information which we have not previously known, “You’re not even my real father.”

    The milk carton announces on one of its panels, accompanied by a picture of Tony, that the child has been missing since May 30, 1991. Aaron punches a hole in the mouth of the boy in the picture, permitting the milk to pour out over him, dropping from the table onto the region of his penis.

    My best Freudian guess is that Aaron and Tony have been playing games involving their penises, confusing the joys they feel and perhaps even what they have begun to ejaculate with urine, the only recognition of young children of what issues from the region of their bodies. Have they also been injecting their “pencils” into other orifices?  Or, of course, it could also be all Aaron’s precocious imagination, a sublimated desire never acted upon.

      In the very next scene, Aaron is sitting across from a gentle female psychiatrist (Maggie Huculak), suggesting that she is going to ask him some questions and prevailing upon him to answer as honestly as he can.

 

     He talks about visits to Disneyland and Disneyworld in Orlando with his very best friend Tony, about many sleepovers, mostly in his house because he has bunkbeds, wherein Tony would sleep on the top while he would always get stuck on the bottom. One morning Tony woke him up to show him, through a crack in the door, Aaron’s step-dad doing sit ups, an image that can only be described, in terms of the way it is shown in the movie, as homoerotic, and surely being precisely what to these adolescent boys, curious about the male body, would be attracted to. Aaron reports, Tony thought it was “funny,” a child’s word for “strange,” an oddity not about the behavior of the adult but in relationship to his feelings concerning it. The language in this film represents truly a child’s language and imagination, which needs to be translated into adult jargon. Sleeping on top, for example, might suggest the dominance of the other boy which might later in their lives define itself into a sexual position. We can only guess that Aaron preferred more normative games, while Tony might have been exploring more complex issues.

      Certainly, the vision of his step-father revealed to him by Tony has an enormous effect on Aaron as he begins to see his father always as being naked. He didn’t want to see him that way, he explains, but he simply couldn’t help it. “But then one day I just stopped picturing him that way.”

      He has a similar problem with a substitute teacher who wanted his students to just call him Mike, presumably the use of a common name suggesting to the precocious child a more casual relationship that called up sexual possibilities along with it.

     At this point, the psychiatrist is, quite humorously, already a bit troubled by the child’s sexual imagination, interrupting the child’s open conversation to speak to his mother, presumably to warn her about the troubling things she has observed, given that it is still early in the 1990s, only two decades after the American Psychiatric Association had stopped seeing homosexual behavior as a mental aberration.

     Throughout this scene the director has carefully placed on the wall behind the confessing child, children’s colorful paintings of rainbows, symbol, obviously, of the LGBTQ+ community.

      In the very next scene, with an ice-cream cone dripping down across Aaron’s fingers, we see the boy hearing the TV news about the discovery of his friend’s body behind the elementary school he had attended.

      Aaron is delighted to have become the new soloist with the choir. The choir director announces that Tony would be proud.

      But in the very next frame the psychiatrist is hypnotizing the boy, obviously in an attempt to further dig deeper into his memories. In reverse order (one of the many formalist devices used by Travis throughout) we now observe Aaron looking for his friend in their hide-and-seek game, beginning in the kitchen under the sink, moving to the garage—a ping pong ball which had fallen to the floor, now leaping up back to the table from whence it fell—moving the shower curtain away to see if Tony his hiding there, and finally returning to the armoire in his own room, before he returns to the couch, his hands over his eyes as he counts.

       Now, however, he backs out the door alone, backs down a wooded path and can be seen putting soil over a shallow hole before he drags a wrapped body…not into the whole but up the stairs of his house, a living boy seemingly writhing with, the covering rolling up neatly to become an extra blanket as we end up with Tony on his bedroom floor, Aaron sitting in his armoire. Asked what he’s seeing, he replies, “Nothing. I see nothing.”

