Louis Reinke | Him / 2025

from fantasy to obsession

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Reinke and Molly Chivers-Cousins (screenplay), Louis Reinke (director) Him / 2025 [5.30 minutes]

 

Almost all of us have fantasies that we play over and over again in our imagination. How many times have I replayed that amazing afternoon when in Norway the school’s star speed skater came into my room and laid down on top of me on my narrow dorm-room bed? I was too afraid to even move, let alone accept his frustrated attempt to make love right there in front of my roommate. But nothing happened. I didn’t move despite the fact that in my imaginative fantasy I finally unfreeze my love with embraces of absolute delight.

    But when do those fantasies set in as possible realities? When the does that crack between eye-contact or an accidental touch and an actual encounter get filled in with “true” events? That is the question that Louis Reinke asks, although not very effectively, in his short film Him.

    The narrator of this short film (Jack Harney) evidently works as a bartender in a pub and spots, one afternoon, a truly quite lovely twink (Oliver Pope). From that encounter, he spins out a “scenario,” his word, that includes a somewhat eventful affair despite the fact that in the film’s images we see only this cute boy breakfasting with a girl. Even our narrator admits that one night he comes out of he bar to observe his apparently now “ex-boyfriend” standing at the corner where he is quickly met by his girlfriend, the two sharing a big hug. “

   All he can mutter is “Last thing I heard was he has a girlfriend now.” But the reality is revealed in the crack between his words and images we perceive on the screen. The “scenario,” which involves the boys meeting outside the bar and going home together, is just that, an imaginative vision of possibilities, the film even revealing a kind of conjuring up of the other, as the twink suddenly appears across our narrator’s breakfast table or later blurs in and out of the film’s flicker as the narrator stands alone on a beach.

     The scenes in the bar, the “real” world where the narrator works and first spots his fantasy boy, show only his object of his desire drinking alone or with a girl. The relationship between the narrator and the cutie is all the product of his cruising, not apparently a real encounter.

     Only in the shadowy world of the streets, an empty beach, or in the even darker corners of his ghost-like apartment rooms does any “relationship” between the two boys take place.

      In fact, there is clearly is no “place” for the narrator in this cute boy’s world since it is quite clear that he is straight and any affair the boys might have had occurred only in the narrator’s head, not his bed.

      By the end of the film we have to restate our question: “When does a fantasy become an obsession?”

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).