Alejandro González Iñárritu | Birdman / 2014

just hokum

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., and Armando Bo (screenplay, based on a story by Raymond Carver), Alejandro González Iñárritu (director) Birdman / 2014

 

Given my self-admitted preference for films, plays, and literature that are what I have characterized as being “theatrical”—works that purposely reveal their methods, narrative strategies, and structures within the process of their storytelling—one might have imagined that I would have greeted Mexican-born Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film, Birdman, with utter enthusiasm and applause. Certainly, in his often over-the-top emotionally raw exploration of what we actually mean by the word love, González Iñárritu often, sometimes intentionally, at other times, perhaps, not-so-intentionally, reveals the mechanisms behind his art. His clearly intentional decision to tie his film together through a series of shots intercut as to appear to be one long continuous take in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and the first very long sequence of Robert Altman’s The Player, does, in fact, give his work an often graceful sense of artistry that winks at his audience with the implication that what might appear as a gritty, slightly realist-based recounting of down-at-the heels actor’s attempts to revitalize his career, is really a grand satire of the collision between and collusion of the cinema and stage drama.

    Add to this González Iñárritu’s clever use of opening credits that remind us of Jean-Luc Godard’s alphabetically sequenced titles in Pierre le Fou, as well as the heavy stew of references to other cinema directors, Scorsese (particularly in the director’s use of New York street scenes), Altman again (in his use of actor’s drug-recuperating daughter in the manner of Lindsay Lohan’s appearance the deceased American director’s last film, A Prairie Home Companion, a work also thematically connected to Birdman), and Federico Fellini (whose masterwork 8 ½ covers many of the same issues as this movie). And beyond these referential nods to the cinema-tradition, the fact that González Iñárritu has chosen, in Michael Keaton, a star who, in his own history as a performer in two Batman blockbusters, in a career hiatus much like the one his character Riggan Thomson faces, and you have, apparently, a work focused on its own artistry.

     In an interview, González Iñárritu has argued that he doesn’t wish the viewer, after the first few frames, to consciously become aware of his astonishingly fluid camera movements, but I’d suggest that the audience members would have to blind to ignore them; nonetheless, such remarkable camera work can be justified in this film simply because it helps to create the sense of unceasingly claustrophobic motion in which the film embraces its characters. But, although the numerous other theatrical-like gestures may hint at the director’s grander intentions with regard to style and theme, such a self-declared imitator must always be careful, as some critics such as Richard Brody in The New Yorker argues, that he can skillfully play in the same tennis court. While Godard’s 1965 masterpiece, for example, goes on from its credits to explore and send-up numerous forms of cinematic genres and methods of representation, Birdman quickly fizzles out through its presentation of what is basically a realist play embedded in another realist psychological tale, spiced-up with a heavy dash of salty fantasies in the form of Thomson’s birdman doppelgänger who continually attempts to convince the striving actor that being a celebrity is far preferable to being a mediocre actor-playwright-director of a New York stage play, absurdly based on one of the short short stories by Raymond Carver.

     Despite my preference any day for a New York stage play over an epic adventure movie, I’m not sure that Thomson’s birdman-self, along with an entire chorus of caviling critics, present and past, mightn’t be right. Perhaps it is better to soar as Icarus in the imagination than attempt to levitate in front a Broadway audience. Certainly, it’s more fun to soar through the Gotham skies than to wander through the rain-sopped 44th Street drunk out of your mind, or, even worse, in nothing but your skivvies—a challenge which, perhaps just for comic relief, González Iñárritu demands of the aging and balding Keaton. You have to give Keaton and his character, Thomson, credit for hanging in there, against the utter chaos of life revealed in the narrow halls of New York’s St. James Theatre, as the actor-character duo battle it out with a current lover who’s briefly convinced that she is pregnant (Laura, played by Andrea  Riseborough), a former wife (Amy Ryan as Sylvia)  who apparently still loves the man she has every reason to hate, a determined wannabee Broadway star (Naomi Watts as Lesley), who hooks Thomson up with his worst nightmare in the form a replacement actor, a rehabbed daughter who convincingly demonstrates to her distraught dad that nothing he is doing really matters (Emma Stone as Sam), a hateful New York Times-critic determined to teach the hubristic Los Angeles denizen the dangers of pretending to be a legitimate Big Apple actor (Lindsay Duncan as Tabitha), and a die-hard method-acting moron, who demands real gin, real sex, and a real gun on stage, the only place he really exists (Edward Norton as Mike Shiner)!  With friends like that…. 

