abuse and abuse
by Douglas Messerli
Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. (screenwriter and
director) Abuse / 1983
Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. has to be perceived one
of the most courageous of LGBTQ filmmakers to date. Not only did Bressan speak
out earlier than anyone about gay men dying of AIDS in his 1985 film Buddies,
demonstrating not only how the dying process of those infected not only altered
their relationships with friends and family but even strangers (positively, in
this instance), while challenging how the so-called support systems failed large
portions of the US society—including the lack of governmental financial aid for
help to find a cure and the slow establishment of local service centers—while
simultaneously portraying the patient upon whom his film focuses with respect,
revealing his humanity, joy of life, and even his sense of humor.
Some years prior, in 1977, the director had explored a gay relationship
between a young man of 18 who had just come of age and who, although knowing
that he was gay, had had no previous sexual experience with an older man which
established Passing Strangers as one of the first cinematic
homosexual romances that, without sacrificing the sexuality of gay life—its
public celebrations, its porno houses and magazine shops devoted to sexual
titillation, and its active street life—managed still to present us with an almost
innocent portrayal of a one-day sexual encounter that made everything seem, as
the title of Christopher Larkin’s more main-stream film of the same year
declares: “a very natural thing.”
In
1979 Bressan had in Forbidden Letters (shot in an earlier period of the
San Francisco gay scene of 1975) explored a situation in which a younger lover
waiting for his older lover to be released from prison reads through his
letters he wrote but never sent while his partner was in prison, hoping that
when he returns he’ll recall their deeply passionate love enabling them to
continue where they left off. Once again, with its odd imbalances of old and
young, a prisoner and an innocent youth, and immense differences in their
sensibilities Bressan creates a nuanced while intensely sexual milieu that
stands half-way between gay porno and mainstream filmmaking, challenging the boundaries in the same way
that other so-called gay porn directors such as Wakefield Poole and Fred
Halstead had.
And
in between Bressan celebrated gay pride days in his Gay USA (1977)
through his immense collation from the shots of 25 cameramen in different
cities covering the parades and celebrations across the USA throughout the late
1970s, which suddenly helped to transform these previously seemingly LGBTQ-only
events into something of significant universal importance.
If
he had made no other films, these four films would have assured Bressan, who
himself died of AIDS in 1987, of a place in the pantheon of gay filmmakers of
late 1970s and early 1980s—which the Bressan Project, in its gradual
restoration and new promotion of his works, celebrates.
Of
all of these films, however, the most problematic when it comes to his penchant
for inquiring into the moral issues surrounding homosexual love and obsession
was his 1983 film, Abuse, which having not yet been restored, is a
difficult movie to find. Luckily, I was able to get hold of the DVD version I
viewed this morning.
I
say “luckily” because I feel almost honored to be one of the first to write a
longer essay about this important work; but I also realize that I must myself
be somewhat courageous in attempting to assert its moral perspectives. I knew
well when I first began the immense undertaking of investigating all aspects of
LGBTQ experience and sexual expression portrayed on film that I would be surely
entering territories about which even some gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transsexual individuals might not approve—let alone what normative heterosexual
society might regard as morally reprehensible. So I claim no innocence or
unintentionality in expressing the viewpoints about the film that I am about
to, even though some may find those ideas perverted and even dangerous.
Bressan’s work, in some respects, is like a series of Chinese boxes,
each hidden within the container of the other. On the surface—if you can
describe any one of these narrative structures as the outer shell—is a
documentary about child abuse being made as a film for graduation by the
central character Larry Porter (Richard Ryder). Even before the cinema has
begun, Larry has created several frames of abused children from hospital and
morgue shots and interviewed individuals on the street whose various viewpoints
represent a range from those who argue for more enforcement, for better
teaching and counseling of parents to religiously-held viewpoints that argue
parents must maintain absolute discipline, to strong feelings that almost call
for parental violence against disobedient children. Evidently he has also been
illegally snooping with a long-range camera on children and their parents in
park playgrounds, where inevitably one parent, at least, daily shows up to
scold or slap her or his son or daughter or otherwise physically restrain their
child’s play-yard behavior.
Since his project, overseen by a Professor Rappaport, is to be finally
judged by six chosen students instead of by faculty members, Larry shows them
scenes as the film progresses, they reacting as variously as the interviewees,
some commenting that his choices seem stereotypical, others feeling they are
fairly representative and sensitive to the feelings of real people.
It
is, in fact, a brilliant way that Bressan has of critiquing his own creation,
permitting us to develop our own perspectives on the character and the position
of child advocacy with which we might align ourselves within his film’s
narrative.
