the scapegoat
by Douglas Messerli
Trae Whyte (screenwriter and director) Lloyd
/ 2020 [17 minutes]
Jamaican-born writer and director Trae Whyte’s
202 short film Lloyd is a complex interweaving of the personal and the
political in which a young college student, Lloyd (Olly Sholotan) is caught up
in political events in a community named Wellington between black and white
factions.
That might be bad enough for a young black college kid like Lloyd who
works at various jobs, including a hospital intern, to support his education.
He is late to work at most of his venues, in part because it looks as if he has
been involved in the violence stirring around him. But we later learn it is
even more complex when we discover that Lloyd is also gay with his friend and
mentor Husain (Danny Royce). At the same time, he is being attacked at work
simply for doing his job and reprimanded by the school authority, Dr. Johnson
(Jayd Swenseid), also evidently the man who lived with his mother, Sylvia who
recently died—a political activist who people claim is behind the current
racial turmoil. In short, the young conscientious man is being attacked from
all directions, often innocently and despite the fact that he is doing his best
to simply survive.
Even worse he is being physically attacked by a fellow student Anthony
(Will Osborn), a brute of a being who at one point appears to almost succeed in
killing the boy, the appearance of Husain saving his life at the last moment.
The
attack is the final straw, as Husain and Anthony consider fleeing both the
situation and the community, at that very same moment they find themselves
being accused of having killed Anthony. Has Husain gone back in anger and
killed off the villain or did his original attack in response to Lloyd’s
near-death later result in the bully’s death? Has someone else intentionally
murdered Anthony to pin it on the gay couple? Or has Anthony himself—who is
clearly mentally deranged—arranged for his own death to make it seem as if the
boys were the culprits.
It
hardly matters since there is now no possibility of escape as the police
dragnet closes in, presuming as has everyone else, Lloyd’s and Husain’s guilt,
an easy thing to pin on boys that do not fit into the society in the first
place.
One
has to marvel at the complexity of Whyte’s short movie, but obviously that is
also its failure. There are so many loose plots ends that we simply cannot tie
them together to create a coherent narrative. Who and why precisely are behind
these attacks on the community and the welfare of these boys? Why does nearly
everyone blame Lloyd for the community tensions which he appears at times to
support but does seem to be directly involved in. Certainly, given the layers
of cultural, social, and sexual prejudice he has to endure, he would be a saint
not to be raging with anger within, forces which Husain seems to calm within
his lover. But now it appears that even their deep love for one another will
not be enough.
What Whyte’s work really desires to become is a feature film which can
fully explore the several avenues which it has almost randomly presented us. As
a short, the multitude of forces at work in this piece, racial hatred, the
inheritance good and bad left us by our loved ones, and homophobia seem, along
with straight-forward racial prejudices that seem never to be laid to rest,
swirl around this cinematic fragment fascinatingly but are totally incapable of
being resolved.
Whyte’s talent is so obvious, I would love to see where he goes in his
next movie or if he can possibly expand this work into a more coherent whole.
Los Angeles, January 4, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January
2023).
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