    The trouble is that, as daughter Sam puts it, nothing does truly matter in this travesty of a Broadway drama. Keaton is a good actor, and tries hard—very hard indeed—to convince us that he can reach beyond his acting range of a man of amused befuddlement to a shrilly screaming psychotic tearing up his dressing room props. He tries so hard at an Oscar-worthy performance that, in the end, we feel sorry when he can’t quite reach the heights of his flying super-ego. Edward Norton, when he finishes tossing around the kitchen cupboards of their kitchen-sink drama, is far better at convincing that he really is a sleazy actor capable of some emotional depth.

     The real problem with Birdman, despite the well-meaning intentions of the director and its numerous fine actors is that neither the fictional drama which Thomson has supposedly written nor the actual screenplay by González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr., and Armando Bo truly rises to the occasion. Basically, both are realist soap-operas with a bit of fantasy worked-in to create the sensation that the plot might just float above the cartoon visions of reality they present.

   

    In the film, Thomson’s stab at realist acting—requiring him to use a real gun to kill himself at play’s end—convinces everyone that his Carver-based play is a kind of masterpiece. Unfortunately, the more González Iñárritu shows us variations of the play—set, as I mentioned above, in a believable kitchen and a vaguely noir motel—the actors tossing out lines so hokey that I cannot imagine any audience actually enduring them, the less we become convinced of its pretenses. A discussion of what love really means or doesn’t mean, at least presented by these seemingly amateur poseurs, is simply boring, no matter who delivers the lines. The very idea that the kitchen-sink-bound first act and the final motel denouement is linked by the playwright with a sort of kitschy psychological interlude with women dressed up as stags who emblematically stagger across the stage, is ludicrous, even if purposely funny. Lunt and Fontanne would have had a hard time overcoming its corny premise that the no-longer beloved husband now matters so little that, declaring he no longer exists, he justifiably kills himself. Making it even worse is our recognition that this play is a kind of commentary on the larger play which overlays it.

 

    In the larger world this film conjures up, moreover, we often openly wonder what is all the fuss about? Sure, Thomson is undergoing a mid-life crisis, questioning whether all of his celebrity has been worth it, given the fact that no one can imagine that he really can act. Yes, he’s fouled up his life, had too many affairs, has been home too seldom to demonstrate any of the love he might feel to his daughter and wife. Okay, he’s under financial duress, the play having cost him far more than he ever reckoned, and is now faced with a possible suit over an accident(?) suffered by his former actor. But do we really care about this silly heterosexual series of recriminations? If nothing else, we’ve heard it all before.

     At one point in the film, after revealing just how much Thomson’s daughter Sam is feeling sorry for herself, actor Mike Shiner asks her outright what she sees as her dilemma in life, daring her to answer why she feels so hurt about the fact that her father has been absent for much of her life and sought to make up those absences with false praises. Just how is she so very different from anyone else? his questions imply. Those are my feelings precisely with regard to Thomson? Don’t all the problems he’s currently facing come with the territory of any necessarily self-centered actor? After all, in a career where someone works so hard at being anyone else, why should we imagine that he or she might later find it difficult to discover his or her own self? In short, why should we care about this character central to González Iñárritu’s fable?

 

    Even if we can perceive that we all share some of these dilemmas of identity and doubts of self-worth, does that automatically elevate this movie to level of serious drama it claims? In the end, it appears that even the film’s creators don’t care to treat their hero seriously. At least once before in his life, Thomson admits, he has failed at suicide, attempting to drown himself until he was so severely stung by jelly-fish that he struggled to return to shore. This time round, he simply misses the intended target of his face. In other words, Thomson cannot really meet the demands of his expression of suicidal art.

     Accordingly, at film’s end, he returns to the fantasy world from whence he has come, floating—we ascertain from his daughter’s final gaze to the skies—in the pipe-dream of cinema instead of spiraling down into a drama with his guts splattered across some Manhattan crosswalk. Hollywood has beaten Broadway. And that is this movie’s great loss. The artifice it has pretended was just hokum after all.

