Wes Hurley and Nathan M. Miller | Little Potato / 2017

nobody wants karaoke every night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wes Hurley and Nathan M. Miller (directors) Little Potato / 2017

 

It’s hard to know in Wes Hurley’s and Nathan M. Miller’s truly startling documentary when to laugh or when to cry. The complete absurdity of life is expressed in a surprisingly and utterly straight-faced telling of what might be perceived as a semi-tragic tale.

     Little Potato, as he was called, (Hurley, represented in his childhood by Benjamin Jakupcak), and his mother lived in the last days of the Soviet Union in one of the most Moscow-distant and corrupted of the major Soviet cities, Vladivostok, located on the Golden Horn Bay by the Sea of Japan.

     There Hurley grew up, vicariously watching television as his father regularly beat his mother, forming a frame around his eyes, as he himself represents it, to pretend that what he was seeing was not real but a movie or a television comedy.

      His forceful mother (Elena Bridges, her younger self portrayed by Darlene Sellers) left her husband, taking her son with her to her mother, who was not at all sympathetic to the divorce and, as Elena makes clear, felt that it was the husband’s right to beat his wife.

      Meanwhile, without even perceiving that he was different, Hurley began to grow up in the last days of Communist regime, where his biology books expressed the dangers of masturbation, a sin (since his mother was still a believer in the Russian Orthodox religion), a sickness, and crime which he confessed to his mother, who was relieved to be able to tell her little “Potato” that there was nothing wrong with it and that his text books were filled with outdated lies.

      At the very same moment—I was visiting the Soviet Union in those very last days—the Communist regime was collapsing. And at first it brought joy and tears to everyone’s eyes. One of the most memorable moments of this short 14-minute work is when suddenly US movies began to appear on a hitherto nonexistent TV channel, 3. The earliest films such as Jerry Zucker’s 1990 film Ghost and numerous others such as Home Alone, the second installment of The Addams Family, and Garry Marshall’s Frankie and Johnny (1991) become icons which Russians repeated to one another like a strange game of “Telephone,” each passing on the story to one another. Elena’s almost ecstatic-like comments about the last-named filmed epitomize just how sad and funny this fantastical and cruelly-real world was to those on the outside looking into the imaginary world of US cinema: “Michelle Pfeiffer’s little apartment was so cozy, and I thought I would be so happy and I would not need anything else. Certainly not Al Pacino.”

      The new Russia was not much better than the old Communist world. The former party leaders simply now described themselves as capitalists, and remained in power over a people still suffering shortages and food, electricity and other comforts. Only now the people could see that there was another world “out there” which they desperately wanted to be part of.

      As her “Little Potato” began to grow up, he also increasingly sensed a kind of difference with himself that was not permitted in the general society. “Every day of my childhood,” Hurley relates, “I heard terrible things said about ‘faggots’ or those ‘pedics’” (the Russian description of gay individuals who they saw as pedophiles). “I wasn’t even sure whether gay people were real or whether they were made-up monsters.”

      He doesn’t know why he can’t relate to “girls,” whether it is because he is a good Christian boy or something else that he just can’t fully explain. Yet when his handsome swimming coach (Matthew Cotner) was arrested for burglary, the young boy imagined himself arresting the beautiful man and keeping him under his bed. The film reads somewhat like a humorous Russian parable.

      Yet it becomes even more absurd when the mother, fearing for her son’s well-being begins to advertise herself as a Russian woman available to American men, finally hooking up with a man from Seattle, whom she visits, finding him, at first, as a gentle and kind man. She returns to Russia to reclaim her son as a married woman.

       The new husband and father is another kind of paternalistic fascist, so it appears, this time in the guise of an American religious fundamentalist, who is alternately gentle and kind, but who quickly becomes violent and abusive, just like the resilient Elena’s first husband.

       The new world, on the other hand, is a remarkable adventure for mother and son. The stores are filled with food, people smile instead of looking scowling, and suddenly, as Hurley defines the experience, there is the joy of, “just being in a place that doesn’t feel like the end of the world.”

      Yet as Elena expresses it, her new husband, was not only a determined born-again Christian, but was defiantly anti-abortion. As his new son summarizes: “He was always franting about politics and religion. He was always angry about the secular world and the state of the schools and…the gay rights movement.”

       Even Elena senses her son is going “through something,” the common heterosexual definition of the trauma a young man or woman suffers when realize that they are not sexually aligned to the society around them.

      But now in the US Hurley realizes from the media that people are fighting for gay rights and “winning” their place in the society. His mother, when he finally reveals his real problem, is amazingly relieved, but now they cannot let the father, James, know, since he might divorce her and the son and mother be sent back to Russia. Closeting now becomes a mother/son intention, a very strange predicament that is seldom documented, but probably does regularly exist.

       Strangely, the very fact that now Hurley can go on line and see the increasing representation of gay men and lesbians throughout history makes him even more angry about his own situation and the treatment of his step-father of his mother, now a more tortured condition that even in his Soviet childhood.

        Yet “Potato” is now 18, a finally is able to move out. But Elena is left with a new kind of monster. One night she calls her son crying, she has come home to see a strange woman sitting on their living room couch. That woman is her husband James, now Janice coming out to her as “the person she knew and didn’t know.”

        The “monster” it appears is transgender, terrified of her own societally rejected behavior. In this hall of mirrors, structured actually around the long and endless history of the abuse of women and young men throughout world history, finally reaches into this immigrant Russian tale in a manner that not even the great Russian storytellers such as Gogol, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Platonov or Kharms might never have quite imagined.    

        James/Janis has chosen a Russian woman because he felt she, as a conservative being, might hide and help him in his own self-deception, but Elena, as we have discovered, was perhaps the most open-minded woman he might have found. And he now finds it possible to “come out” to her, maybe the most bizarre coming out tale one might have ever imagined.

        Elena becomes, as her son describes her, “like a groupie to Janis and her trans girlfriends.” Perhaps the most hilarious ending to a film ever is Elena’s admission that Janis and her friends enjoyed karaoke. As Zamyatin or Kharms might have expressed it, if it had been in the range of their experience, “There was karaoke night after night after night. That’s when I decided it was time to divorce him. Transgender was fine with me, but nobody wants karaoke every night.”

        Life is truly far more incredible than fiction. And happy endings do not exist, evidently, only in Hollywood movies.

 

Los Angeles, October 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).