Timothy Smith | Attack / 2005

various versions of a hate crime

by Douglas Messerli

 

Timothy Smith (screenwriter and director) Attack / 2005 [8 minutes]

Even as the front titles role for this short British film of 2005, we see the aftermath of an attack, a British bobby taking down the report from the head of a local black gang, Steve (Tyronne Lewis) who declares that he and friends were attacked out of nowhere by the skinhead Malcolm (Callum Walker) who now lies unconscious on the ground.

 

   Steve and his gang, including two teenage boys who offer up their statements, one badly bloodied, who claim they were the one’s attacked, can’t believe that the policeman has called an ambulance for both their friend and the attacker. “We’ll take care of him,” Steve insists. A girl from the gang (Maria Mathurin) steps out of the shadows—a bit like West Side Story’s Anybodys—and spits on the downed skinhead.

    But soon we see events spool out a bit differently, as we watch the bloodied black boy, and his friend running down the alley to report to Steve, their gang leader, that he’s just been attacked.

     In another Rashomon-like version of events, it seems to have just been a stand-off, as the black boys discovered and were challenged by the skinhead in the alley.

    Yet another version, makes it clear that they are stalking Malcolm after he has just left a bar, he repeatedly asking them as he tries to move off down the alley to just let him be, that he wants no fight.

 

  And finally, we get another viewpoint, explaining perhaps an entirely different logic. Both Malcolm and his black lover Max (Eugene Washington) drunkenly explode out of the bar, kissing one another several times before leaving for the night, each on their separate ways home. Malcolm begins his journey once again down the alley.

 

    The teenage blacks appear, clearly having watched the interchange, and brutally beat the white gay boy, who attempts to defend himself.

    The fact that we are led to believe that the latter version is perhaps the most credible is somewhat problematic, since it simply reifies the notion that it is always black men who attack the whites, when we know that it’s usually the other way around.

    David Hall, writing in Gay Celluloid, however, sees it less as a variation of events as he argues that it represents a completely backwards telling of events:

 

“Violent by nature, strong by language and yet equally laced with scenes of homosexual tenderness, this in-your-face work questions how one can at times form an opinion on something or someone based solely upon appearance, without knowing the true facts involved. For does camp equal gay? Does a white skinhead sporting a flight jacket and bovver boots equate to neo-Nazi? And did a racist attack really take place that night?”

 

    What this film most certainly does reveal is that not everything, particularly when it comes to gay sexual matters, is as black and white as it may seem. There are multitudes of reasons why such attacks occur around the world, night after night, and it this case it probably may have been the product not only reverse racism but homophobia as well.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).