(W.I.Z.) Andrew John Whiston | Baby / 2000

teenage angst

by Douglas Messerli

 

(W.I.Z.) Andrew John Whiston (screenwriter and director) Baby / 2000 [12 minutes]

 

A young man (Ben Whishaw, in only his third film but only four years away from his major stage role as Hamlet), is purposely overwhelmed by female and homoerotic images. By day he visits the local public pool, mostly to serve as a voyeur as he checks out the male divers and swimmers—some of whom greet his glances with delight—finally joining them in the steam room before daring to share quick glimpses of their bodies in the shower.

 

     The skater boy also appears to be heavily into drugs, at one point sitting on his skating board shaking in a manner that looks something like a slight withdrawal.

      By night the clicks of his eyes serves him as a memory screen of images to which he masturbates, and through which British director Andrew John Whiston’s film draws its audience in as shared voyeurs, reexperiencing the narrative they have already witnessed as the almost never-ending blinks of bodily imagery we all daily encounter.

      The boy, however, is still a kind of innocent, somewhat like a child embarrassed for his own body and equally afraid to share in the world of sexualized images that he witnesses even at his local grocer, with its magazine racks of women’s glamour magazines and adult porno mags equally and openly displayed.

       When our nervous young bi-sexual finally decides to leap into the pond, so to speak, he can hardly bring himself to maneuver around the dozens of bodies, large and small which fill up the space around him. Ready to leave due to self-confidence, the sudden appearance of a female beauty in a mauve one-piece bathing suit opens his eyes to the true seduction of the flesh.

       This short film ends, however, in the men’s shower, where he has now joined all the other male swimmers who’ve been forced out of the pool due to the restricted pool hours for women only.

       Into this mass of male muscle and cock, the boy plunges almost terrorized for showing an erection. But suddenly, in comic counterpart, a naked female child appears in the doorway, moving forward without pause through the mass of male flesh in search apparently of a father or uncle. The baby is the complete opposite of the young teenage “baby,” totally unaware of any of the sexual implications of nudity or gender, demonstrating perhaps what happens to us all as we gradually become sexualized through societal pressures. Our baby boy teen hopefully might take lessons from the real baby in his midst, joyful in her body, innocent, and mindless to the meaning of sexual difference.

 

      Since this movie was filmed in 2000, both British and US culture has grown even much more nervous and self-conscious about nudity and sexual difference, perceiving nearly all nudity as a potentially dangerous manipulation of others, so that such an innocent scene would surely never have been permitted, with thousands defining it as “child porno”—which perhaps reveals just how much we are now all trapped in a teenage-like angst.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).