Dominick R. Domingo | Outpost / 2009

motion and rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominick R. Domingo (screenwriter and director) Outpost / 2009 [45 minutes]

 

40-year-old Jake Preston (Kaiwi Lyman) has spent most of his life trying to escape the memories of an early relationship with a farm boy, Farren McGraw (Brandon Stevenson). Both of Jake’s parents died, and he eventually came to work on the McGraw farm as a 17-year-old, working alongside Farren, also 17.

 

   The religious values of this farm family allow hardly any possibilities for the virginal boy, who resists even masturbating and is expected to marry a local girl and settle down on the farm when he comes of age.

      In small sections of the film, we get glimpses of their relationship, as Jake helps the boy to begin dreaming, and finally, after they are trapped in an old mining pit by an avalanche, helps to bring him out sexually. The boys are rescued by a now disgruntled father and others who find it hard to forgive Farren for having walked away from work to show Jake the abandoned mine and a nearby “social tunnel,” where the miners used to meet up with prostitutes.

     For a while after the event, the boys continue their sexual relationship, hiding away in sheds and other remote locations, while knowing that all eyes are on them. In the end, Jake is ordered by the Sherrif to leave town for his corrupt influence on the boy. He tries to convince Farren to join him in Denver, but the boy cannot yet fully break with his religion and family, and Jake is forced to go it alone, while promising to come back for him.

     But realizing that any return might only further confuse Farren, Jake stays away instead of coming to save the boy as he promised. Eventually, Farren, accused his family and the locals of having been possessed by an evil disease, begins to curse his own wife and threatens to leave before finally committing suicide. Most commentaries describe it as a “mysterious death,” but we clearly see Farren has hung himself at the front entrance to his family farm, which, unless the publicists are suggesting someone else carried out the act, hardly hints of anything mysterious. He appears to have simply grown into despair for his lack of any wonderment in his life and his true loss of his companion lover.

      This tale, however, is buried in the large story of Jake arriving at another such dead-end town, where he goes to work for a cook for a small restaurant owner, Mabel Robbins (Nancy Berggren) whose husband has become both paralyzed and mute. While working there, Jake encounters the handsome delivery boy, David Gagnel (Lance Shigematsu), who for a small-town product seems quite experienced and is immediately attracted to the newcomer.

      One afternoon, the two have what can only be described as hot sex; but after that event, Jake attempts to move away from the younger boy, worried perhaps about the effects his attentions may have on the boy while still nursing his own sorrow which has been salved only by mindless wandering.

 

      David, however, attempts to convince him not only of his love but of the fact that Jake has not been able to forgive himself, and accordingly is no longer able to accept his need for love.

        When Mabel’s husband finally dies, she suffers and shares with Jake her own guilt for purposely allowing her inert husband to choke to death. And through her admission, Jake realizes, once again, how precious time is and permits David back into his life, finally ready to remain still and permit himself the love he has longed for.

        With its themes of a western drifter unable to settle down and a character’s inability to accept his own gay desire, this 45-minute film echoes works like Brokeback Mountain and, particularly, the more recent Pedro Almadóvar film Strange Way of Life (Extraña forma de vida) of 2023. Outpost, by US director and screenwriter Dominick R. Domingo, might almost appear as a response to the Brokeback’s cowboys, Jake refusing to make the same mistake the sheep herders did by settling down when love finally appears; but overall, it is closer in spirit to Almadóvar’s work of 14 year later.

       Of course, this isn’t a “cowboy” movie. Jake is simply an itinerant worker on the run, a kind of gay “on the road” figure who finds his match, strangely, is a smart hometown delivery boy, who while staying at home, has a worldly viewpoint that the poor indoctrinated Farren never had and perhaps could never have embraced.

       If the acting is a bit amateur in this movie, the script, under the right directorial guidance might have become a truly memorable work given its mix of outsider sexual love, remorse, and nostalgia, and its structural opposition between motion and inertia. The true question this film asks is whether or not, through the imagination, there can be a resolve between the two. Lance Shigematsu, perhaps the best actor in this work, seems to represent that possibility, a young man who know very well that his town is dead, but still uses every moment to liven it up. And it is people with his kind of energy that turn dead outposts in lively towns and even cities, or as Jake once argued for, who turn dreams into a fabulous reality. What ultimately we perceive that even the emptiest outpost can still contain men and women who live out imaginatively exciting lives.

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).