Phillip J. Bartell | Crush / 2020

little differences

by Douglas Messerli

 

Phillip Bartell (screenwriter and director) Crush / 2000 [27 minutes]

 

Perhaps because I grew up around people who used the word to describe everything I most hated, I have basically banned the word “cute” from my personal vocabulary. Yet it was hard watching Phillip J. Bartell’s charming short film of 2000, Crush with that word coming to mind, in the very best of its usual connotations.

     Nearly everything about Crush is cute in some manner. The movie begins with a young preteen girl of 12 Tina (Ema Tuennerman) leafing through her fan magazines in search of pictures of “cute” young musicians and actors she might cut out and post on her walls, presumably one of the major activities of pre-millennium born teens.

      Robbie (Brett Chuckerman), a slight older 16-year-old truly cute teen doing precisely the same thing—although Robbie pastes it into a private note-book, it being far too dangerous to paste on his wall.

      Both choose the same very cute hunk.

    The two soon meet up in a small rural Illinois town where Robbie, who lives in Springfield (Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, in case you forgot), has been sent to visit in grandmother Brenda (Rengin Altay) until the middle of August. He’s helping her out at the local general store, Royalty’s, where she runs when Tina and her mother enter.

      Tina’s mother suggests that Robbie and her son, Brian, just a year younger, will surely hit it off, particularly if he likes baseball. Robbie and his grandmother are invited to dinner at their house that very evening.

      We can see from the look at Robbie’s face that he has utterly no interest in baseball, and what’s more when we meet the overweight, unhappy slob at the dinner table we recognize that there is no possible way Robbie will take up with Brian. Besides, Robbie plays piano, and Tina plays the flute; mightn’t they work up a duo to perform for the entire gathering someday soon?

      Moreover, Tina enjoys watching a teenage comedy show, High School High, which evidently Robbie regularly watches (or at least did in the past, since it appears that Tina is watching reruns) as well. He’s certainly far more interested in watching TV with Tina than “shooting a round of horse”* with Brian. His grandmother, however, doesn’t have cable.

      Tina is suddenly delighted to have found a live “cute” boy who seems to share so many interests, and she marches off the very next morning the general store to ask him if he might want to come over to play the piano while she practices on her flute. When he is about to pass on her suggestion, she declares she has other “surprises” as well, which means, of course, watching the next episode of the TV show. Soon they are regularly rehearsing together and watching High School High, evaluating which performer is the “cutest.” Tina even buys a notebook to start keeping her own private journal on the suggestion of Robbie.

      And before you know it, she has worked up a very serious pre-teen “crush” on the big town boy, who, himself, can’t keep his eyes off of local boy Tim (West Mueller).

        The viewer is just waiting for reality to set it, which it does one day as Tina speeds past Robbie on the street, knocking his journal to the sidewalk, its open pages revealing the boys he’s pasted inside. “I like boys,” he finally admits, she gasping, “You’re gay?” She’s hurt of course, but even more upset because their TV days and flute-playing concerts are now over, as Robbie refuses any further contact.

       But the willful Tina doesn’t easily give up. She even looks up “homosexuality” on the internet, causing her mean-headed brother Brian to declare to his parents that she’s a lesbian.

       When Robbie continues to brush her off, she “accidently” meets up with him in a park where he is watching Tim and others play football. She reports that Tim plays the flute with her in church, which surely heartens Robbie. And smart cookie that she is, Tina soon after arranges a meet up with Tim and Robbie at her house, playing the perfect “hostess” as she serves “rum and coke” drinks, carefully arranging for the boys to get to know one on her couch, and finally insisting that they all play “Truth or Dare,” in which neither of the boys want to participate. But even here her ideas are definitely those of a child: “I dare you to drink this full bottle of Vodka,” or “I dare you to pretend you are Martian.”

     In a free moment together while Tim goes to the bathroom, Robbie pleads to know “What’s going on,” Tina finally admitting that she wanted them to meet. “I think he’s a little [she drops her hand, as if the age-old queer stereotype] and I saw you looking at him in the park.”

     When Tim returns, Robbie seeks the truth about how many people (other than relatives) that he

has kissed (3 and 1/2, the fraction never explained), and Tim dares Tina, if she’s begun to wear a bra, to go into the bathroom and return with her bra on the outside of her dress, all of which gives the boys to talk alone for the first time.

      And strangely, after daring Tim to do a strip-tease (shirt only in this case), all of them get into the party mode, as dancing to “Getting Lucky Tonight,” only to be interrupted by a total freaked- out Brian who returns unexpectedly.

       Yet as the two boys head off home, Tim suddenly grabs Robbie and gives him a long kiss. Tina’s bet has worked after all.

       The film ends with Robbie and Tim planning an auto trip, and Robbie telling the rather crestfallen Tina that another young boy, Casey, has told him that he really likes her, forcing Tina to look at the boy who keeps asking her to join in the football game, quite differently.

      Now wasn’t that a cute movie? Even grandmothers surely can’t complain about these sweet hometown boys who just happen to be in love. Perhaps only mean teens like Brian wouldn’t see this film to be as American as apple pie, but even he seems more amused than angry when he imagines that his sister is, as would put it, “a les.”

       In an odd way, this is simply a safer, slightly more homogenized view of the All-American family with its various little “differences,” that we observe in John Water’s Pecker, of only two years before.

     

*Horse, is a basketball game where a player can shoot for a basket from anywhere he chooses, and if he makes it, the second must stand in the same spot, etc.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).