a future of which no one dares speak
by Douglas Messerli
Tom Donaghy (screenwriter, based on his play, and director) The Dadshuttle / 1994, 1996 general release
His
LGBTQ short Dadshuttle, adapted from his own play, is a work of
doublespeak, wherein a father (Peter Maloney) and his gay son (Matt McGrath)
are driving from their home where to the train station where the son, after his
visit to his family in Philadelphia, is on his way home to New York. From the
very beginning we comprehend that nothing truly will be communicated between
the two, yet a great deal is expressed nonetheless that lies behind their
verbal dodges and linguistic twists. It begins with what might have been easily
answered:
Son: And why did they
call him Yank?
Father: Oh you know,
there’s, when he was a kid
he used to...I
don’t know
Son: They just called
him that because he...
Father: It was a name
he got somewhere along the line...
but we worked for
them for something like 25 years....
Even in this brief interchange, we already perceive that nothing will be answered, nor any possible completion of their sentences proffered. Both are evidently afraid to say the obvious, that perhaps as a boy the vague “he” of whom the father speaks masturbated regularly. But we also recognize that for the most part, what they speak about is meaningless.
The son isn’t even quite sure of what his father actually does for a living. Perhaps he builds skyscrapers, yet he no longer works directly in construction but mostly meets with people. Is he a union negotiator? Does he suggest variations in the buildings’ construction or their codes? The son will never discover the answer.
The
father talks endlessly about small family matters, growing up with 15 related
family members in one house, how is wife drags him to various tourist
destinations such as The Edgar Allan Poe house, which isn’t actually Poe’s
house but a replica, and isn’t a building in which Poe lived...etc. Later on,
he begins a similar monologue about Clara Barton’s house.
The
son cannot comprehend why the family reunion picnics are always held in famous
gravesites such as at Gettysburg battlefield, as the father attempts to explain
that his wife likes to make candles, but later, after the son seems confused,
clarifies that she likes to watch the candlemakers at Gettysburg make candles.
There is an entire conversation about a relative who gets “frequent
flyer passes” that are good only on the train. The man travels back and forth
endlessly on the train, getting up and going without saying anything to his
kids. The son cannot even find out why he, whoever he might be, doesn’t talk to
his kids other than the father’s proclamation that the whole family is just
crazy.
There are incomplete sentences spun out about the son’s brother, Marty,
who’s disturbed evidently that no one told him that their mother is seeing, so
it seems, a psychiatrist. No one around them, the father insists, ever go to
psychiatrists which the son understandably finds impossible to believe.
A
later mention of the other younger brother comes back into the conversation
with the father’s statement that “He’s getting better you know. All his friends
come to the house.” He evidently has a girlfriend, but he never calls her; she
only calls him. Again the communication breaks down without us discovering what
Marty is getting better from, or what might have previously been wrong with
him. Our only clue is that he seems to be very much like his mother.
And as issues about the boy’s mother creep into the conversation, the
father keeps moving away from them to further describe visits, other family
members, and pieces of furniture they have recently purchased.
It
gets even worse when the son begins attempting to ask if when he comes home at
Christmas he can bring someone home with him. It takes several tries to even
get that question posed, which the father immediately deflects by saying that
he needs to ask his mother about that. But the son finally breaks through to
say that he would like to have Paul over, who the son’s father keeps confusing
with a waiter who has spilled something over him at one time in the past. The
son attempts to explain that Paul is not that waiter, but does work as a
waiter.
Slowly as the father rattles on about the Edgar Allan Poe which is not a
house, we begin to perceive that the son wants to invite Paul to the family
Christmas because he is all alone, and from there we begin the realize, despite
the barrage of miscellaneous interruptions what the father seems to refuse to
comprehend, that Paul is the son’s lover.
After a sudden interruption by the father about “all this stuff”; “We’re
still reading about all this stuff, for years now....People magazine
keep having these articles about these young guys who work in New York
City...girls now too....all these young people they get sick and they don’t get
better.” And suddenly while the son is now insistent about correcting his
father’s notion that he works in a bar, we realize that the elder is talking
about AIDS.
Finally, the son shouts out, that he doesn’t need to worry. “I take care
of myself....” And finally, as his father goes on and on about “all this
sickness,” he cries out “I don’t have sex. I don’t have sex.”
The
significance of that outburst finally begins to explain to us that Paul, his
lover, indeed has AIDS, the reason for the son no longer having sex. And
slowly, in between endless meaningless harangues on anything that crosses the
father’s frightened mind, his son reveals that he too has gotten tested.
We
never quite find out if he is positive or negative since the two have a
ridiculous discussion about the ambiguity of those words—the father is
convinced that “positive” means good. But we can glimpse the boy’s fear. And it
slowly dawns on us that his father is equally worried about the health of his
wife, the son’s mother.
Neither ever express their feelings or even convey the truth of their
partners’ conditions to one another. But we now recognize that this shuttle
between son and father has been a voyage very much like Charon rowing the dead
to the underworld.
We
can almost be certain that neither father nor son will see one another again
except perhaps at a funeral, and perhaps not even then, since if the mother
dies first, the son will surely be occupied with his dying lover; and if Paul
dies, the family will surely not wish to attend a funeral in New York City.
For a few seconds, now and then, it almost appears that they have
communicated something below or above the torrent of intentional
miscommunications. Yet as they finally arrive at the door to the underworld, they
have nothing left to say but to awkwardly signify their love.
For me, this is the saddest story of the group, even though, unlike the in
so many of the others films, no one in this work has yet died, and we truly
know nothing about the mother or Paul—or Marty or the dozens other family
members they superficially list. We just know that both father and son are
scarred, terribly frightened beings, unable to even communicate their fears to
themselves let alone to one another.
Los Angeles, March 19, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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