 

Los Angeles, October 26, 2014

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (November 2014).

Philip Leacock | Escapade / 1955

daedalus apologizes to his son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gilbert Holland (Donald Ogden Stewart) (screenplay, based on a play by Roger MacDougall), Philip Leacock (director) Escapade / 1955

 

Donald Ogden Stewart, as Djuna Barnes disgruntledly perceived as early as her interview with the playwright and later film writer in 1930, seemed to have been born to succeed. Already by that time he had been immortalized in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as the character Bill Gorton, was a member of the legendary Algonquin Round Table, and had authored several plays and novels. Soon after, Stewart would go on to write the film scripts for Tarnished Lady, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Life with Father, and other popular films.

     After his interview with Barnes, Stewart also became increasingly involved with politics, in 1936 serving as one of the founding members of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. He joined several left-wing organizations, including the American Communist Party, in part because of their support of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.

     Accordingly, by the late 1940s, when he wrote the George Cukor film, Edward, My Son in England, he strategically chose to escape from Hollywood, particularly since the House on Un-American Activities was already involved in its witch hunts, for which he refused to testify. With his second wife, Ella Winter, the widow of activist Lincoln Steffans, Stewart permanently moved to England, over the next decades writing under various names for British and American films and contributing English dialogue for Roberto Rossellini’s Europa51.

 

   Based on the play by Roger MacDougall, Stewart wrote the screenplay for the 1955 film, Escapade, under the pen name of Gilbert Holland. Later, Stewart wrote other memorable films such as Summertime and An Affair to Remember. In 1974 he published his autobiography, By a Stroke of Luck!, the introduction to which was written by his friend Katherine Hepburn who described him as one of the great wits of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Stewart lived a long life, dying in 1980 at the age of 85.

     Philip Leacock’s 1955 film, Escapade, with a script by American Stewart, is an exceptional apologia of the older generation to the young.

      From the very beginning in this comedy-drama, it is clear that the adults are all having problems. John Hampden (John Mills), a notable pacifist writer, is meeting with argumentative fellow-pacifists, each expressing himself in loud outbursts of frustration and anger. Before John’s wife Stella (Yvonne Mitchell) can even serve up sandwiches, the group has vociferously disbanded, unable to even come to a resolution for reading the formal minutes of their last unsuccessful meeting. “They are all idiots,” Hampden summarizes.

     Their young son Johnny (Peter Asher), recovering at home from the measles, is busily attempting to read comics in bed, his gentle grandmother (Marie Lohr), John’s mother, comforting him and closing the window so that he might not hear the argumentation occurring below. Soon after, however, he is even more disturbed by an argument that breaks out between his mother and father, occasioned by Stella’s attempt to convey to her husband just how self-centered he has become—particularly since he has grown so involved with his cause, seemingly sending off his sons to boarding school to find more time for political activities. As she later suggests, he is a father to them only in the biological sense. Johnny fears that, instead of being sent back to school, he and his other two brothers will be brought home, losing the active community of the school-boy chums.

    With slight proto-feminist stirrings, moreover, the film suggests that Hampden not only ignores, but is completely insensitive to his wife. While arguing for the cause of Asian women, he has no ability, evidently, to see that he is treating his own wife in a manner that may be even worse that the stereotypes his speech is about to disdain. Even Stella’s attempt to tell him that she needs to leave for a while, in a desire to sort out her discontent, is met with absolute incomprehension and disbelief.

     Meanwhile…back at school, the headmaster, Dr. Skillingworth (Alastair Sim) is fearful that something’s up. He has been discovering, in part through the bad-boy spying of his own son, messages between the boys, half in Latin and in other codes that suggest they are planning something. As soon as Johnny and his friends arrive back at the institution they are called into his office to shed some light on the illicit messages. While interviewing them, he witnesses Johnny’s brother, Max (Andrew Ray), attacking his own son, nicknamed Skilly (Colin Freear) for being a snitch. The school faculty holds a quick meeting, fearful of the secretive communications—in a way that parallels Johnny’s own boyhood imagination in which he fears that the headmaster is being spied upon through secret microphones—between their charges. Leacock, in short, quickly turns the institution into a metaphoric cold-war world, where fear subsumes any rational behavior.

