there’s nothing wrong with loving pumpkin
by Douglas Messerli
Cameron Thrower (screenplay and director) Pretty
Boy / 2015
The price of sending a son off to a prostitute
to transform him from a young budding homosexual into a strapping straight man
has gone up enormously from 1999. The $30 of Gregory Cooke’s visit now runs to
several hundred dollars, and if the son and the whore get hungry it costs even
more; and in this case the son—evidently of a wealthy father who has sent him
off to a private school where the family lives at quite a distance from cheap the
motel where he, Sean James Collins (Nick Eversman), has been hooked up with the
prostitute Katie Bloom (Rebekah Tripp)—is willing to pay even more if the
hooker is simply willing to let him stay on without having sex.
If
Katie seems tough and even mean in the first, she, like the proverbial whore,
has a heart of platinum, and when the 18-year old kid gets an opportunity to
tell his story, revealing the bullying he’s been receiving at school and the
verbal abuse of his well-intentioned but homophobic father (Jon Briddell),
she’s willing to punish him by forcing him to sleep in the car while she and
Sean sit in the bedroom celebrating his birthday with a pumpkin muffin and a
long—for the film’s sake perhaps a little too long—chat about their lives.
While we learn in Cameron Thrower’s 2015 film Pretty Boy that
poor “pretty boy” Sean suffers the slings and arrows of peer mockery and the
rejection—temporary we can imagine—of his father, Katie has it even harder,
forced to prostitute herself to pay for her son’s upbringing by a mother who
won’t even talk to her, coincidentally also on the child’s birthday, on the
phone. Even shopping at the local stop-and-shop mart becomes an obstacle course
of disapproving women who themselves look like rejects of whatever urban
society has clawed its way to status in this suburban Los Angeles outpost.
In
order to survive, Katie has created a tough veneer of slick-backed hair, heavy
lipstick, high-heeled shoes and, even more importantly, an ever-ready outsider
irony she delivers like she were a campion dart player. Describing the boy’s
father, Katie observes: “It must be exhausting trying to fix something that's
not broken.” When she visits the father sheltered four hours in his automobile
to demand the money for dinner treats, he pleading with her to help his son
become a heterosexual, she snaps back: “What am I? Some fairy fucking
God-hooker?”—a line that could as well have been spoken by a drag queen,
dredged up from the depths of all outsider and queer sardonicism.
At
the supermarket stop she asks him to pick out a muffin, Sean choosing pumpkin,
and she responding, “Do you really like pumpkin?” Sean answers, “Yes, I’ve
always loved pumpkin.” If the script uses this occasion as an instance of
good-will mentoring—Katie insisting that if he likes pumpkin he should never
allow anyone to dissuade him or demand that he like something else—a problem
from which this 31-minute short suffers overall, we also recognize that the boy
needs a mother, his own having died when he was young. And there are plenty of
nicely honest moments that writer/director Thrower has tossed into his script
that do nothing but reveal character and help his work establish credibility.
For example, when Sean admits that his fellow students call him names,
the one they most often use, “Pretty boy,” he admits doesn’t really bother him,
since his mother called him the same name. At another moment when Katie asks
him the inevitable question every gay boy and man is asked again and again
throughout his life (and lesbians probably as well), “When did you know you
were gay?”—the equivalent of asking a prostitute how or why she became a
hooker—the kid answers what so many other gay men have, “I think I’ve always
known,” equivocating in way that makes perfect sense to me, “I just didn’t know
what it was” [italics mine]. For the first time in my life I realized,
although I’ve declared that I was so innocent I didn’t realize that I was truly
gay until college, I now believe that the same was true for me. I always knew,
but wasn’t able to describe it—that thing that makes you feel separated
from all those around, that makes you feel so very lonely and apart from world
you daily inhabit. This kid, as Katie tells the father, is lost.
Fortunately, she helps him focus on and find a way home, in part by
insisting that he kiss her—the father peeping into the room window at the very
moment, smiling approvingly—as he imagines the face of a boy to whom he is
attracted. And by helping him to realize just how brave he has been all his
life for dodging and escaping the bullying world in which he is forced to live
while returning to that battleground each morning, she does become some kind of
“fairy fucking God-hooker.” If it doesn’t get said outright in this film, it’s
what it says in tone and manner.
By film’s end the boy is ready to demand his father recognize him for
who he is. But Katie, whose mother won’t even let her wish happy birthday to
her son, has no other recourse but the tears she sheds to help her move back to
her battlefield of motel beds. She refuses her equivalent of the inflated $30
dollar’s on the boy’s pillow as he sleeps.
Los Angeles, September 25, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2021).
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