Euros Lyn | Heartstopper: Bully / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 7]

the mirror cracks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Oseman (screenplay), Euros Lyn (director) Heartstopper: Bully / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 7] [27 minutes]

 

Again in the very first frames of this tearful TV series, the substance of the story is revealed, this time by Tori (Jenny Walser), Charlie’s older sister, after being finally told outright by her brother that Nick and he have begun an intense relationship; she agrees to keep it a secret. But you can see that she’s disturbed, particularly since she knows what her brother has gone through. She’s evidently pleased about his going out with other friends, but you can perceive that she’s worried, which is, after all, what this episode is all about: a return to the bullying world which so many gay boys have to endure in order to come to terms with their life. And the issue here, most obviously, is what it all might mean for the neophyte Nick.

     Even the first moments of this film take us back to his abusive former relationship with the horrible Ben Hope (Sebastian Croft), a self-hating gay who can’t and perhaps ever will fully accept his sexuality. These are often the bullies who hate other gays with a desire of vengeance and coverup bluff.

 

    Charlie is attending an event where Nick has promised the bullies won’t show up, but even Charlie’s father Julio (Joseph Balderrama) is bothered, and we know that Charlie is now going to encounter the world he has previously attempted to skirt. “It’s going to be all right,” he assures his father, when we know it’s going to be a very rough night.  

   They’re just going to a movie, but it is the kind of evening where even there in the halls of the dark heaven of dreams you might be attacked. Charlie can’t even consume the requisite popcorn. But suddenly and rather amazingly Nick has given his beloved Charlie a nickname, “Char,” which strangely means everything has changed. They’ve entered a private world, just between the two of them.

      There is, of course, the usual secretive hand-holding, the crackle of emotions if not the crack of corn beneath the teeth (after all this was a graphic fiction, recreated with animated moments).  Love in movie-theaters is a gay genre all by itself.

      But the bully here, Harry Greene (Cormac Hyde-Corrin) cannot resist abusing Nick’s new friend. “Do you like Harry Styles? He’s pretty sexy.” a comment which might suggest his own sublimated need to be loved by someone like Charlie. But when he adds, “What about Nick?” Charlie chokes up and returns back to his denial. “Nick’s not even my type.”

     Despite the open refusal, meant to protect him of course, Nick still demands Harry stop. Such intrusions make for only more suspicion, which is precisely what Charlie is attempting to deflect. Nick chases after, but Charlie admits what every gay has long ago lied about: “Honestly, I’m used to it.” The film knows that a gay boy can never become used to the open abuse. It’s simply a ruse to escape from the one you want to protect from the hurt you’ve suffered.

      There is always more when you’re under such gang attacks, Ben confronts him asking his ex-lover it it’s really true that Nick and he are a couple. Like Christ’s disciple Peter, Charlie denies again, allowing Ben to attack him where it truly hurts: “As if anyone would go out with someone as desperate as you. You actually thought I liked you? You were just there like some tragic loser with barely any friends, who ate lunch alone and let bullies walk over you. I never liked you. I’m not even gay. I just felt really sorry for you.”

    All is a splendid coverup of his own feelings while doing the very bullying he presumably is dismissing. Oh, that’s the wonder of such beasts, whitewashing themselves from the act they are in the midst of committing. Attack and denial at the very same instance: these magic tricks are what bullies do best. How can you talk to even an understanding and sensitive father about that? Young kids carry burdens they don’t even know they needn’t. Guilt is embedded in the blood of being different from even their parents who love and might seek to protect them from such hate.

     And then it gets worse as Nick attempts to return and confront his rugby friends about their abuse, which ends in a nasty battle where he too, ferried to safety by his mother, can’t truly share the problem of his black eye. With the wonderful Olivia Coleman as a mother, any son might finally open up: “I lost it. I’m just so angry at myself for not seeing all my friends…suck.” It’s an important recognition that all gay or bi boys must make, straight kids not only hate, they just don’t understand what it means to be someone who is perceived to be “abnormal,” to be moving off it a direction that they have not even had to consider as a path to recognize themselves.

     She realizes that Charlie is “a very special friend,” and comprehends the suffering he is going through. I wish more gay films would focus on the suffering the parents who do understand and sympathize but can’t possibly resolve their son’s or daughter’s suffering by openly confronting them. Not all parents are monsters, even as they must endure the process as well. They too must come “out,” perhaps even a greater challenge for the old than the young. Coleman’s performance brought this home. Nick’s simple two-word admission says everything: “He is.”