     Back at the homestead, Stella is sorting out phonograph records into his and her piles, signifying that her temporary respite from marriage may be a much more significant separation than she has first suggested. A verbal row ensues, with the avowed pacifist again displaying his violent propensities, and Stella, although attempting to be reasonable, erupting into something closer to a volcano than a cold “star.” So loud are their shouts that they fail to hear the doorbell ring when, in a most surprising twist of plot, the headmaster appears at their door to report that Max has, once more, attacked his son. Once again, John is filled with adamant protestations and threatening gestures, while Stella returns to the role of disturbed mother. Why has her docile son suddenly become so violent? she and her husband can only inquire. No sooner has John suggested that the problem might lie with the educational methods of Skillingworth, than he receives a call: Max has apparently used a homemade weapon to “shoot” another professor. He is locked away in his room when the phone suddenly goes dead!

     Given the series of events outlined so far, we might almost expect this film to turn into a kind of comic, bad-boy film such as Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct or, even more disturbingly, a horror film in the manner of Wolf Rilla’s later Village of the Damned. But Peacock and Stewart quickly surprise us, by switching the roles, as it soon becomes apparent that the scheming children are involved in an enterprise meant for good, while the adults show themselves as caring less about their charges than about the dangers of publicity for the school (in Dr. Skillngworth’s case) and their own reputation (in the example of the Hampdens). Only Stella seems to be solidly on the side of her sons; yet even she willingly joins her husband in their examination of their son’s Icarus’ room and private notebooks. And when a nosey newspaper reporter, Deeson (Colin Gordon) show us, the representatives of local authority—parents, educators and media spokesmen—all join together, attempting to trick the younger generation into revealing secrets they now understandably, given the insidious methods of the adults, want to protect.

     Despite their fellow students’ evasions, however, the trio of incompetent sleuths soon discover that the Hampdens’ sons have stolen an airplane and two of the boys, Max and Johnny, have suddenly turned up in Luxembourg—Icarus, as his name might imply, rushing on toward the rising sun of Vienna.

     The shock of these maneuvers finally force all the involved adults to begin to rethink their own behaviors, and before long, the Hampdens—reunited if only by the search for their missing boys—admit some of their failings; for the first time in the film, John even suggests that he no longer has the answers. Skillingworth, previously playing only the nemesis of Hayden, offers up his admiration not only for the pacifist writer, but openly expresses his appreciation of the intelligence and ingenuity of Hayden’s sons. Even the reporter, admitting his own children have been killed in a wartime event, suddenly becomes an ally instead of an enemy of those around him.

    Quite obviously such a sudden turn-around of the film’s incompetent adults is absolutely unbelievable, but as creaky as it is, it contributes to our final sense of righteous pleasure we get out of the decisions of the young to take over the weak and failing negotiations the elders have made for a better world. Icarus, it is soon revealed, is heading to Vienna with a manifesto of sorts, carrying a document, signed by the students of his school and numerous others, that none of them will ever kill students of their age—as if suddenly answering the plea of the alien visitor of Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still of just a few years earlier, in which the space visitor failed to convince the world’s populace to stop their warring.

     We have no way of knowing to whom this young Icarus presents his utopian plans or how it might be received by European leaders. And we—as adults always are—can be only cynical about the ultimate success of his voyage. But Icarus’ young compatriots, nonetheless, have no serious doubts, lighting up the sky throughout England with bonfires symbolizing their hope and faith that the future will bring about the changes their generation desires.

    We never even catch a glimpse of this new Icarus, who instead of falling into the sea, seems to have, at the very least, lit a spark of new possibility among his compatriots. The film ends as he is about to return home, with his literary craftsman father, Daedalus implicitly apologizing for his inattention and doubts about his own son’s capabilities.

    Nonetheless, we know that Leacock’s and Stewart’s post World War II film is simply a feel-good film, a kind of pipe-dream fantasy that somehow the future generation will solve the problems the current generation has been unable to resolve. We can only fear—an emotion already instilled through the character’s consistent presumption that Icarus has not survived the voyage and through the fact that he has never literally appeared in human form before us—that the figure stands more as an ideal than a human being who has accomplished the impossible. And, although the bonfires that suddenly flare up across the screen, lit in at near-by schools in support of the boy’s applaudable values, may certainly warm the hearts (and bodies) of those who stand nearby, we can only doubt, sadly, that his acts have warmed the hearts of the general human species.