     The psychiatrist snaps him out of his hypnotic condition, with the boy repeating “Nothing.” If the narrative is accurate, it appears he has embedded the boy in the blanket, dragged him to and deposited him into the shallow grave behind the school before returning home to play the game of hide-and-seek alone. Of course, this could also be entirely in his imagination, the product of guilt or sorrow, filling in the imaginary details that accord with what he has heard about his friend’s death. True or not, it is disturbing, a truth he has not revealed to the doctor. The emphatic nothing is either a lie or the actual truth.

       The armoire in his bedroom is now missing. He asks his parents where it’s disappeared to? “It’s in the garage,” answers his mother. “It’s not normal to sleep in a wardrobe,” his step-father pontificates.

 

      In the garage, we see the boy open the armoire, crawl inside, and close the doors behind him. The boy clearly has chosen the abnormal, outside of his parents' attempts to protect him.    

    In the very next frame we see the armoire, back in his bedroom, the door suddenly opening from within as we observe the two boys having been together inside the closet, Tony now sitting with his legs dangling from it, Aaron still more deeply embedded inside.

 

    It is clear that their games with their bodies have been played out within the wardrobe, a hidden space, a kind of closet just as surely as the metaphoric one where gay men often hid themselves during the same period.

    In the angelic voice of a boy soprano, Tony begins to sing, but eventually interrupts himself, responding not to anything Aaron has said, but simply to his curious movement of his eyes with the word “What?” Aaron says the very same words he had previously spoken to his doctor, “Nothing.” Tony dares his friend to go back in the armoire, which Aaron does, crawling back into its depths. Tony quickly shuts the doors, locking it with a fork.

     Aaron begs to be let out, Tony answering “Not until you say you’re sorry.” “What for?” “I’m not going to play your games.” “Let me out, Tony, I can’t breathe” “You liked it in there before, didn’t you?”

     Aaron shakes the doors, “Please Tony.” “Not until you say you’re sorry.” …”Count to one hundred and I’ll let you out.”

     As Aaron slowly counts, Tony sits on the bed, finishing his bagel with cream cheese.

     When Aaron finally reaches 100, Tony pulls away the fork, the doors opening. He moves back to the bed, learning up against it, to speak the words: “Your turn.”

      It’s evident that whatever went on in the armoire is something that Tony will not accept as his fault, blaming it on his friend, as if any sexual activity between the two were not a mutual act. It’s also seems apparent that Tony is basically torturing his loving friend, attempting to instill guilt for their sexual explorations.

      “Truth or dare?” Aaron asks, seemingly recovered from his temporary imprisonment.

      “Dare,” answers Tony.

      Aaron points to a wall socket: “I dare you to stick your fork in that outlet.”

      Tony bends down to the outlet, pulling out the night light and turning back with a look at Aaron of deep recrimination.

  

      We now know what must have truly happened, a terrible accident on account of their almost saddo-masochistic childhood versions of truth and dare.

      But strangely, Travis’ film, despite its tragic events, ends in a rather surrealist ray of hope. Travis, in an interview in 2012 with James McNally, himself argues that in making The Armoire he felt he “couldn’t have my sad child films end in such a dark way. With The Armoire, there is a light at the end of the tunnel of adolescence.”

      Aaron suddenly exits from his residence in the garage Armoire, walks firmly into the room where his parents sit and marches upstairs. He climbs into the top bank, explaining that he is ready. Below him his friend Tony moves his feet up into the air, slightly tilting the top mattress and turns on a tape recorder with music as Aaron sings in a lovely high soprano voice a song about “sailing away despite the crashes of the ocean,” “take my hand, let us both make our way, let us both make our way.” Together they reach a new world, a time beyond the difficult voyage they have just encountered, a song written and performed by Alfredo Santa Ana entitled “Floating Down the Stream.”

      Despite his actions, despite the horror of their games, Aaron remains an innocent who will pass through this dark episode into a continued life of new possibilities, a world outside the armoire. Yet, I doubt an easy resolution as he grows older and realizes his culpability for what happened. If he need not have felt guilt for their sexual games, he will surely feel it for their aftermath. The sadness, in this case, may exist mostly in the future.

      This truly awesome short work reminds me, in several respects, of Travis’ fellow Canadian director John Greyson, with their surprising intersections of various genre and music.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2024).