Jerome Elston Scott | Connor & Jayden / 2022

fairy tale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerome Elston Scott (screenwriter and director) Connor & Jayden / 2022 [33 minutes]

 

US director Jerome Elston Scott’s short film of 2022, Connor & Jayden begins as a “meet cute” flick as Bueller High School football hero Connor Tucker (Christian Barba), now on crutches after a football injury that will keep him out of the game for his senior year, joins the home economics’ cooking class, hoping for an easy A.

     The only other male in that class, Jayden Sansbury (Ty Newcomb), the school outcast, is immediately paired up with the newcomer. Even if the rumor is that Jayden is “gay,” he’s also good-looking, smart, and funny, and daring enough to ask the school jock why he has joined a nearly all-women’s class. Is he hoping to find it a better way to hook up with girls?

     Connor assures him that he has absolutely no problem with the girls, and, in fact, seems to know everyone of his female classmates by name, whereas Jayden, the outsider, has no such ability.

      Yet, the two boys, basically assuming the worst stereotypes of the other, hit it off, Jayden carrying his new “partner’s” books for him to his car, and Connor even offering him a ride home in his red souped-up SUV, the complete automotive specifications which Jayden lists off the top of his head (“411 horse power, a 6.2 Liter V-8 with a hill descent control system, automatic locking rear differentials and an upgraded 3 link suspension with bottle shocks) wondering if he missed anything besides mentioning that it’s bad for the environment. When asked how he, of all people, knows so much about cars, Jayden explains at home he has five brothers.

        As for the ride home, Jayden explains that he has choir practice.

    Their first day, accordingly, ends it appears with Connor saying that he’ll see his new friend tomorrow, Jayden jocularly responding, “Not if I see you first.”

     The unexpected happens when Connor suddenly cannot get his beautiful car to start up, and is forced to interrupt the choir practice by asking for Jayden’s help. Jayden quickly fixes the auto, Connor finding the nerve to ask Jayden, “So what’s your deal. I mean like, are you gay?”

       “Why? Because I’m choir?”

       “No, I’m just asking.”

       “Is that what people around school are saying?’

       Connor pauses. “I’ve heard it.”

       Jayden cockishly winks, “Pretty much. Does that bother you?’

       Connor immediately denies any negative view. “Live and let live I say.”

      Jayden responds that, in fact, Connor is the first person who as even had the courage to outright ask him, Connor wondering if he has a boyfriend.

      What we quickly learn is that Jayden has had no gay sexual encounter.

      “Then, how do you know you’re gay?” Connor seeks to learn.

      “You just do. Did you need a girlfriend to know you were straight?”

      “Fair enough.”

      Again, Connor asks Jayden if he needs a ride, Jayden again jokingly responding “Are you sure that’s what you want to ask me?”

       And before either boy knows it Connor is asking if Jayden wants to watch a movie with him the next evening, a Saturday, which Jayden immediately argues sounds like he’s asking him out on their first date, which Connor, obviously needs to deny, but which Jayden keeps insisting certainly sounds like a date. A movie. Saturday night.

       They miss the movie (Connor, having been cocooned in football all of his life presumes they begin at 8:00, despite Jayden’s continued attempt to get him to set their meeting at 7:00). But they, nonetheless, drive Connor’s red car to the nearby railroad lines (what else is there to do in small-town USA; in my hometown community, which used to be a railroad center, I suppose young girls and boys did the same) to talk. In an almost chivalrous action, Connor offers his football jacket to his chilled new friend as they begin a conversation about their future career possibilities, with Jayden attempting to imagine some likely future vocations for the former footballer (real estate agent, gym teacher, etc.), Connor himself trying to imagine, perhaps for the first time in his life, what else he might be good at.

        He finally turns to Jayden and asks, quite simply, “Could I be your friend.” From there, without a skip, he asks rather startlingly, “Could I be your boyfriend?”  Before we know it they are experimenting with kissing, enjoying it, and falling in love. After only the first kiss, Connor is already imagining all the others’ reactions when they see the two of them at the school prom (8 months in the future at this point.) And already one of their classmates, the movie ticket seller has spotted them kissing.

