Ron Fisher | 1st Shade of the Heart / 2024

love thwarted

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ron Fisher (screenwriter and director) 1st Shade of the Heart (2024) [11.30 minutes]

 

Ron Fisher’s 2024 short film 1st Shade of the Heart is yet another tale of a young gay boy who just isn’t ready or who doesn’t have the courage to come out. It’s an endless tale, and reveals once more just how the heteronormative world holds control of young minds. You might think that as late as 2024 that young boys and men might have been able to escape the forces that make them suffer, but in Tom’s case (Stuart Bassett), despite his brief affair with a boy he meets at a party (Cale Kazmeirczak), he just can’t escape the chains to which he’s attached himself to heteronormative behavior.

      Apparently the two boys even have sex, although we don’t get a glimpse of it in this film, one of the increasingly Puritanical series of films that have recently been released; but he just can’t commit himself to a gay relationship. In this case, at least, he recognizes that his resistance is a problem within himself, even asking his friend, “Do you think I’m a bad person?” He also keeps a shield of heterosexual being by describing himself as simply “complicated.”

     Obviously, the pushes and pulls of his inner self are at war with what he has been taught. Even a discussion of Christ “walking on water,” leads him to describe it as blasphemy. Without making it entirely clear, director Ron Fisher suggests that Tom is a child of a highly religious upbringing.

     Usually, in such films there is a resolution, a discovery that leads the confused figure out of the darkness of the fear, but no such luck in this short. Tom’s would-be lover, after a final hug, drives off into the dark accompanied by the sad music of Frank and his daughter Nancy’s “Somethin’ Stupid”:

 

I know I stand in line

Until you think you have the time

To spend an evening with me

And if we go some place to dance

I know that there's a chance

You won't be leaving with me

 

Then afterwards we drop into a quiet little place

And have a drink or two

And then I go and spoil it all

By saying somethin' stupid like, "I love you" 

 

    The young man of this film is simply not ready to be loved by another man, and will clearly have to go through the long heartbreak of many a heterosexual relationship, perhaps even marriage, before he recognizes how truly stupid he has been to deny himself what he truly desires.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).