cacophony and silence
by Douglas Messerli
Zac Goold (screenwriter and director) Out /
2020 [5.23 minutes]
Irish director Zac Goold’s 2020 short Out
is a one-line “joke” that keeps getting delayed in being told by a team of
impatient and seemingly caring parents terrified by the fact that their son has
called them together so that they might talk.
If we easily foretell it, his dear da and ma keep imagining their own
alternative perceptions of what he is about to announce. His father’s (Carl
Nuzum) emphatic query: “It’s not the drink, Ben?” to which their son’s denial
is quickly overwhelmed by their mutual recounting of other neighbors and
friends who have had such problems with their alcoholic sons, followed by
sentences such as “They got him the help he needed,” “We can help you,” etc.
Finally, Ben’s insistence that “It’s not the drink” seemingly puts them
back on track to possibly listen to the confessions he’s been attempting to
express. “What is it then/” asks his mother Alice (Janet Little).
“Is it about girls?” asks David, the father.
“Well, sort of, yes.”
“Are you dating someone?” his mother wonders.
A
pause before the father dares to utter the word: “Masturbating?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ almighty” Alice wails as if having just been told that
someone close to her has died.
“Masturbation is the work of the devil” his father repeats what he must
have many times in his young’s son’s life.
When Ben assures them that he’s not been masturbating—a strange white
lie, it appears to me, at the very moment he is about to confess something far
more startling to their sensibilities—his mother even more oddly adds, almost
as in relief, “We should be able to see that.”
Ben, nearly as confused as the viewer is, ponders if they might be
electronically surveilling him.
His mother reaches up and pulls down the large family Bible, thumping it
upon the table before him with loud bang: “Matthew 5, 30. If thy right hand
offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.....” I think we can safely say
we would have noticed, she reckons, if you’d been doing something like that.
At that point one might imagine that any normal human being might have
abandoned his original intention, but Ben still soldiers on, the parental
interruptions continuing (“What did you want to tell us then sweetie?” “You can tell us anything, it’s okay.”) as he
seeks to finally find the fortitude to tell these logomaniac monsters the
truth.
“We love you,” one says.
“We love you and we support you,” enjoins the other.
By this time in the picture we feel that if there is any truth to
psychological explanations for queer behavior, we have been shown all the
evidence possible for Ben’s aversion to normative behavior.
Once more, Alice slaps the Bible to the table and reads out a passage,
while her son finally almost painfully whimpers: “I’m gay. I like boys.”
The room in which he sits suddenly grows absolutely silent, utterly
hushed for the first time since the parents have entered into the cinematic
frame.
“Is anyone going to say anything?” Ben eventually pleads.
“Oh, we’re speechless.”
Blackout. Music.
It might be interesting to compare this work with the short of 2015 by
Mexican-American director Alejandro Ibarra’s, Safe and Sound, which
begins with a scene that might lead us to suspect that its central character is
about to make the same confession only to completely invert our presumptions
with a far more problematic announcement to his family that allows for a far
deeper resonance.
I don’t think we can read Goold’s 5.23 minute work as a realist text,
but rather simply recognize it as being what I suggested in the first line of
this review: a comic routine. If there had ever been a gay vaudeville, this
might have been one of its most beloved skits.
Los Angeles, November 17, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(July 2025).
No comments:
Post a Comment