Sam McConnell | Twoyoungmen, UT. / 2009

a trip of lies on the way to truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nicholas Citton (screenplay, based on a story by Sam McConnell), Sam McConnell (director) Twoyoungmen, UT. / 2009 [17 minutes]

 

Throughout the first decade of the 21st century there were a number of very intelligent, well-crafted, and beautifully filmed short movies produced by students or independent directors. Twoyoungmen, UT. is most certainly one of them.

     Filmed mostly on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, this film begins with a young man on the phone to his mother. Evidently, he has returned back home to Salt Lake City before his family, and is attempting to assure his mother that the house is fine and he will pick her up at the airport in the morning, while lying to her about his whereabouts as, immediately after hanging up, he walks into a corrugated building from which the sound of a drag queen shouting out “Judy Garland,” emanates, revealing the place to be gay bar.

      As we shall soon discover, the lives of the two young men from Utah in this film are centered upon lies, large and small, as they face the religious and cultural hostility of the world into which they were born.

     The drunken drag singer (her act seems to center around bad renditions of Carol Channing singing from Hello, Dolly!) wants to buy the new kid a drink, and the bar owner George commands Eli (Art Gager) to give him one. First checking his ID, Eli wonders what it feels like to be a 38-year-old Columbian named Raimundo Gomez? “Awesome, actually,” replies the boy, Will Oberlain (George Loomis). He orders up a beer.

      Eli, a boy of almost the same age, leans over and asks if Will wants to “get out of here” and join him in one of the parties out on the Salt Flats. Will is incredulous that such events actually happen, but Eli, now with the car Will drives at his disposal, is ready to check them out.

      Will, not even of drinking age in Utah (where the age is 21)—he is probably 16—is a true innocent in this localized “on the road” movie, passive to the seemingly older and more-knowing Eli. And we also immediately sense the danger in that fact.

       They hardly get outside the bar door when they observe two men in automobile checking them out with car lights bright and clearly ready for violence. Will immediately makes for his auto, trying to ignore them, while Eli challenges them, taking down his pants and mooning them, “Come on, you want this, be a man!” They turn off the car lights and drive off.

       Will is disturbed, particularly as Eli makes light of the situation. “Why so shy, Raimundo?” he asks, telling him he shouldn’t so disturbed by guys like that.

        Immediately, Eli pulls out the car ownership out of the dashboard, confirming the car belongs to the boy’s mother Lorraine, and in the process, summing up Will’s life. He suggests she must be cool paying for Will’s private school, which at first the boy denies he attends, but then admits only to discover that Eli is also a high school student at the local public West High. How did he get a job at the bar? Eli suggests he just fills in from time to time.

       Just as suddenly Eli turns the conversation back to the subject of Will. “So I don’t get it. Lorraine must be smart, liberal, gnostic, went to a good school, meaning you got to go to a good school, meaning you’re supposed to be studying for AP calculus right now”—Will interrupting to explain it’s “biology”—So why hasn’t she figured out Raimundo’s a ‘pole smoker’” (a street term for someone who likes to suck cock.)

 

     A few moments later Eli observes—Will having stopped the car fearing he hit something—that Will’s either “real trusting or real stupid,” driving out there with a stranger. Eli takes a piss a few feet from the car.  He names the terrible things he could be.

      But Will, moving toward him, suggests it’s fine with him, Eli incredulous given the fact that there’s no one out there to even hear him scream. Will moves toward him, Eli turning around immediately in reaction and accidently pissing on the boy’s feet. After a moment’s pause, Eli declares: “I’m not gay.”

       Suddenly, the film has shifted from Eli’s easy assumptions about who Will is, to the far more complex and mysterious aspects of Eli himself, who not only keeps the short narrative constantly in motion as we follow the quick leaps of his mind, but is the real subject of the film, being the individual who keeps us wondering where he’s really planning to take his new friend Raimundo and himself.

