David Lange | Mein Anderer (My Other) / 2017

gay paranoia

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Lange (screenwriter and director) Mein Anderer (My Other) / 2017 [26 minutes]

 

Good boy Leo (Bjön Helge Jochum), having just finished his high school diploma and now working on an internship, is openly gay, but dissatisfied concerning love. With his best female friend Eli, he argues that he is better off without a boyfriend, which evidently for him means he’s better off without sex. Eli describes it as simply meaning that her friend his not yet ready for sex.

     She and her boyfriend invite him to a party, which he’s leery of attending, but finally agrees to attend. There he meets an older drug addict (Alejandro Nicolás), who offers him a joint before later, in the bathroom, inviting him into a toilet stall to share a snort of cocaine.

      They dance and decide to head to his new friend’s house, where they have sex.

    What might have been a simple film about a young unsure gay boy finding sexual fulfillment suddenly turns to a work of what might be described gay paranoia, as Leo wakes up to the reality of what has just happened. In fact, the lug he has gone home with is someone hard to imagine a good-looking kid like Leo being attracted to. But his reaction to the situation goes much further as Leo suddenly realizes that his bedroom partner has fucked him without a condom. Instead of realizing any self-responsibility, he blames “the other” for having taken advantage of him, of having basically drugged him and intentionally fucked him without protection.

       When he confronts the man with whom he wakes up in bed, the other seems unperturbed, rightfully pointing out that Leo hadn’t asked for a condom and moreover that he seemed to fully enjoy it. His diffident attitude further troubles Leo as he wonders whether unprotected sex with others boy is a regular thing for the man with whom he’s just has sex. Apparently, it is.

        Storming out of the house, Leo meets up with his female friend Eli, who at first also doesn’t quite comprehend his terror, and moreover, blames him for not properly choosing the right partner and seeking out proper protection.

        Surely, Leo will now have to have an AIDS test.

        But when he storms out on Eli as well, we realize that Leo is not only an immature being, but that his sexual distancing of himself, his disinterest of participating in parties where he might be seen and, as he puts it, judged or evaluated, is part and parcel of his homosexual hysteria. Always playing the seduced passive, he cannot admit to his own sexual desires or the consequences those desires have.

        In the end, he almost blames his own parents or the generation before him who counseled: “When we are small, we were told: Do whatever you want to do and love what you do. What do you want? Who do you wanna be? You just need to figure it out. Then you’ll be happy.” His credible question: “Is that the way it goes.”

        There is no question that the generation of young gay men coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s must surely have felt just those feelings, that the promises of open gay pleasure promised them by the elders of the day had become their own death knell, that they had been somehow led down at path that turned deadly without their having fully realized the consequences.

        But a young man coming of age in 2017 must surely have realized not only the responsibilities that come with such attitudes, but the fact that HIV-infection, as terrifying as it might be to anyone, was not necessarily a death sentence. And to go around blaming others for his own naivete and obviously unfulfilled desires is not the problem of the other, but of the self.

        We seem to have spawned a whole generation of young men and women who blame the other for all their sexual fears and confusions. A subtly solicited touch, a night that ends with an unexpected turn of events, an attraction that can’t quite be controlled has been hoisted on the shoulders of the “other,” the older, more mature, more self-confident, less paranoid “others” of their world who unnecessarily become the villains for all their sexual insecurities. Rape, unwanted groping, even excessive verbal flirtation are all things to be removed from our encounters with others. But there also are situations when individuals actively engage and wake up with regret, falsely blaming or accusing the “other” for their previous night-before desires and actions. Mistakes are made, but they are not always the fault of someone else.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).