 

     What follows is what happens far too many times in such otherwise perfectly charming gay movies, which this short film has become: the boys go on a sugary binge for the next 10 minutes of the film, traveling together, dining out, running across fields, rowing, racing across the beach, and even darting through the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts’ installation of Chris Burden’s city streetlights, Urban Light, which is rather curious since the movie theater they attempted to attend a few weeks earlier was in Maitland, Florida. 

        The boys have sex and begin to post hearts with their names on it on nearby campus lights, instead of trees. These boys are quite apparently absolutely and truly in love. And we keep waiting for the film’s metaphoric other shoe to drop, as having been discovered in a gay relationship, Connor must now experience what Jayden has, being outside the community of which in which he was once the center. All we can hope is that like the boys themselves, their fellow students can lay down their stereotypes and discover that perhaps their football hero was gay all along.

           But no such event happens. Except for a very short hiatus in their love-making suggested by Connor, nothing happens, and that’s the problem. It may be utterly heartening that in this 2022 film finally the boys attend the prom without anyone any of the other boy’s bowties getting crooked. In the huge auditorium of Bueller High no one even seems to notice, expect perhaps the interviewer to whom they explain how they met and fell in love all over again, as if we needed a recap.

 

        As I suggest, it’s almost earth-shattering that not one of their classmates has seemingly even blinked at the notion of the odd couple holding hands and mooning over one another every day in their classes. If only gay critic Vito Russo were here to see it. He’d be so proud.

         But this movie—unless it is hinting at an irony that I’ve somehow missed—has become almost pointless, a valentine that keeps reproducing, over and over again, a series of “I luv you hearts.” What was a charming and quirky movie, in the end, has become a kind of pointless love story where everyone ends up so happy “ever after” that its audience can only blush and tiptoe out of the theater to leave the happy couple to their own bedtime joys.

        We can only imagine the happy couple a few years later, Jayden busily cooking up a meal for his always late lover, Connor, out working every day as a real estate agent, something which as the dreamy young boy he thought sounded so boring, but which was, in the end, the only thing he could truly imagine as an adult vocation. He could have taught gym, but the salary was simply not enough, since Jayden’s restaurant had gone bust. But now they live in a nice house and have good gay friends and are even thinking of adopting a baby. So what went wrong? Why are we so very disinterested in this perfect couple? And why are we almost offended that all of this might be seen to be of interest as a movie?

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2024).

       

William Wyler | The Letter / 1940

forgiveness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard E. Koch (screenplay, based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham), William Wyler (director) The Letter / 1940

 

The changes forced upon Americans films by the Hays Office and Production Code were generally dreadful, based as they were on absurdly limited notions of moral behavior and ethics. Indeed, William Wyler’s 1940 version of W. Somerset Maugham’s story, The Letter seems a candidate for one of the worst intrusions into Hollywood scripts.

     In the original, Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis), the wife of British Rubber Plantation manager in Malaysia, is a murderer who, primarily because of racial attitudes and the class-conscious British community, gets away with the crime. The movie opens with a sensuous scene that only Hollywood movies could call up: a cloudy, moonlit night, the rubber dripping from the trees, and the native workers attempting to sleep in clapboard, open hovels surrounding the manor house on a hot night. A shot rings out, another, and we witness a man grasping his side, having been shot. He falls, and Leslie comes out of the house and shoots him several more times until she has emptied the gun’s cartridge.            With cold-blooded lucidity, she orders the servant and others to bring back her husband, working at another nearby plantation through the night, and calls for a doctor and her lawyer. She locks herself in her room, and they come together, as she expertly tells the story that she will repeat several more times: a friend of hers and her husband Robert (Herbert Marshall), Geoff Hammond had tried “to make love” to her, and she has shot him in self-defense.

     Soon after, the couple and the lawyer, Howard Joyce (James Stephenson) head off to Singapore, reporting the murder to the authorities, which lands Leslie in jail for a short period until the trial. All are quite certain, however, that justice will prevail, and she will be found innocent. Leslie, in particular, does well in jail, spending her time as she has many a lonely night, knitting an intricate lace table cover. But Robert is depressed and worried, and moves in, temporarily, with the lawyer and his wife.

