Bella @The Bellzar | Boys Beware / 2015 (?)

the horror, the horror!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bella @The Bellzar ? Boys Beware / 2015? [4.30 minutes]

 

Another in the growing list of films using material from Boys Beware and linking their reactions to that film, this semi-pseudonymous short movie posted to YouTube in 2015 by Bella (@The Bellzar, is one of the cleverest of the appropriation movies, making use of the numerous educational and other youth-oriented clips of the 1950s and early 1960s.

      The major focus of this satirical short is the ineptitude of teachers who simply cannot answer the often very specific questions of their students. The first fragment of the film makes its point clear as a young girl asks “When does menstruation start,” only to be answered by a male teacher obviously talking about male penile functions. But the young girl is insistent and most specific, she means what day of the week it will start. Her mother’s starts on Tuesday and she wonders whether hers might begin on that day as well. Fair question for a young innocent, answered by the totally flummoxed male who answers “When you feel like it, I guess.” Another student asks about dancing, can you do it while menstruating? Answer: “No, not exactly.” A third girl asks “Is it true that people can tell when your menstruating?” Our jock’s response is to take out his graphic about the male penis, explaining the relationship of the testicles, scrotum, etc. The room of girls justifiably look absolutely puzzled.

      In the next frames, the director cuts in short clips from Boys Beware regarding Jimmy and Ralph’s strange relationship with a homosexual. The director follows this up with clever cuts from a film of the period titled How Do You Ask for a Date?

      The boy calls up a girl asking her for a date on Saturday. When she attempts to be coy suggesting that she may be busy, he asks if there’s any chance she can give “him” a brush off. She thinks it might be fun, but when he suggests he pick her up at 8:00 she’s utterly offended—“Why of all the nerve!”—and hangs up.

      The boy tries again, just asking “How ‘bout a date?” but the girl responds, “No thanks, Woody.”

      The narrator asks, “Is there another way?”

      We now see Woody eagerly calling up another person for a date. “I have a ticket for the high school carnival Saturday and, well, would you like to go?”

      On the other line we see an eager boy, obviously from another movie, reacting, “All right, I’ll call for you then. About seven?” “Yeh,” replies a finally gratified Woody.

     

      In the very next sequence, a young boy demands to know when boys should start going around with girls. This time a female teacher answers, “Well some girls start when they’re 10 years old, and some when they’re 16 or 17 or anywhere in between.”

      Another boy reiterates: “Well sometimes it gets hard. Sometimes it just happens by itself, doesn’t it? Not every time though.” We have to assume he talking about ejaculation. The teacher’s response: “Well, it might, but it probably won’t.”

       A third male member of the all-male class ponders, “But babies and all that, that’s not all you go out with girls for, is it?”

       No, it isn’t she replies. “In fact, you can do most of the things you usually do,” obviously replying to the earlier young girl’s question about dancing during her menstruation, as a chart suddenly appears stating what you can do (bathe or shower, wash your hair, swim, dance, and picnic) and what you should do with moderation (skate, ride horseback, play fast games, and square dance). Is it any wonder that the boys, just as the girls previously were, are thoroughly confused, particularly when the teacher suggests you can dance as long as you wear “your prettiest dress.”

      Bella’s film now transforms into a darker saga as we watch a group of boys experimenting with marijuana, each of them almost immediately getting sick of the results. They feel awful funny and sick, but Marty refuses to admit his condition and seemingly, in the next few clips, moves into a series of maneuvers with other friends in which, already drunk, he carries a case of beer bottles, and soon after he seen with stomach cramps so severe that he can hardly stand up.

       The closing images demonstrate young men and women in duress, with brief clips of the 1950s about war, along with a glimpse of nuclear bomb, which created the major angst of the era.

       For Bella, evidently, the homosexual slurs of Boys Beware are simply part of the larger fabric of the misleading and utterly ineffective educational attempts regarding sex, drugs, and youth of the era. No “fact” ultimately can be believed and only confuses gender identity, while youthful sexual trauma remain in the place of knowledge.

 

Los Angeles, December 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).