Thursday, April 17, 2025

Don DiCillo | Box of Moonlight / 1996

finding his very own pan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don DiCillo (screenwriter and director) Box of Moonlight / 1996

 

In the midst of the glorious rolling wildlands, with seemingly pristine forests, lakes, and rivers, is a small Tennessee town with the usual small town look-alike chain-owned dining spots, a sprawling strip club, and new a factory going up on the edge of town, to be powered by a Zeus dynamo electric generator to mass produce window-shield wipers. In the town live also the usual hillbilly mechanics, mean-spirited elderly men and women, and masses of citizens who come running the minute one of their brethren spots a figure in a billboard that looks like Jesus Christ.


    Staying in the nearby Quality Inn motel are the workers building the new factory on the edge of town including their Chicago-based boss, the finicky and basically unfriendly company robot Al Fountain (John Turturro), feared and mocked by his employees, a fact he knows but discovers more fully while standing outside a room one night where his workers are playing poker as they express their feelings that, having just been invited by their foreman, he will not show up. Al would suck up all the joy even out of family July 4th celebration, which in a few days is about to occur, he reminding his young boy with each telephone call that fireworks are illegal, while he demands instead that the kid learn his multiplication tables.

       Even his wife, describes Al as a piece of “clockwork,” a human under the thrall of time; and throughout the film Turturro’s character not only telephones home to his wife Deb (Annie Corley) and his son Bob (Alexander Goodwin) at precisely the same time each evening, but clocks his comments to himself, which have become increasingly more common. Moreover, he has begun to have impossible visions, a strand of gray hair that he has plucked from his dark black mane falls to the floor as if in slow motion. When waitresses pour water or coffee, the liquid flows backwards, out of the cup and back into their pots. A young boy bicycles backwards past the bus the workers take each day to their work site. 

      In another words, Tom DiCillo’s 1996 film Box of Moonlight is, on one level, a fairly conventional story about a man undergoing a mid-life crisis. If at first, Al hasn’t a clue as to what is happening to him, when an executive helicopter flies in to announce that work on the new plant is to immediately cease, he does not, as do the others, gladly take his bonus and hurry off home. Lying to his wife, Al determines to stay on the few days more at the closed-job job than it was to have taken and travels to a lake where he remembers in which that as a child he had a wonderful time swimming out to a large slide in the middle of the water, which sent him flying off its lip like a bird in flight.

      No one remembers the place he calls Splashy Lake, but after a long drive the following day, he does eventually find Splatcee Lake with its old slide crumbling into pieces, the water filled with formaldehyde leaked from a nearby factory. There he encounters a seemingly friendly couple who briefly share in his nostalgia about the days of the original park before attempting to convert him to their born-again religion, Al hurrying off in disgust, even his lame attempt to discover some of the missing joy in his life having also ended in failure. On the news, we later see the same man after he has axed to death of his “followers.”


    But around the very next bend of the road he spins out in terror in his attempt to miss hitting a stalled car owned by an eccentrically dressed young man (Sam Rockwell) who calls himself “the Kid,” costumed as Davy Crockett, trappings he has stolen from a movie set because after trying it on; “it just fit perfect,” as if made for him.

      The Kid, utterly stymied by the car’s breakdown, asks if the electrical engineer might know anything about car engines, and before Al can answer with a weak, “probably,” he finds himself in the driver’s seat of the boy’s broken down Cadillac with the Kid in the front seat of his rental car, the two chained together as they tow the broken-down auto to the young’s man “house.”

      His home, it turns out, is the outer shell of a deteriorating trailer, at the back of which, in the midst of a forest grove, sits a bed defining a kind of bedroom, a couch standing in for a living room, and benches pretending to be dinner tables all lit up with strings of festive lights that  celebrate, as the Kid describes it, “going off the grid.”

    Told that there are no hotels for miles and given the late hour of their final arrival, Al has no choice but to fall into the open-air bed, while the Kid snuggles up exhaustedly in his couch. Like clockwork, Al wakes up to join the Kid in a breakfast of mashed-up Oreo cookies and milk, ready to drive back to his motel and probably back into his routine life—but not before the Kid shanghaies him for a quick trip to the local garage for his car’s new distributor, and, through a series of tricks and deceit, which includes the inexplicable loss of rental car’s keys, holds Al a virtual prisoner for a few days in what Al soon discovers is paradise.




