Mark Pariselli | After / 2009

fantasy and fugue*

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Pariselli (screenwriter and director, suggested by a poem by Dennis Cooper) After / 2009 [12 minutes]

 

Back in 1996 Diet Coke ran an ad (a series of many similar commercials) titled “11:30 Appointment,” with music by Etta James, “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Evidently at precisely 11:30 a bevy of women office workers signaled one another to their windows to watch below a beefcake hunk take his Diet Coke break, as the works stripped off his shirt to reveal his pecs while sipping on the can. In some respects the short gay film I describe below reminds of that popular commercial during which I am certain many a gay boy at home looked over the office women's shoulders. However, this gay appointment with a hunk has far more serious implications.

    Canadian director Mark Pariselli’s 2009 short film After, inspired by the poem “After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade” by Dennis Cooper, presents the rather kinky gay sexual fantasies of three boys, Arthur Tim, and Jacob (Matthew Armet, Andrew Holland, and Cole J. Alvis) who daily sit on the front porch of one of their homes to watch older boys, in particular Lukas (Jamieson Child) play a scrimmage game of football in the park across the way.  

     Like a murder of crows, the three boys alight upon to stoop precisely at the moment the game begins, sitting in a triangle of delight as they watch their hero flex, leap, and fall to the grass with others piling atop. As they sit there in rapt attention, the football comes clattering across the road to fall at their feet. The best-looking boy, who sits at the bottom of the triangle shyly stands to retrieve the ball, bringing it forward to Lukas in a slow exchange that feels something like a sacrificial offering, the hands of the boy and player meeting in almost a shudder of sexual excitement. Both smile as the boy returns to his place as a watcher while their hero crosses back to his fellow team-players.

     That touch of the hands begins a series of private fantasies between the football player and each boy that exist somewhere between kinky sex acts and S&M behavior.

      The first boy of the upper left point of the facing triangular grouping is evidently a Catholic altar boy who imagines himself in the dark confines of a church-room with candles lighting up the space. He enters in red underwear, sits in a red chair, and strips off his skivvies, masturbating. The football player sneaks up behind him and puts a momentary strangle-hold to his neck before picking up one of the votive candles and slowly pouring wax upon his chest to the ecstasy of 8-year-old.

      The second boy with the red blazer obviously imagines that he might one day be a doctor. And in his fantasy, the football player lays on a partially raised doctor’s bed, the young boy applying mercurochrome to a knee wound the older player has suffered in a tackle. He reaches up toward his patient’s crotch but quickly moves to the back of the bed masturbating as he looks down upon the supine player who seemingly approves.

     The red-headed cutie in the front has a rather odder masturbatory fantasy as he sits in a tub of water to which guppies have inexplicably been added. Naked, he enters the tub, and soon after the football player enters the room, bending to the side of the tube to momentarily lick the young boy’s toes before himself stripping off his clothes and joining the boy in the tub as the two touch and prepare to make love.

 

     At that very moment the young hero in the park catches a pass in the street. But as he turns he

is suddenly faced head-on by an approaching car which crashes into him, killing the player immediately.

     The boys rush up to the site of the accident, looking down at the body in horror.

     Suddenly, in unison, they find themselves in the church-like room with the sheeted corpse laid out on the floor. The three of them fall to their knees to pay respect to the dead player. But the red-haired boy pulls off the sheet, revealing the bleeding head of the footballer. The other two boys immediately arise and turn away, while the red-headed boy bends closer, touching his hands to the dead boy’s lips and laying his head against his chest. We quickly realize that what has seemed their fantasy has been real, and the scene returns to the street, the two friends pulling the boy away from the corpse, turning, and leaving.

      But the boy continues his fantasy, which we now have no way of knowing whether he is truly acting out or only imagining. As the other two stumble away in distress for what they have witnessed, the last boy again lifts the sheet and crawls under it, laying down beside the football player’s corpse.

     

    The objects of their previous fantasies can be seen decaying, the water of the tub having turned brackish and black, worms crawling through the spaces, the world gradually fading away as the red-haired boy lays there with his now dead lover.

      What was a series of fantasies has turned the boys themselves into ghosts, the past something which will probably now never again allow them to share the present.

 

*Fugue: 

1. A musical form or composition in which a theme is taken up and developed by the various                  instruments and voices in succession according to the strict laws of counterpoint.

2. A state of psychological amnesia during which a patient seems to behave in a conscious and                rational way, although upon return to normal consciousness he cannot remember the period  

of time nor what he did during it.

3. A state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's 

usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022)