Dustin Shroff | Deflated / 2012

inevitable choices

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dustin Shroff (screenwriter and director) Deflated / 2012 [6 minutes]

 

In Dustin Shroff’s short film of 2012, a young boy named Chris (Carson Trinity Haverda) has jut been permitted by his father to select a toy for $3.00. He tells his father he already knows what he wants to get, and, as his father moves to the hardware aisle, Chris races to the toy aisle of the discount super-store.

 

     His eyes open in wonderment of a large bin of bouncy-balls. Just what he is seeking! Yet there seems to be a problem, despite his obvious delight. In the midst of the mountain of fully-inflated pink balls there is one lone green one. And Chris, without even having to be told, knows something already about what color means in relationship to being a boy.

      Not being able to reach into the bin from the top, he finds a way to let out all of the balls through a bottom wicket, the aisle filling up with pink bouncy-balls which almost cling to his heels. But there is the one green one, near the bottom. He picks it up and tosses it to the floor where it lands with a thud. The green one is deflated and impossible to play with.

      He takes a pink one in hand and tosses it up. It seems to stay in the heavens of the store several long moments before it begins to into his read hands, ready to bounce off with the child on the chase. It’s beautiful, perfect, just what he was hoping for.

      Soon, however, his father returns. It’s time to make his choice. The father is clearly a factory worker or a farmer, the kind of everyday macho dad of the Bible Belt, the territory in which director Dustin Shroff himself has admitted this tale is located.

      But the father might have a job in profession and the story might be located in any US location. For already at his young age, the boy knows that pink is a gender coded color signifying girls. His father would clearly be embarrassed or even angry if he were to choose the pink one, so it is the green, meaningless ball which the boy feels the necessity of taking into his hands, surely his heart already broken by the time they reach the check-out counter.

      Someday in the future perhaps this boy, having grown up in such an atmosphere, will simply have assimilated those same values. Or perhaps, he will resist them, having come to realize that pink does not truly mean anything. Maybe even he will prefer a pink ball over a blue or green one.

      But today, the child feels a pressure that he should not have to feel, a demand to select “male” toys over “female” ones, and even worse, to pick colors meaninglessly coded for gender.

      I believe Shroff’s argument in this film, that these subtle codes are instilled in most children even before they have any comprehension about their gender and have utterly no concept of sex. They know innately what their father and what prefer and how their behavior will be greeted by their parents by behaving in different ways.

      Not only does this charming young boy go home unhappy in this film, but boys and girls are daily disappointed by their parents’ mindless prejudices. I remember one Christmas, my parents (pretending to be Santa) brought me a tractor to play with. My father, now an educator, had grown up on a farm and he surely felt it was a fit toy for his son. It sat in the corner without me every playing with it. The next Christmas my surprisingly sympathetic parents brought me a Walt Disney stage all made of metal, accompanied by plastic figures from the Disney films, Snow White, Mickey Mouse, and the like. I played with that stage, performing theater to myself for months, perhaps for an entire year or more; and the next year I received a real puppet with strings to control its movements, which I have still today at age 76.

      Children such as Chris will likely continue to receive tractors, trucks, wagons and other such “male” toys for the rest of their childhood. Certainly there will be no cha-cha heels in their future, no purple backpacks.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).