growing up in a dying utopia
by Douglas Messerli
Andrew Durham (screenwriter and director) Fairyland / 2023, 2025 general release
A young father, Steve Abbott (Scott McNairy),
is awakened to be told on the phone that his wife has just died in an
automobile accident, news he attempts to explain as best he can to his young
six-year-old daughter, Alysia (played as a child by Nessa Dougherty).
Almost immediately after the funeral the child's maternal grandmother
Munca (Geena Davis), a small Ohio town member of the bourgeois, makes it clear to
Steve that Alysia would be far better off remaining under her care, living nearby
her cousins in the comfortable, close-minded Midwestern paradise.
And throughout the film we worry that she might sue for the right to be the
legal guardian of the child, particularly when we realize, soon after, the
father’s intended life style.
Steve has rather radically
contrary notions of where and how he wants to raise his daughter. This
narrative, driven from the viewpoint of the young charge, doesn’t quickly reveal
the reasons why Steve determines to drive his daughter across the
continent to settle in San Francisco. Nor does the father bother to explain to
his child that instead of living in a comfortable home, she will be now
ensconced in a small bedroom with a mattress on the floor within one of that
city’s hundreds of famed communes of the 1970s and 80s.
There she encounters an
Italian pot dealer, Skid (Annabella Peregrina), a transgender performer named
Johnny who spent a couple of years in a Buddhist monastery (Ryan Thurston),
another drug-pushing female Paulette (Maria Bakalova), and a gentle man named
Eddie (Cody Fern) who, when she awakens in the morning confused and frightened,
wanting to return to the comforts of her previous life, helps entertain her by
regaling her with stories as he cooks her a breakfast of “toads in a hole.”
But the truth, as we
gradually perceive it even if the young Alysia cannot, is that Steve is gay;
and as she eventually discovers, he has always been gay even during his
marriage to her mother; the man driving the car in which the child’s mother was
killed was her sexual partner, Steve being the father only in marriage, without
generally engaging in sex with his wife.
Meanwhile in San
Francisco, Johnny, as Matt Zoller Seitz observes on the Roger Ebert review
site, “initiates Alysia into the world of makeup, as her late mother would
have, and remarks that when he was a boy, he asked for dresses and was denied
them. ‘I never understood why only girls get to have beautiful things…’”
Alysia’s father, who in
her book she aptly describes as having “a kind of delayed adolescence,”
attempts to write poetry, Eddie soon leaving him, in part, in disgust for the
wild conditions of late night parties, and the mess of left-over wine bottles,
drugs, and dirty clothing littering the floors of the place in which his lover
Steve is raising his daughter.
As Alysia describes it
in a Time interview with Barry Levitt, “Getting to be in San Francisco
after the death of my mom, he was a single gay man. It was a time of tremendous
freedom. To be gay didn't mean you were sick anymore, and San Francisco was one
of the few places where you could be really open. For me, it was like a
Fairyland, a place of wonder, but also a place that died. Any utopia is too
good to last.”
When Eddie leaves, Steve drags home many
another man or regularly visits the gay bars, often leaving his young daughter
home alone at night, insisting, when she complains, that he is trying to
instill in her a sense of independence. By age 8, they have moved into a
rent-controlled apartment on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, the very center
of the counter-culture world into which she has been thrust.
Soon of school age, she
is sent off to a French-language school (paid for apparently with the help of Munca),
and in the very first week, after being mocked by the more traditionally raised
school-girl peers, she has been charged with taking a bus home alone. Seitz
nicely summarizes that first voyage into the lonely streets she will now long
inhabit:
“A creep spots Alysia walking home from school after getting off
the wrong stop on her city bus route, offers her a ride home, and opens his
passenger door. A random woman saves her from whatever horrible thing was about
to happen and escorts her home. By the time Steve finally shows up there, the
sun has gone down. The woman chastises him for permitting a girl that young to
ride a bus by herself. “She knew where to get off the bus!” he whines in
protest. ‘I wrote it down!’”
When Munca makes her
regular interrogational calls, Alyisa is cautioned by her father not to discuss
the full mélange of beings who trot into and out of their lives, as her father
goes through the extremes of exploring himself in female garb to a stage of
dressing up in cowboy boots and hat.
