Jen McGowan | On the Ride / 2020

the heart of the matter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeremy Glazer (screenplay), Jen McGowan (director) On the Ride / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

This lovely short is a real tearjerker that takes the viewer on a ride at the very moment when a survivor of a gay marriage, Scott Long (Jeremy Glazer) goes on a morning bicycle trip after his husband has died of some unnamed disease.

    In his back pack is a letter which he intends to mail, but he finds, as in 2020 we all discovered, the mailbox closed. In his mind, filled with flashbacks of his husband’s illness and death, he loses his focus and narrowly misses an accident with a car in the Los Angeles roads in which he’s riding. He ends up by the side of the road, finally realizing that it is time to take the next step, to visit the family to which has been writing to him, the son Roshawn (Spence Moore II) having received his lover’s heart as a saving live-saving transplant.

 

    The mother, played quite remarkably by Deidre Gilbert, openly greets him into her home, as he finally meets the young black man who has received his husband Todd’s heart. In a remarkable sequence the young man, who now wants to become a doctor, allows Scott to actually listen to the beating heart he has inherited.

    The mother drives the bicyclist home, welcoming him into her family and the noisy world of her son, while he returns home, alone, to celebrate Thanksgiving with alone, yet celebrating his lover who, he claims, endlessly talked.

    If this is not a particularly profound short film, it is certainly an eloquent one, a work which makes you realize the continuation of life is not necessarily spiritual, but a real possibility that exists in the possibilities of community, love, and memory.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2025).