     The two go swimming naked (the Kid at least) at a local water hole, steal tomatoes and eat  them fresh from the vine, play vineyard games that result in the police showing up to arrest what they think are delinquent kids, and after evading the cops, they share a short trip through the nearby forest at the edge of which sits new factory being built which the Kid is certain is government installation to create nerve gas. It happens to be the very windshield wiper factory that Al and his men were building, all this time, he now realizes, having been only a few steps away from the wonderous new world that the boy has shown him. His stay ends with an Independence Day celebration that includes hamburgers, hotdogs, corn-on the cob, a wild display of illegal fireworks, two girls (Catherine Keener and Lisa Blount) the boys have met at the local swimming hole, and before the night is over, they share the absolute pleasure of sex.


     Al discovers in the Kid a gullible boy who loves professional wrestling—which he watches on his found TV screen powered by electricity stolen from a nearby powerline—refusing to believe the truth when Al tells him that it’s just a stage performance in the way that some Southern folk still today refuse to believe the truth about presidents and elections.

        Upon being beaten up by the two local goon mechanics, the Kid breaks down in tears when Al attempts to hold him back from seeking revenge, the boy hugging Al desperately in his momentary defeat like a father he probably has never had.


        And despite all of the Kid’s thievery—which extends to wooden statues of deer and gnomes that people put out on their lawns as objects of beauty which he resells to local buyers to pay for the little food he consumes (Al has purchased all the 4th of July eats and liquor)—the boy has a private moral code that would shame any priest or elected official.

        All of which leads Al to his own deceptive tricks, postponing the delivery of his car keys in order to stay on just a little bit longer before returning to the routine that is at the center of his growing angst.

        As I mention elsewhere in these pages, a straight friend of mine once said with regard to the film On Golden Pond, “All you need to make an older man happy is to put him on a boat with a beautiful boy fresh with the wonder of the world.” If Al and the Kid don’t bother to board a boat, together they have a near-ecstatic adventure sailing through the few days they spend with one another, engaging in a deep kind of hetero love that is close to that shared by Enrico Salvatore "Ratso" Rizzo and another grown up kid in a queer costume, Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy


        These are heterosexual men behaving somewhat like kids in their exploration of each other’s minds and bodies, for of course the only real solution to a midlife crisis is to meet up somehow with Peter Pan, the lost boy who, having never grown up, who can take you to Never-Never Land, a queer world that opens up all your closeted desires. And who doesn’t love Pan?

        Only in this case, alas, Al has been his own Captain Hook followed about by his crocodile clock. But by joining forces with the enemy, Al comes through, realizing that all his visions of time going backwards where in his head, available any time he wanted them, as nearby to life as his factory was to this back-hills paradise. Being spot on the grid and off is only a matter of traveling through a few synapses of the brain.

        When he finally does drive off into the sunset, pausing ruefully to wave goodbye to his Peter Pan, Al returns home with gifts, a little pack of the least dangerous of fireworks for his Bobby, and a box that the Kid has given him upon his leaving, which so the boy insisted captures the moonlight that falls so visibly upon his open-air house. Al suggests Deb might want to use it as a jewelry box.

      When she opens it, of course, the moonlight escapes without her seeing it. But under its purple lining she discovers something very strange, a pair of rental car keys. I wonder who these belonged to, she muses?

     Evidence, once more, that the heterosexual world needs queer reality to learn how to survive, DeCillo's lovely film demonstrates, without threatening sexual identity, how "the other" is necessary to help the majority to enhance and redeem their lives.

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

 

Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (as Larry and Andy Wachowski) | Bound / 1996

 plumbing the depths of lesbian desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lilly Wachowski and Lana Wachowski (as Larry and Andy Wachowski) (screenwriters and directors) Bound / 1996

 

The 1996 movie Bound begins with a scene we’ve all encountered a thousand times before in cinema, a woman enters an elevator with a man, her eyes glancing over at the other passenger, taking the person in with a knowing and lusty glance, which is returned, eyes meeting, bodies surveyed, a get-together assured, particularly when they both get off on the same floor, the stranger headed to the room next door to the apartment the man and woman enter. The fact that we soon discover that the woman’s boyfriend is mafia, is even familiar. As in so many movies of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, this promises to be to be a long, slow-paced film wherein obviously the lone passenger is going to be in for some difficult times until he gets the girl away from the danger which he has just assessed.



