Barry Digman | Chicken / 2001

the challenge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Audrey O’Reilly (screenplay), Barry Digman (director) Chicken / 2001 [3 minutes]

 

This Irish micro-drama says in all in three minutes. Mick (Darren Healy) has brought another boy Kev (Niall O’Shea) to the beach for the day, and they’ve been drinking, putting rocks to cans of empty brew, and god knows what else. It’s getting cold. Although the beach is on one side, a train tracks is on the other with regular one-car hitches coming by at a regular pace.

     Kev is obviously not a macho sort in the way Mick is, who can grab a cold can and nearly open it with his teeth or at least a knife stuck deep into its guts. Kev attempts to follow his challenges, but mostly without success.

     Mick even calls him a “regular momma’s boy,” but still offers him his coat since it’s getting cold.

     Yet to prove Kev’s not a mamma’s boy Mick demands he play a game of mumbly peg with his knife. To make sure he’s not terrified by the game and somewhat protected, Mick splays his own hand over the other’s boy’s, starting slowly as he hammers the knife between the fingers. As a train approaches, he speeds up faster and faster, counting out the knife stabs until he can hardly speak them at the speed the one-car liner seems to be approaching.

     The train goes by, the camera looking down upon the boy’s hands, each atop the other. Blood oozes out of one of their matching fingers. Mick puts his fingers between Kev’s fingers the way one does when grasping another’s hand and puts his left hand into Kev’s hair, pulling his head close in a gentle hug.

     This is, quite obviously, a display of masculinity, of power, of refusal to admit what is nonetheless quite openly displayed male-on-male love.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).