Soon after we begin she
see Alysia growing up (now played by Emilia Jones) as she finally makes friends
with a couple of fellow students who survive on the foggy city streets and illegally
dance in its clubs. But even then, Alysia feels she must keep her “home” life
somewhat secret; these girls, like most adults of the day outside of this San
Francisco hotspot see gays as disgusting faggots and are astounded to discover
that their friend’s father lives his life as a poet.
Invited to one of his
readings, Alysia is hurt and confused when, through the confessional mode of
his writing, he speaks of her and her dead mother. She takes solace in the
company of her bigoted friends, but arrives home to a still loving and
forgiving father.
In the film, we vaguely
hear of Allen Ginsberg, the death of Harvey Milk, and glean that Abbott writes
full-time for a gay newspaper. We even tangentially learn through radio reports
of the anti-gay and lesbian campaign led by Anita Bryant.
But while we might wish
the film slow would down to explain what these figures mean to Alyssia and her
father, from the viewpoint of his daughter these are simply passing names engaged
in vaguely comprehended events.
In reality Abbot was
an organizer for the Gay Liberation Front, even back in his Atlanta days. He
interviewed Ginsberg, edited a magazine named Soup*, wrote regularly for
gay papers in support of Milk, and marched in the earliest Gay Pride parades.
At one point in the
film, as Steve and his most recent lover Charlie (Adam Lambert) prepare to attend
one of the gay marches, dressed in leather and studs, he casually asks her how
they look. Her answer is one of the most painful moments in this film, as she
responds that they look “like all the other fags.” Her father desperately hurt,
quickly leaves the room, but Charlie remains to severely castigate her: “You
should know better,” he scolds, as she turns partially away knowing that the
words are not really hers as much as those of her friends and the normative
world she has chosen to embrace after all the years of childhood abandonment.
Youth is often blind
and stupid, and now as a college student attending New York University, she
returns home somewhat surprised to find her father at a local hospice house,
reading to a young dying man suffering from a new disease called AIDS, a malady
hitting primarily the gay communities of urban areas which she has only tangentially
encountered. She has returned to tell her father that she has applied for a
year of continued education in Italy, and receives his blessing for her to
undertake the European adventures he once had promised they would take together.
In Italy she quickly
falls in love with a handsome young Italian boy of her age, which might have
led to another kind of fairytale, a romance and a new life, were it not for a
pained telephone call from her father who reports that he is now suffering from
AIDS himself. She attempts to explain that she cannot yet return given the
changes in her own life, but Abbott pleads for her return, explaining that he
is truly on his last legs and needs serious help.
Giving up her life at the
apogee of her youth, she discovers a dying man for whom she must turn on the
vacuum cleaner some nights so that his endless coughing will not awaken other
tenants in the building. Eventually, unable to care for him after he collapses
in the bathroom, she must place him in the very hospice bed where she observed
him reading to the young boy long since dead.
Yet in caring for her
father, re-visiting her former girlfriends, and at one point running into
Paulette who is now working in the pharmacy where she picks up the AZT pills
that, without the HIV inhibitors later developed, cannot successfully stop the
progress of the dreadful disease, Alysia begins to perceive the world which she
had inhabited as a child, but never fully appreciated. One of her bigoted
friends expresses the absurd selfishness of her girlish values, admitting that she
and her friends had envied Alysia for having a father so hip.
For Alysia, the
fairylands of both her childhood and her college days collapse with the death
of her father when she is just 22 years-of-age, forcing her to realize that as
eccentric, disorderly, and at times perhaps even abusive as her upbringing was,
it was filled with deep love and true freedom, along with the guilt and pure
exhaustion that comes with attempting to live in a utopia within a dystopic
nation.
For all this film’s
focus on the LGBTQ world of San Francisco, however, it is not truly a gay
movie, but a story of how a young heterosexual girl grew up within this larger
communal family which permitted her to develop into the open-minded and loving
woman who could take time out to remember the ghosts of a world no longer in
existence.
*While writing this essay, the film suddenly became a very
personal one, as I remembered that a couple of my earliest works of poetry
appeared in Abbott’s magazine, Soup. I had never connected the character
in the film with that magazine until I did some research for this piece.
Los Angeles, October 16, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).
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