     Except—this seemingly familiar scenario has, in fact, seldom been played out before, because that passenger is not another male looking upon the foreign territory he would like to conquer, but another woman, a tough lesbian broad, who’s just been released from prison for robbery, now hired to completely redo the plumbing, walls, and floors of the condo next door. The seemingly ditzy mafia gal, Violet (Jennifer Tilly) is, in fact, only playing that part to keep her job as a long-time partner with benefits until a better opportunity and a tastier sexual tidbit comes along. And with Corky (Gina Gershon), opportunity and sexual allure have suddenly arrived in the very same instant.



     Violet loses no time, trotting over next door to see if Corky might help her get back her earring she has “accidentally” dropped down the drain. This plumber not only retrieves the earring, but like all plumbers shows her crack, the two getting it on so suddenly that there’s no turning back.

      If Corky, equally attracted, is a bit cautious at first, before you can even spell the name of the famous head of the Chicago crime syndicate for whom Caesar works, Gino Marzzone, Violet has not only bedded Corky but managed to hint at a way out of her 5-year relationship with her gangland money-laundering boyfriend, Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), a relationship she convinces Corky she has performed simply as if it were a job.



      Just to make sure you know what they’re up against, the directors, referred to in 1996 as the Wachowski brothers, arrange the torture of a gangland executive, Shelly (Barry Kivel) who’s managed to lay away 2 million dollars of syndicate funds. In brutal 1990s cinema style, the monstrously perverted son of Gino, Johnnie manages to torture the in-house thief by punching and beating him, jamming his head down the toilet several times, cutting off his fingers one by one with a garden shears, before, off screen, shooting him in the head at the very moment he reveals the hiding place of the cash. In short, this is what these men do for a living—when they’re not beating up their girlfriends or their wives. Any sympathy we might have for them later, has already been erased.

       Caesar has been assigned this time to quite literally launder the now bloody money, the man staying up late to wash and press every single $1000 dollar bill and hang them throughout the apartment to dry before Gino arrives the next afternoon to collect the restored loot.

     Gino, it so happens, drinks only Glenlivet scotch. So, according to Corky, it’s easy. Violet, in preparing a cleanup for their august guest will accidentally drop the bottle, forcing her to run out to get some more. And while she’s out, Corky will sneak in while Caesar is showering and getting gussied up, and steal the loot which Caesar has by this time counted, stacked, and packed away in a locked briefcase. It’s a cinch. Corky steals the money, fills the briefcase with heavyweight cardboard, and places the stash in a plastic bag buried deep within a paint container next door.



       As arranged, Violet returns with the scotch, tells Caesar she’s just seen Johnnie leaving, and waits for her suspicious boyfriend to wonder just enough to check on the cash. He does, and just as planned, suspects Johnnie of having entered and stolen it.

       The next step, so Violet and Corky presumed, would be for Caesar to flee, knowing that Gino would assume that Caesar, not his beloved Johnnie had robbed him. But Caesar, behaving somewhat irrationally, as women in such situations are often portrayed, knows that if he runs, he as much as admits he has stolen the loot. He decides to confront Johnnie in front of Gino. Realizing that suddenly everything has begun to unweave. Violet panics and threatens to leave. But Gino, now claiming he needs her more than ever, beats her and forces her to stay on for the arrival of Gino, Johnnie and the bodyguard, Roy.


        Caesar and Johnnie have long gotten on each other’s nerves, Caesar, in particular, detesting his hot headedness and his constant flirtations with Violet. When Johnnie, after arriving immediately begins to hit on Violet, Johnnie taunts him, finally pulling out a gun and announcing that Johnnie has stolen the cash. When Gino realizes that the money is gone and Johnnie appears trapped in Caesar’s accusations, both get ready to turn on Caesar, he having no choice but to kill them and the bodyguard. The gunshots, obviously, frighten the neighbors, as well as their special next-door neighbor listening in to their every move. The police arrive and before they can reach the apartment from their front door buzz-in, with Violet stalling them, the already exhausted Caesar drags the bodies into various other rooms, attempts to clean up and cover up the blood pooling on the living room floor, and together with Violet calmly meets up with the police explaining that he’s been listening to TV rather loudly since he's going deaf. Somehow, even with blood seeping through their shoes, one of the cops sharing the toilet without even noticing the body in the bathtub, Caesar convinces them that nothing suspicious has been going on.

