Cory Ewing | The 50's / 2019

can’t keep my eyes off of you

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cory Ewing (screenwriter and director) The 50's / 2019 [5 minutes]

 

I have grown very leery of any work of prose, literature, or film that attempts to characterize an entire decade or, for that matter, even a shorter period in time with a few broad strokes. Such generalities always miss what might be of most importance, the exceptions often being of far more importance than the generalities since they are perpetually overlooks. In particular, disturbs me when young people—in this case a US director apparently born sometime in the late 1990s—attempt to characterize the 1950s as being a time in which it was nearly impossible to exist as a gay man.

 

    We all know how in many situations the social attitudes of a society suddenly dominated by men who’d gone to fight in World War II, men determined to recreate upon their return from their wartime duties a sense of familial normalcy, to protect the US from the dangers they had encountered in European and Asian cultures, and who had often developed delimited notions of the role of women and were terrified by behavior that didn’t support the binary sexual patterns in which they’d grown believing attempted to delimit American thought and acts. At the same time conservative individuals in government like Joseph McCarthy, terrified by the rise of Communism and spooked by changing sexual values worked hard to rid governmental agencies of leftist beliefs, religious doubt, and homosexuality in general while also putting terrible

pressures on the public media and individuals working in Hollywood and New York theater, causing many innocent and well-meaning men and women to lose their jobs.

      But, in fact, a great many of the returning soldiers had greatly expanded their minds during their European and Asian stays, and the fears of the conservatives were not without some warrant. For indeed, Hollywood was opening up to new sexual and social possibilities in cinema, while writers such as the Beats or the poets of the New York School were demanding change and living lives that rejected the old ways.

      Women who had moved into the working pool in the absence of males were reflecting on their societal roles in new ways. The 1950s, if highly restrictive for many individuals, in particular for wives with traditionally-minded husbands and children such as myself growing up in smaller, traditional suburban communities, so too was it a time of new openness and exploration for many, a time in large urban areas such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, Provincetown and elsewhere of great sexual experimentation. Women were increasingly speaking out, controlling their household finances, and taking on positions that had not previously been possible before the War. After all, these 1950s children and dutiful wives were the same people who by the mid-1960s effectuated the radical changes of that era.

      If what I have just said sounds like a great deal of bombast to introduce what is at heart a cute little pinch of the 1950s buttocks on the beach, I fully admit it and apologize; but Cory Ewing’s clever 5-minute-long tweak of protest and others like it should not simply go uncontested because of their very innocent and insignificance.

      In this case, we’re told in the IMDb description—which itself seems somewhat contradictory—that a straight couple are visiting the beach in the early 1950s. The couple James (Alex Rollins) and Karen (Mikaella Abitbol) certainly act like a straight couple, arriving at the beach with a large stripped umbrella which James immediately plants into the sand while his wife Karen blows up a beach ball.

      But it only takes a few moments for the returned muscled swimmer Kenneth (Andrew Neighbors) to catch James’ eye, which has little to do, as the IMDb note suggests, “with the prejudice about gay people in the American society,” but a great deal to say about James’ own hidden life. Clearly from the way in which his eyes keep gazing over to the hunk and in which his interactions with his wife quickly grow increasingly resentful, James’ is simply a closeted gay boy who’s let himself be swept up into a conventional heterosexual marriage.

      Now I’m not saying there we’re perhaps a great many such men in the 1950s, but they exist in large numbers even today, as I have suggested most recently in my essay about several short films and a music video from 2011-2013 titled “The I’m Not Gay Syndrome,” which established that there are still many such boys, perhaps even more haunted the days than were the ones from the 1950s since any gay boy of the 1950s would probably have chosen another beach and certainly would not have openly flaunted his sexuality as Ken boy does. Moreover, in the early 1950s setting of this short work most “straight” boys didn’t even notice gay men, since as traditional values would have it, being gay was a strange perversion which affected only a small

group of the male population. By and large gay men didn’t really exist until Life and Look magazine took out their cameras in Manhattan and Los Angeles in the early 1960s to prove to their readers that such men truly did exist.

     But Jimmy her just can’t keep his eyes off his own nearby Marlboro man, who lies face up on the sand with a cigarette dangling his mouth a little like James Dean. Moreover, like all such wives, Karen knows that her hubby’s eyes are wandering and attempts to interrupt his pretense of reading by snuggling up close, which causes him to push her off and spill her Coke.

      Good thinking, closet queen! Hand her some money so that she can go off to buy herself another few calories of Cola. And, as if nature itself were on his side, when the ball gets blown off in the direction of the sand God, Jimmy and Kenny can spend a moment of eternity retrieving the ball, their hands cautiously caught up in the touch of not only the ball but (perhaps only imaginarily) of each other’s body—just for a few seconds before Karen returns.

      The recorded messages of the dangers of homosexuality we hear at the end of this little cinematic diversion are from the 1950s, but the dilemma it portrays continues to exist even today.

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).