Nate Trinrud | Goodbye, Charley / 2015

suffering the consequences

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nate Trinrud (screenwriter and director) Goodbye, Charley / 2015 [6 minutes]

 

Using the age-old trope of a ghost haunting his past and even attending, as Huck Finn does, his own funeral (in this case, in form a school memorial service), US director Nate Trinrud introduces us to Charley (Austin McKenzie), a high school boy who no one seems to remember.

     In the brief 6 minutes we catch images of reasons why Charley’s death may have been a suicide: his love affair, in back hallways and empty locker room between him and the popular school athlete Chris (Ryan Nunn), the empty stares when his name is invoked in front of other students, and an incident when Chris himself has sprayed his friend’s locker in red letters reading “Faggot.”

     It’s not always a good thing to haunt one’s own past, particularly when homophobia still stalks these high school halls. The Principal (Elizabeth Herron) announces a memorial service, which only a handful of his peers attend. And when the school loud-speaker notifies students that they are able to seek counseling if necessary, but we are certain that no one will rush off to the counselor’s office in the next days.

     But finally, alone in the locker room, the ghost of Charley finds the seeming unflappable school jock Chris, sitting alone bawling his eyes out, clearly in need of counseling, but given his homophobia and self-hate unable to seek it out.

     Alas, the dead cannot succor the living, and Chris destroyed the love that might had transformed him into a happier human being. This is yet another short tale that shows us the tendency, as Oscar Wilde put it, of each man destroying the thing he most loves.

      This film of deep sentiment has some problems concerning its inability to distinguish events from the past with those going on in the present moment of the framed story. Although it appears that Chris scrawls “faggot” on his locker door while Charley is haunting the halls, it would make far more sense to have located it in the past, representing another cause of Charley’s death. And we might have felt more involved with both Charley and Chris if only we had been provided with a little more backstory about their relationship other than being broadcast the standard tropes that spell out what we know too well about brutalized gay boys in a high school setting. And in that sense, Trinrud’s short seems to be more of an essay on the problem than a heartfelt rendering based on his own or someone else’s immediate experience.

      And, finally, there are other ways of reacting to gay school romances than to reveal the homophobia of the other. One only has to turn to the first of the contemporary “coming out” story Get Real of 1998 to perceive that the hurt of being rejected because of the other lover’s inability to accept his own sexuality need not end in death.

 

Los Angeles, February 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).