McGhee Monteith | He Could've Gone Pro / 2016

oblivion

by Douglas Messerli

McGhee Monteith (screenwriter and director) He Could've Gone Pro / 2016 [14 minutes]

 

He Could’ve Gone Pro is an angry little film, featuring as the focus of derision a stock character, a chain-smoking, mean-minded, unthinking and unblinking Southern granny right out of Flannery O’Connor and later diversions into the Southern gothic mode through horror films, Gayle Kellum (Cecelia Wingate).

     Her daughter Debbie (the film’s writer and director McGhee Monteith) hardly can deign to talk to her, let alone keep her abreast of her life, evidently having never revealed that she is now living with Lamar Bedford (Stephen Garrett), and that the only reason that they return home for Christmas in the standard $200 check that Gayle puts in the stockings over her hearth along with the numerous angel figurines she scatters across her living room.

     She even sets an extra plate at the table, not for Elijah, but for Debbie’s brother who “died” as a young high school boy, the young football-playing boy who, as the title argues, “Could’ve gone Pro.” Debbie has no intention of hanging around for Gayle’s honey-baked ham, but sticks around to get her check—as Lamar reminds her in the car, they could use the extra money—and, this year, to reveal to Lamar just what a monster her mother truly is.

     Unfortunately, we’re so distracted by Debbie’s revenge and Gayle’s absolute denial of the truth and her inability to comprehend her actions and viewpoints, that we almost lose sight of the story at the heart of this Christmas horror tale, another of the numerous queer American dystopias.

     A few drinks pass through her lips before Debbie begins to reveal the truth about her brother Daniel, events surrounding his death that have not allowed her to sleep, as she admits, for 10 years.

When she demands that Gayle tell Lamar how her brother Daniel died, the gorgon can only report that his “heart stopped beating.” Gayle sarcastically agrees, “This tends to happen when you shoot yourself in a closet with a hunting rifle.” “Lamar,” she continues, “would you like to know why my big brother shot himself,” as he pours herself another whiskey. “Daniel blew his brains out because mamma saw him kissing Jason Gordon, a boy from our school.”

      Like so many of these stories, the boy’s mother told him he was sick and threatened to send him to a conversion camp, denying her love, and, in her last words to him, told him “If you choose to live this perverse life, then you are dead to me.”

     The mother’s defense: “What was I supposed to do, stand by and watch? He would have lost everything, scholarships, babies, a normal life. He could’ve gone pro. What was I supposed to do.”

Debbie’s answer is simple and pure: “You were supposed to love him. You were supposed to love us.”

     Debbie, who as a young child stood by and said nothing, admits she will be tortured for the rest of her life for her inaction. But here the question of what we might suppose the child to have done has true meaning. Could she have stopped her mother from speaking her awful words of hate? Might she have changed her mother’s mind had she spoken up?

     So, she and Lamar collect their check and leave after respooling yet another US horror story about homophobia still embedded deeply in our roots.

     But lest we imagine that the mind of someone like Gayle Kellum could ever be changed, we watch her repeat the scene from the first frames of the film immediately after her daughter leaves the house. She picks up the fallen angels Debbie has knocked over, takes out a cigarette, and like Tennessee Williams’ mother in The Glass Menagerie, Amanda Wingfield, she picks up the phone and makes another call to a neighboring friend, with a “Happy happy and a ho ho to you,” immersing herself in a world of mean-spirited gossip, solving the problems of the world without a clue to understanding those involved in difficult situations that do not fit her world view.

     It is sad that in the 21st Century we still have so very many LGBTQ films telling stories of self-murder and attempted suicide by young men and women who because of their sexual differences from the heterosexual world in which they lived, were rejected by their parents. Among them are the characters in Marcus Schwenzel Bruderliebe (Brotherly Love) (2009), Mikel Ledesma’s Losing Your Flames (2014).  Miguel Lafuente Mi Hermano (My Brother) (2015), Lucas Morales’ Pourquoi mon fils? (Why My Son?) (2015), Daniel Castilhos’ Meninos Tristes (Blue Boys) (2016), Farbod Khostinat’s Two Little Boys (2020), Daniel G. Karslake’s documentary For They Know Not What They Do (2020), and Alan Ball’s Uncle Frank (2020)—not to mention the dozens of films in which young boys are locked out of their homes and must face a life on the streets or, in a few cases, are outright murdered by their parents or relatives for their sexual “perversions.”

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).