Adam Baran | Jackpot / 2012

real magic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Baran (screenwriter and director) Jackpot / 2012 (9.38 minutes)

 

Adam Baran’s Jackpot is not outwardly about magic or potions which might transfer a straight boy to become a potential gay lover. Besides, the frustrated young man of this story Jack Hoffman

(Ethan Novarro) is only 14 and, accordingly, too young in most US states to even have sex with another human being. But Jack can’t even find any good “wanking” material. Like me in the mid-1950s he has only pictures cut out of newspapers and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue of men in pajamas or underwear to create a jack-off fantasy. I even found a cute bare-chested volunteer for The Peace Corps in my family’s set of encyclopedias that helped meet my needs.

     The film is set in 1994, when there were plenty of juicy gay magazines available, but not if your parents watched your every move and regularly checked out the contents of your bedroom, as we can only suspect is Jack’s situation.

     He also lives, quite apparently, in a small town where if he were to enter a store selling any kind of gay porno he’d be noticed. In fact, at the moment this film begins, he is even afraid of leaving the house for fear that he may be beaten up by the town bully, Billy Hook (Ryan DeLuca) and his friends, determined to make life impossible for anyone they describe as a “fag.”

     Interrupted in his frustrating attempts to masturbate by a phone call, Jack is told by his best friend Sammy (George DeNoto) that he and has friends, while obviously dumpster diving, found a huge stash of porn magazines, which after quickly perusing, they were forced to leave behind, Sammy preventing his friend from burning them.

     Suddenly Jack is motivated to leave the house, riding his bicycle as quickly as possible to the designated dumpster, diving in, and finally retrieving the pile of gay magazines. He quickly begins stuffing them into a plastic bag to speed them off to a secret shrine in his bedroom when, quite  magically, one of the cover porn artists, Ricky Swayze (Adam Fleming) appears to him in real life, insisting that Jack leave the rest and stuff the magazine in which he appears in six different roles into his back pocket.

      But Jack refuses, insisting quite forcibly that he wants “it” all, hungry clearly for having waited so long for just such a treasure.

      But before he can even begin stuffing them in the bag, Billy and his gang appear—now realizing that Jack truly is a “fag”—eager to, as he puts it, to make him “die.” Even while Jack is talking to Billy, Swayze appears again, this time as a cop, correcting Jack’s lie about intending to burn the material: “You know you going to take this magazine home to jack-off to me!” which, as in so many films where figures attempt to talk to phantoms and real human beings simultaneously (think of Blithe Spirit, 1945 and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, 1947) things quickly grow out of hand.

     Swayze tells Jack to “deck him,” but Jack is none too sure that he can “take this guy” as the gay model suggests, and almost immediately goes on the run.

     As Jack sprints into the woods he again meets up with Swayze, now dressed in football quarterback gear, who asks why he didn’t believe that he could have “decked” Billy and his bozos. Out of breath, Jack gasps back, “You’re not real.” to which Swayze argues, “If I’m not real what do you call 4 covers of Mandate, 3 specs in Torso....”  and a gig in The Pizza Boy Delivers.

     Running even further into the woods, Jack finally trips on a log and falls face forward, exhausted and out of breath. He lifts his head up to the sky only to see Swayze as a cowboy looming over him. “Dead, aren’t I.” “Could be better,” the porn star retorts. “But I’ve seen guys packed into tighter spaces come out on top!”

     Jack pulls out the magazine from his hip pocket throws it down and bends down preparing to masturbate, Swayze asking him what he’s doing. “What does it look like I’m doing? If I’m going to die I’m going to least enjoy my last moments on earth.”

     But Swayze talks him out of it, arguing “It’s too bad you won’t fight back. Pathetic actually.”

     Jack rises, “You think I’m pathetic, what about you? You’re just some loser gay porn star in bunch of cheesy costumes.”

     It’s not about me, the porn star reacts. “Gettin’ beaten up doesn’t mean you don’t win. Especially if you get want you want. Meaning me.”

     The last frames show Jack with several dark bruises and a shiner, lying on his bed staring at the magazine with his friend on the cover, front and back.

     Evidently Baran’s simplistic theme is that you have to take the blows as a young gay boy to get your just desserts. As he wrote about his film, “I really made the film because I loved teen movies and never really saw one for gay kids that both addressed their sexuality in the way that straight movies like Weird Science or American Pie or Superbad did, and let them get what they want. Jack in my film learns that he has to fight back for what he wants, even if it means he has to take a couple of licks. I think that’s a resonant message for gay kids everywhere.”

     I can’t say his message is very profound or that I perceive violence as a necessary passage through gay youth. I don’t think it made me any better for having endured a couple of just such  beatings. If anything, it forced me to stay at arm’s and mind’s length from my peers through my school years until I escaped to Europe in my senior year. And, unfortunately, one such beating does always satisfy those fearful of that frightening magic you hold in your desire. Surely Swayze won’t get him through the difficult times ahead anymore that the ghostly talking porn stars helped solve the problems of Michael Waters and Scott Favor in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).