     Both boys suffer internally the consequences of the other's behavior. It pulls them apart at the very moment when they have grown so close.

     But at least, Charlie soon discovers, Nick is willing to fight for him, that the things he has "gotten used to" are not permissible and are worth fighting about. Charlie doesn’t want Nick to dump his friends for him, but Nick admits that even the nice ones just “stood there,” not responding, not rejecting the hurtful words of the bullies. We have clearly entered new terrain.

   Charlie returns to the corner where he has hidden out for so many days in his art teacher’s, Mr Ajayi’s, protective den long before this series began.

     And Tao is now sorry for having himself verbally been sparring with the bullies, trying to protect his beloved friend. Sometimes just ignoring hate is the best route. But he has done precisely what Nick now is demanding Charlie do, to stand up to hate. But how?

     Charlie certainly doesn’t seem to have an answer. And Elle admits that Harry did the same to her, never confronting it, never even seeking the help of a teacher. And finally in the midst of this, slow-minded Tao realizes that Nick and Charlie are really a couple, that what everybody knew about, he has been thoroughly blind.

     Elle visits Tao at his house, his mother being thoroughly welcoming—parents in this first season at least are more than accommodating. Tao, however, is confused about another matter. Why hasn’t Charlie shared the truth with him. Did the new friendship matter more than their love?

Young people, we perceive, already have developed such jealous loves. Tao admits that he is, after all afraid of being alone, and Elle shares the fact that she too felt that angst. Being alone for a young person is a fierce terror, I recall. It’s why we often seek what an acquaintance recently described as “alternate friends,” not people with whom we might truly feel a kinship, but those we know also have no friends, a kind of second-rate substitute for those for whom we truly might seek a relationship. They know it but are just as appreciative to find a new friendship, even as a substitute; and we lie to one another, as I did as a child, pretending we were naturally akin, while knowing each other was all we had left. Even friendships can be burdens when you know in your heart they’re not truly serious, which is why bullies like Ben can so easily dig into your guts. Losers hang out with losers, and that’s how they come define themselves. Coming out is not just declaring but adjusting to the limitations of everything you’ve previously done to protect yourself, all the lies you have told yourself and others. And it never truly ends. The guilt goes on forever. And then it gets worse, when late in life you discover some of the people you most wanted to be wanted to be with you.

      But I’ve gone off the tracks. This series makes me do that.

     As Charlie attempts to back out of his lovely relationship with Nick, Tao saves the day by actually engaging in hand-to-hand combat with bully Harry Greene. And although Nick quickly rushes in the save the day, Tao is angry about Charlie’s inability to be honest with him. Charlie is left with what he can only perceive as another burned bridge. The mirror has cracked.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

 

 

 

Euros Lyn | Heartstopper: Girls / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 6]

everything’s changed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Oseman (screenplay), Euros Lyn (director) Heartstopper: Girls / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 6] [30 minutes]

 

Hardly five minutes in to Episode 6 of Heartstopper we have already discovered that Nick (Kit Conner) is exploring whether or not he might be bisexual and Elle (Yasmin Finney), the trans woman of the series, is confessing to her new lesbian friends Tara and Darcy that she is in love with Tao (William Gao). And Tara is beginning to have problems since she has now been fully outed as a lesbian. Let’s talk about sexual and gender confusion.

      And that is precisely what this segment of the award-winning series does. 

      Nick asks the vital question to all coming out movies, how did Charlie know he was gay, and the answer comes back quite predictably that he’s always realized it perhaps even since he was young: “It’s always been boys.” Nick is not quite sure who or what he is, and Charlie, always the conciliator, assures him that he doesn’t have to immediately figure it out, like waking up and saying “I guess I’m gay now.” Which strangely is precisely what as a young man I did.

      Yet when they might find joy in an ameliorating kiss, Nick pulls back, apologizing despite their agreement to never be sorry for who they are with one another. It’s a scary this for anybody, and particularly the young Nick and Tara to sexually declare their differences in a world that isn’t fully able to embrace them.

