Benjamin Kemper | Pop! / 2017

cartoon reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamin Kemper (screenwriter and director) Pop! / 2017 [21 minutes]

 

What is a 13-year-old boy like Ty (Harrison Redeker) who questions his own sexuality, is forced by his alcoholic father (Michael Kemper) each morning to down a jigger of whiskey to prove he’s a man, and who is daily bullied by the school thug, Carter (Dustin Johnson), to do?

     This short film posits that when his father gives him a gun for his 14th birthday and the bully has challenged him to an afterschool fight, the result is as inevitable as film’s title.

      Perhaps it seems that for a child whose best friend, Jay (Mattox Barnette) also appears to be a bit dim-witted, and whose mother (Tracy McQuillan), forced to work in order to support her family, is mostly absent. But then the film never explores any other possibilities.

     There seem to be no teachers, no counselors, indeed no other adults in Ty’s life, no one he could possibly turn to. Although he and Jay play tag in the library stacks, neither of them appears to have actually read a book. Director Kemper’s villain Carter behaves like a robotized stereotype of a bully, who himself has no weaknesses.

 

    The issues Kemper brings up are terribly serious and are perhaps behind many a school shooting. But that makes it all the more important that a director, even a neophyte one, more deeply explore the dynamics of school violence.

      If Kemper’s denouement seems all too inevitable, perhaps he owes it to his frightened 13-year-old creation at least to explore a possible out from the world in which he feels trapped. Some young boys like Ty simply take cover and endure it; others, like me, create their own internal worlds and dream away those terrible days. Still others find adult help. It should never feel inevitable, not even in fiction, to take up a gun and pull the trigger into the perceived enemy’s face.

 

Los Angeles, June 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (June 2024).