Douglas Messerli | Four Variations of Denial and Delusion / 2020 [Introduction]

four variations of denial and delusion

by Douglas Messerli

 

It stands to reason that in a year of political unsurety and general insanity along with the world suffering a pandemic virus that has killed hundreds of thousands of individuals and made millions ill, that four of the year’s most interesting films would not only be works that feature issues concerning the LGBTQ community—which has previously been at the center of such a killing virus—but deal with issues of denial and delusion which characterize several current political figures, in particular, the US president Donald Trump.

     Superficially, none of these films are actually about politics or COVID. Yet all of these works sustain a political subtext in the way the societies they present deal or refuse to deal with non-normative behavior and all of these films contain some issues of physical or mental disease including bi-polar disorder, metathesiophobia (the fear of change), obsessive compulsion disorder, alcoholism, and an obsession with death if not outright thanatophobia. Characters in each of these films either attempt to deny painful elements of their pasts or delude themselves with regard to their relationships in the present.

 

    If those facts might seem to indicate that these works of 2020 appear to be a dour group, in fact all are comedies of a sort in which the central figures learn from one another and move into their futures with new insights that will forever change their lives.

     While too often in these kinds of LGBTQ works at least one of the outsider characters has to die, only in just one of these films does a death occur and it may have had nothing to do with the sexual relationship. Yet death does haunt three of these works and is a source for the denials and delusions of the characters. Indeed, as in most LGBTQ works, death is still a major theme running through these cinematic creations.

      Finally, all of these films oddly involve intense relationships between older and younger figures, along with issues associated with the dynamic which alters the characters’ views of the past and the present.

      Obviously, denial and delusion is at the center of thousands of narratives in film history, so I will not attempt to lay claim to structural exceptionalism between these four films. And clearly none of these movies, most of which were written and began filming long before the current political and health concerns, were necessarily produced out of a consciousness of the contemporary climate which, I argue, helps to deepen and enrich the meanings of these works. Neither were any of the directors/writers, to my knowledge, aware of the other films. Like all such cultural phenomenon the creators were simply responding to the world around them and their personal obsessions and concerns.

     Nonetheless, I still think by grouping these pictures they do reveal something important about our time that open them up to a generational perspective that further highlights their importance. That they all appeared in the New York LGBTQ Film Festival (one of them Uncle Frank also appearing in the same week at the Los Angeles based American Film Institute Festival) also helps to strengthen the links they share.

 

Los Angeles, October 23, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).