     Tragically, history has proven us right

     In failing to realize his legendary Icarus as an everyday human kid, finally, Stewart has simply continued the tradition of naming names, instead of exploring the human beliefs that have motivated his character’s acts.

     .

Los Angeles, January 4, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2015).

Jules Dassin | Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi) / 1955

art and consequence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Dassin and René Wheeler (screenplay, based on the novel by Auguste Le Breton), Jules Dassin (director) Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi) / 1955

 

For Jules Dassin, Edward Dmytryk’s cooperation with the conservative forces of American culture meant, in some respects, a more-or-less permanent dissociation with the US. Although US authorities had originally allowed US distribution if Dassin were to renounce his past, he refused to do so; yet his French film, Rififi, distributed by a dummy company linked to United Artists, carried his name on the credits, making him one of the first to break the Hollywood blacklist.

     Based on the novel, Du rififi chez les hommes, by Auguste Le Breton, the movie was first intended to be filmed by noted French film director Jean-Pierre Melville, who when Dassin approached him about directing the project, gave his blessing to the American—although Melville did a film that shared much with Rififi, including the basically soundless heist scene, The Red Circle of 1970. 

      Although Dassin’s film might certainly be described as sharing many of the tropes of the American film noir, which Dassin had himself dabbled in the genre in his 1950 British film, Night and the City, Rififi, one might argue, is a mixed-genre affair. Although it begins with a dark gabbling scene in which the recently paroled thief Tony le Stéphanois (Jean Servais) is on a losing streak, it quickly shifts to a much brighter work when Tony calls his friend, Swedish gangster, Jo le Suédois (Carl Möhner), a man who seemingly dotes on his home life, his young son, Tonio (Dominique Maurin), and his wife, Louise (Janine Darcey).

    Indeed, throughout much of the film it is Jo’s attachment to and engagement with his son and wife that helps the film’s audience to allay their judgments against Tony, Jo, and their other two gangster friends. Tony, moreover, has taken the rap for a previous heist, saving Jo from imprisonment, and the fact that when called on for a loan Jo not only immediately shows up but convinces his friend to abandon the card game helps us to perceive the devotion between these men of the street. Throughout the first half of Rififi, at least, we are somewhat enchanted with the “rough-and-tumble” street life led by these men, a life described in song by the local chanteuse, Viviane (Magali Noël) in the entertaining title number by M. Philippe-Gérard and Jacques Larue. Indeed, music (with a score by Georges Auric) is essential to this work, which helps to lighten its darker elements.

     That Jo and his happy-go-lucky friend Mario Ferrati (Robert Manuel) have a new idea for a heist in which they need Tony’s participation almost seems a joyous occasion, as the group meet in a small bar in view of their intended target, a swank Parisian jeweler’s shop. For obvious reasons, Tony turns them down. The place, he observes, is rigged with up-to-date alarms and cannot be easily breached through the front window; and besides he’s not yet ready to face the possibility of another prison term.

     His re-encounter with his former lover, Mado (Marie Sabouret)—who has returned to Paris, working in a club for the notorious gangster Pierre Grutter (Marcell Lupovici), performing of his nightclub, L’Âge d’Or. Despite warnings from Jo, Tony insists upon visiting the club to reclaim Mado, only to take her back to his dismal room, force her to undress, and beat her with his belt.

   That scene temporarily shifts the tone of Dassin’s film once again, as we now must perceive the brutal elements behind Tony and his associates’ friendly wise-cracking exteriors. But we also accept Tony as a kind of seriously betrayed man like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca, who when he discovers that Mado has again disappeared, abandons any alternative fate to join with his old friends in a new heist.

     For that heist, the gang need a safecracker who they find in another Italian, the dandyish macaroni, César le Milanais (played by Dassin himself), a figure about it whom it is said: “There’s not a safe that can resist César and not a woman that César can resist.”

     Dassin found the original novel, with its racist types of Arabs and northern Africans despicable, replacing them with figures from various European countries. But the film cannot quite erase the misogyny at the base of le Breton’s tale. Most of the women in this film are dangerous and expendable. And César’s infatuation with the singer Louise is ultimately the undoing of the successful heist.

