Christopher Larkin | A Very Natural Thing / 1974

where is love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Larkin and Joseph Coencas (screenplay), Christopher Larkin (director) A Very Natural Thing / 1974

 

    Even from the beginning of A Very Natural Thing we quickly perceive that the two gay men, David (Robert Joel) and Mark (Curt Gareth), who meet one night at a gay bar, are basically incompatible, and we wince a bit as David soon pushes their night of good sex into a more serious relationship.

      In the first scene of the film, we have seen David being released from his vows as a monk from a Schenectady, New York, monastery. The night he meets Mark he has driven down to New York City to visit his long-time gay friend Alan (Jay Pierce). He is, in short, a man attracted to if not still committed to spiritual beliefs, a man who has lived an ordered life of commitment, if only to the church. And he soon becomes a public-school teacher, which obviously requires a new dedication to some of the most important of normative cultural values, the education of the product of those heterosexual unions. As a teacher, just as we suspect of Mark, he has of necessity closeted off his sexual life from his daily job.

      Mark, a businessman, it is clear, picks up tricks mainly as an exciting alternative from his overly regularized schedule which, we suspect, he uses as a kind of relief valve from the highly formalized world into which he is locked. To David he even admits that at times he does also have sex with women, suggesting that his very societal role demands some restrictions to his central gay attractions.

     Clearly, however, the sex with David has been highly enjoyable, and surprisingly, perhaps even to himself, he asks if he can see him again after returning from a two-week trip to Cleveland to see his parents.

     David, it is apparent, is already quite hooked, yelling out a greeting to a stranger on the street who just happens to be wearing the same kind of suit coat Mark has worn.

     They do get together upon Mark’s return and before long are enjoying weekly outings together at Coney Island, the zoo, museums and elsewhere, even rather openly sentimentally rolling down hills. And David has begun asking the kinds of questions which Mark dismisses by dubbing David as his “fucking romantic friend.” Playing with the popular culture of the day, the writers call up the Erich Segal film Love Story from 1970, Mark responding to his friend’s predictable question “Do you love me?” with the comeback, “Love means never having to say you’re in love.”

    Yet despite Mark’s obvious resistance, David pushes the issue until we observe him moving in with his new lover shortly before he begins cooking, house cleaning, and gardening. Mark is neither a deep thinker nor a natural talker, and the tensions within him build up, despite David’s attempts to bring the problems into the open. It begins with him picking up a boy waiting outside the subway stop, and soon after expands into late-night walks in Central Park and other inexplicable absences, not so vastly different from the life of any heterosexual married partner.

     The causes for his cheating, if you want to call it that, are something quite different, however, from simply tiring of one’s wife. On the contrary Mark is still sexually very attracted to the man waiting at home. For the reasons I’ve outlined above and simply because of living outside of the constraints of normative values, queer life almost demands alternatives, what Mark and others of his kind describe as a “perfect relationship that still permits a couple to live separate lives.”

      David’s friend speaks of this in similar terms, a slightly older man explaining that he has grown used to his lover demanding outside sex and permits it, except if he were to see a beautiful young face more than once in his lover’s bed, whereupon he would quickly join him to break up any false romantic attachments. There is almost a kind of cynicism in this kind of “give and take” concept which instead of entailing compromises consists of a “commitment with limitations.”

     Yet even David comprehends those pulls in his companion, agreeing to explore new possibilities with him on Fire Island, where, however, the moment David wanders off with another man, Mark becomes jealous, and when Mark suggests group sex, David breaks away unable to continue with the anonymous groping of strangers.

     Their differences demand they reluctantly break up, with Mark, at first, half-heartedly attempting to lure David back through sex, David perceiving all along it is still a kind of test, a trap that puts him at a distant embrace without the deeper emotional attachment he seeks.

     Of course, heterosexuals also feel these pushes and pulls. It is no accident that nowadays gay marriages sometimes last longer than heterosexual ones, in part because we have been forced to be more honest, as Larkin’s film makes clear, about these various issues. It is hard to imagine that one night or even several in someone else’s arms would end in immediate divorce as it appears almost always to end in the cinema romances of husbands and wives, male and female.

     And ultimately, in this very optimistic work, David finds someone with whom he is sexually in love and to whom he can also talk in Jason (Bo White), a photographer who was formerly in a heterosexual marriage with a child, and who has had to struggle with these very issues in order to come out. Accordingly, he remains close friends with his wife, is committed to participating in the Gay Pride March, and puts the very words that one might imagine David wanting to hear in his mouth “Do you love me? “Why not move in together?” etc. by requesting them instead the standard smile alert: “cheese.”

      Only it is now David who has become skeptical, determined this time not to force commitment upon himself or someone else, but base their future not on their needs but their wants. The wait-and-see attitude this time around, bodes well for what the audience which cannot help but to perceive as a necessary coupling as the two skip naked through the Cape Cod surf.

   Not surprisingly, particularly given David’s own discomfort about the true meaning of what an annual march might mean and the film’s seeming argument for a marriage-like commitment in a time of new liberations, A Very Natural Thing was not so “naturally” well-received. Yet its positive message was something totally unavailable previously—when the vast majority of LGBTQ films ended either in suicide or with the heroes (and studios) hiding or transforming their sexuality into something else—or a few years later with AIDS looming over the horizon.

     In later films, moreover, these questions were often simply shuffled under the table because of AIDS, with more traditional marriages not only able to protect the LGBTQ figures from disease but finally being embraced by the society at large. Only a handful of films between the 1970s and early 1980s could substantially take up these issues.

     Sadly, the director of this work committed suicide in 1988. One only hopes the cause was not because he had not found a lifetime commitment or was suffering from AIDS, both of which seem possible given the time and the issues his film raises.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).