     The next impossible step is for him and Violet to visit Johnnie’s apartment to find the missing money. Just as in so many previous gangster movies, he trashes the place in search of the loot, of course without finding anything. In order to waylay Gino’s other mob palls, he telephones Mickey, Gino’s best friend from Johnnie’s landline, faking Johnnie’s voice, that his father never arrived at the airport.

      By this time, however, Caesar has begun to suspect other possibilities, and when he catches Violet attempting to make an illicit call, hearing the phone ring through the wall, he figures out that, in fact, the robbery has been another “in-house: job. Threatening Violet with the same garden shears as Johnnie has used on Shelly’s fingers, her scream brings Corky running to their door. After a good fight, Caesar slugs them both out, ties up Corky and drags her into the closet—signifying the terrible life she has long ago thought she escaped. To gain more time he forces Violet to call Mickey and explain that Gino and Johnnie are in the hospital after a car accident.



      Having found out that the money is next door, he drags Corky to that apartment to find the money. Violet meanwhile escapes, calls Mickey to tell him Caesar took the money, and returns, gun in hand, to save Corky from the consequences.

      So far, however, although the women have certainly made it clear that they are extremely clever and have almost outfoxed their male counterparts, the story seems to be going in the direction of so many other films about gay figures throughout cinema history, those movies so brilliantly documented by Vito Russo that end with the LGBTQ figure dead.

       If nothing else, it surely appears it will fit the pattern of what B. Ruby Rich has described in her essay, “Lethal Lesbians: The Cinematic Inscription of Murderous Desire,” of the other “lesbian chic” murder movies and real-life situations such as the serial murderer Aileen Wuornos (arrested in 1991), Thelma and Louise (1991), Catherine in Basic Instinct (1992), the teenage girls Hillary and Bonnie in Fun (1994), the similarly young girls of Heavenly Creatures (1994), and the Papin sisters of Sister, My Sister (1994)—all in either lesbian or close sisterhood relationships—who were forced to suffer the penalties of taking on the male prerogative of violence through death or imprisonment.



      Even as Violet holds a gun to his head, Caesar is convinced that she really loves him enough to be unable to pull the trigger, that the female weakness for romance will always save the far more hard-headed and brutal male of the not-so-human species. She proves him wrong in an instant, blowing his head off and escaping almost as a mob hero with the money, Caesar suspected as having hidden or destroyed it. She and Corky head off into the sunset in a newly purchased truck to live a life of sexual fulfillment without an iota, evidently, of guilt for the men from which they have ridden themselves.

      As Rich summarizes the situation: “…They get to drive off into the sunset, not just the Grand Canyon, after committing the perfect crime: they get away with murder, and money, a gun, and most of all, each other. It took five years to get there, a half decade of eroticized vengeance.”

     Rich also observes that the truck they speed off in is blood red, a haunting reminder of the significance of the lesbian menstrual blood that permeated the earlier lesbian murder flicks as well as the numerous lesbian vampire films, Jean Rollins' 1979 Fascination serving as an early emblem, before AIDS made it necessary to remove that association.

      Almost as interesting is the fact that the two brothers’ directorial premier met with negative reaction by executives at some studios who insisted that they could do the film only if the character of Corky where to become a man. The siblings refused the suggestion, arguing “that movie’s been made a million times, so we’re not really interested…”

      Larry Wachowski began transitioning to a woman in the early 2000s, and formally announced that she was now a woman, Lana Wachowski in 2008, appearing as a fully transitioned female in 2012. Her former brother Andy came out as a transitioned woman, Lilly in 2016. Obviously, the Wachowski’s even back in 1996 had sympathized with the female point of view enough that they knew where they wanted to take their powerfully liberating movie.

 

Los Angeles, May 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...