      Before we know that for certain, however, Dassin takes us through the rehearsals of the robbery and the heist itself with spellbinding detail, a kind of literate “how to” pull off a major jewel robbery that outraged authorities in many countries, including Mexico and Finland, where the film was banned. The Los Angeles Times declared the film to be a “master class in breaking and entering….” In the US, the ever-censorious Roman Catholic Legion of Decency spoke out against the movie. Yet it would be difficult for anyone to deny Dassin’s mastery of direction in the tensely silent episodes of the heist itself. Dassin quipped that the fact that he had not yet mastered French perhaps led to his use of so little spoken language; but any nitwit can see just how brilliant the decision was to cast the events of the break-in within the sounds only of an intrusive piano, the high-pitched drills the robbers use to crack the safe, and the occasional grunts of their labor. So tense is that long scene at the center of the film that when, as they are about to escape the place, César returns momentarily to collect one last diamond bauble for his new girlfriend, we feel almost cheated in our impatience for their magical caper to come to a close.

 

    For some critics, what comes after seemed almost a let-down, film-making that could not match what Dassin had already achieved. But, in fact, it is in the last half of the film, as one by one the successful villains destroy and are destroyed by one another, that Dassin truly reveals his mastery. Despite their success as thieves, the gang of four, the evil-minded Grutter and his heroin-addicted brother are failures at living life itself, which the money they have reaped or desire from those acts symbolizes. For most of the men, that money might only offer a few more pleasures, but Jo wants it for his son, which elevates him, strangely, to a man who we might see above the fray of the pack with whom he travels. But as his wife proclaims—after Grutter and his gang kidnap the kid—holding him for ransom, “You’re not the only one that had an unhappy childhood, there are millions like you, and, in my eyes, ‘they’ are the tough ones, not you!”  Predictably, Jo gives in to the Grutter’s demands at the very moment when his son has been liberated. He is not a successful “rififi.”

    But neither are the others. Mario is killed, along with his wife, when she squeals about how to reach Tony. César, the original stool-pigeon, is strung-up to be shot by Tony for his failure to keep to “the code of silence.” And Tony himself, even though he now seems to be attempting an action on the good side of the law by trying to save Jo’s Tonio and destroy the unredeemable Grutters, is suddenly doomed.

    He saves the boy, but cannot save himself, which Dassin portrays in a stunningly filmed long scene in which Tony attempts to drive the boy home through the Paris streets while dying from the plugs Grutter has put into his body. Conflating Tony’s hallucinatory vision of the Paris landscape with the exciting spinning motions experienced by the child trapped in his car, both figures appear to be floating across the city, having escaped all bonds of real time and space. Yet we know that the child’s vision is of his imagination, somewhat like playing a wild version of cops-and-robbers, while Tony’s increasingly blurred view of the world is a lack of “real” vision which can only end in death. When the car comes crashing to a stop, Tonio is quickly scooped up into the protective arms of motherly love, while Tony and his suitcase full of cash receives only the cold curiosity and surveillance of the cops.

   In Dassin’s telling of the tale, one might almost be tempted to see the heist as art, and the gang member’s deaths as the undeserved consequences for having created it.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2014).

 

Caleb Cook | Fertilizer / 2023

flowers taking root in grass

by Douglas Messerli

 

Caleb Cook (screenwriter and director) Fertilizer / 2023 [23 minutes]

 

Karson (Mickey Frusci) begins this short film by Caleb Cook with a kiss, telling the boy that he is the first guy he ever kissed. Soon after, we see him taking pictures for a gay dating site. Things seem to be happening all too quickly in his life, particularly since only a month from the time in

which work this begins, he will apparently be moving into a college dormitory and beginning his higher education.

       That evening we observe him putting on makeup and spraying perfume on himself, presumably for a dance club date; but in his imagination the dancing figures all become skeletons, dancing, kissing, and having sex as part of the seemingly living dead. We have difficulty identifying this young knit-topped, bejeweled young man with the cute, next door neighbor-like high school senior we have previously just observed.

       In a moment of late-night fury, it appears that Karson too is having difficulty bringing the two aspects of his life into focus with each other, as if he were living two simultaneous realities that simply aren’t in sync.

