Todd Haynes | Dottie Gets Spanked / 1993

saving love for another day

by Douglas Messerli

Todd Haynes (screenwriter and director) Dottie Gets Spanked / 1993

 

As Will Fabro muses at the beginning of his excellent essay in Bright Wall/Dark Room on Todd Haynes’ 1993 short film, Dottie Gets Spanked:

 

“Queer people are often asked “When did you know?” as though there was simply one irrevocable event that changed us, a clearly signposted fork leading us off the default path of heteronormativity. The question is fallacious at its core, not just in its presumption of a dominant heterosexual identity compromised, but also in its binary notion of cause and effect, i.e. This happened and you became That. My experience, instead, was one of sporadic but seismic rumblings—sometimes self-aware, mostly subconscious, and others externally applied—of difference throughout childhood that marked me as queer long before any actual sexuality asserted itself during puberty.”

     So too did I experience my own unconscious and knowing instances of self-awareness that ultimately led me to perceive I was gay. There are hundreds of small moments that began early in childhood—one time asking a neighborhood girl to switch roles in our game-playing activities so that I might be the Mother and she be the Father; the early bullying and name-calling which baffled me, particularly when I was designated as a “queer,” which, without knowing its sexual meaning I gladly accepted, knowing I was indeed a bit “odd” in comparison with my male companions; my early childhood attraction to theater, even as a six-year-old asking a friend to “play play,” for which his mother rapidly accused me of speaking baby-talk and, soon after, my complete devouring of the Burns Mantle Best Play Books I’d discovered in the local library from which I memorized the dates of plays, the theaters in New York in which they were performed, and the number of performances they survived; and my general disinterest in all male-oriented toys, my parents finally breaking down one Christmas to buy me a marionette, Robin (as in Robin Hood), the closest thing to a doll they might have imagined as an appropriate gift for their eldest son—but only four mind-searingly instances in my later youth that served as deeper revelations of my hidden sexuality. After two years in high school revealing to the head coach that I had utterly no talent in any sport, he offered the former basketball coach and current superintendent of school’s son, me, the opportunity to serve as team “mascot”—which meant traveling with the various football, basketball, and track teams to all their venues and cleaning up after the athletes’ showers the towels and other debris they left behind. At one point, while hanging out in the locker room while they changed back into their street clothes I caught a glimpse of the football team captain, Doug Reed, in the nude. I don’t know if anyone noticed my eyes captivated by the sight, but I do recall my immediate erection, which might explain why later that day several of the team members grabbed and stripped me with the intention of some vague sexual initiation which, upon noting my bodily immaturity, they quickly abandoned. I remember being disappointed instead of relieved as I should have been.

      A second moment of self-awareness stole over me as I found myself in a drugstore leafing through the pages of a fan magazine, lusting after the image of the long-flowing mane and hairy chest of Barry Gibbs of the Bee-Gees, his penis out-lined clearly by his tight pants. I could hardly put the magazine down but was embarrassed in case anyone might spot my entranced stare at the pages of a magazine clearly intended for teenage females.

      At sixteen I had finally admitted to myself, as Adam Lambert has recently described his own childhood self-revelation, that “I was not wired like most of the other guys.” Living in a dormitory in Norway I had developed a secret crush on the dark-haired ice-speedskating champion of the school, Halvard. One afternoon, as I laid reading on my bed, he entered my room, obviously frustrated by my unconscious flirtations, and, marching over to my bed, splayed his body face-to-face across my own. What was I to do with my roommate sitting across the room? I gasped and laid as still as if I were dead, an act I still regret and will to the moment of my actual death. If only I could have lifted my arms and wound then round him. I was still not gay in my head.

      Finally, having returned to the US that same year, I read in the June 24, 1964 issue of Life magazine their pictorial commentary on homosexuality in America, accompanied by an essay, basically outlining the “sad, sickness of these desperately lonely men,” by Paul Welch. I recently reread that sad and sick essay, but can’t find the phrase I remember it for. It doesn’t matter, I felt that it suggested that they had even seen men kissing one another, which I might have concocted in my 17-year-old mind from their account of how the police watched to see if these men demonstrated any sexual enticement, which in those days might even be evidenced by placing one’s hand on the shoulder of a friend. But I do remember that I was not disturbed by any such enticement but the reporter’s seemingly incredulousness about the fact that two men, attracted to one another, might want to follow it up with a kiss, and found it absurd that this was something about on which they felt they needed to comment. I never once had discussed anything about sex with my father, but for unknown reasons felt it necessary to mention my observation to him. Suddenly the seemingly quiet, gentle man I knew grew enraged, his face almost turning red. “If ever a son of mine would be found to be a homosexual,” he almost screamed, “I would immediately disown him!” If I had merely spoken out of my confusion, I now was suddenly awakened into a new realization. I didn’t know the word then, but I might now express by describing father a brutal homophobe. His terror took my breath away, transforming my innocent wonderment of two men wanting to kiss into something darkly and emotionally terrifying—and inviting. I didn’t “come out” until two years later, but I now already knew I had been waiting all those years to be raped, or at least kissed.

      At the same time that I was “playing play” or as I would now describe it, performing improvisatory theater with my friends and even, from time to time, my disinterested brother and sister, Hayne’s six-and a half-year-old, Steven Gale, was fixated by the television show starring Dottie Frank (Julie Halston), based loosely on Lucille Ball’s I Love Lucy. I too watched that weekly with my mother, knowing, as does Steven, that it was not my father’s idea of good TV, which consisted for him, as it does for Steven’s father (Robert Pall), of westerns and football broadcasts. Steven is as utterly focused on Dottie as I was on all things theater, drawing pictures of Dottie and her fellow characters with a creative energy that I put into listing and learning about Broadway venues and playwrights.