      The revelations begin with Eli’s first admission. He doesn’t work at the bar. The bartender George is his dad. Will is truly frustrated with the truth, now caught up for night in the middle of nowhere with a boy who whom he can’t even sexually engage. As Eli suggests he doesn’t need to keep his frustration inside since there’s no one to hear them, as for the first time also we encounter another side of Will, howling out a prolonged “Fuck!”

      Eli suggests they get some breakfast.

     Over the next half of the film we discover that Eli, who at first denies it, is Mormon, and that his father left his mother two years ago—“Turns out he wasn’t flyfishing with cousin Richie every month”—moving west. Now Eli has a place to drink for free, making him really popular at school.

       At the restaurant Eli jokingly tries to hook up Will, through the intercession of the clueless waitress, with some of the male Puerto Rican workers, which angers the boy. And outside the diner, as they continue their argument, someone suddenly calls out, “Will.” 

       It’s four of his school friends, who ask him if he’s going to join the soccer team for his senior year. Eli again intrudes with seemingly jocular remarks. When asked where they’re going, Will answers that even they don’t quite know, but Eli quickly injects, putting his arm around Will’s shoulder, “We’re going to fuck. We’re going to go find a quiet place and I’m going to do gay sex with him.” Eli begins to laugh, Will quickly joining in, as the four friends gradually accept the joke which it’s clear they don’t find to be that funny.

       Will is still offended, declaring they’re his friends to which Eli immediately argues, “No they’re not. They’re people you know right now. In five years, they’ll be dead to you.” 

       The mix of Eli’s constantly dangerous humor and his wisdom is disconcerting, the fuel on which McConnell’s cinema relies for its continual perplexing engagement.

     Frustrated, Will finally asks where he should drop Eli off, clearly no longer interested in the promised party. When Eli insists he can’t go home, Will drives off. He quickly returns, however, demanding that Eli give him his wallet. Eli responds, just drop me off at the party, and I’ll give you your wallet back.

      Now as they drive off into the darkness, it’s Will’s turn to seriously ask the questions. He doesn’t understand, he insists. Two weeks before he saw Eli take a guy with a baseball cap into the back room for sex. Eli hints that it was just to shake him down, and Will wonders is that what he determined to do to him this evening. Will finally speaks his piece: “Guys like you are such fucking joke. You think you have everyone figured out, but you don’t. The world shits on you a bit more than it does on the rest of us, but it doesn’t matter because you won’t do anything about it. You’ll be stuck here with everyone you hate. And you’ll be just as lost as you are right now, just this second.”

       Suddenly Eli gets a phone call, asking Will to stop the car so he can hear the conversation. Will continues to intrude upon the call, suggesting it’s his turn to become Raimundo.

       It turns out to have been Eli’s mother. Having found out that Eli went to see his father, she has kicked him out of her home. Almost he tears, Eli explains: “She kicked me out. She just told me not to come back.” Will admits that Eli has been right, there is absolutely no one out there in case he wants to scream.

       They stop by a small house surrounded by hogs who have evidently just killed a bird or a cat. Eli goes up to the door, but doesn’t even try to enter, turning to see the sick look of Will’s face. We don’t know what horrific world we have now entered. Is this Eli’s father’s place? The home in which he has now to look forward to living?

       No answer is given as, in the morning light we now observe Eli driving Will’s car as they have actually reached the Flats, many young girls and boys wandering along the road. Eli stops to ask what’s going on, and is told that they have to park two miles back so that the cops don’t find the site.

       “It’s the party. You guys are here to party, right?

       Eli answers, “No we’re not here to party.” He drives on, the boys looking toward one another as a rain storm is suddenly upon them.

       It’s unlikely that Will can make to the airport to pick up his mother or that Eli has anywhere else to go. Suddenly they only have one another. And Eli’s seemingly humorous foretelling of where they might be heading expressed to Will’s friends back in the diner has become, for the first time in this film, words of truth.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).