        We soon see him knocking on a door, obviously a meet-up with a young man named Lucas (J. Everett Reed). But as they move forward, Karson calls out that he doesn’t “get into stranger’s cars,” Lucas yelling back, “Don’t worry, you’re driving.”

         Lucas takes him to a forest pasture, where, quite inexplicably wild flowers have grown up in the open field of grass. It explains it is one of his favorite spots. The metaphor is clearly that these flowers have grown up in a place where you never expect them, a flat pasture land where their seeds have surprising taken root.

        Clearly, they’re both uncomfortable with the meeting, particularly when Karson makes it clear he has only 29 days before leaving for college. Strangely, Lucas doesn’t invite him in after their day together. But they do get to know one another in the days following, and appear to fall in love despite themselves.

         Yet, we realize Karson still has problems regarding his old friend, the one we saw him kissing in the very first scene.

          Although the boys joke with one another, even sharing comic “secrets,” there is obviously something that Karson is not sharing. His previous lover keeps reappearing in his memories. And he admits, it’s simply not what he expected, “being out, being with boys.” Things didn’t work out the way he had hoped.

          Strangely Lucas provides some deep wisdom that such “coming of age” films rarely explore. Unlike straight boys who have all their youth and often the help of their parents to rehearse their heterosexual love, gay boys suddenly come to terms with themselves at 16 or even later, and are still expected to be as experienced in love as those young men who have been so carefully trained for it all their youth. Love is suddenly explored for many young LGBTQ figures in a manner of weeks or even days, without any of preparation for the problems they may face.  

          Lucas even admits that he never actually “came out.” “My parents just went through my phone when I was like 16 and saw my DMs with some boy.” Because he had a boyfriend, Lucas felt he could deal with his parents, take their verbal abuse and nicely survive. But his parents kicked him out of their home. “16 really fucks you up.” The shocking new information explains why he seems to be living in a motel room, and surely provides a reason why at first he didn’t invite Karson in.

          Karson now speaks of the kiss we earlier witnessed, from, we’re now told, a year earlier. “We went out a few times and he asked me to be his boyfriend. Karson explains that, living in a conservative family, he would only be able to come out if he had someone to support him through it. “It’s like the stars aligned and I my very own fairytale.”

         We see the standard “coming out” scene, the boy trying to warn his parents about what he is about to tell them, recognizing it will be hard for them to hear—the words almost always coming out of the child’s mouth with a sense simultaneous fear and relief, a kind of whispered shout: “I’m gay.” There is nearly always a momentary dead silence. But Karson goes on in full explanation of the fact that it’s something beyond his control and that he will still remain the loving son who he previously was, the “same me” necessary to assure parents that being gay not does suddenly turn someone into a bizarrely contorted version of his previous self. He’s obviously carefully thought out his “coming out” ceremony.

         When he looks up to hear their reply, he is told in the usual false “Christian” manner they still love him, although they cannot accept him—whatever that might mean, as if love could somehow exclude acceptance of whom the person fully is. Moreover, his friend immediately ghosts him, obviously having not himself come out to friends and family. Karson asks a question that is seldom asked: “Do you ever wish that you never came out?”

  

      The obviously more mature Lucas, argues that if “life sucks, it sucks slightly less by being out.” They share further disappointments and terrible high school experiences. But in doing so they become even closer, realizing that their disappointments are also those of many young gay men of their age.

         But soon it’s time for Karson to pack up for his move. The boys hug and kiss. And Karson enters the car, ready to leave. Suddenly, he runs back to Lucas demanding that they become truly lovers. After all, two hours is not that far!

        Cook’s narrative is often predictable and the film’s structure highly disorganized, the dialogue often sentimental and standardly “cute.” Yet there is a deeper wisdom in this work about the expectations young gay boys make upon themselves that is fascinating, their failures to fully comprehend love helping us to realize why young gay men, particularly in the past, often sought out serial lovers rather than monogamous relationships. Today, perhaps, in a world where young queer men and women are expected to immediately settle down like their heterosexual brethren, there is perhaps even more pressure put on young individuals who are just truly discovering sex. It might be good for them to perceive that “coming out” is a beginning, not an end. Perhaps if they simply allowed themselves to explore the new world into which they have suddenly entered, gay boys and lesbians might be better prepared to enter either serial relationships or marriage, whichever seems best for them.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).