Ayana Barber | Go Crazy with Crazy / 2020

catfished

by Douglas Messerli

 

Justin Garascia (screenplay), Ayana Barber (director) Go Crazy with Crazy / 2020 [9 minutes]

 

This film is about a young man who is being involved through a pretense of a film deal into a world of possible crystal meth addiction, who amazingly comes to awareness just before the final “audition.”

    Clearly, the young actor Ben (Justin Garascia) has had sex with Joey (Jimmy Brooks), who appears to be the connection to a perhaps imaginary film world which Ben is seeking to enter.

      Fortunately, as he arrives for the final “audition,” in which he is being asked to put simply a saline solution into his arm, he has figured out that Joey is a liar, a trickster of sorts who has brought him into this situation either to get him hooked on drugs or simply to entice him into a kind of drugged-out porn flick.

      Unfortunately, the film doesn’t quite make it clear where it might be going down. All we know is that Ben perceives he has been “catfished”—which in contemporary jargon means someone lured into a relationship by a fictional, generally on-line, being—and as clear symbolic evidence, he brings his own real catfish into Joey’s bathroom as evidence of his discovery.

    There is nothing subtle about this short film, which nonetheless warns young viewers of the dangers of falling in love and believing someone older than yourself and promising more than can possibly be rewarded by his demands.

     The title of Michigan-born Garasica’s story, evidently based on his actual experiences, however, is not quite appropriate. Yes, Ben’s fears, as he himself expresses it, are perhaps paranoid, but when you realize something is not right about the world into which you’re about to be sexually “invited,” you are not at all “crazy” in doubting and pulling away from that world.

     This is a film of warning: think before you act, even if you’re intoxicated by a vision of the possibility you might imagine is being offered to you. Hollywood built an entire system of young women who suffered the same punishments of being lured into the camera’s embrace. Ben, with the help the internet, has been given the evidence to so something about it, and leaves in an elevator faced with the demon behind the drug-dealing sexual menace (João Queiroga). He escapes what we realize so many young gay men and innocent women have never been able to.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).