Fokke Baarssen | Missed / 2018

meeting with a ghost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Keith Armonaitis (screenplay), Fokke Baarssen (director) Missed / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

This short work, directed by Dutch filmmaker Fokke Baarssen is a subtle piece about the rude, loud and crude politics of our day, and how it effects people on a very personal level.

    Graham (James Kacey), a young man in his late 20s or early 30s has made an appointment in a California desert truck stop with his estranged father, whom he has evidently not seen for four years.

     He waits alone for a while, wondering whether his father will show, the waitress Doris (Jennifer Lynn O’Hara) trying a couple of times to get an order out of him as he explains he’s waiting for someone.

     The father (Sean Kane) finally appears, a grizzled gray bearded man wearing a red MAGA hat. He hardly gets in the room before disparaging his son, demanding to know what he thinks is so important that he has attempted to set up the meeting. He suggests that Graham is not tough enough to even deal with the way things are in “God’s country,” presumably how he perceives where he now lives. Graham reminds him that he was born and raised in New Jersey.

   Apparently some of the distance between them has to do with the fact that he had left is the boy’s mother years earlier. Moreover, he had not attended his son’s wedding, and rudely treated his partner, Robin, at the mother’s funeral.

     Indeed, the father goes full attack on his son yet again in front of the waitress, presuming that she might stand as a supportive witness to the fact that his son doesn’t have what it takes to live a good American life and has refused contact with him for years.

     What we quickly discern is that Robin is a male and that Graham is gay. Moreover, when the father asks if he’s still with Robin, Graham demurs, suggesting, at least to his disinterested father that the couple has since broken up.

     When the son attempts to explain that in attending the funeral with his companion, he wasn’t trying to demonstrate anything to anyone, that he was there out of respect for the mother, and that the father’s behavior was not simply a situation for taking a stand, but was crude and impolite. The wounds have clearly not healed.

      Graham’s father agrees that the world is no longer polite without seeming to comprehend that he has been far more than cruel so far in their meeting. He complains that when entering, he held the door open for two young girls, without receiving even a thanks.

      Graham wonders whether he held the door open out of politeness or the need to be thanked. And so it continues; there clearly is no possible rapport between them. The father comments that his son can’t even bother to take off his cap.

      Anyone with empathy might, at this point suspect, particularly when for a second Graham touches his beanie cap, that there might be a reason for it remaining on his head. But the father, grabbing up his own hat, not only advertising his political position but challenging anyone who might disagree, asks for the coffee he has ordered to go, rejecting out of hand any further communication with his son.        

      Graham reacts with the reminder that he has always been good at turning his back on anyone with he might disagree, presumably meaning his mother and not just him.

      As the father challenges him yet once more, the boy falls into a coughing fit; we recognize something the insensitive father, who even makes fun of his son’s weakness, cannot sense, that Graham is ill.

      Finally, realizing that nothing has changed and there can be no communication between the two, Graham himself stands, ready to leave.

      But now the father is even more ready to challenge and ridicule the boy, following him out of the restaurant and, for a moment, grabbing him as if to pull him back to face his diatribe.

 

      This time Graham falls to his knees in a heavy coughing fit, the father finally realizing that something’s wrong without being able to even slightly explain it. He does offer to help his son up, but the boy rejects it and moves off to his car.

      The father stands alone for a moment, wondering what the call for a meeting has been all about.

But meanwhile Doris has found a small pamphlet that Graham has left behind and brings it out to the older man. We now read it’s title, “The Dying Process, A Family’s Guide to Hospice,” clearly meant for his father’s perusal. But, as apparently has occurred regularly with this angry, stubborn, and unthinking man, the opportunity to communicate has again been missed, lost to the world that harbors no room for opinions other than his own.

        Fokke Baarssen’s camera shifts now to observe Graham in his car, in full tears, his hat pulled off, revealing his bald head—probably from radiation treatments.

        His son clearly is sick with something like cancer, and is near death. This film does not explain the cause of the young man’s illness.

       Perhaps it may be a complication of AIDS that was not caught quickly enough, and, if so, we might even conjecture that Robin has also suffered from the disease and died, which would explain why Graham makes no attempt to dissuade his father from his presumption that the married couple has broken up. And yes, people still die of AIDS. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019, the year after this film was released, 6,228 people, mostly male and gay, died of AIDS in the US and its territories, the lowest it had since the epidemic began. But before we might congratulate ourselves, since that year is has significantly risen. In 2022 it had reached 19,310 deaths among adults and adolescents with diagnosed HIV in the US and its 6 territories.*

       In many respects, this work is not even about politics, however. There simply is no talking with people who believe in their own righteousness and will not listen to anyone who holds values outside of their own.

      If Graham is soon to die, however, his father is a howling ghost. When a man no longer has any empathy with others, he is already dead inside.

 

*Tragically, 2,976 individuals died of the various terrorist attacks on 9/11 in 2001. Every year, we commemorate that day for those who died in those horrific events. Yet, we seem almost oblivious as a culture of the 6,228-19, 310 of our citizens dying each year of a disease for which we still have no known cure, even if we are close to a cure and have drugs that save many of those infected with HIV.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).