the quarrelsome siblings
by Douglas Messerli
Carl Pfirman (screenwriter and director) Boy Next Door / 1999
[13 minutes]
How time flies and next-door heartthrobs differ in a mere 95 years. In 1904 a girl like Judy Garland’s Esther Smith could expect that with a just a few prods—a high school party and a meet-up on the trolley on it’s way to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition—that she’d lasso her age-appropriate boy next door, John Truett, in Meet Me in St. Louis.
But by 1999, at the end of the same century, there is serious competition between brother and sister, Chris (Tom Lenk) and Charlotte (Piper Harrell), for the hunky new neighborhood boy Rick (Robin Larsen) who lives just across the street in their suburban community.
Even more outrageous
than the sibling rush to fetch the handsome new pool boy a coke in the 2017 gay
Coca-Cola ad wherein their mother beats them to it, Chris swirls his sister’s
toothbrush in the toilet bowl and rubs hair dandruff into it, while Charlotte
steals the gay porn mags from under his bed and refuses to return them—all in
punishment for each other’s attempts to entice the boy to which they claim courting
rights.
Instead of the motherly
support that Garland receives from Mary Astor, these siblings’ mother demands
their get their “bitchety, faggoty asses” into their bedrooms before her date
arrives.
On the boy front, Charlotte
is awarded a ride in his red roadster, while Chris enjoys a bicycle outing with
the body beautiful Rick.
Yet in the end, it is all
for naught; while the two stage a front lawn brawl, Rick’s girlfriend (Lindsy
Fellenbaum) shows up to be embraced and kissed. She’s a beauty, but since she’s
wearing bibbed-overalls perhaps writer/director Pfirman is hinting, at least in
the stereotypical view of costume, that Rick might be equally attracted to both
female and male genders.
Los Angeles, September 30, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).
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