      Meanwhile the Higgs girls and Truham boys are performing a concert, with rehearsals that again bring the girls and the boys together in this world of whirlwind changes. Nick wants to come to the Friday night concert, but Charlie is not at all sure that he needs to be there. After all a jock at a musical soiree might be a sign of something.

    And Nick actually dares to confess to his former girlfriend Tara that Charlie and he “are actually going out,” a truly dangerous admission in a world of young rapaciously gossipy kids. Yet both Tara and Nick once felt they were a couple and their own confusions make for a possible bonding, at least worthy of a lunch. And before you know it, Tara and Darcy have made plans for a double date with Nick and Charlie. They too seem sympathetic to Nick’s confusion and dilemma, and Tara tries to warn him that coming out can most definitely be problematic.

       But then Nick feels some relief and even joy in having been able to share his love of Charlie with someone else, and that is, underlying the whole weave of dilemmas, what begins the process of sharing one’s identity and love with the rest of the world. This series gets it perfectly right.

      Even Charlie admits to his sister, vaguely, that he and Nick are now a pair. Although strangely he’s even more tentative than Nick, being always the one who is afraid of hurting others and of himself being hurt.

     When Charlie discovers that Nick has told Tara and Darcy, he’s naturally ecstatic. Word is out. And even more remarkably they agree to go on their first date, the first for both of them in fact.

      But things get more complex when Darcy suggests they make it a triple date with Elle and Tao. People do get hurt. In this episode it is mostly Tao, who is the only one who has left totally in the dark, about Charlie and Nick, about Tara and Darcy, and most importantly about Elle and himself. His best friends have all kept secrets and he’s taken chances in helping to protect Charlie. He’s stood up to the rugby bullies time and again.

    I have to say that the bubbly milkshake fest, looking like a rendition of the sweet 1950s with pastel colors gone berserkly into pink, robin-egg blue, yellow, and magenta and sweets poured into the shakes that might make a dentist tremble with anticipation was not truly convincing, and nearly pulled the plot’s important revelation out from under it. Elle’s pissed and so is Tao. They’ve been set-up, and Tao not told anything about anybody. 

      Tara is equally aware that sharing the truth is necessary, but also scary. When one of her orchestra mates whispers to another that she should stop looking her way because she might “catch the lesbian disease,” Tara bolts, returning the music room where she and Darcy first met, and whose door when closed in locked from within. That room represents everything from everyone in the film attempting to escape, being locked away, closeted forever.

      But the door has shut and the girls at least have time to talk it out as they wait.

      And Charlie must have at least a pang or two when Nick suggests that he might be bisexual.

      But as friends, Charlie, Nick, Tao, and Elle come to rescue to release their friends, the concert goes on, and yes, as Tara has best expressed it: “Everything’s changed.”

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

 

John Francis Dillon | Call Her Savage / 1932

having to do what you have to do

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edwin Burke (screenplay based on the novel by Tiffany Thayer), John Francis Dillon (director) Call Her Savage / 1932

 

The 1932 pre-Hays Code film Call Her Savage is perhaps best known today for its late-in-the-movie scene in a New York Greenwich Village restaurant where the denizens are entertained by two gay performers as they dance to racy lyrics. Arguably, it was one of the first appearances in US filmmaking of self-identifying homosexuals without any pretense of a drag comedic performance or a coded sequence of under-the-radar sexuality. Perhaps only Ralph Cedar’s western spoof The Soilers of 1923 or James Whale’s The Old Dark House of the same year so openly expressed LGBTQ figures.

     Yet, John Francis Dillon’s film, based on a novel by Tiffany Thayer, had numerous other ground-breaking themes and several more coded references to queer sexuality laced through its almost epic recounting of a doomed family, cursed by an old settler after a wagon train Indian attack “brought on,” in his imagination, by the sexual philandering of one of its leaders, Mort, who had left his wife to drive the lead wagon in order to have sex with a woman in a wagon further back. Eventually Mort becomes a wealthy Texan.

     His daughter Ruth grows up to marry another boy from that same covered wagon trek, Pete Springer (Willard Robertson), who himself has become a successful businessman, often leaving his wife alone as he travels throughout the Southwest on business trips. During one of his absences, the young Ruth, in love with a local Indian named Ronasa (Weldon Heyburn), becomes pregnant with his child, Nasa (Clara Bow), who is the heroine of our story.

