Keith Goh Johnson | Little Lies / 2012

three suicides

by Douglas Messerli

 

Keith Goh Johnson (screenwriter and director) Little Lies / 2012 [15 minutes]

 

In this moving but also somewhat confusing short by Australian director Keith Goh Johnson, the central character Phillip (Dominic McDonald) has just long his partner Marcus of 20 years, in reaction to which, half-drunk and filled with grief, he hires a male prostitute, Tyler (Andrew Steel).

    In most such movies the “rent boy,” while he may be dangerous, is basically perceived as intellectually impaired. In his outward behavior, Tyler certainly matches the type but this prostitute is also clever, curious, and assertive.

   While Tyler showers in preparation for sex, we hear Phillip talking, clearly with Marcus’ family, about the fact that he will not be invited to the funeral itself, but will be allowed to attend the burial after, another blow to the already aggrieved lover.

     But through Tyler’s probing’s we soon after discover, according to Phillip, that Marcus had committed suicide, while the prostitute is convinced that Phillip actually “did him in,” in reaction to which the survivor races from the house, Tyler chasing after, and strips naked in an open park clearly visible to all. We cannot quite glean Tyler’s reasons for his conclusions and his sudden accusations, nor for that matter do we quite comprehend the supposedly innocent Phillip’s seeming over-reactions.

     But there are little signs that Tyler picks up: the fact that the two fought through most of those 20 years,* Tyler presuming that such a relationship cannot go on. Moreover, when he later asks Phillip, “Did you love him?” the survivor answers somewhat vaguely, “Yes, I mean, love’s never what you think it’s going to be, you know. There’s one thing that is certain though, the first time I ever saw Marcus, he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.”

     Was he jilted, was Marcus simply a bore, or was it simply erectile dysfunction, Tyler demands to know.

     Tyler, moreover, has his own story about a teen boy who, he argues, he tried to warn about going around shouting “I like cock.” The teen is severely beaten, all of his teeth now loosened. And soon after the boys hangs himself. We have to wonder, what was Tyler’s relation to the teen, what was his personal involvement? Why, indeed, is he telling, unasked, this story? Was he, perhaps, sans the morbid ending, the teen he is describing?

     In any event, we become convinced that, in fact, Phillip is not a spousal murderer. And eventually Tyler lures Phillip back into his own home, settling into bed with Tyler resting his head upon the elder’s chest rather like a father/son relationship.

      The camera suddenly reveals it is morning, with a wind-up Hawaiian dancer huluing-in the morning. Tyler, now alone in the bed, rises and switches the dancer off. But from the window of the second floor, he sees below Phillip’s body on the concrete lying apparently where he has fallen in his leap to his death. Might Tyler have been involved in this? His response is “Fuck me!”

      Now, all reality is open to question. Was Phillip lying or just in despair? We have no answers in a world trapped in “little lies” which add up to major deceptions.

 

*I must protest against Tyler’s perception. Many a relationship between two strong individuals is contentious. Howard and I, ourselves, might be described as what Jane Bowles described as a “quarreling couple,” who still also love one another after now fifty-five years. Those arguments, moreover, are also a way of releasing the tensions of all people who find themselves living together with another being after years of training to become oneself and live apart from the parental unit.