      And gradually the child at the center of Haynes work grows to realize that unwittingly his infatuation is somehow not quite normal. The first time he perceives this is when his mother is being visited by a neighborhood lady who, observing Steven’s total attention to the situation comedy, remarks on how strange it is that he is so completely wrapped up in his observations, reporting that they can hardly keep their daughter still despite her husband’s regular spankings. Mrs. Gale, who might remind one of Barbara Billingsley who played the mother on TV’s Leave It to Beaver, quietly objects “We don’t believe in hitting.” Yet Steven, like most children, has overheard what parents often think their children have tuned out, an inexplicable comment about the appropriateness of his behavior.

       This process of gendering even public entertainment continues as the next day Steven boards the bus, where three girls are engaged in an intense conversation about their personal likes and dislikes, including their shared enjoyment of the Dottie show. Later, while he waits at the end of the day to be bussed back home he overhears his three female classmates discussing the color of Dottie’s hair (red, apparently, as was Lucy’s) and her hairdo, information which he knows—probably through a fan magazine like the one I was consulting at a far too advanced age—and cannot resist sharing with them: she wears a wig, and the natural color of her hair is brunette. The girls giggle in horror that a male has entered into their female territory, knowing more than they do about hair color and appliances. In a long-held camera frieze Steven looks down at his white and black leather oxfords in embarrassment for having entered a territory that he had not even recognized as being defined by gender. By the next morning, one of the girls calls Steven over to taunt him for his intrusion: “My sister says you’re a feminino!” I doubt that Steven even knows what that might mean, but like the word “queer” hurled at me, he recognizes it as a label of otherness, of something he was supposed not to be.

      By the time his father demonstrates irritation for his son’s sacred program that interrupts his time for watching football, Steven has begun to learn he too is not “wired” like the other boys at his school, and that his innocent love of a television figure is somehow not appropriate. As Fabro nicely summarizes the situation:

 

“Steven, with loving parents and an almost satirically archetypal suburban home, seems like a fairly ordinary child—sweet and dutiful, though maybe too meek for a “normal” boy—until the intensity of his heroine-worship initiates a slow but persistent recognition of his difference, a minor but profound transgression that Haynes insinuates as queer. Steven’s love for Dottie is desire, but not a normative/heterosexual one; it is instead an act of emotional transference and identification. To be a queer child is to disrupt norms you are just beginning to understand; to be aware of the burgeoning self-consciousness of your othering. Over the course of Dottie Gets Spanked’s 30 minutes, Steven Gale’s Dottie idolatry increasingly ostracizes him from his family and peers due to the implications of his deviation from a more conventional, and less complicated, expression of desire.”

 

     Although his father resists, Steven’s mother helps him to fill out an application for her son to attend a shooting session of Dottie’s series, which despite Mr. Gale’s refusal to even put it in the mail, he wins, along with girls and their mothers from other parts of the country.

     Haynes brilliantly hints of several lessons the six-and-a-half-year-old boy learns from his studio visit. The Dottie he meets there is not at all like the wacky, scheming, housewife Dottie of the TV screen but is a tough-talking, cigarette-smoking, and somewhat course woman of power on the set. She receives the book that Steven has prepared for her of his precious drawings with near diffidence; certainly with none of the charm of someone like Steven’s mother. Out of costume, Dottie is consummate artist demanding the retake of scenes and at the point, as she is about to be spanked by her husband for her bad behavior, cuts the shot, approaching the cameraman to check out the height of the couch on which her husband sits in relationship to her position, and demanding that it be raised in order to better position her in relation to the action.

      This is not the same woman he witnesses upon the TV screen nor is she anything like the women he’s encountered in his suburban surroundings, information that, when combined with his own terror of being spanked like the neighbor’s daughter, is expressed by a wildly colorful artistic rendering of Dottie getting spanked. When his father catches him in his room portraying his imaginative recreation of the emotional scene he has witnessed, he might as well have been caught masturbating, something about which his father clearly disapproves but says nothing. In this new work of art, Steven is no longer drawing a cartoon-like version of what he observes about Dottie, but is painting a personal and almost abstract reinterpretation of what he has seen combined with what he now recognizes as the powerfulness of her position.

     Is it any wonder that he dreams of himself as being a sort of king who nonetheless has been ordered to be spanked by a muscleman of enormous proportions, almost as if he were a muscle-builder out of the 1950s bodybuilding magazines of Bob Mizer and others? Through his love of Dottie (Lucy) he has himself somehow become a powerful force which must be punished for transgressing the standard patriarchal order.

     The only solution is to destroy the evidence of that transformation. Carefully folding the “Dottie Gets Spanked” drawing, the boy wraps it up in foil—just as one would a precious leftover treat to sustain oneself at a later date—taking it out in the middle of the night to bury, with a few other sacred relics, near a tree for a later time when he may need it. Dottie’s spanking, accordingly, does not represent the subservience it pretends, but portrays instead a potent secretly sexual energy (little wonder that so many gay and straight porn films feature spanking as a prelude to the sexual act). 

     Having just written about Werner Schroeter’s important film, The Rose King, I cannot but be reminded that Steven’s almost sacramental act is similar to the young Albert of Schroeter’s film burying his rose king in a sacred grove with the hope that it/he may flower at another time with the full force of love with which it/he has been recreated and temporarily sacrificed. 

     

Los Angeles, New Year’s Eve, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

Michael Brynntrup | All You Can Eat / 1993, USA 1995

a special and limited audience namely adults

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Brynntrup (director) All You Can Eat / 1993, USA 1995

 

In five minutes, counted down several times throughout the short film, German director Michael Brynntrup rhythmically takes us through dozens of male orgasms clipped from 1970s gay porn films.

      With a great sense of humor Brynntrup’s hovers over the standard X-film notice, insistently warning us of our viewing responsibilities—we, being presumably part of a “special and limited audience, namely adults who request and desire sexually explicit materials” told that we cannot sell the film “to any persons except consenting adults who agree to view the film in private and further agree not to transfer the film to minors or to any person who does not wish to view the material”— before diving into the actual sex acts which include both masturbation and anal sex.

      The humor lies in the fact that all we see of these graphically sexual acts is the young men’s faces and shifting expressions as they enjoy sex or come to a climax.

