Douglas Messerli | Family Secrets [essay]

family secrets

by Douglas Messerli

 

I think we can safely say that other than one’s innate sexual inclination and personal desires, the greatest impact on one’s sexuality comes from the family into which one was born and raised, even if that is not a truly unified experience. Parents, however one defines them, and siblings help determine one’s sexuality and the ability to develop relationships that one either readily accepts or works against if contrary to a person’s innate sexual feelings. It is no accident that throughout LGBTQ cinema, families play an essential role, often helping or thwarting the coming out process or the simple maturation of the individual. Sisters and brothers, older and younger, moreover, can help either be models to emulate or hindrances, in some cases actually helping to shape and define one’s sexual orientation.

       Sexual attraction to siblings, while often natural given that the close relationships with brothers and sisters are some of the earliest connections we make with other human beings, and can also terribly effect and delimit one’s own sexual identities. Parental sexual abuse can obviously destroy one’s faith in sexual relationships or confuse a child to such a degree that he or she finds it difficult to maintain healthy and effective relationships later in life, although it does affect all individuals in the same ways.

       And abuse can also consist of simply being narrow-minded about the varieties of sexual possibilities or unaccepting of those possibilities when manifested in one’s own children. And the greatest fears and devastation of self-worth can arise from lack of parental acceptance. Although we generally tend to think of community as being one of the most central reasons why young men and women prefer to stay closeted, it is generally the fear of confronting parental disdain and even hate and rejection that keeps many youths from being able to fully come to terms with their sexual feelings. While those issues most often are centered around a young person identifying as part of the LGBTQ community facing strongly heterosexual parents, it can exist in reverse and, just as devastatingly, effect young men and women whose mother or father are themselves secretly closeted when their children face similar feelings.

      These issues can extend, moreover, to other family members beyond siblings, including uncles, aunts, grandparents, and even cousins.

      Throughout these pages I have written numerous essays, too many to even selectively mention—although it is obvious that the grouping of films that bear a deep connection with the trio of longer films about family sexuality that I discussed in George Stevens’ Shane (1953), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1969), and Harold Prince’s Something For Everyone (1970)—that demonstrate the complexity of how family life effects a young or even a slightly older person’s sexuality.

       In this essay I have chosen 12 short films from 2001 to 2020 that deal with only a handful of the numerous familial issues that complicate and sometimes destroy the individual’s sexual life and possibilities for adult love.

      All of these involve “family secrets,” in most cases not just sons and daughters hiding their sexuality from their parents, but a far more intricate and complex linking of secrets that when revealed sometimes lead to greater openness and freedom but just as often end up in terror and even suicide.

      I was tempted to discuss these in connection with the subject of sibling sex, but in the end felt it was simply more logical to discuss a far wider variety of familiar situations in chronological order of when the films were first released; but I will interlink each of these films with the others when appropriate.

      These films, produced in many different countries and societies reveal to us that often the transgressive behavior of family members, although not always destructive, is connected with their children’s or even the adults’ behavior. The issue at heart here is the necessary secretness of any such sexual acts as well as numerous other secrets the family has hidden in shame or obfuscation, which only further mystifies the very young men and women involved.

      Although not included in this discussion one might cite one of the most extreme examples in the case of the TV series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menedez story from 2022, created by Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy, which I write about in that year.

   The films included here are Australian director Ben McMormack’s 2001 film Family Outing; Brazilian director Júlio Maria Pessoa’s 2002 film In the Name of the Father; US director’s James Burkhammer’s Starcrossed; the 2008 film from US director Gregor Schmidinger The Boy Next Door; another US film, J. C. Oliva’s Brotherly also from 2008; German film director Marcus Schwenzel’s 2009 work Brotherly Love; Brazilian director Caru Alves de Souz’s Family Affair of 2011; the Spanish film by Venci Kostov, The Son from 2012; Spanish director Miguel LaFuente’s My Brother of 2015; another 2015 film by Costa Rican-Swedish director Nathali Álvarez Mesén, Filip; Hong Kong filmmaker Ray Yeung’s Paper Wrap Fire, also of 2015; New Zealand director Welby Ings’ Sparrow of 2016; Brazilian director Caio Scot’s After that Party, released in 2019; British director Maj Jukic’s My Dad Marie of 2020; and in the same year, the director from Czech Republic Dominik György’s The Touching, which almost summarizes the issues at hand.

       But there are many, many others. Anna Kerrigan’s Cowboys of 2020 and Alan Ball’s Uncle Frank of the same year might be described as filled with sexual family secrets, or even Pedro Almodóvar’s 2023 short, Strange Way of Life. The list is nearly endless. This series of essays is but a dive into a foreboding and hidden subject. Family life is also about sex whether or not it intends to be. Fathers and mothers are not inseparable from their sons and daughters sexual dires, and the children cannot be removed from their own desires even for one another. Incest and family destruction goes back to Greek drama and before. Let us be honest: families are a sexy mess mixed up with every child’s identity.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2024).