Robert Metson | Ticking Boxes / 2020

dynamite

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Metson (screenwriter and director) Ticking Boxes / 2020 [8 minutes]    

 

Like so many gay men still locked in a heterosexual marriage, Matthew Reynolds (Robert Douglas Metson) spends much of his time lying to his wife, Jennifer (Mega Greaves), creating business problems that will last him through the night, or making imaginary business trips during which he can steal away a few hours with another gay or, in the case of Ryan Baptiste (Shaun Cowlishaw), a pan-sexual man.

    Unlike so many short-lasting sexual encounters Matthew hooks up with, Ryan is honest and calls Matthew on his hiding behind marriage when he notices the ring on his friend’s finger. Matthew could have perhaps, like “ticking off boxes,” escaped any of the reality of Ryan’s observations as well, but this night in he was finally told off and engaged in a fight, not because Ryan necessarily disapproved of bisexuality, but because of Matt’s inability himself to know who he was. Matthew even removed the ring in hopes that it would not impede the sex he was sure to come.

    Not only does Matthew come home with a black-eye, however, but Ryan sends a packet to Jennifer in which he has enclosed the wedding ring that Matthew has taken off when he recognized Ryan’s disapproval.

     As the IMDb brief summary correctly comments, the “illusion of his idyllic life begins to crumble,” or more rightly we might describe it as quickly collapsing on him a bit like the roof of a house in an earthquake. Such relationship don’t just crumble, they always explode like dynamite.

      Suddenly there are no lies he can tell, nothing to fully explain away the red and black swelling under his eye, or certainly not a marriage ring arriving via special delivery.

      In fragmented glimpses of what happened last night, we see Ryan trying to tell the shallow, self-infatuated Matthew that “deep-down” he was unhappy; as Ryan argues to his friend, “You can’t just force yourself on people,” a comment to which he might have added, “in order to play out your fantasy about who you really are.”

    When Jennifer finally demands an explanation, recognizing his half-hearted lies for what they portend, he is such a fearful coward that he cannot even speak. He hasn’t the language to even explain his transgressions to her and himself. As Jennifer packs up to leave, he still even then blames others: “I keep thinking I’ve been caught in a trap,” without recognizing that if it is a trap, it is one of his own creation.

      All he does perceive is that he was too scared to “tick outside the box,” the box being also one of his own making—and all those of his family, educators, and others who influenced his upbringing who had convinced him and themselves that life needed to be lived in a box—and into which he accordingly implanted both himself and his imaginary (but all too real) wife.

    As those who have read my other essays on gay men who remain duplicitously in straight relationships, I have little sympathy, just as I am still impatient about my own several years that I drooled over boys who might have been perfectly ready to help me come out. But like this film’s sad figure Matt, I too was frightened, too brainwashed, perhaps still too naïve to even realize that I needed to make a decision, that I could fulfill my sublimated and not so hidden desires simply by reaching out to touch and hold someone other than those I had been told were not properly available. But at least in my case it was the box that even more terrified me; my parents’ insistence that the girl I was pretend-dating was already their daughter-in-law, and my mother’s visit with her to a furniture store where together they conspired to pick the ugliest furniture in the place that would become the center pieces of “our” apartment or house. I was horrified by their full embracement of an event she and I had never even discussed and the kitsch values that both my mother and she represented. No box for me! It must have been at that very moment when I finally realized I was truly different and not just going through a stage in life from which I would eventually fly free of the ugly, self-hating cocoon my society had woven for me. I must have realized I was already a butterfly.

    British writer and director Metson’s version of this common scenario has been far better done in feature films such as Making Love (1982) and The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), to name just two earlier films in which gay men have had to face the mistakes of heterosexual marriage, even when, as those in these films, they still loved the women with whom they lived. But perhaps the good-looking white cis pretend hetero-boys who dominate this world, and who probably served as bullies to the gay boys all during high school, have seldom been better exposed.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).