Jamie Travis | Why the Anderson Children Didn't Come to Dinner / 2003

queer beings

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamie Travis (screenwriter and director) Why the Anderson Children Didn't Come to Dinner / 2003 [16 minutes]

 

Already in his first, film school offering, Why the Anderson Children Didn’t Come to Dinner, Jamie Travis was impressing the critics with his offbeat, formal, surrealist fable-like filmmaking. Although the two films that followed it in what would become his “Sad Children Trilogy”—The Saddest Boy in the World and The Armoire—might both be superior to this first offering, there is perhaps no stranger work in his still youthful oeuvre, and this movie remains, outside of the three Pattern shorts, seemingly impenetrable to many viewers.

      While the other two “Sad Children” films readily fit into a LGBTQ category, moreover, this one, at least at first viewing, seems to lie outside of any sexual or gender concerns. Indeed, none of the three Anderson triplets, Chester (Michel Kurliak), Eliza (Katherine Eaton), and Godfrey (Colton Boreen), seem to have ever even imagined that there is another world outside of their seemingly wealthy mansion-like dwelling, and it appears they have been locked away in the insanity of their home in a manner that is not far removed from the children in Giogos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009). If these children don’t speak a parental-created language, they certainly are employed in odd playtime activities when they’re not spending their time at their maternally controlled affairs described as breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

    Chester, surely a future plumber, spends most of his time attempting to flush strange objects down the toilet such as his rubber bathtub duck, a series of pens and pencils, numerous pieces of silverware, and entire wardrobes of clothing, etc. He is ready with his plunger for the backup of water after the flush, but strangely the toilet in their home swallows up everything—just as the triplets are expected to do at mealtimes.

    Godfrey, the only overweight child among them strangely, is likely to become a gardener, since he spends his off-meal moments planting seeds in pots and in the yard, watering them, and waiting for them to turn into flowers. Just as soon as the nasturtiums and geraniums flower, however, Godrey pulls off their buds, tosses them into his mouth and devours them. Even found objects around the yard get swallowed up in his odd hunger.

     Eliza is perhaps the most inscrutable. She will perhaps become an artist, since she spends her time off with paintbrushes, an easel, and canvas. But her canvases are all paint-in-the-numbers, nothing original whatsoever. And the subjects are of a girl on a swing and other banal scenes. In between painting, moreover, she spies on her family through a window telescope. Perhaps she can yet determine whether she wants to become an artist or a family gossip when she comes of age.

     Yet the true psycho among them is Maud (Patti Wothrespoon) their made mother who spends her days as all model fairy-tale mothers are supposed to, cleaning (the house is spotless) and most cooking. The only oddity is that the thin Maud is hooked, most of the time, to an IV unit—perhaps to remind us that she truly is sick, or, perhaps, her veins are being pumped with special kind of drug. For she never eats.

      But for her children nothing is spared. For every meal she serves up each of them a full treats such as a cooked piglet, stuffed with various fruits, as well as masses and masses of eggs, breads, fruits, sweetmeats, vegetables, and juices. At one point for a birthday treat, she even attempts to cook, live, one of the several family cats.     

    At each meal she serves up the equivalent of what Charles Laughton consumed in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry the VIII (1933)—although not with his gusto since the children, under careful watch of mamma, are forced to eat conventionally and properly what might take them hours to consume, reminded that there are starving children in Africa if they attempt to leave a drop of food behind on their plates. Godfrey seems to have the most difficulty at the table, probably because of his other even stranger eating habits.

      Beyond all of these eccentricities, moreover, is Maud’s total inability to deal with “difference.” As an egg-cooking specialist she daily opens carton after of carton of fresh white eggs, becoming furious whenever she encounters a brown one. And increasingly as the movie progresses, she finds her cartons filled with higher numbers of the detested brown egg. When she encounters one, despite her spick-and-span kitchen she immediately tosses it to the floor. At one point, she stomps on such an egg on her spotless floor.

    If she is a strict parent at the table, she is truly intolerant regarding brown eggs. And when she discovers during one meal that Godfrey has consumed just such an object when, unable to finish his pork roast, upon which he regurgitates a brown egg up out of his mouth, she can hardly contain herself as she rushes off to the kitchen, propelling it into a kitchen cabinet as she screams.

      If she cannot accept difference, she has certainly chosen the wrong children to so diligently care for. And the triplets themselves realize that, if they may not be sexually “different” from others, they most certainly are queer beings.

 

   They may truly resent the over-bounteous feasts she forces upon them morning, noon, and night, but their true resentment arises with the brown egg breakdown. Godfrey packs two suitcases and places them in his red wagon which he pulls out into the garden, turning the sprinkler on. Chester writes a hot pink lipstick message on the bathroom mirror, “good-bye,” and the Eliza finishes her paint-by-the-numbers work, letting go of the balloons she constantly holds with other hand, the green helium-filled balls having found their way to the ceiling.

      Maud sits alone at the table since the children have fled the house and are now swinging together in some far away park.

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).