      The first series of faces are simple expressions of pleasure as these teenage boys and slightly older men—not all of them very attractive—rather straight forwardly cum.

   But after a number of these ejaculations, Brynntrup shifts the rhythm of 1-2-3-4 to something more complex, the images suggesting not just the sexual act but anticipation (a licking of the lips), voyeurism (the eyes focused on another), mutual or group orgasm, and pain.

     In the last section, the music slowly winds down, suggesting the last minutes of spent sexual release, amplified by repeating it with several different figures before the short work announces:    

“The End.”

      The obvious question, of course, is whether or not observing sex without seeing any sexual organs is pornographic or not. Might these faces, without the context of the porno film, be seen simply as a group of young men enjoying life, simply taking it the pleasure of an April morning or the appearance of a dear friend. Or does pornography even define joy itself when it matches our notions of how sexual release is expressed. Are the sexual actors who are performing these scenes expressing precisely what everyone else does in ejaculating or experiencing a good fuck, or are they “acting,” giving us something that we have to expect as emblems of sexual gratification?

      There are certainly no answers, but the questions about what pornography consists of spiral endlessly out of this small work. Is something pornographic only because it represents the body parts of ass and penis (those parts of the human anatomy which we are not allowed to reveal in public or even on Facebook and other such internet services) or does the “pornographic danger” exist in the expression of how those particular body parts make us feel with entered, pulled, jabbed, or rubbed?

     Does pornography perhaps even define the joy we take from participating in such natural and normal acts? Throughout these clips we see only one person at a time, never two men or more. Accordingly, can this work even be describes as representing homosexual sex?

      By the time we reach the climax of this film, we are certainly more confused about sex than any of the young men we are watching. Does the pornography perhaps lie in our eyes and not at all in the acts we are witnessing?

      Is the director’s humorous title itself pornographic. What if he explained that all these boys have just had bitten into something delicious, like a chocolate eclair or a handmade tamale?  How do we identify active sex?

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

Fred Schepisi | Six Degrees of Separation / 1993

theme and variations

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Guare (screenplay based on his stage play of the same name), Fred Schepisi (director) Six Degrees of Separation / 1993

 

It seems appropriate to think of Fred Schepisi’s 1993 film version of the John Guare play* as a kind of theme and variations. The “theme” is played out and then gets repeated first in simple variations, but then grows more and more abstract as it is internalized and reiterated through various different individual perspectives, until finally, at film’s end, having almost lost sight of the original theme centered upon by the primary character of this work—who I see to the  guide into the fantasy which all the others enter in one way or another, the dreamer named Paul (Will Smith) —disappears utterly and frustratingly, but also perhaps inevitably, the other central character, Louisa "Ouisa" Kittredge (Stockard Channing) moving off into new territory where we might imagine that someday she provides a new theme, which, in turn, will have its own variations. But that is all for another movie. 

      The confusion most viewers feel about this film, an emotional response which appears again and again in the critics’ comments (Leonard Klady of Variety describes it as a “transition from farce to thriller to moral inspection that provides the “material with an edge and uncertainty.”;  critic Adrian Martin describes it as demonstrating “something else going on in [the] middle section of the film, which is more deeply resonant and unsettling.”; and Los Angeles Times reviewer Peter Rainer simply observes that “Watching the movie is a bewildering experience.”), is a result, I argue, of these variations turning more and more abstract until finally we don’t quite know what we’re hearing or sometimes even watching—although this work about the art world is most definitely an a aural tale despite Schepisi’s attempt to visually invite it into large Central Park East apartments. 

     Let us begin, as precisely and straight-forwardly as possible, to lay out the major theme. Flanders “Flan” (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Ouisa Kittredge (Channing) are comfortably wealthy through the sale of major art works to world collectors, some of which they haven’t seen in person before they make the sale by buying the work through the help of wealthy investors before selling it for a profit. Flan is hoping to sell a Cezanne to a Japanese collector, and on this particular evening has invited his friend, a truly wealthy South African sophisticate Geoffrey Miller (Ian McKellen) to join them at dinner where he hopes to convince him to invest in the project. The Kittredges own a few fine works of art themselves, several silver antiques such as Flan’s beloved “Jaguar” and a two-sided Wassily Kandinsky painting, one side being what they describe as “geometric and sober,” the other “filled with vivid colors and wild forms,” obviously a symbol in the play and film of the possible variations of talented human expression.

      Most of the evening is spent with Flan mouthing his encyclopedic knowledge of art and the art world—in the rather pompous way, we gather, he communicates with most of his acquaintances—while Ouisa basically backs him up, furthering and encouraging his babble. But the time has finally come to stop the drinks and dinner chatter and be off to the restaurant where they’ve reserved a table. But suddenly into this posh, over-stuffed world, comes a young black man, Paul, brought up to the apartment by the front desk guard. The handsome Paul describes an incident where he was mugged in Central Park, just across the street, and having nowhere else to go remembered that the parents of his Harvard University friends, Flan and Ouisa’s son and daughters, live at this address. He might have visited the Auchincloss’ or other families who he knows in the building, but having heard so much about his friend’s parents, he chose them.

    Paul’s stomach does indeed have a heavy blood stain upon it and his face looks bruised, so what choice does Ouisa have but to bandage him. And soon after, he’s begun to charm with his story of his thesis having been stolen, a study on “the fate of imagination” using as one of its major sources, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

    Somewhat like Flan, Paul is a fount of information, although his specifics lead to wonderful generalizations as well, such as his argument that “imagination is not our escape, it is the place we are trying to get to.”

      Paul’s name, incidentally, is Paul Poitier, and yes, his father is Sidney, the black hero of the white imagination, who, quite astoundingly, he describes is planning to do a film of Cats. They will be meeting early at the Sherry (the posh Sherry-Netherlands hotel at 781 Fifth Avenue), and before the evening is over his has promised his new friends that he’ll find roles for them in the movie version—even though when he first mentions the musical, Ouisa, in particular, gets rather snarky about it, reminding herself that they once attended a benefit production of it for some disease or other.

