Adam Salky | Dare / 2005

first kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Brind (screenplay), Adam Salky (director) Dare / 2005 [16.25 minutes]

 

Perhaps the first of the openly LGBTQ films to feature game-playing as a major structural element was Adam Salky’s 2005 short film Dare (not to be confused with Germain Choffart’s film of the same name which I write about in this same context), and its continuation in his 2018 work which without specific references to the “Truth and Dare” game-playing nonetheless appropriates the same challenges without mentioning the game except through its title.

      In this work the young, quiet, somewhat bullied, and yet determined gay boy Ben (Adam Fleming)—nicknamed “Light Boy” both because of his work in the school’s theater department as a lighting worker and perhaps because of lack of a social position in the high school hierarchy—dares himself one evening to come out of his solitude which is clearly a shell of self-protection. Although Ben is a good friend to one of the most popular girls in school, Alexa (Marla Burkholder), who as the film begins is starring as Blanche DuBois in a horrifying bad high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire, he is clearly equally an outsider to nearly all others, or at least to those who for him matter.

      Inevitably, he is particularly smitten by Johnny (Michael Cassidy), clearly the most popular and certainly the most handsome boy in the school, who plays Stanley in the school production so badly that even kissing Blanche leads him to forget all his lines. With only a week before the opening, he is severely chastised by the adult drama director and his fellow thespian, Alexa, who in anger over her co-star’s ineptness will not even drive him home (why this wealthy young boy doesn’t possess a car is never explained), which leads suddenly to Ben’s recognition of a possible entry into Johnny’s world as he offers him a ride home in his car and the possibility of his helping Johnny learn his lines.

       Even Johnny is suspicious about the offer; and when they arrive at Johnny’s family moderne home with a full-sized pool replete with a bar stocked with several buckets full of the best brands of champagne and wines, the would-be actor doesn’t at all appear to be ready to study the lines Ben pitches to his schoolmate while he puts on a swim suit and flops down in a lounge chair. For his part, Ben, recognizing the expensive champagne on ice, pops a cork and begins to intentionally swig down a full bottle of the elixir of fortitude and forgetfulness.

     After only a few moments of cuing lines for the foggy-headed Johnny, Ben becomes almost another person as he probes his heartthrob about his sex life and challenges his braggadocio, suggesting when Johnny tosses out the brag that life would be perfect with a good girl and blowjob, that he is willing to take the girl’s place.

     This time even when Johnny tosses the epithet of “fag” in a seemingly self-reflexive manner (“I’m not a fag”), Ben counters that he is not the one claiming to need servicing and perhaps that Johnny is just afraid. Amazed by the tone of Ben’s challenges Johnny wonders what has come over him, turning him into such an “evil” dude.

 

     As Johnny even briefly considers the possibility before he swims off, Ben throws out yet another dare of sorts, announcing that although he is about to graduate that he has never yet been kissed by anyone. And what’s more, he is pained by the fact. Startled again by his guest’s unusual honesty, Johnny reluctantly admits that he’s never had a blow job either. And intending to resolve Ben’s problem he swims over to him to plant a kiss on his cheek, presumably suggesting it might be Ben’s turn to grant him his desire.

       As Johnny lays back at the side of the pool, Ben ups-the-ante of his dares even further, moving into the handsome boy’s crotch and beginning to lick his navel moving down toward his cock, as the camera moves up to Johnny’s face, where we observe his early attempts to resist and repel the predator before it becomes awash with the pleasure of the event for which neither of them have been prepared.

     In a maddening coitus interruptus, however, Johnny’s posse of males and females, including Alexa, arrive, brews in hand, forcing Johnny to push away Ben so suddenly and violently that the boy falls back into the water, struggling for a moment to regain his bearings, rising a bit like Venus from the waters, but with a bloody nose.

       Startled to see the outsider seemingly at home in Johnny’s pool, his friends wonder about Ben’s presence, their always posturing leader insisting that the drama teacher has sent him to help him study his lines, as the others quickly pull Ben away into the house.

      But Johnny, pulling on his shirt, turns back for a moment to look at Ben now alone and vulnerable once more in the waters below him, gradually flashing a gentle and affable smile, almost as if to suggest that the secret they now share might open up other possibilities in the future.

       Yet, of course, there is no future here, the film ending without suggesting or even logically allowing any other communication between the two. Johnny has recommitted to his old ways, even if Ben has if only for a moment realized his own powers to attract and even somewhat control the most popular boy in his class. For Ben it surely means an end to his slouching through the Bethlehem of his hometown. And, just as the central figure Léo learns in the last film I write about in this essay, these offstage and onstage actors are not so very able to play out their pretended roles.

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).