Robert Ian Simpson and Sara Wolkowitz | Lightning Bugs in a Jar / 2015

family life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Ian Simpson (screenplay), Robert Ian Simpson and Sara Wolkowitz (directors) Lightning Bugs in a Jar / 2015 [19 minutes]

 

It’s truly rare these days when a short US film featuring gay figures is not about the problems and difficulties of their relationship, but employs the strength and love of their relationship as a support for other family problems.

     Robert Ian Simpson and Sara Wolkowitz’s film begins in the house where Max (Devin McDuffee) grew up. His mother, Farrah (a wonderful Betsy Aidem) is selling the place in the beautiful Catskills after years of no one living there, and her son Max and his lover Ben (Ethan Slater) have come over from their university to help pack up. Indeed, by the time the slightly ditzy and seemingly independent-minded mother arrives, the boys have finished the packing, she complaining only that she thought it perhaps would look more “tidy.”

     Yet, she is hardly a “tidy” individual, in the very first scene in which we see here demanding the driver stop so that she can pee by the side of the road. In fact, she is the kind of woman with whom Max’s lover Ben gets on very well, seeming to be a sort of buffer between her and Max, who clearly can’t bear to be around his mother with a history that we discover later on he has never revealed to Ben.

     Most of the early part of the film, in fact, appears to be almost a mystery story as we attempt to discover why Farrah, clearly a larger than life figure and certainly an untypical mother figure drives Max crazy, leading him to demand sex with him the moment her car is heard in the driveway—ending obviously in her discovery of the two boys in the middle of an orgasm—or why, quite inexplicably, he leans far out of the car to smoke a cigarette as they drive to a grocery, Ben explaining to Farrah that he doesn’t usually behave in this manner. Her answer: that she realizes that he saves up all his craziness to react to her the very few times they encounter one another, the two behaving like “lightnings bugs in a jar.”

      There is certainly some truth to her metaphor, as we observe Max buying up 12-packs of beer as if they were intending to stay on for weeks, although Ben reminds his boyfriend that they’re leaving the very next day.

      Farrah meanwhile buys a birthday cake which she asks, in a truly unthinking and spontaneous moment, to top with the name, Tanner, who we soon learn was Max’s adored younger brother, suffering from autism. Knowing that it will send Max into a frenzy, she quickly smashes out the red moniker, making it look like an absurd childish finger painting, which when Max comments on its dreadful appearance, she declares reminds her of one of his butterfly finger paintings when he was in second grade, this one, in particular, she recalls “I can close my eyes and see everything about it, the white spots, the pink wings, how it looked in flight…like it was already leaving us. You captured something right before it was gone.”

      If there was ever a moment for Ben, who has been there with her during the whole time since she rubbed out the name Tanner, to realize the marvelous and daffy creativity of Max’s mother, it is this moment, and the humorous incident draws us closer to her character is well. She lies so deftly about what, at that moment, seems so meaningless, that we are almost left in wonder at the ramblings of her mind.

     But soon after, several drinks and slices of cake later, when she suddenly demands the two boys drive with her, we begin to perceive the truth behind her and her son’s enmity. As they travel along a road when Ben driving and Farrah signaling the directions, Max suddenly becomes aware of where she is taking them and becomes furious, demanding to get out of the car, racing off into the woods.

     The two sit alone in the car together, Ben startled by the event asking her, why his Max still so angry about his brother Tanner’s death. She suggests that he imagines it still as his responsibility, his failure to protect him. But Ben continues in his speculations, why should he feel that way about a boy who died of meningitis.

     Is that what he told you? Farrah, more than little taken aback, replies. No Tanner did not die of meningitis, but following his elder brother’s kite, entered onto the highway where was hit, first by one car and, then immediately afterwards, by another, all in front of the young Max’s eyes. She comments that she doesn’t know if he was already dead before the second hit him.

     Just as this is slowly sinking in to Ben’s and our own imaginations, she adds, and I am so appreciative that he is still protecting me after all these years with his story about meningitis, because he hasn’t explained where I was, drunk and passed out at 2:00 in the afternoon. Her brave admission sadly explains everything and forgives what has earlier appeared as a childishly resentful behavior of her gay son.

     Ben and she drive on to the cemetery to where she has been heading, paying brief homage to the autistic child killed in a meaningless traffic accident. As they drive back home past the place where Max has left the car, she wonders whether they shouldn’t look for Max, but Ben assures her that he’ll call when he wants to. Perhaps it will do him good to be alone for a while.

      Farrah turns to him, almost for the first time admitting his existence, replying that sadly she doesn’t even know his last name, but is so happy that Max has him as someone to love and rely upon.

      As twilight falls, Max calls and is picked up by Ben, the two returning for lovely sex, the curative of sorts for a soul who lost a part of himself in a moment of mutual neglect. The next day, before their return to their college campus, Max visits the grave, Ben obviously waiting in the car, Max’s life support, his gay lover.

      I repeat the sentiment with which I began this essay: it is rare when being gay is not the problem of a film, but rather the answer to the trauma facing all of us, in different ways, of family life. And this beautiful filmed work by Robert Ian Simpson and Sara Wolkowitz is a near masterpiece in that respect, a work justifiably chosen for inclusion in the short film corner of the Cannes Film Festival.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).