    But everyone, including their guest, is by this time so thoroughly enchanted by Paul, who takes his role as Scheherazade one step further, by suggesting that instead of going out, he will whip out a delicious salad and pasta, which he proceeds to do while endlessly talking, telling them tales that truly brings wonderment to their lives. He even insists upon washing up the dishes himself.

    How could they not, as appreciative hosts, invite Paul to sleep over for the night?

    Everything seems to have gone perfectly. And by the end of the evening, Geoffrey is planning a black festival at which Sidney Portier will serve as judge along with Diana Ross, Eddie Murphy, and “some new blacks,” to visit South Africa and, after leaving, calls to tell Flan that he’ll put up the money to the buy the Cezanne.

    The next morning, since Paul has told them he needs to meet his father early, the accommodating hostess Ouisa cracks the bedroom door to see her guest fucking a naked man, she screaming bloody murder and turning on the run. The white boy jumps up naked and runs after her, furious by her intrusion, and when she suggests he might have shot her, he angrily lunges forward, continuing her absurd suggestion, by arguing, “And I might have knife.” 

    The building guard is called and the “hustler,” as he is now known since Paul has spent the $50 dollars they have given him to pay for the boy in found the park, is rushed out of the house. Paul is himself ushered out of the apartment, the Kittredges immediately rushing from room to room to see if any of their “important” (meaning expensive) items have been stolen. Nothing’s missing. But, so they quite illogically convince themselves, their throats might have been slit in the night. And, of course, they are astounded by their own naiveté.

     The above is the film’s “theme,” as fully as I can express it. But this theme simultaneously represents the first variation, since we observe these scenes as Flan and Ouisa describe them to several wedding guests at an affair they have committed to attend that same day. Since the theme and its variation are simultaneous, at first there we do not perceive any variations except a few important comments that lie outside the story. But we do clearly observe their utter impatience to share their story. Even as the wedding begins they are whispering to those around them that they might have had their throats slit, that they might have been killed, sarcastically joking “But here we are!” And the moment the wedding proper is over, they corner a couple of friends, a contingent which soon grows into a group including the room and bride, to tell their story. In short, the events of the last evening have become for them a sensational new experience that they are more than eager to share with the world. It is as if they have suddenly entered the place where they intended to be all along, a world of the imagination, even before that line has been spoken in the “theme” or story proper.

      They are also terrible gossips, going on for a long period of time about how rich their friend Geoffrey is “as rich as Midas” and owns mines. Ouisa continues, “But he’s always short of cash because his government won’t let its people—Flan interrupts to correct her, “It’s white people”—to take out any cash.” Flan’s interruption merely reiterates what we soon discover, that despite their liberal ideology and their later mockery of bigoted Americans who might visit South Africa, these people are blindly prejudiced. And this “variation,” in turn, effects the “theme” we gradually uncover along with it. 

       They also admit, off-stage so to speak, that the amount Flan needed to buy the Cezanne was 2 million dollars, Ouisa offering up the comment that “while he may not have enough for the price of a dinner he might easily have 2 million dollars.” Yet, despite their need for Geoffrey’s money, they even backstab him: Flan offering up his view that “The awful thing about having a truly rich folks for friends…” Ouisa interrupting to add, “Well, let’s face it, the money does get the way.” Flan continues, “Having a rich friend is like drowning and your friend makes life boats. Only your friend gets very touchy if you say one word.”

       Again, Ouisa interrupts, “…We were afraid that our South African friend might say that we were only loving him…” Flan continues, “because of his life boats. We weren’t sucking up. We like Geoffrey.” In short, in this brief variation, they are admitting what they immediately deny and play down significantly in the “theme” proper: they need their rich friend primarily for his money. So do we also comprehend that this couple is hypocritical, which again colors how we perceive the “theme” or main story.

       Also embedded in this main “theme” is yet another variation, which seemingly makes far less sense than some of the couple’s asides in telling their story at the wedding. A couple of times we see Paul, in a white T-shirt, rehearsing his lines, telling the story of Sidney Poitier. Since we have no context for this yet, the first time he not even having been introduced to this character, and the second time immediately after his appearance in the house, it does not seem as significant as it does later in the film. But even then we can’t quite imagine someone preplanning the event in such detail that he actually memorizes his lines as if he is about to perform a play—the performance, of course, which we are in the midst of experiencing.

      Accordingly, script writer John Guare’s variations are already so opaque that we barely recognize them for what they are. Only in hindsight, do they begin to make sense, after, metaphorically speaking, we have heard the full theme.

       More importantly, the theme itself contains so very many cultural references and moves in so many directions that many of its most important and significant phrases might be missed. It’s important to note that a number of the moments I discuss above (and others which I have not mentioned, such as the numerous art and theater references) are not generally discussed by the majority of the critics, a most audiences, I argue, would see no reason to even think of them.

      Although most mention that Paul is found in bed with a “hustler,” for example, none of them mention that his bedroom guest is an extremely handsome white man, and many if not most of the reviewers (such as Ben Falk of BBC.com who doesn’t even mention the event, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment who describes his bed partner as a “crazed man,” and Marjorie Baumgarten of The Austin Chronicle who reports, mistakenly, that “Paul vanishes from their lives as quickly as he arrived.”) suggest that what really matters was the fact that Paul has invited yet someone else into the house. But, in fact, I would argue before we go any further, that the most disturbing issue for Flan and Ouisa is not Paul being a black con-man, although that is an important aspect of some of the various variations, but that Paul is gay man who was having sex in their house.

