Ben McCormack | Family Outing / 2001

a true story

by Douglas Messerli

Ben McCormack (screenwriter and director) Family Outing / 2001 [5 minutes]

 

Australian director Ben McCormack’s 5-minute short in black-and-white condenses a story about a young boy (Michael Curven), obviously having realized he was gay, determining to visit the baths for sex for the first time in his life.

     Like so many people who find bathhouse activity intimidating, this kid finds the showering, cruising, sweating bodies of mostly elder men attractive, but is clearly uncomfortable with the public and voyeuristic aspects of most of the sex others try to illicit in the showers, the steam rooms, and the open doors to cubicles which invite him in.

     Finally, he selects to the most common and least public form of sexual intercourse, putting his penis through a glory hole in the wall between his booth and the next, thoroughly enjoying the cunnilingual sensations provided by man a within the next cubicle (Leo Bradley) while imagining the juxtaposition of images, like snapshots, we have witnessed as he stalked the Brisbane spa upon arrival.

     Satisfied, he leaves the cubicle only to encounter the man who sucked him off on leaving his own room. As he looks up into the man’s face, he gasps out the words, “Dad?”

     The film stops there, forcing us to imagine all the resultant difficulties of his sudden revelation. Fear, hatred, disgust, horror are all possible emotions, as well as a possible understanding comprehension of things previously unexplained at home, acceptance, and maybe even love—of whatever kind is possible given the situation.

      Porn films have tread this territory; it is after all one the most severe of cultural restrictions, and accordingly an inevitable pornographic attraction. Yet this small film takes it on with all seriousness with no comfortable prurient readings encouraged since the sex itself is never represented and only hands and facial gestures are put to screen, the fingers of the father seen as he invites the boy to put his cock through the hole, and the face of the boy in obvious ecstasy of his sexual release.

      Some of these same issues have been explored in feature films such as Tanuj Bhrama’s Dear Dad (2016) and Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio’s Retablo (2017), although in both these cases the son is not gay and we witness a resolution that is missing in McCormack’s work.

      The film, however, takes its subject into even more serious territory by declaring at film’s end a documentary-like admission: “This is a true story.” which forces us to put it into the context of actual speculation of what might happen to the two individuals when such a thing occurs? No one was at fault, no abuse intended. Yet deep secrets, we are certain, have now been revealed, and they always leave spaces in the realities we have created, sometimes simply to cover over the gaps we sense in our knowledge of one another. There may be release, there may be hate; there may be anger even violence, or reconciliation, a new secret to be shared out of familial love—possibly an ever greater rupture in family life. But the notion of family will surely never again be the same.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).