Nathan Keene | Disarm / 2010

fear of the possible self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Will Faulkner and Nathan Keene (screenplay), Nathan Keene (director) Disarm / 2010 [18 minutes]

 

The central figure of Australian director Nathan Keene’s short film Disarm (Tris Tyler) begins the work by standing on his bed, his hand down his underpants while watching TV porn and shouting at a business associate on the phone. A Grindr pick-up, a young boy (David Ryan Kinsman), after knocking on the hotel door, enters the room.

    The older man hangs up and calls the boy over to him. For a few moments they tussle as they kiss, alternating as they force themselves on the top of one another, the younger boy finally kicking the older one off. The elder comes back with his fist in the air ready to beat the kid, but only growls “No one fuckin’ kicks me.”

      The young boy is about to slink off, but the older man calls him back for a drink. So begins a discussion between the two beginning with the elder asking how many guys the young trick has a week, and the younger asking the elder’s age. After establishing his superiority of the quantity of boys he has each week, the elder demeans the still puny younger boy for going to the gym to work out 5 times a week, arguing that he’s just burning off his body mass.

      Asked if he has a boyfriend, the younger argues he doesn’t want one. Life should be an endless party, he argues, a bit like Cabaret’s Sally Bowles. But his life of going out clubbing on weekends and getting fucked while sitting home the rest of the nights to wait for the weekend doesn’t sound like much fun as the elder points out.

      Indeed, our young trick has never had a boyfriend. The younger can’t imagine having one guy, “it would get fucking stale.” The elder admits that he’s had a few boyfriends but they haven’t lasted “cause my minds always racing.” It’s just a vicious cycle, he admits.

      Asked why he clicked on his site, the younger man argues that he likes masculine looking men. “Skinny, queeny guys annoy me.” He goes on to tell the story of a young gay boy at his high school whom he describes as a pansy, flailing his arms with a fem-lisp.

      The elder asks if straight boys beat him up in high school, but the younger says he had a girlfriend even though he knew he was gay. What isn’t being said is that he had the girlfriend as a cover and that what he saw in the effeminate boy was a vision of a possible self, a fear of what being gay might really mean for him.

      The older man asks him what he’d like to do, meaning what career, but the younger hardly has a clue, even though we’ve established that he’s 22. He asks the older one what he does, the man responding, “Guess.” The boys responds “business,” to which the elder argues he chose it because of the money, but admits it’s boring. When the elder again asks the younger what he actually wants “to be,” the boy responds vaguely, “To be like you.”

      The conversation turns back to the subject of fighting, the elder observing that as gay men they are supposed to charm their offenders, the younger arguing that he would fight a gay man if necessary.

      The elder cuts to the core, responding that it’s just because he wants to be “straight.”

     “I just want to be a man, what’s wrong with that?” to which the elder argues, “What the fuck is a real man anyway?” And soon after he tells the younger, “Acting like a straight won’t make you a man.”

     Noticing a scar on the elder’s body, the younger asks where he got it, but the older man refuses to discuss it, saying only that he got it in a fight. And finally, the younger boy admits he fought the gay boy in his school.

    “Did he fight back?”

     “Not really.”

    “Did you hurt him.” The younger kid shakes his head. “He was a fem, there was a whole group of us.”

     The elder berates the younger for his actions arguing that he was probably the only one who knew what the other boy was going through. He finally recounts his own story. “I was beat when I was 16 until I went unconscious. That’s how I got my scar.

     “I had feelings for my best friend. But when I told him, he wouldn’t reciprocate, not at all.” The elder admits that it resulted in him finding hard to get close to people, that he pushes them away.

       The younger responds that “It’s easier to cut yourself off.”

      And suddenly the elder comments: “You know I can’t remember when was the last time I did this with someone.”

       “What?”

       “Talk.” The man calls the boy over to him, trying to discern what color eyes he has.

       “So we gonna fuck?”

       The man leans back, obviously no longer interested in the kid.

     The boy angrily gets up to leave, fed up with the older man’s lack of sexual interest, the elder shouting out, “Fuck you. You’re just like the rest of them!” Apparently, the kid did not comprehend one idea within the elder’s communications.        

     The boy pauses a moment outside the hotel room door, but then quickly walks off. The elder turns back on his porno station.

       But as the boy makes his way back to the car he does, in fact, rehear some of the elder’s comments, particularly how he is attempting to hide his own effeminacy, his own “fem-lisp.” He sits for a moment in the car staring at himself in the car mirror. There is a knock and the window. The elder stands there, the boy rolling down his window, the older man leaning in to kiss him before walking off.

        Although writers’ Faulkner and Keene’s dialogue is fairly unbelievable as a realistic event, it is nonetheless a rather moving exploration of gay men who are still caught up in the myth of masculinity and sexual performativity. And if the conversation itself is unconvincing, its representation of gay types who persist in performing basically heterosexual values within the gay world is quite accurate. In a sense, these men, although they outwardly declare their gay sexuality, are inwardly still battling with their fears and sufferings they carry within almost as a scar of their own somewhat unsuccessful coming to terms with their youthful sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).