     One must recall that by 1993, the in same year that the AIDS themed films Roger Spottiswoode’s And the Band Played On, John Greyson’s musical satire about Patient Zero, Zero Patience, Derek Jarmans’ Blue, and most important, Johnathan Demme’s Philadelphia all premiered, AIDS was the number health crisis in the world, and gay men, no matter how liberal the household, were seen as being the possible carriers of a horrible disease which ended in death. The benefit performance of Cats which Flan and Ouisa attended, was surely for AIDS, she knowing, even as she describes it somewhat sarcastically as “some disease,” full well what disease was in need of a benefit performance. Their throats, they well recognize, were never truly in danger of being slit; but without saying it openly, the film suggests their absolute horror of the contagion that may have entered their protected and guarded lives, restated in Ouisa’s comment upon their return home from the wedding: “Here we are [long pause] safe.”

    Finally, not one critic who I’ve read talks about this first variation’s revelation that both the Kittredges have had dreams that night. Ouisa, in bed with dozens of cats, young and old, tries to find out from Paul, sitting at the edge of her bed, why his father has chosen that musical to film. Paul takes an odd position, arguing that there are so many causes that focus on the beginning and end of our lives, “The Right to Life,” “The Right to Die,” etc. that we forget what comes in between, the span of our lives. “And you get all that into Cats?” she asks. “We’re going to try,” Paul modestly responds.

      Flan, who we discover was a former artist, truly loves the works which he buys and sells, arguing that for him they are not “just meat.” He also recalls his own child’s experience with art, amazed that in the first grade the students simply produce blobs, while by third grade their works have turned into camouflage. Yet it the second grade each child, including his own, creates art that’s close to being a Matisse, wondrous masterworks of color. Meeting that second-grade teacher, he wonders what is her secret. How does get her students to produce such masterpieces? She doesn’t do anything, she responds, “I just know when to take their paintings away from them.”

     Their dreams, in fact, reveal something crucial about both Ouisa and Flan that in later variations will come to be of increasing significance.

    The first major variation follows. Walking down an East Side Manhattan street, The Kittredges run into friends, Ouisa immediately yelling out that they have a story to tell. But the friends Kitty (Mary Beth Hurt) and Larkin (Bruce Davison) claim they have a story as well, and since, they quickly discover, the Kittredge’s story happened Saturday night, while their tale happened Friday, they insist on going first. Kitty begins her tale by giggling with the news that they’re going to be in the movie of Cats. A stranger has appeared at their door having just been mugged as well. He too turns out to be the son of Sidney Poitier and so very nice that despite the fact they had to go, they let him stay in their apartment. We get a glimpse of what might have happened after sex that morning in the Kittredge’s apartment when Larkin explains that “Middle of the night, we heard somebody screaming, ‘Burglar! Burglar!’ We came out in the hall, Paul is chasing this naked blond thief down the corridor. The blond thief runs out, the alarms go off… I mean, the kid saved our lives.”

     Flan and Ouisa, all sarcasm by this point, share the observations: “That was no burglar. You had another houseguest.”

     Their comments go right over the friends’ heads as Kitty and Larkin declare they feel guilty since Paul could have been killed by the intruder. Again, nothing was missing from house, and instead of $50, they gave him only $25.

     Now speaking to the police, Flan comments, “We told them our story.”

     The two couples go back to the Kittredges to phone their mutual children, who all attend Harvard.

    Here, the overall variations are quite charming, for Paul’s encounter with the couple of the night before in retrospect seems far more successful and even charming than that of the next evening.

   Instead of phoning the kids immediately, Ouisa provides us with a comic interlude where she attempts, without success, to contact Sidney Poitier in order to check up whether Paul is really is son. In the midst of this, they receive, in yet another wrinkle, a floral arrangement and a pot of jam from Paul, the pot of jam momentarily forcing them to toss it to the floor, as if in their minds it might have been a bottled bomb.

     Their next step is to go to the police, from where we have witnessed brief moments already in this variation. When the finally policeman asks “What are the charges?” the film takes a momentary turn into the theater of the absurd or, at least, into a Kafka nightmare, as Ouisa answers: “He came into our house,” Flan continuing, “He cooked us dinner. Kitty: “He told us the story of Catcher in the Rye. Said he was the son of Sidney Poitier.” Obviously, they cannot come up with any charge. All the beautiful joys that Paul has offered them are represented as possible criminal acts.

      When the children of both couples finally show up, we hear the first of the terribly discordant variations. The children all obviously hate their parents, behave obnoxiously, and bring out the worst in the adults. These little selfish monsters use words like “conspiracy, suggest that Ouisa move in Paul and divorce her children, and bring Kitty and Larkin into a shouting match when Kitty accidentally announces that she has a friend who does theatrical art, which alerts Larkin to the fact that she knows somebody who he’s never heard about or previously met. None of these monsters know a Paul and certainly know no son of Sidney Poitier, and all are clearly disgusted by their parents’ collective behavior.

      Trying to sleep after the unruly mob has left, Ouisa dreams of a visitation by the beautiful Paul who recites, in case we missed it earlier:

 

“The imagination…It’s there to show you the exit from the maze of your nightmare, to transform the nightmare into dreams that become your bedrock. If we do not listen to that voice, it dies. I shrivels, it vanishes. The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.”

 

      This too might be seen as a musical transition into yet another “variation,” this one even more comical than all the others. This time the now “abused” couples discover yet another individual, a Doctor Fine (Richard Masur) has also been paid a visit by Paul, again claiming he was mugged, blood pouring from a wound in his gut. Sidney Poitier was a matinee idol of Fine’s youth, “Somebody who had really forged ahead and made new paths for blacks just by the strength of his own talent. Strangely, I’d identified with him.”

      His conversation with Paul, interrupted by a pregnancy call, led Fine to give the stranger his keys for his brownstone. When the Doctor calls his son Doug (Jeffrey Abrams) at Dartmouth to tell him what he’s done, proud of the act, the son bawls him out and brings up all the hate he as evidently inherited from his mother, “Mother told me you beat her. My Mom told me that you were a rotten lover, and that you drank so much, your body smelled of cheap white wine….Why did you ever bring me into this world?”

      Backed up by a policeman, Fine returns home to discover Paul in his dressing robe and drinking brandy, but when he demands the boy’s arrest, Paul explains that he’s given him key, has drunk some of his brandy, and used the electricity, but that he’ll find nothing missing.