     Nasa, as the old man in the wagon train (Russell Simpson) had predicted, also grew up wild, presumably—so posits Edwin J. Burke’s racist screenplay—because of her “savage” blood. So mercurial in temperament is Nasa that at one moment, after having been almost bitten by a rattlesnake, she whips her lover, the “half-breed” Moonglow (Gilbert Roland) before, a moment later, she tries to nurse him back to health, tearing away part of her own blouse to serve as a tourniquet. As she explains human nature, in part justifying her own behavior:

 

                  "Nobody is good or bad. People just do things they’ve got to do

                  that’s all. Something inside makes them. Nobody ever likes

                  the things I do, but I got to do them.”

     If there ever was an early attempt to describe non-normative behavior, both in terms of daily personal encounters and sexual desires, Nasa’s philosophy represents Hollywood’s declaration. And soon after, when she is sent away by her pious father to be straightened out in a Chicago School for Women, she proves her theory of uncontrollable vacillations of behavior by acquiring the Windy City’s journalistic moniker of “Dynamite.” As a social newspaper commentator observes in announcing her societal coming-out party: it’s hard to determine whether this is be described as a society event or as police car news.

     At the party her father is determined to announce his daughter’s marriage to the heir to another fortune, Charlie Muffet, a man she cannot abide, and to whom she later announces—when he insists that he wants to marry her—that she is “making arrangements for a nervous breakdown.”

     To gum up the works, Nasa invites a local lothario to her party, Lawrence Crosby (Monroe Owsley), who describes the attempt to marry her off to Muffet as “trying to hitch up Niagara Falls to a squirt gun.”

     Crosby, whose father owns a couple of banks, is in the midst of breaking up with current lover, the equally wild woman Sunny De Lane (Thelma Todd). Packing up, Crosby’s butler holds up a woman’s slip to ask “Will you take this with you Mr. Crosby?” to which his employer quips, “Do you know the difference between a woman’s dress and a gentleman’s trousers?” No answer is given.

     When only a few moments later Sunny De Lane argues that Crosby will surely eventually come back to her because, “I understand your little peculiarities,” we can only suspect that woman are not the only basis for his admission that, “I wonder if there’s any sin in the calendar I haven’t been guilty of.” When the woman to whom he says this ponders how he finds time to do anything else in his life, he quips: “I lump them all together and commit five or six of them all at once,” which leaves almost any many of combination of sinful acts to our astounded imaginations.

    His ex, Sunny, is also determined to attend Nasa’s party, declaring that she’s not afraid of “dynamite,” and before the evening comes to an end the two girls have not only made a public spectacle of themselves in a good ole women’s wrestling match, but Nasa finds herself married to the already gone-missing Crosby. On their wedding night he returns home drunk at 2:00 to, after a 5:00 telephone message, get dressed again and return to whatever party he’s previously left.

      Realizing that her marriage to Crosby was an act of spite against Sunny, Nasa determines to make the best of it by going on a shopping spree that any stylish beauty might envy. But eventually that comes to a stop, not because as Crosby’s lawyer argues, her husband has cut off her expense account, but because he is now dying in a New Orleans hospital and begs to see her before he goes.

     Reluctantly, Nasa makes the trip to find a much weaker man in the hospital bed, but still not frail enough to prevent him from attempting to rape her—although oddly enough he seems more interested in her diamond bracelet than in her body, wrapping it around his fingers as he declares “I haven’t had any jewels in my hands for months.” When he does get back to admiring his wife’s looks, she bonks him over the head, the doctors finally rushing in, one of them later quietly telling her that her “the disease has affected his mind.”

      Obviously, we might interpret such a disease to have something to do with alcoholism, but I’d argue the script is more clearly winking at that pre-Aids scourge to both sexually active hetero-and-homosexual lovers, syphilis. Certainly, Nasa is suddenly worried, not necessarily about her philandering husband’s deteriorating health, but for the well-being of her soon-to-be born baby. She must have been impregnated the first afternoon of their sham marriage.

      The baby, nevertheless, is born healthy—although in a story about the damned children of several generations (the old coot from wagon train quoted from the book of Numbers from the Bible: “The LORD is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.”) it may be possible that her son, like Oswald Alving in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, might still one day go blind. But Nasa doesn’t give the poor kid a chance. Without money, she determines to briefly work the streets in order to raise enough money to pay for her son’s medicine, and, leaving her newborn alone in the care of a young neighbor girl, returns to discover that her child has died in a rooming-house fire. But there’s good news along with the bad: her grandfather Mort has died and left her his substantial fortune.

