Trevor Scholtens | Boys Beware 2 / 2019

the driver as homophobe

by Douglas Messerli

 

Trevor Scholtens (screenwriter and director) Boys Beware 2 / 2019 [4.25 minutes]

 

At this point no title connected with anything about Boys Beware as number 2 seems meaningful, since we have had dozens of such rewrites, satires, and re-interpretations, as is apparent from the previous entries. But young directors clearly may not know the entire history of what has almost become a franchise, so we should perhaps simply forgive US director Trevor Scholtens for his presumption of being the only second version of the title. His short film, fortunately, is an interesting revisit of the original.

      In this film, the young boys are in college, removing them from the teenage context of the original, and allowing us to see the film a bit more objectively. A college boy Johnny is walking to his house after a long, stressful day at school. Tiring, he sits on the side of road to rest. Soon a man in a car stops by and offers him a ride. The man looks and Johnny, always ready to make a new friend, jumps into the auto.

       Like Jimmy in the original version, Johnny finds the man enjoyable to talk to and a good listener, and is delighted, according, when the man suggests that, since he drives that way every day, he’d be glad to pick him up the next day well.

       The following day, in fact, the two meet up again, Johnny delighted for the ride. This time the driver complains of an annoying co-worker: “He was being a real fag today.” Taken aback, Johnny asks the man not to use that slur, the driver curious about his reaction. Johnny explains that hate speech is not okay. The driver is still curious why the boy is so offended, Johnny replying that he is gay.

       At this point the driver suddenly stops the car and demands the boy get out, which Johnny does, walking the rest of the way home.

      The narrator now references the earlier Boys Beware film: “Johnny had thought he’d made a new friend. But what he didn’t know is that the man was sick. The sickness was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous. A sickness of the mind. You see, the man was a homophobe, somebody who has an extreme an irrational hatred toward members of the LGBTQ community.”

       Johnny turned out okay, we’re told. But we’re reminded that not all homophobes are passive. Some resort to violence—the narrator now bring in real-life examples—"which is the case of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. They tortured and murdered Matthew Shepard on October 6, 1998 after offering him a ride home.”

        A final title reads: “According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs 52 hate related homicides of LGBTQ people were reported in 2017.”

        In 2022 there were a reported 1,944 incidents of hate violence due to sexual orientation, a rise from the previous year. One wonders if, in fact, there may be more young gay men being attacked, abused, and killed by homophobes than young boys being molested by gay men. The statistics are difficult to determine since, as we know, such molestation is difficult to separate out by sexual orientation, the molestation sometimes also committed by homophobes whose fear for their own sexuality which often results in hate and violence and, of course, by pedophiles who make no gender distinction and cannot form relationships with other adults. As with rape, child molestation often has more to do with power and control than it does with sexual desire.

       Scholtens’ film does not fully probe these issues, unfortunately, and the narrative voice, probably that of the director, represents such amateur acting that it quickly disengages the viewer in the director’s important subject.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).