Fred Schepisi | The Devil's Playground / 1975, US 1982

minding the body

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fred Schepisi (screenwriter and director) The Devil's Playground / 1976, US 1982

 

Australian director Fred Schepisi’s 1976 film The Devil’s Playground concerns the repressive world, particularly when it comes to sexual matters, of a Roman Catholic juniorate administered by the De La Salle Brothers in 1953. It begins, as Flash critic Clancy Sigal puts it, with a view of the school’s young teenagers, mostly 13, splashing in a small lake like a Thomas Eakins painting, several of the school’s brothers looking on with obvious delight.

    And the major subject of this film is the male body, the movie itself filed with highly homoerotic images, particularly when boys come together to shower—although this school is so very repressed that they are not even allowed to display their naked bodies and must shower in swim wear—or even sometimes in chapel singing but secretly whispering and jabbing at each other. One young boy constantly pushes the film’s central figure, 13-year-old Tom Allen (Simon Burke) to wrestle him, purposely losing as he declares the winner can do anything they want with the loser, hoping, praying perhaps that Tom might kiss him or even demand he display his cock or actually touch it. Tom, a seeming heterosexual, suggests that winning itself is the award.

      And for all the older Brothers’ complaints about sexual repression, they not only go along with the Church’s doctrines, but preach it constantly to the young boys.

    Yet this film is not a deep revelation of how the Catholic Church’s sexual repression leads to pedophilic behavior. Almost all the Brothers, the children’s teachers, seem to be frustrated heterosexuals, and overall, this film demonstrates little of queer interest, except for a small group of boy fanatics, which I will discuss in a moment.

       Schepisi’s film, apparently somewhat autobiographical, is not a denouncement of Catholicism or even religious fundamentalism. Yet it does reveal yet another way the Church had of destroying lives, separating the body from mind in a way that often tears the soul apart.  

     Throughout the Brothers discuss the difficulty of their own lives to remain celibate, particularly in a world where even masturbation is a sin. Brother Victor, when he occasionally is allowed to take a day off, is attracted to the local female factory workers and toys with the possibility of sinning, even though he never makes sinful plunge. Brother Francine (Arthur Dignam) a stricter authoritarian, actually explores more lurid territory by taking in the town bathing pool, voyeuristically observing the women and later suffering nightmares in which he pulled down into the waters by naked women. Unlike Victor, who has, despite its restrictions, come to love the community in which he lives and works, Francine hates life, not for the innocent body but for the evil ways the mind.

      But even worse, as the Brothers perceive, are the restrictions on the truly innocent bodies of the boys under their care, who are naturally developing pubic hair and beginning to compare cock size with one another. Even the elderly Brother Sebastian mumbles “What does it matter if they masturbate? It comes out anyway.” The Brothers, meanwhile, find other ways to abuse their bodies, mostly through alcohol consumption.

     The visiting Father Hanrahan (Gerry Duggan), appearing like a leprechaun liberator and encouraging the boys who are about to enter in three-day retreat of silence to come to him about any problems that they be facing, nonetheless preaches a sermon that might have made Jonathan Edwards cringe, instilling his young audience of the horrors of hell if they do keep to the doctrines of the Church.

       Poor Tom, from whose point of view this work is primarily seen, not only wets his bed, but has been secretly masturbating 3-4 times a day, refusing to confess his sins while still remaining devout and praying endlessly in the chapel, something his older friend Fitz (John Diedrich), with whom he works in the kitchen, admits he is not very good at: “Praying in not my thing.”

    Tom, in fact, appears like a good recruit for what the elders describe as the fanatic fringe of their young charges, young boys who enter into mad bouts of flagellation, one whom pours boiling water on his legs and is now testing the ice cold waters of the lake late at night. He drowns in the process. Fortunately Tom demurs.

     As critic Michael Bronski, writing in The Gay Community News puts it: since their acts are described in the context of homoeroticism, sadism, and masochism, “the message of the film is clear—sexual repression turns the boys into s/m queers. …It is a cheap point to score and clouds the other issues the film is raising.”

       What really is at heart here, although never said, is that all the figures associated with this religious institution, the boys and their teachers are being forced to live closeted lives, unable to represent to each other or even to themselves was is truly natural concerning their sexualities, whether it be heterosexual or gay.

       From time to time throughout the film, boys disappear, sent away for crimes that are never elaborated. When Tom’s best friend Fitz suddenly disappears, the Brothers refuse to even let know

where he’s gone and disallow any communication with him.

      Tom realizes his full love for Fitz by finally running away himself, hitchhiking presumably back home. But finally on the last leg of his escape, Victor and another Brother stop for him. For a long moment he refuses to rejoin them, but they promise to take him to the semi-final soccer game, before they call his parents to tell them he is safe. Yet clearly now Tom has been strong enough to stand up the hypocrisy of his deep beliefs, and in a sense to free himself from the closeted life.     

      Schepisi when on to make two almost classic outsider films, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Barbarosa, and Six Degrees of Separation.

 

Los Angeles, November 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024).