Josh Cox | Far from Water / 2024

where do we go from here?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josh Cox (screenwriter and director) Far from Water / 2024 [5 minutes]

 

You might describe Josh Cox’ micro-film of 2024 as a fast finger painting of a scene any gay boy might have experienced in the process of coming out. Two young friends (Arid Dominguez and Lucas Nealon) rush to the ocean to experience something that is obviously outside of they daily lives. They pull off their t-shirts and strip down to their jockeys, their eyes all the time intensely focused on one another’s youthful bodies. They jump into the ocean and enjoy themselves in the manner in which it now seems to be required in all young gay coming-out films, pushing and pulling each other into and out the water.

    But it is during the approaching storm as they sit on the beach that it happens. Suddenly one of them becomes so overwhelmed with the sensual experience of other male that he can no longer resist and turns to kiss his friend, who willingly obliges.

     They dress and ready themselves to return, but the other boy finally is determined—unlike so many boys of his age—to open up the situation which might often later turn into forgetfulness and denial. In the dark skies of reality about to embrace them, he suddenly shouts out, “You mean you’re not gonna even talk about this?”

     “What?”

     “You have nothing to say, after all, about all that? And there’s nothing, nothing to say about that?” Its rhythms are even a bit Beckettian, the word “that” being the subject obviously they cannot openly express.

       “Do you regret it?

       “No.”

        A fly buzzes nearby and the credits rise.

       Perhaps there is nothing else to say. But, of course, for young gay boys on the verge of coming out, there is still everything to be expressed. Was this simply a typical heterosexual experiment, an expression of affection for a best friend? Does the other’s intense kisses indicate a radical change in their relationship, a movement toward the sexual that has always before remained unsaid? Will this momentary expression of love be repeated? Will the other admit that it’s not just a hormonal moment in a young heterosexual’s movement toward sex? Clearly, the questioner is gay, desiring to make the situation far more formal than just an “incident.” But are they both willing to move in that direction?

       These and others are the intense questions that any young gay boy must face over and over again as even his straight peers explore the full sexuality to which they will probably never admit.

      The ultimate question on the young inquirers’ mind is something he cannot even say: “Where do we go from here?”

     These boys, in high romantic metaphor, have clearly drunk of the waters of exquisite love, but may not ever be able to swallow the experience they have just undergone or return to the ocean to engage themselves again with the wild expressions of nature.

     As they trudge back home they are still so very far from the water which will wash their desires clean.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).