nothing about love
by Douglas Messerli
Quinn de Matta (screenwriter and director) Into
Temptation / 2021 [20 minutes]
Into Temptation begins with what seems to be an older man, Michael (Juan Manuel
Salcito), perhaps a father, playing hide and seek with whom he might assume is
his son, calling out the numbers from 10 down to 1 before he goes on the search
presumably for the running and hiding child.
But almost immediately we recognize something here is terribly amiss, as
the older man looks into a couple of places before entering the bedroom where,
in fact, an even older man lays tied up, gasping through a mouth gag for help.
Michael asks if he’s ready to talk, pulling out his cell phone
presumably to record whatever the older man says. The gag, we realize is a jock
strap. Pulling it out of the man’s mouth, the elder asks him to “stop.” He asks
“Who else is here,” presumably having heard Michael speaking to another, but we
almost immediately recognize that the other is his own childhood version of
himself, a young Michael (Jaxon Ballenger) which we presumed was the child on
the run.
Michael smiles, fondly stroking the man’s face: “No one’s coming.”
He
bends to kiss the man, who screams and pleads for help.
“Isn’t this what you want? You and me?”
The child goes racing through the room again, Michael in chase of him,
following the image of his own younger self, imaginatively capturing the boy as
he, himself, has become the elder. “Now the last one back has to hold the
vestments.”
This film, we suddenly perceive, is a revenge tragedy, a work in which a
now very disturbed adult is playing out the sexual tortures of his own
childhood by the man, a priest, Father Graham (Tom McLaren) whom he now has
captured and controls, just as the other had been in control of the young boy.
This psychodrama plays out in alternating scenes of the young priest and
the boy and the interchanges, such as that which we just observed, of Michael
and the now much older priest.
In the re-imagined past, we see the priest presenting the boy with a
special present he has bought him, a cross he puts carefully around the boy’s
neck. Conflating God with his own personal attentions, he tells the boy that
“He and I will always be with you all the time. And you’ll always know how
special you will be to us both,” his devilish clever linking of himself to God
making it almost impossible for the child Michael to separate the physically
loving attentions of the priest with his spiritual values supported by his
parents and the community.
The priest tells the child that he has one more for him, a special gift,
demanding that he not move.
As he strokes and kisses him, the elder Michael plays the role of the
young priest, “The feeling inside, it feels good, doesn’t it. Some say it feels
like butterflies, but I think it feels like angels—hundreds of them.”
Michael
again straddles him: “They never understood what we had.”
But
now the priest responds: “They call me a monster. But what was I supposed to
do? They put me in the garden. And then they punished me for taking a bite.
That’s all it was. A little bite.”
“No,
no, no,” shouts Michael, now caught up in his own version of their past sexual
interludes, again revealing just how manipulated the boy was, momentarily reliving
another past moment: “Do you feel that? That’s you! And that’s me. He wants us
to be together. But you have to promise. If they find out, they’ll send me
away.” One can easily visualize what is happening, and how the priest turns
even the special adolescent feeling of an erection into emotional quagmire of
guilt if he dare to share the experience in language.
Observing
the childhood memory, the priest now begs that he will never tell anyone if
only Michael will let him go.
But
the boy become the man cannot let him go. And we’re not quite sure of the full
reasons. Is it just revenge, the full expression of what it meant to live under
the total control of an older man, or is it his own now perverse deep feelings
for the priest who has been forced to abandon him for his sinful behavior?
Playing
the priest again, he demands the old man stop crying. He didn’t hurt him. But
clearly the boy Mickey did feel hurt, had reason to cry out, just as now the
older priest does.
The
adult Michael admits, “I’m not letting you go again.”
But
the now cynical old priest clearly cannot comprehend anything, has not learned
anything, asking “How much to you want?”
Michael,
shocked by the suggestion, makes it clear the kidnapping has nothing at all to
do with money. When the priest asks him to call people to and tell them want it
wants, the formerly abused adult says something that is hard to comprehend:
“You are what I want. We made a promise.”
The
priest mocks him, did he keep his promises to Santa, to the Easter Bunny. “Go
ahead, tell them about the mean old priest who touched you.”
