by Douglas Messerli
Trevor Anderson (screenwriter and director) The Island / 2008,
2010 USA [6 minutes]
The independent filmmaker from northern
Alberta, Canada, Trevor Anderson, might as well be on an island as he treks
through the snow to tell his comic anecdote and share his animated response.
“You fucking faggots! You’re a disgrace to
society. You should all be put on an island so that you can give each other
AIDS.”
The rest of Anderson’s short film consists of his contemplating, “Why
not?” as he imagines a “homo utopia” on the tropical island of his imagination,
a gay Israel, a kind of “ass-munching diaspora.” He recognizes that the idea of
an “island” for gays is not exactly something new. He grew up with it, he
contemplates, being part of the “rhetorical landscape of his small-town prairie
childhood.” The sentence, “They should send them all to an island,” being a
common expression of gay dissatisfaction in the local bars.
But this new island, where gays are supposed to all give one another
AIDS, he argues, is “a way better idea.” The very idea of “humping” all day
long intrigues him. “It would be like the ‘70s all over again,” he argues, “but
better because it’s on an island”—an animated scene from the film displaying a
warm, tropical space, filled with coconuts and bananas. Finally, gays could
make up all the rules.
He
even imagines, should someone not survive, the pleasures the island might still
provide him, gathering around him at twilight, covering him with moonflower
blossoms and decorating his skin with “rub-on sailor tattoos.” And as the
pounding tide sounds in the background, to sing him a last song and jettison
him into the mouth of the volcano “to worship him as a god.”
Those who suffer from AIDS and the millions of us who lived through the
AIDS epidemic might not be so very amused by Anderson’s somewhat cynical
satire. And even Anderson admits that despite the charms of such a “faggot
island” it seems, well—as he continues to tromp through the vast open space of
snow alone—"kind of lonely.” Presumably, he, like most of us, needs the
heterosexual world as well as they need us to define the complexities of the
human race.
Los Angeles, April 25, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April
2023).
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