Stephen Riscica | It Gets Better? / 2016

when love is hard to find

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Riscica (screenwriter and director) It Gets Better? / 2016 [11 minutes]

 

In this short US film an older man, clearly now an alcoholic, sits next to his computer, occasionally watching a short YouTube piece by a handsome young man (Samuel Ashkenazy) who proclaims, as have many a short film and just such broadcasts, that things actually do get better when you graduate and leave home. The young speaker is clear that although he despaired in his high school days, he now has beloved friends, and feels at home in the LGBTQ community.

    This message, I believe, is important for young people to hear, for, in fact, things do generally improve for those who move out of their closeted worlds into larger cities at the right age, and who find jobs, and are willing to meet others at bars or other social occasions. The gay world is generally supportive. It certainly was to me when I tried out New York City for a year, helping me, at moments, to find places to live and showing me in general how to survive. I fell in love with an older man who made me feel somewhat protected, although I already possessed a pretty strong constitution, and was ready to meet the obstacles of that sometimes cruel city. Besides, I knew that eventually, when the time was ripe, I would return to the university and finish my education. For me the tough urban jungle was an exciting and energizing experiment. Things were never that bad for me in the first place, but succeeding at the challenge made my life even richer and allowed me to finally live the full sexual life for which I been longing.

   Disgusted, however, by the proselytizing of the young YouTube speaker, the man determines to record his own story. He too agrees that in the freshness of youth things do indeed get better, when you’re young and you meet someone with whom you fall in love. He makes an important point, arguing that young gay men (and by extension gay women) are never taught how to love.

     One could argue that many a young heterosexual is also never taught to love as well, but the society is full of models. Perhaps it’s easier for today’s youth who need only to turn on their computers to see gay films and even porn that help to explain and teach what it is gay men and women do together, the gay films sometimes even presenting the problems and joys of what loving entails.

     But for those of previous generations, which this man represents, there were no models. Yet somehow, as he points out, young gay men still found one another, learned how to love together, and how to heal their previous hurts for simply having been born different.

      Just as the youthful YouTube commentator argues, youth seems full of possibilities. But the old man (Gys de Villiers) soon lost his lover and has grown bitter. Evidently he looked for replacements without success, and as the years passed, despite his constant attempts to keep going and seeking what he describes as “the light,” he was unable to find it. This happens, as we well know to many people. Love seems to pass them by. The joy others have been awarded, has slipped away from this now angry man, who however, like a Beckettian hero, determines that “must go on,” even if he feels he cannot.

      The “It Gets Better” campaign is fine for youth, but at a certain age for gay men, whose chances become slimmer as time moves on given the smaller pool of choices they have available, and the structures that—which I argue fortunately—still do not always fully embrace the institutions such as marriage which are generally required of heterosexuals, some people have to learn how to live alone, and find close friends to fill the gap. The man in this movie seems to have not imagined that possibility, or was simply unable to make friends, being as determined as he was to find a replacement lover.

      As mean and unfulfilling as the regular gatherings presented in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band were, at least they represented a community offering up both bitchery and love. And today there certainly must be more open-minded, less closeted gatherings available to older men such as the figure of this short film. His sadness, however, is overwhelming, this short offering him no consolation since he has now confused love with wine.

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queen Cinema blog (December 2024).