Alex Karanis | White Rock / 2024

i’ll be watching you

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alex Karanis (screenwriter and director) White Rock / 2024 [7 minutes]

 

I’ve seldom seen a film with more inexplicable situations and actions written into the script to facilitate a preconceived idea.

    David (Dante Toccacelli) comes home early from his basketball practice to find his older brother (Care Garcia) lying in his bed. The brother, who seems to be filled with advice about everything, senses immediately, with absolutely no logical explanation, that his younger brother is going on a date—in fact, his first date, finally!

     When David admits it, he demands a name. With utter honesty, David replies Joe, his brother reacting in the usual heterosexual manner with the automatic correction, “Josephine?” Yeah, I guess so, David mutters, I’ve never met her.

     David is finally able to get his brother out of his room as he prepares for his date at the White Rock, and, as every elder brother knows who loves to interfere in his younger brother’s life, the first thing you do is to immediately get on the phone to a friend (Aidan Vadala in this movie) to share the news.*

    “You know honestly,” says his friend, “I never thought he was into girls.”

     Meanwhile, every two minutes, again for no logical reason except perhaps to stretch out the empty script, David and his date exchange messages to tell one another that they’re getting dressed, they’ll meet up in five minutes, or that they are just about to go out the door.

     His friend’s wonderment about David’s sexuality leads the elder brother naturally to follow David to his meeting, with David walking and the brother driving behind him, a bit like the hare trying to sleuth out the turtle’s slow progress. Mightn’t his brother recognize his sibling’s car following him even at a discreet distance of two blocks? Never look back.

     Sure enough, David meets up with a male Joe (Hans Lee), and plans a day hanging around the beach and dinner after. Elder brother calls up his friend, assuring him he was right. So, what’s his reaction? He’s proud of little brother he explains. And as David looks back, spotting his brother’s car, big bro gives him the high sign.

    As badly acted as this simplistic little moral fable is, it’s the absurd illogic of the plot and the crudeness of an elder brother spying on his younger sibling that is truly embarrassing. One presumes the older brother’s life is so empty that he hasn’t anything better to do than trail behind his little brother and report the events back to his friend. But why on earth would anyone else care about this mysterious dating boy is beyond my imagination. The film seems to simply serve as a kind of LGBTQ pat on the back: see how far we’ve come? Even elder brothers are proud of us gay boys these days. And I suppose the fact of the older brother’s approval gives his dirty little act of spying on an innocent a clean bill of health.

 

*I should mention that I was the elder brother to a sibling also named David, and I don’t think I ever once even so much as discussed his dating or sex life. I certainly had no interest in involving myself with his extracurricular behavior. At that age I was far more involved in my own life. But then, I was closer to the age of David in this film, and one also wonders why a 20-some year old, as this film depicts, is still living at home; but at least that’s somewhat plausible. Perhaps he’s attending a nearby college or has a start-up job which doesn’t pay enough for him live on his own.  

 

Los Angeles, January 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).