Jacob Kernis | Who You Wanted All the Time / 2024

an unlikeable trio

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kyla Kralapp (screenplay), Jacob Kernis (director) Who You Wanted All the Time / 2024 [13 minutes]

 

It’s hard to know with whom to even sympathize in Jacob Kernis, Who You Wanted All the Time. Beck (Caleb White), a pre-law student, is an insecure man who is now suddenly faced with a hearing product. Although Beck is clearly the one with whom we are meant to feel empathy, he basically dismisses his previous roommate and friend, Jasper (Diego Andres Rodriquez), with whom he obviously desires a relationship. Besides, he, like Jasper, has spotted a handsome new boy Georgie (Jamie Martin Mann).

   If Beck is uncertain in how to approach Georgie, the latter is not at all afraid to play tricks in order to get to meet Beck, pretending in the library that he can’t find a certain book—he’s completely looking in the wrong section of the library—and begging for the pre-law student’s help. Beck quickly takes him to the book, and to Jasper, who serves as check-out librarian.

    Before they know it, both have been invited to a private party at Georgie’s, who, with a wink, suggests they can “play games.”

    Which indeed they do, as he takes out masks, forcing them to put them on, and, as a kind of ritualistic indication of friendship, demands that they each sacrifice something of great importance.

    Jasper flirtatiously sacrifices his fear to tell Georgie the truth; he wonders can he sacrifice that? Only if he promises to never lie, argues Georgie.

    Beck, momentarily suffering a serious problem with his ears and his thought processes, has a sort of emotional breakdown, finally after a long silence with inner turmoil, sacrificing Jasper himself, willingly giving him up to Georgie. Is Jasper the mysterious you of the title?

     A short time later we see that Georgie and Jasper have, in fact, developed a relationship which clearly now excludes Beck.

     The viewer, however, has difficulty in knowing how to react to this. We have only the slightest evidence that Jasper and Beck actually saw themselves as a couple, or that Beck wished they might truly get together. Mostly he spouts a principle about law concerning the famed ternary of the judicial system: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

     But what this means precisely in terms of his desires and what he has truly sacrificed is never made clear. How can you truly sacrifice another person without owning or controlling them? What writer Kyla Kralapp and Kernis are suggesting is simply that Beck has given up his desires for a relationship with Jasper that seemed to have never truly prospered enough—given his lack of confidence—to mean anything in the first place. Are we, accordingly, meant to feel deep empathy for him now to be locked out of the new relationship with Jasper and Georgie?

     And then what kind of a friend might Jasper be, to so totally exclude Beck not only from his own company but from Georgie’s, knowing as he does that Beck has been attracted to him.

    And what kind of person is the intruder Georgie who forces his future companion to don a mask and sacrifice something special in order to find love? I might suggest he is an untrustworthy manipulator. And does he, himself, have no preference of the two “candidates” for his sexual desires? What does it say about a relationship that’s based on what the other might do for you?

    Finally, what does Beck’s possible sudden hearing loss have to do with all this? Is it a metaphor for his inability to hear what has actually been going on between his two acquaintances? If he is losing his hearing, moreover, are the film’s creators simply using his disability to make us pity and side with him?

    In the end, there is just too much confusion about this story to render it meaningful. We realize that we don’t actually know any of these characters, and what little we’ve been shown in the 13 minutes we encounter them, makes us want to turn away and find another trio upon whom we might better focus.

 

Los Angeles, August 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).