“No,
no I won’t” shouts the adult Michael, still committed to the love he believed
he and the priest had long ago committed to. The horrible truth is almost
unbearable. He won’t tell anyone, he insists, “Because I love you.”
How
does a man who manipulated a young boy into touching his penis and allowing him
to touch the boy’s erect young cock explain to himself the horrifying results
of his endless series of lies, of the deep intertwinement of his relationship
with the boy and the boy’s own very belief system. If love is godly, if Christ
preaches love, and the priest argues for the child to engage to that love, how
can a boy, even later as an adult, ever be able to separate the spiritual from
the profane? How can the man whose job it was to truly educate young men in
spiritual matters, now undo his twisted and perverted teachings?
Even
the priest finally admits it, makes it clear what this film argues, sexual
abuse of an elder man with a boy has nothing at to do with gay love: “Nothing
about then, and nothing about now is love.” As we have witnessed, pedophilia is
about control, not about love.
But
Michael is now forever deluded, answering in tears, “When they came for you, no
one believed me, no one listened. And I waited. And I prayed. I prayed. He
brought us back together.”
Misunderstanding
everything, the old priest responds, “Then, why am I being punished?”
Michael
doesn’t comprehend his control of the priest as punishment, however, any more
than the priest would have accepted the fact that he was controlling the boy
Mickey.
There
is a strange element of such relationships that is very much akin to
sadomasochism, of capturing and controlling the other in order to make certain
the lover will remain, keep silent, and return their love. If there is any love
involved in such situations, it is accompanied by a deep fear that the love is
not truly available, that it will not be returned, that it will be utterly
resisted and ignored. And given that fact, any love that may have been involved
is converted to control, fear, self-doubt, the fear of discovery of its
existence by others. The forbidden remains forbidden even after the rules, the
sin of breaking those rules, and the disdain of the law—whether social,
cultural, or personal—has been fully expressed. It is the very forbiddenness of
the act which helps to render to even more irresistible.
“You’re
not being punished,” Michael cries out again and again: “I love you.”
Michael
again strokes the priest’s face and finally kisses him fully on the lips.
As
he begins to attempt to masturbate the older man, the priest argues “None of
the others behaved this way.”
Michael
points out it was the others who sent him away. He kept their secret. “I am, I
am special,” he insists.
As
he momentarily backs off, we see the scars on Michael arms that clearly
represent a suicide attempt, he arguing that “He brought me back to so that I
could keep my promise. We made a promise to God. And I’m going to keep that
promise.”
Who
is now is the monster, the Frankenstein who created the other or his creation?
The issue is unanswerable. And it no longer matters. Both have destroyed any
possibility of real love for a strange and perverse notion of love that
wasn’t/isn’t what it pretended/pretends to be.
As
Michael undoes his belt to strip himself of his clothing, we suddenly move into
the past again as the priest reads pontifically from “The Song of Solomon”:
Close your heart to
every love but mine.
Hold no one in your
arms but me.
Love is a powerful
as death.
Passion is as
strong as death itself.
It burst into flame
and burns like a raging fire.
Water cannot put it
out. No flood can drown it.
That is the word of
the Lord.
Amen, says Mickey, the child, as Michael lays down with his elderly
priest lover, having just turned on the gas burners of his kitchen stove.
I
have encountered only a couple of other films as powerful as this 20-minute
exegesis of cultural and scriptural texts, complemented with Paul Spaeth’s
almost queasy-feeling musical score (featuring the unlikely combination of
timpani and flutes). If there was ever a film I might point to in order to
explain the horrors of male child abuse, I’d name this movie.
But
it is dangerous matter, as I have pointed out time and again, in our current
society terrified of discussing just such complex issues. Just this week,
Google brought down years of blog writing for my sites about poetry, theater,
opera, art, fiction, and film because of a meaningless accusation—without
mention of any specific text—concerning my comments on this very subject. While
we in the US like to complain about the censorship in other countries, it’s also
become quite apparent that we do not have free expression in this country on
the internet, that although the internet sites allow numerous examples of false
political statements, it monitors and cuts away free speech on numerous
subjects which frighten the general populace just by their existence.
Los Angeles, November 24, 2023
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(November 2023).
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