Tabitha Russell | Undone / 2018

a polemic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joshua Walker (screenplay), Tabitha Russell (director) Undone / 2018 [13 minutes]

 

Jarod (Joshua Walker) and Chris (Dwain Duran) meet at a party, but don’t really communicate. Jarod’s female friend hints that he’s enlisting in the Marines and he’s apparently not gay.

     However, a few days later Jarod runs into Chris on his daily jog, Chris asking if he’d like to go for a drink. We see the two, Chris walking a somewhat drunk Jarod home after their bar visit. At the door, Jarod turns, asking, “So, was this a date?” immediately regretting his statement and blaming it on his drunkenness. But Chris quickly moves forward with a kiss, responding “Yes, it was a date.”

     In between, are brief clips of the current event that is at the very center of this 2018 film by Tabitha Russell “The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” regulation regarding homosexuality in the military implemented in 1994 as a compromise measure during the Bill Clinton administration as opposed to a complete ban on homosexuals in the armed services. The rule was finally repealed in 2011. During the years of existence, 13,650 (other sources suggest as many as 17,000) military men and women were discharged, 889 of them Marines, the branch in which Chris enlisted.       

     In a somewhat larger perspective, we get a quick history of Jarod and Chris’ relationship as Chris becomes a Marine, falls in love with Jarod and finally wants to marry him. Jarod is still warry, given the fact that Chris has still not spoken about his sexuality with his parents, something he argues vociferously that he is not ready to do.

     In the very next frame he is sitting with his lover explaining that he’s gay, a fact that his parents readily embrace.

     However, it has just been announced that the policy has been reinstated, and Chris has been called in to his commander’s office to be told that he is a good soldier, but it would be better if he simply ended his open and widely shared relationship with Jarod. Chris declares that he will never again deny it, and leaves the office, beginning and ending the film in the shower, breaking down into tears for having been forced to make the decision between the man he loves and his career.

     The right to marry through the Supreme Court decision was in 2015, so presumably what we are seeing is an imaginary event motivated by Donald Trump’s decision to ban transgender individuals from the military in 2017, with fears that he might reinstate the general “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. And in that respect, this film is a call to arms over something that, fortunately, never occurred—although it certainly may have for transgendered couples.

     On the one hand, its sentiments of any such governmental policy against LGBTQ individuals and their current rights is still very much an issue, and the emotions that this short work bring up are still worthy of reexploring. The trouble is that we don’t really get to know these figures very well. Why did Chris join the military? Why did he choose it as a career? What do these two very different men see in one another? What is the basis of their love? And what is Jarod’s career? If such a thing were to happen, might he be able to support them in their relationship? In such a polemic, these are crucial questions. If we are to be emotionally moved by the possible consequences, we need to know more about what these two have invested of themselves in their choices.

     Unfortunately, a film about an event that never happened featuring characters that we know little about doesn’t, in the end, really amount to much.

     But then, we later came into the second Trump days when these matters truly mean something.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).