      The crazed son, Doug ends this “variation” by shouting that father is a “cretin, a creep” and throwing the phone out the window in sound and fury.

       Now retelling the story at champagne opening, Ouisa reports that the group descended upon the Strand bookstore to find a copy of Sidney Poitier’s autobiography only to discover that the actor had four daughters—no sons.

      In yet another “variation” the families jointly visit their children at Harvard, enlisting their help in attempting to track down who Paul is and how he gained the knowledge for entry into their lives. Even Doug from Dartmouth has joined the council of unhappy kids. Since Doug does not go to Harvard, Flan argues that it has to be someone from their high school who was part of their group and become homosexual or is deep into drugs?

      His daughter Tess answers: “That’s like about 15 people. I don’t want to know. No, I find it really insulting that you assume it has to be a guy. This movie star’s son could have had a relationship with a girl in high school, right?” Kitty and Larkin’s son chips in, “That’s your problem in a nutshell. You’re so limited,” while Tess continues, “That’s why I’m going to Afghanistan to climb mountains.”    

     Ouisa tries to return to the subject at hand, suggesting they track down everyone in their class. “Male, female, whatever. Not just homosexuals, drug addicts. That kind could be a drug dealer.”

Doug takes immediate offense, “Why do you look at me when you say that? You think I’m an addict? A drug pusher? You know, I really resent the accusations.”

      And so does this variation push further into absurdity, as no one seems able to speak more than a few words without everyone else appropriating them into a different context.

       Ouisa’s children even mock her by reminding her how much she hated the musical Cats.

     In the end, the children accuse them of everything. But Woody Kittredge’s (Oz Perkins) charge against them is perhaps the most humorous and in some respects the most appropriate, suggesting far more than is being said: “I just wanna get one thing straight. You gave him my pink shirt? You gave a stranger my pink shirt? That shirt was a Christmas present from you! I treasured that shirt. I loved that shirt. My collar had grown a full size from weight lifting. You saw that my arms were growing, you saw that my neck had grown, and you bought me that shirt for my new body! I loved that shirt! My first shirt for my new body, and you gave that shirt away?” Pink, if you’ve forgotten is the color most often associated with gays; any heteronormative kid might be delighted that such a shirt found its proper home on the back of a real homosexual. But as Trent Conway soon describes, he has a “dumbbell for brains.”

      One can surmise that if the children of these wealthy New York East Siders have turned out to be such stereotypical comic monsters that something else inside the walls of Flan and Ouisa’s, Kitty and Larkin’s, and Dr. Fine’s residences must be going on that the film that has not yet identified. The director takes the attitude of Larkin: “I don’t want to talk about it.”

       And it is perhaps at this point that most viewers and critics find that the variations have grown so discordant that it is hard to even remember the dulcet tones of the first 2/3rds of the original theme.

      At yet another formal cocktail party Flan and Ouisa have evidently just finished summarizing their newest adventure, as one of their friends summarizes it as “When the children turn.”

      In the penultimate variation, the children leaf through their high school yearbook, Tess finally identifying Trent Conway, now at MIT. She makes a visit to Trent and finally discovers another remarkably absurd truth. On a rainy night in Boston Paul stands in a doorway, Trent and he meet, and Trent takes him home. There Paul discovers Trent’s large address book, filled with names and addresses.

     The resentful Paul argues “Got to be rough to be with rich people. Gotta have money, you gotta be buyin’em presents all of the time.” To which Trent argues, “Not at all. When rich people do something nice for you, you give them a pot of jam.”

      So does our variation return vaguely to one of the minor chords of its theme.

    In exchange for information about each individual (where they live, secrets, everything) Paul will give up one piece of clothing. A relationship between the two begins. But Trent wants more. Having evidently been excluded as a gay man from the society in which he grew up, he makes a serious deal with Paul, the engine of the entire movie, which Paul carries out, feeling obviously many of the same feelings as a black, street-living homosexual:

 

“I don’t want you to leave me, Paul. Now go through my address book, and I’ll tell you about family after family. You’ll never not fit in again. We’ll even, uh, give you a new identity. I’ll make you the most sought-after young man in the east. And then one day, I’ll come into one of these homes. And you’ll be there, and I’ll be presented to you. And I’ll pretend to meet you for the first time. And our friendship will be witnessed by my friends. And our parents’ friends. And if it all happens under their noses, they can’t judge me. And they can’t disparage you. I’ll make you a guest in their houses.”

 

     Obviously, Trent, as Ouissa later perceives, was a rather amazing Henry Higgins, over three months apparently transforming Paul, in turn for spending time him, into a knowledgeable, sophisticated young man who one might even imagine being the son of Sidney Poitier. His Pygmalion was Paul, the transformed beauty who showed up in New York’s Upper East Side knowing nearly everything he’d learned about them and their children from one of their own, Trent Conway. Even Trent admits, in his teaching all his stories just to keep Paul near, to feeling a bit like Scheherzade. Paul’s three months, however, fall far short of the 1001 nights he might have hoped for.

     What also becomes quite clear through this “variation’s” revelations, is that instead of feeling simply the need, as does Trent, to feel accepted, Paul, far brighter than his teacher, realizes that the goal, as he states it several times throughout the work, is not merely to pretend to be someone else, but through the imagination to become that someone, to enter through the mirror into a world known only through the imagination and remain there forever, close to their hearts.

     Alas, Paul comes to realize that there is something that keeps getting in his way, interrupting the fulfillment of his dreams, something he cannot fully control: his own sexuality. The rich are willing to go along with nearly all of his imaginative transformations, even accept his being black, perhaps forgiving him if they discovered the lie about his parentage; but they cannot accept him bringing another man into his bed. It is one thing to have a nice-looking boy sleeping away in a bedroom, but to have a real sexual being who asks in another boy, however nice-looking, cannot be tolerated. They will never admit to it, but from them it represents a contagion. Paul is fine, but if he meets up in a bedroom with a Trent the party is over. The disease that Ouissa pretends to forget hovers over them, making them terrified for their lives.

