Jonathan Hodgson | The Man with the Beautiful Eyes /1999 [animated film]

the missing children

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bukowski (writer), Jonathan Hodgson (director) The Man with the Beautiful Eyes /1999 [animated film]

 

Several young boys have been told by their parents not to go near a house in their neighborhood,

perhaps because, as the animator of this short film hints, at least one child has recently gone missing, a poster of which we witness.

    But of course, being naturally curious and in contradiction to parents who often demand things of their children that make no sense, these boys immediately head off to the dangerous house where they find a forest of bamboo where they love to play Tarzan without a Jane and watch the fattest of goldfish rise to the top of a nearby pool which they feed with pieces of bread.

 

    For weeks they never encounter the owner of the house. But one day, they hear a shout coming

from the structure: “You goddamn whore!”

    And out steps a man who needs a shave, is barefoot, holding a fifth of whiskey, with a cigar in his mouth. His hair is wild and uncombed. He is about 30. But the most notable thing about him is that “His eyes were bright. They blazed with brightness.”

    The man greets them with the words: “Hey little gentlemen, having a good time, I hope.”

    They go home to think about the man and what he said. Their parents, they decide, had asked them to stay away from the house because they never wanted them to see a man like that, a strong, natural man with beautiful eyes.

    Over the next several months they continue to play in the bamboo forest and feed the goldfish bread. But they never see the man again. The shades remain drawn.

    But then one day they discover that the house has burned to the ground, the water and disappeared and the fat goldfish are dead and drying out. The bamboo forest has also burned.

     They are convinced that their parents had burned the house to the ground along with the man in it because it was all too beautiful. “They had been afraid of the man with the beautiful eyes.”

     “And we were afraid then that all through out lives, things like that would happen, that nobody wanted anybody to be strong and beautiful like that, that others would never allow it, and that many people would have to die.”

     The man with the beautiful eyes is obviously a figure who stands as a metaphor for the outsider. Yet there is no direct evident that this particular man was anything but a wild alcoholic with a promiscuous wife, figures who represented behavior that did not want their children to witness.

    We sense, however, with the bamboo forest, the pool of golden fish, the fact that in this all male society where there are no women that this particular man was alcoholic for other reasons. Perhaps it was not a woman he lived with in the forest with no Jane, but another man. And perhaps the children were so astonished by his beauty because he was a gay man, a figure which indeed would be abhorrent to the neighbors and possibly even be seen as related to the “missing boy” posters we see several times throughout this short film.

     Even if Bukowski had so such intention of placing a queer at the center of his work, more likely presenting a wild sexist alcoholic something like himself, the director at least allows that other possibility. I know nothing about the sexuality of the popular British animator, Hodgson, but in his other films such as Roughouse a closely knit male community is often the focus of his works.

     For the boys, moreover, even in Bukoski’s original work, the major thing that sets this man apart from their parents is his beauty, his eyes, the natural masculinity he exudes—all things we might assert that make him different from their heterosexual parents. Even the way he speaks to then, as “little gentlemen,” hoping that they are enjoying themselves is far different from the world of regulations put upon them by their own folks.

    Why are the shades always drawn if the man with the beautiful eyes is living out simply an alcoholic version of heterosexuality; certainly, at least some of these boys’ parents occasionally drink. This man lives in a world different from their parents not because he is simply alcoholic, but because of something else that keeps him apart from the society at large.

    What that is precisely is never explained; but his difference, his outsiderness is so dangerous, they believe, that ultimately he has to die for it, his world be utterly destroyed. And they realize that unless they too become their parents, they too may have to suffer the consequences. And in the boys’ perception that most certainly is something queer, something not part of their parents’ lives.

   I wouldn’t necessarily describe this as a “gay” film, but its implications equally apply to the LGBTQ+ world.

 

Los Angeles, December 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2025).