James Burkhammer | Starcrossed / 2005

hooked

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Burkhammer (screenwriter and director) Starcrossed / 2005 [14 minutes]

 

Offhand I’d claim that the most common of LGBTQ family films involve two brothers who become sexually involved. It is clearly a major theme of queer cinema which shows up in various ways time and again in both short and feature films, in part because of the allure of yet another layer of forbidden sexuality that is attached to the already forbidden experience when it comes to the issue of incest.

     But I’d argue that it also seems to be an issue that inherently seems unjust when it comes to legal restrictions, just as LGBTQ individuals justifiably felt about such laws created to restrain their sexuality were.

      The incest laws, as I read them, are based on two-fold cultural fears: the first having to do the issue of age, since commonly one of the two blood-related figures is older than the other; it is clear that in those instances the younger may have no full awareness of the sexual emotions that arise and the results of those physical and emotional ties, and they may easily be coerced or forced into such relationships, physically or mentally, by the elder without their full willingness. Incest laws also have a great deal to do with the genetic issues of inbreeding, which result in illnesses of body and mind the children produced from such relationships that endanger their lives.

     Yet often brothers may be close of age, perfectly willing and aware of their love and sexual desires for one another, and obviously will produce no inbred offspring through participating in gay sexual activity. So why are these laws still applicable in such instances? Often it stems simply from the cultural taboo concerning the idea that families might also be sexually involved in any manner, a strange emotional response, one might argue, given that many younger people spend more time with family members, particularly today when parents are more fearful about permitting their children to roam freely, than anyone on the outside. But, of course, that fact in itself may be perceived by some as a problem in need of correction. And obviously the taboo is also grounded in homophobic fears.

     In any event, a great many films have concerned themselves with sibling relationships, two of them documented in this gathering, and both leading to quite similar tragic results.

     I have previously reviewed another such short, J. C. Oliva’s Brotherly (2008), in which I bring up some of these same issues and, in what almost seems to be a subgenre of gay cinema, the sexual relationships of gay twins in which I focus on Florian Gottschick’s Zwillinge (Twins) (2010) and Adam Tyre’s In Half (2012). There will certainly be several others along the way.

      In US director’s James Burkhammer’s Starcrossed the subject is put front and center, beginning with a scene in which it is clear that the father, preferring his more gifted and physically able son, Darren (J. B. Ghuman, Jr.) over his younger son, Connor (Derek Sean Lara/Marshall Allman) resulting in verbal abuse of the weaker of the two. Much as in Brotherly, this only results in the elder perceiving as his role to protect the younger, and that brotherly love and protection quickly pours over into physical and in this case a deep spiritual love between the boys.

     Basically, we see them trying to live somewhat “normal” lives, participating in sports, dating girls together, and generally interacting with society in an outwardly pleasing manner. But we recognize even through the one instance that the film shows of their interactions with girls, that their fondness for one another has boiled over into something much different. As the two sit in the movie in the position of girl, Connor, Darren, and girl, we witness that at the very same moment their girlfriends attempt to illicit sexual responses of their boyfriends, the two brothers are superstitiously holding hands and sexually engaging in the kind of pre-sex activities that in a teen date movie would be focused entirely upon the heterosexual pairing. 

      In his 14-minute film, Burkhammer doesn’t waste much time in moving them from Connor’s

original unexpected kissing of his brother to the two joining one another under the covers involved in deep hugging and fondling before engaging, symbolically, in what we recognize is sex. And the boys themselves quickly recognize that their love, given the strictures of their parents and the world around them, is doomed, even though the younger assures the elder—with the natural optimism of the innocent—that he will protect their love.

      Clearly, that is a claim that cannot be met, particularly when their mother enters their room to find her sons bodily entwined in their sleep.

       Their father’s angry lectures—represented in the film from a distance with mostly mute gestations, allows us to imagine the actual fury—merely leads to their attempt at escape. In the car Darren takes to the road with Connor to an unknown destination which first appears to be simply a motel room where they might continue their love making, but we suspect will end where so many “on the road” travels wind up. Consider, for example, other LGBTQ examples such as Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991) or Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992).

       It doesn’t take them long to realize that what they are doing is so outside of societal norms that there is no way their intense feelings will be permitted to survive. Soon a policeman arrives at the motel, obviously in search of the boys. But not even knowing of his arrival, Connor, who despite is younger years appears to be quicker in grasping the patriarchal forces of the world around them—arguably because he has suffered more abuse from those forces—holds up a hand-cuff (we’re not supposed to ask where he has acquired it) which serves as emblem for the elder who immediately knows what he is demanding of them.

      As the policeman closes in, now searching their room, we see the two boys at the edge of the motel pool ready to jump. When they do so they drop to the bottom, kiss one another, and cuff their hands to the lower rungs of a pool ladder, assuring that they cannot escape their fate from drowning in one another’s arms, an image similar to the first in the film, in which Darren saves Connor from the same fate.

      This work from 2005 eerily foreshadows Marcus Schwenzel’s work of 2009, Bruderliebe (Brotherly Love), which I describe below, where the elder brother of a pair of such sibling lovers ends his life also by drowning.

 

Los Angeles, September 22, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).