      Ouisa and Flan have told nearly all their story and its variations to nearly everyone, having put the events and its hero nearly of their heads. But people still want the story. And there is now a new variation. In this equally absurd story, Flan is spit upon by his doorman as he enters his building, the couple having just returned from Rome. This time a poor heterosexual couple, Rick and Adelle, would-be actors taking a picnic in Central Park, meet up with Paul. 

      But in this go-round Paul’s father is not Sidney Poitier, but a man who loves painting, who has a Kandinsky but loves Cezanne the most. He points to the building nearby in which the man lives, John Flanders Kittredge. He was a child, so he claims, of his radical hippie days, when he marched down South, meeting Paul’s mother. Now, being a fancy art dealer with a white wife, he will no longer even see him, so Paul complains.

     It is clear that although the Kittredges might have thought they have gotten rid of Paul, he has not gotten rid of them. Yet, in a strange way it is not about them. Convincing his new Utah friends that he is forced to live in the park, they allow him to move in with him over a roller-skating disco.

     Paul becomes their Henry Higgins, teaching them how to speak, staying with them the apparently mandatory three months. Suddenly, he reports that he’ll be moving, his father having made a large deal can now afford to help him out without informing his wife. It’s just too bad that he doesn’t have the $250 to visit him in Maine. The two have worked too hard, however, to loan him their life savings.

     When Adele goes to the bank, however, she discovers their account has been emptied, Rick obviously not being able to deny his new best friend the chance to get everything he ever wanted.

    The innocent Rick now has a wonderful story to tell, awful news to Adele’s more experienced ears. Having found some extra money of his own, Paul takes him to the Rainbow Room in a rented tuxedo. They drink the most expensive wine, and, as all the others are dancing, Paul asks if Rick would like to dance. He draws a blank, but without hesitation, Paul rises and pulls Rick into a tango. In pure Midnight Cowboy-like dumbness, Rick tells Adele, “I’ll tell you. Nothing like this ever happened in Utah. And I tell you something like that must’ve never happened in the Rainbow Room, ‘cause they asked us to leave.”

     Paul follows this up with a coach ride through Central Park, and sealing Rick’s special evening with an event that only a hick like Rick could properly make us believe. As Paul begins to touch Rick’s hair, the boy responds, “Hey Paul, stop that!” Rick continues his narrative:

 

Paul: I was wondering if I could fuck you.

Rick: Man, I don’t do things like that.

Paul: That’s what makes it so nice. You don’t.

And he did. It was fantastic. We came here for experience, right?

 

     Entertainment critic Adrian Martin compares Paul to the subversive dark-angel in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (although that’s not quite how I read the angel in that film), and there is some truth to that reading. At least this time we realize that Paul’s sexual desires have truly crossed the line, particularly when we discover that Rick, having lost Adele through his admission of enjoying gay sex, jumps from their apartment to his death.

     It is Adele’s confrontation with Flan and Ouisa that results in the doorman’s mis-impressions and in bringing Paul once more into their lives.

     Almost impossibly, it is Kitty and Larkin who first come upon Rick’s body outside the roller-skating disco. This time the Adele says she’ll press charges, if only Ouisa and Flan can find Paul.

Something, however, has changed as they enter back into the theme of this work with another possible human interchange with Paul. While Flan continues the same old tropes, “He might have killed us,” Ouissa finally insists on the truth: “He wasn’t going to kill us.”

     At yet another party, this hosted by Mrs. Banister (Kitty Carlisle), the Kittredges are asked to tell yet another “variation,” but this is primarily a return to the theme.

     As the couple plan to go out to yet another grand event, Ouisa “dolled up,” as she puts it while talking on the phone to her daughter Tess, she gets a call from Paul. This seems now to be a different Paul than we have encountered to date, a frightened and defensive Paul, who insists that he was given the money and never knew the boy would kill himself. Ouisa insists that he has to turn himself it. “You’re so brilliant, you have such promise. You need help.”

     Paul asks if she’ll help him. “That is impossible. My husband feels you betrayed him.”

     “Do you.”

     Now finally comes the hidden questions, the ones the film itself have been hiding from us all along but which we nonetheless knew hovering in the room like the “elephant” they themselves have described: “You’re a lunatic. Picking up that dreck off the street. Are you suicidal? Do you have AIDS? Are you infected?”

     “I don’t have it.”

 

 

       If this seems to be a new Paul, so too is it a new Ouisa. She now seems truly to care for him, asking about what he’s been doing, if he has been in new trouble.

     No, he argues. He claims he didn’t like the first couple so much; they went out and left me alone. And he didn’t like the doctor who did the same thing. “But you and your husband, we all stayed together”

     “What did you want from us?”

     “Everlasting friendship.”

     “Nobody has that.”

     “You do.”

    Flan gets on the phone and nearly destroys the serious conversation Ouisa has been having. But when she finally gets on the phone with him alone once again, the truth returns. “That was the happiest night I ever had.”

      “Why”

      “You let me use all the parts of myself that night.”

       When he later talks about collage being the art form of 20th century, she responds “Everything is somebody else’s.”

       “Not your children. Not your life.”

       “No,” she sighs in near exasperation. “That is mine. That is nobody else’s.”

       “You don’t sound happy.”

       “There is so much you don’t know. You are so smart. And so stupid.”

        When he takes offense, she explains that he’s stupid not to comprehend what he could be.

        And he once again begs for her help in his becoming that being.

      But she again brings up the real subject, the real issue which is at the heart of problems between them and someone like Paul. “You picked up that awful hustling thing to show us your contempt.”

      And finally, we get a truly honest response that her world might never have imagined. “I was so happy, I wanted to add sex to it. Don’t you do that?”

        There is a longish pause that speaks volumes. “No.”

