Ohm Phanphiroj | All That I Desire / 2017

voyeurs of desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ohm Phanphiroj (director) All That I Desire / 2017 [6 minutes]

Thai-American director Ohm Phanphiroj’s All That I Desire is a three-panel installation film that represents, clearly, three aspects of the filmmaker’s notions of desire. On the far left from the viewer’s vantage-point is a cute nude Caucasian boy over which the camera hovers as a hand slowly caresses his body parts, face, chest, legs, penis, etc. moving up and down the body several times over the 6 minutes of the video. Obviously, this is a gesture of desire and perhaps even infatuation, a gentle desire that doesn’t quite dare to fully embrace and engage the all-white image which the owner of the hand nonetheless clear desires.

    Subliminally, given the slightly darker tone of the presumably Asian hand that strokes the all-white boy, there is clearly a racial statement implied in this portion of film, particularly when compared with the middle image of an Asian boy at which is regularly expelled a white liquid that can only remind one of semen. Over and over again the Asian boy is drenched with a load of the white liquid accompanied by the sound of a bang or shot, as if he were engaged in a Bukkake session.

 

     At least, in the second image the individual (or group) is somewhat sexually engaged with the  figure as opposed to simply expressing adoration or a distant fetish; but in this instance the sexuality if also a kind of abuse—although certainly one which some gay men take pleasure in (indeed the man on the screen may be the artist himself)—that if nothing else does not suggest the gentle intimacy of the first panel’s gestures. Perhaps, if this barrage of semen is being produced by only one individual instead of the usual group, we can at least presume that the aggressor is highly excited by the Asian boy, and ready to engage in ejaculation over and over, suggesting a total sexual excitation. But it is not the kind of sex one generally has with a single lover, but is suggestive more of simply sexual excitement, the kind that results in orgies and group participation. The repository of the several loads of semen in a Bukkake session may be willing, but he is nonetheless, still an unengaged stimulus or even a victim whose own sexual desires and urges are not attended to, resulting in a sense of abuse—even if it may be also enjoyable.

 

    The third panel shows ocean waters undergoing vast tsunami like waves, a violent act that suggests perhaps an appreciation for violence. Yet this is described as being part of what the artist “desires,” so we have to imagine that violence on a large scale, vast numbers of individual effected is also one of the filmmaker’s expressed desires. There is, of course, also great beauty and power in the third screens images, an expression of the ineffable force of nature itself which may be behind all obsession or deep desire. If we watch the first with a sense of eroticism, the second with a sensation of true sexual action, the third becomes something from which we must stand apart, appreciating its beauty without wanting at all to become involved with its highly destructive powers.

     All three also engage a kind of body, the passive and still male body being admired in the first panel, the male face being abusively used as source of stimulus for sexual action in the second, and a body of water demanding our astonishment and fear in the third and final panel.

     One might characterize the first image, finally, as representing “adoration,” the second as “use or abuse,” and the third “terror,” all of them strangely separating, ultimately, he who desires and the thing he desires.

      In each case, moreover, the humans at the center remain basically passive and submissive. In the first, although the boy gets a very slight erection, his role is simply as the adored being, touched without real sexual stimulation. In the second, while he is the cause, presumably, of the white liquid being catapulted upon his face and hair, he remains the uninvolved recipient. And, in the third, the viewer remains, if he is to survive, outside and apart from the wondrously violent presentation of nature which he observes as an observer.

      In all three panels, in fact, the viewer is also, in some respect, a voyeur, not fully engaged with the activities he desires—just as we too become voyeurs of this artist’s desires.

      As in so many of this Bangkok-born artist’s work, he raises the question of desire, its price (financially, socially, and spiritually) and effects upon our lives and others involved.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).