Kilian Feusi, Jessica Meier, and Sujanth Ravichandran | Pipes / 2022 [animated short]

new applications for old tools

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kilian Feusi, Jessica Meier, and Sujanth Ravichandran (screenwriters and directors) Pipes / 2022 [4 minutes] [animated short]

 

Bob the plumber has just been called to a business location to fix a broken pipe. Now we all know the stereotype about plumbers, how they are big and burly men who as they bend down to fix the plumbing, dressed as they are in outmoded jeans, often reveal their ass cracks. Over the years there must have been dozens of porn films in which the plumber is called, ogled, and eventually fondled by young willing boys and their dads.

     But this Bob is just a little teddy bear who has entered what he might describe as a visual hell, a gay leather fetish bar in which the figures are engaged in all sorts of kinky sex and dressed up in gear that sometimes seems to be from outer space.

     After witnessing the denizens’ behavior, Bob can only imagine his every action on the pipes to be similar to the so-called human interchanges being performed around him. Pulling a small drainage valve is associated with what he’s observed of men pulling and sucking on each other’s nipples. A mallet pounded into iron, becomes a slap stick applied to a bargoer’s butt. Sawing through the metal is quickly turned into images of raw fucks and sucks, fists going in and out of willing asses. Peeking into an open pipe turns into an eye-to-eye encounter with a cock. The leaking values might as well be the customer’s penises pissing upon the floor and one another.

    He’s soon swimming in the liquids of cum, piss, beer, and other alcohol consumed and expelled around him. Clearly, it’s time to pull the plug! But in his imagination that is like being sent into the sewer and spitted whole from a bar attendee’s ass.

    The men gather round him in consternation. Finally, he figures it out. He plugs up an open hole in the pipe with a dildo, he closes of a valve with a nipple ring. The men suddenly get excited by the art of his trade.

    It’s hard to imagine this brilliantly animated Swiss film being popular with any viewers save a very open-minded gay audience with S&M tendencies.  But that’s too bad. This is a work of comic genius that uses the nearly all the fetishes of gay leather men to other uses than bodily torture and pain.

    In the film, the human pipes of cock, ass, ear, nipple, and mouth become blurred with the pipes that keep us warm and cold and sweep our human excretions away from our ordinary space.

 

Los Angeles, September 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).