      Now determined more than ever to get even with society, Nasa relocates to New York, hiring a male escort to show her the sights before she digs in for revenge. He takes her to various night clubs and even shares a view the city from the top of the Rockefeller Center Tower, which at the time of this film was still under construction, this clip perhaps being one of the first on-screen portrayals of the Art-Deco wonder.  

     Her escort, Jay Randall (Anthony Jowitt) is yet another wealthy young, dapper, but somewhat effete man, pretending in this case to be an obedient employee just to get closer to the woman which has caught his eye, much like the jewels that Crosby so enjoyed holding.

     When Nasa requests, one night, that they go slumming, he takes her to that now infamous Village restaurant—sure to be filled, as he warns her, with wild poets and anarchists—where the two gay performers with which I began my essay, dressed as cleaning maids replete with feather dusters they flap in the faces of their admiring diners, sing a song something like this:

 

                 “If a fairy in pajamas I should see, I know he’d scare the life out

                 of me. [The second responding] And on a great big battle-

                 ship you’d like to be!”

 

     It’s interesting that Nasa’s escort knows all about this place, and when the couple enters, appears to be widely recognized by the crowd. There is, in fact, an anarchist in the crowd who recognizes Randall to be the son of the mining mogul, Silas Jennings, resulting in a male and female kerfuffle—the likes of which the Hollywood screen would not again see until Marlon Brando flew down the missionary doll played by Jean Simmons to dinner in a Cuban bistro in Guys and Dolls. For Nasa it’s so invigorating that she immediately accepts the proper polo player’s offer to marry.

     The father, as moguls are wont to do, thoroughly disapproves of Mrs. Crosby’s intentions regarding his son, and invites the couple along with the surprise guests of Mrs. Crosby and Sunny De Lane to dinner just to test Nasa’s mettle. Evidently the now-cured Crosby (Dr. Erlich had found his “magic bullet” in 1910) has returned, perhaps for his “peculiarities” to his former mistress.

     From the long camera pan of the dinner table after the affair and the shiner in Sunny’s eye, we perceive that Nasa has once more failed the test. Even the prudish Randall is shocked by her savageness.

     With the wedding called off and near total rejection by anyone of social importance, Nasa falls into a self-pitying drunken state, daring not even face herself in the mirror. A telegram reports that her mother, back in Texas, is near death.

     Sobering up, Nasa returns home to her mother’s deathbed, where, in her last breath, Ruth whispers the name of Ronasa. When Nasa’s old friend Moonglow tells her that Ronasa was a great Indian chief who fell in love with a beautiful white woman and committed suicide, Nasa suddenly answers the dilemma she has long faced concerning her “difference,” perceiving that she too is a savage, a half-breed. Now, finally, she is free to marry her first love, the calm and long-suffering Moonglow, the perfect foil for her “blazing sun”-hot temperament.

     It appears that critics such as The New York Times’ Mordaunt Hall didn’t quite know what to make of all Nasa’s transformations and the men spinning round them: “Miss Bow does quite well by the rôle of this fiery-tempered impulsive Nasa, but whether the flow of incidents makes for satisfactory entertainment is a matter of opinion.” Hall seemed more taken by the New York theatrical sites than with the events of the plot, although strangely deleting any mention of the Village bistro, ending his November 1932 review:

 

“With a charming setting that gradually comes to view after introductory lighting effects and flashes of movement and color, there is on the stage of the Roxy, Maurice Ravel's composition ‘The Birth of the Waltz.’ It is a gratifying rhythmic spectacle, with graceful girls in attractive gowns, and men in uniforms swaying to the melody. The first number of Frank Cambria's footlights diversion is Edelweiss, in which there is a colorful mélange, including dancing, singing and balancing.”

 

Well, he likes dancing and singing girls and boys at least, even if miscegenation, homosexuality, adultery, suicide, sexually transmitted diseases, and down and dirty female wrestling bouts are deemed unworthy of being topics for entertainment. Only two years later, Hall would find in Will Hays someone who utterly agreed.

     In the 1970’s The Song of the Loon directors Andrew Herbert and Scott Hanson brought many of this film’s major concerns once again to the screen.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).