       When he finally tells her his real name it is “Paul Poitier-Kittredge,” even though she imagines him still insane, he knows he has her, that her heart is with him, at least, if not her full imagination. Again, he asks for her help, and finally she agrees, insisting over her husband’s protests that she will meet him and take him to the police to protect him, adding for the first time a genuine expression of feeling: “Paul we love you.”  “And I love you Louisa Kittredge, and hey will you bring me the pink shirt?”

         But traffic is heavy and by the time they reach the Waverly Theater downtown, he is already under arrest, the cop not allowing Ouisa to become involved. As he is driven off, Paul shouts: “Remember, there’s two sides to the Kandinsky.”

        The next day when she shows up at precinct, she’s told that the detective with whom she’s been in conversation has been transferred. When she tells the officer that it concerns an arrest at the Waverly Theatre last night, she is told that no such arrest was made. She calls the criminal courts but she doesn’t even know Paul’s real name and since she isn’t family…there is no way to find out what has happened.

        At the party, she bemoans the fact that she read that a young man committed suicide in Riker’s Island prison, “tied a shirt around his neck and hanged himself. Whas it a pink shirt? A burst of color, pink shirt? Was it Paul. We never did find out who he was.”

        Flan attempts to turn the whole event back into a mere variation, an event not having anything directly to do with them: “Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t him….We haven’t seen the last of him, believe me. He’ll be back. He’ll find a way.”

        Someone asks her, why it means so much to her. “He wanted to be us. Everything we are in the world. This paltry thing, our life, he wanted it. He stabbed himself to get into our lives. He envied us. We’re not enough to be envied.”

        Ouisa realizes that he did more for them in those few hours than their own children ever did. And he wanted to be Flan’s son, she reminds him. “He sat out in the park and said, ‘That man is my father.’ He’s in trouble, and we don’t know how to help him.”

        Flan refuses to become human, reverting once again to dodging tactics, using utterly no imagination: “Help him? My God, we could have been killed. Throat slashed. …Oh, please. Cut me out of that pathology right now.”

       

     Fed up with the anecdotes, she declares it was an experience, not a story to be told over and over. How do we fit experiences in our lives?

      She walks out of the party, finally realizing that she and Flan, the gambler as he describes himself, are a terrible match. She walks away, with one final vision of Paul repeating, “The Kandinsky is painted on two sides.”

      Presumably, we can surmise that he is suggesting that the imagination can simultaneously hold both controlled order and joyful chaos which play out in a kind of ying and yang relationship, the one always alternating with the other, which might simply infer that she should return Flan, the ying of her yang. 

        And we have to wonder—in doing so perhaps creating our own stupid variations—was Paul’s final meeting with her just a show, an attempt to get to perceive her own true feelings, to help push Ouisa in the direction in which Louisa (her true name) was already moving? Perhaps there was no arrest, and he has simply dropped out of her and her husband’s life to allow them to discover and live out their own experiences as her own dreams had been telling her to. Or perhaps he had already turned himself in, knowing that, in fact, he was innocent with no real crime to be uncovered except for perhaps using Rick and Adele’s money to entertain Rick in a manner that he and she had not previously imagined. Is he even really homeless or simply a sort devilish angel as Pasolini’s character in Teorema, on the lookout for those in need a kind of Pan to excite their lives?

     Like Pasolini’s character, he changes everyone’s life whom he encounters, sometimes for better and often for worse. Rick, like so many who buy into the sacredness of heteronormality, destroys himself as punishment for his unexpected pleasure. Even though the Doctor fully enjoyed his encounter with Paul, he cannot accept the fact that his sense of self-hatred was temporarily resolved. Kitty and Larkin’s delightful experience has been tamped down by Ouisa’s and Flan’s sarcasm. Geoffrey and Trent seem to have gotten away with simply the joy Paul brought them. But Flan cannot allow himself to accept experiences he cannot contain within his necessary weapon of wit and sarcasm. Only Ouisa has fully accepted the gift he offered to all.

       The major problem for those who cannot accept what he as to offer seems to revolve, as it does in Pasolini’s work, around the issue of sex. Once she has confronted him with the issue of homosexuality and AIDS, realizing in the process just how empty her own love-life has been, she is able to become an openly caring and loving woman again.

        But deep down, this anecdote can’t answer our fears that Paul may, in fact, have died for his innocent desires to live a life of what appears to be happiness.

 

*The title of this film, which I do not discuss in this essay itself, Six Degrees of Separation, is the theory that made its first appearance in a 1929 short story of Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy that all mankind is connected to each other through a distance of only six individuals, and that if we simply were able to make the proper links we would find out how truly interconnected we are with all of us on our planet. This is an issue that both delights and frightens Ouisa, reassuring her of her connection with the world in general, but demanding of her and each us the responsibility of finding those connections to all others. In Hollywood lore, the game of “six degrees” has often been to linked up Kevin Bacon who is rumored to have worked with everyone in the movie business.

       In the case of the movie, she discovers that there are only three degrees between her and Paul, her daughter Tess and Paul’s Boston lover, Trent Conway; and by the end of the film, Paul seems strangely linked to almost everyone on New York’s Upper East Side, through her and Flan if no one else. And the fact that she chooses to seek out those connections, instead of making fun of them and denying their existence as does her husband, is another matter that results in their separation.

       At several points in this film, the sculpture of a Yukon husky in Central Park is mentioned, the image appearing at least twice. The dog represented in Frederick Roth’s bronze is Balto, the lead of a sled dog team which bravely fought the harsh elements on the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome, which transported the diphtheria antitoxin to Anchorage and Nenana, Alaska, saving countless lives. Dog-lovers world-wide paid for the sculpture, which was dedicated, with Balto in attendance, on December 7th, 1925 in Central Park.

       Interestingly enough, and rather humorously, the sculpture was used in the ending scenes of the animated movie Balto in 1995, two years after this film, with Kevin Bacon performing the voice of the dog. In 2022, Bacon visited the statue during a walk in the park, posting a short video of himself with the dog saying "Ran into an old friend of mine in the park #Balto.”

 

Los Angeles, August 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).