Victoria Warmerdam | Korte Kuitspier (Short Calf Muscle) / 2019

the lovely gnome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Victoria Warmerdam (screenwriter and director) Korte Kuitspier (Short Calf Muscle) / 2019 [13 minutes]

Dutch director Victoria Warmerdam seems to offer up a wonderful absurdist-like comedy. Anders (Henry van Loon), a rather tall gay man, is visiting the doctor (Lucretia van der Vloot) because of a pain he has in his calf muscle. She reports that there is nothing wrong with his leg, although they see this problem quite often, she reports, in “his kind.”

     What possibly might she mean, he wonders. Has she somehow sensed he was a gay man? Even she suggests that she doesn’t mean to discriminate.

     He next visits a baker (Beppie Melissen), asking for a whole wholegrain loaf, sliced. She challenges him saying, “Are you sure you don’t what half, my small friend.”

     Has she run out of full loafs? No. Well, then he’d like a whole loaf please. She suggests we might prefer “a bag of cut mini currant buns?” No, just the whole loaf.

     She stares at him endlessly, with a smile pasted to her face.

     Eating lunch with his colleagues, one asks him how his physio therapist when, Anders commenting that it went fine. He received a small injury while running, he reports. He has a short calf muscle.

      That must be common his “his kind” another colleague responds. Anders is confused, announcing that his doctor also responded in that manner. Surely “The fact that I’m gay doesn’t relate to my physique, does it?”

      After a rather uncomfortable pause, one of his colleagues finally speaks up: “I think he was referring to the fact that you’re a gnome.

      Anders, just as any sane man might, laughs. But they don’t join him, the manager finally adding “Of course it doesn’t matter. We don’t mind at all.” Besides he’s a good worker and they get extra subsidies by having him on their team, just as they get for including Fatima (evidently of Middle Eastern birth) on their staff.

      Yet one of the colleagues even wants to carry the discussion further, now that they’ve brought up the subject. “I was wondering what it was really like to become invisible? Or is it a myth?”

      Anders pretends to go along with the joke, even pondering the issue of invisibility. But they want to know is it done consciously or is it metaphysical. And would he do it for them?

      Anders finally can only answer that he is not a gnome. When they persist, he mutters that he really doesn’t find their game-playing funny. “Short legs, short fuse,” one of his fellow workers comments.

     Back home, he confides with his lover Paul (Loes Schnepper) that it went on like that all day. “I can’t laugh about it anymore.” It just went on and on. “You should know when to stop.”

      But Paul wonders that he can’t take teasing anymore. But, this makes utterly so sense, Anders argues.

      Since when was this a problem with you, Paul seems astonished. But what can Paul possibly mean, answers the confused Anders. “Your figure, darling.”

      “I’ve never made a problem with the fact that you’re one of them, have I?”

      This time, Anders is clearly fed up. Must even his lover now carry on the ridiculous joke?

      Paul would have thought by this time his lover would simply have accepted the fact. That’s what made him attractive. Paul proclaims.

      “I’m not a mythical creature.”

      “No. You’re a lovely gnome.”

      If you thought it couldn’t get worse for Anders, his own parents confirm that he was adopted and that they knew this day would finally come, surprised, in fact, that it didn’t arise a lot sooner.

      But the film, once we realize the nature of this perverted absurdity, has nowhere else to go. Anders is flabbergasted and confused and simply can’t come to terms with the reality the others presume, reminding us not only of the ridiculousness of the prejudices imposed upon others including the LGBTQ community, but the strange beliefs of many MAGA supporters who have created absurdly fantastical lives for their political rivals.

      Yet, in the film gays seem to be easily accepted and assimilated. Being gay is not the problem, but looking different, in this case being “a legendary dwarfish creature supposed to guard the earth's treasures underground.” Even his parents confirm that their son is now a “double minority.”

      But it’s at this point when the film seems to truly fall apart. Comparing Anders’ second role as a minority figure having to do with his appearance takes the short movie down a very different avenue that is not at all the same as being sexually different.

       When the police finally take him down as a radicalized gnome, Warmerdam’s work strikes up the Staple Singers’ version of a song about black children facing discrimination, “Why (Am I Treated So Bad),” taking it down a truly illogical path.

       Like it or not, most gay people are able to live lives, if they so desire, without being perceived as being sexually different. That’s precisely why for so many years gays stayed, so to speak, in the closet, hid out, amongst themselves, invisible to the world at large.

      But being someone of color, unless of very light skin and with a desire to “pass” as a white, is not something a black man or woman, most Asian individuals, and many Hispanics can imagine. Despite Ralph Ellison’s social and cultural metaphor of “the invisible man,” people of color are hated by bigots precisely because of what they look like, not primarily for how they behave, even if their culture and traditions are occasionally different from caucasians. Being a gnome, if such beings were to exist, is not truly comparable with being a gay man. As one commentator observed, such a comparison is “boneheaded and insulting.” Yes, the discrimination, even if not mean or openly spoken, is absurd, something of which no truly intelligent human being should be capable. But when your skin color or size is “different” there is very little possibility of pretense or simply having failed to notice.

     It is why the biggest difficulty for most gay and bisexual individuals in “coming out,” expressing their differentness openly to others. One of the reasons that we LGBTQ+ individuals gather for Pride Days and other such occasions is to remind ourselves and others that we do still exist, that we are different even if we don’t look it. People of color don’t have that problem. The hatred heaped upon them is justified simply by their appearance, something of which they are reminded of every day of their lives.

     We can comprehend that Warmerdam’s film was well-intentioned; but unfortunately, it was not well thought out. This film really has no meaning for gay men and women, or, for that matter, black individuals, Native Americans, Asians, or many of those of American-Hispanic descent. It might mean something only to mythical gnomes, putti, or cupids.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).