      A few days later, however, a young Chinese attorney, Ong Chi Seng (Sen Yung) reports the existence of a letter written to Hammond by Leslie the day of his death. The existence of letter alone is troublesome, since Leslie has reported that she had not seen Hammond for some weeks before he showed up at her home to molest her; but, more importantly, the contents of the letter reveal that she has called for their meeting and hints that the two had been lovers. When Joyce notes the existence of the letter to his client, she at first denies having written it, but finally admits the truth; and soon after, he, a reputable man, is put in the unconscionable situation of having to buy the letter back from Hammond’s wife, an Eurasian woman in this censored version (while in the original was of Chinese extraction). To save Leslie and to protect his close friend Robert, however, Joyce agrees to the payment, withdrawing the sum of $10,000 from Robert’s account.

 

     The plot grows a bit thicker yet when Hammond’s wife (an imperious Gale Sondergaard) demands that Leslie bring the money to her, an encounter which ends up with Leslie literally groveling at the woman’s feet to retrieve the letter.

      Despite Joyce’s struggle with his moral conscience, he, nonetheless, speaks eloquently enough in court to free Leslie, who returns to the Joyce home for a celebration with all their friends, as they joyfully great her back into their fold. Just previous to the event, however, Robert has become determined to move away from Malaysia to Borneo, where he plans to buy his own rubber plantation; Joyce and Leslie attempt to dissuade him, finally admitting that they have drained his bank account to buy the letter.

       Although Joyce has known of letter’s existence, he has not read its contents, believing it was a simply friendly correspondence between his wife and the dead man. But now, shocked at the turn of events, he demands to read it, and Leslie is forced to admit the relationship, her jealousy of Hammond’s wife, and her murderous reaction. At the party, the formerly loving and gracious Robert becomes drunk and garrulous, spinning stories about his now impossible Borneo plantation.

     The film might have ended there, with Leslie having been exonerated and celebrated, while nonetheless, destroying all the men around her. But the Hays Office, determined to protect the American public from the possibility of a criminal escaping punishment from both adultery and murder, demanded that she be killed off. Accordingly, in an attempt to exact their own petty morality, they ruined the irony of Maugham’s story, which suggested that even seemingly good people, in their narrow prejudices and class systems, protect and even encourage evil acts.

     To solve the dilemma, the screenplay asks us to believe that this strong-willed murderess, evidently to atone for her crimes, walks off into the night prepared to be murdered by Hammond’s wife and her henchman—a seemingly ludicrous proposition.

     But Koch’s change, in some ways, actually improves the original. The message of the story is still intact, while the new version, in which Robert is ready to forgive his wife for her sins if only she promises that she loves him, now reveals a new dimension. Leslie simply cannot bring herself to lie one more time, and adamantly admits that she still loves the man she murdered. Suddenly we realize, despite his kind gestures and love of his wife, just how boring and inattentive Robert has been all along. Leslie has been forced, night after night, to sit crocheting while he has worked on the extraction of barrels of the white, viscous substance, which film critic David Thomson argues, is inextricably linked by the viewer with semen in the film’s very first scene. Leslie is not even allowed in the kitchen; they have a servant for that. It is a man’s world akin to the world of the homoerotic sperm whalers portrayed in Melville’s Moby Dick, which has no place for a forceful woman, a theme of which the gay author Maugham was most certainly conscious.

     The beautiful, vivacious Leslie has clearly sought out a more exciting world for herself in Hammond, a man whom even the males admit, was attractive to women and men equally. While the original tale pointed its finger at the society and Leslie as equally guilty parties, this new version points its finger at her husband and the society of men just like him in which women are left at home like beautiful objects, with no thought of their being needful, thinking, and desiring beings. Leslie’s murder of Hammond is triggered by her recognition that his rejection of her means that, metaphorically speaking, she must return to her lace, to live out the rest her days as old woman in glasses, crochet needles in hand. 

      By rejecting her husband’s “forgiveness” and embracing the dark night with murder in the air, Leslie reveals her powerful strength as a woman, becoming a proto-feminist figure who is unafraid to take a direction different from the one her husband proffers. It is only just, after all, that she, who has destroyed her own alternatives, must be destroyed by the woman whose love was also taken from her. In a sense, they are similar: both women are forced by the society around them to wear a mask of femininity beneath which their power and vitality are necessarily hidden, much like the moon disappearing between the clouds, an image which brackets the beginning and the end of the film.

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 20