And obviously by featuring a filmmaker as his central figure Bressan
automatically encourages us to see his work as semi-autobiographical, which in
some respects appears to give more credence to his character, particularly when
others, such as the adult advisors, friends, and confidantes begun to critique
his methodologies and, more importantly, his real-life behavior. If nothing
else, perceiving the film itself as a thing in process provides Bressan’s
entire project with a strong sense of authenticity, no matter how fictional his
material may be. We feel close to his characters simply because we so
thoroughly come to believe in their existence within the fiction pretending to
be a document of real experience.
What Larry the director and Bressan the director both perceive
simultaneously is that they need a central character directly involved in such
abuse in order to tie the various talking-heads, interviewees, and stock
footage images together. Larry finds that person when suddenly his young intern
doctor friend, Dr. Bennett (Steve James) calls him to observe a young boy who
has just been brought into the ward because he has inexplicably gone into
convulsions. The boy also has a broken arm that has seeming cured of its own
without medical attention, and a chest showing signs of cigarette burns as well
as various damaged bones in the other arm.
It appears that this boy, Thomas Carroll (Raphael Sbarge), has been
abused, but there is not enough specific proof to make a charge against the
parents who have brought him in to the hospital. Perhaps the boy has been
burning himself, the arm broken during amateur sports, etc. Charging parents
with such crimes demands a long-term commitment and far more extensive
evidence; and like most of the adults in this film, the intern, about to finish
up his residency, is fearful of how it might affect his own career.
But seeing this handsome young boy, Larry is convinced he has come
across the perfect focus for his film. The problem is how to approach the kid
who is being sent home the next morning.
We have already been shown the mad series of events that have led up to
Thomas’ hospital visit, and by introducing this second “hero,” Bressan has
opened another up another framework in which to tell his story: a firsthand
dramatic account of what abuse truly looks like up-close, not simply existing
as a statistic or instance of photographic evidence. Yet Larry can do nothing
but look in with doctor through a glass wall to watch the boy slowly coming
back in consciousness. What Larry has almost forgotten is that he wears a
T-shirt with the question, “Are you being abused?” with his personal telephone
number.
And a few days later he receives a call from Thomas, asking him to meet
on Sunday morning, evidently the one regular time when the boy is permitted to
leave the house. Larry meets up with the boy and after some clumsy moments he
suggests they go for a coffee, but when the boy resists, changes their
breakfast location to his own apartment. So does the film shift yet again as
Larry, eager to get information from Thomas, finds himself describing the
several men in the photos strewn about his room, open evidence of his own gay
sexuality and former job as a male model. In this first meeting it appears that
Larry spends more time describing his own past experiences than the boy
expresses his daily terrors and personal suffering. At one point when the conversation
shifts, Thomas asks the obvious question, “is Larry gay?” responding that he
too is gay without any close friends at the moment. Thomas will not even shower
with his classmates, afraid that they will discover the burns tattooed into his
chest.
Almost immediately the two develop a rapport, as Larry offers him a
beer—the first of the elder’s illegal and irresponsible actions—and a stick of
Trident to cover up the smell when the boy returns home, evidence that he knows
the significance of his actions. And over their next couple of get-togethers,
the director increasingly entrusts his camera to Thomas, not only eliciting a
terrifying and fascinating confession from the boy, but enlisting his help in
making other shoots such as those he does of playground adult abuse.
Just as his film takes on greater resonance with the presence of Thomas,
so do we, the audience of his film, begin to comprehend the cycles of abuse in
better terms. We learn, for example, that Thomas still loves his parents
despite the horrible things they do to him, arguing that between their sudden
eruptions of hate, they show him love, help him to mend, allow him to sleep
between them, and shower him with attention. Not only do we begin to understand
why so many abuse victims do not immediately run away from the source of their
torture, but in some respects embrace it, becoming unknowing triggers for
further abuse as they begin to truly believe that they, in fact, have done
something worthy of their punishments.
Furthermore, Thomas now has the guilt of sharing his familial secrets
with an outsider, a stranger who also cannot truly comprehend how thoroughly
embedded in his and parents’ lives are the alternating responses of love and
aggression. At one horrible moment when the boy is telephoning Larry, his
parents arrive home. The boy quietly puts the phone upon the floor while he
runs to greet his father at the door where the share a deep hug—so intense that
for a moment one might even wonder if there isn’t yet another kind of abuse
hidden within the obvious one—before his mother enters demanding Thomas be
punished for still being up. The father begins to slap and then beat the boy,
Larry’s machine catching his screams and shrieks of pain. When Larry finally
plays back the message, however, there nothing the filmmaker can do but
recognize that everything has already happened hours earlier.
Accordingly, we also now perceive that in his slow reconstruction of the
film—the addition of a beautiful spiritual-like song about suffering children
by a black performer, the introduction of new clips he and the boy have shot,
and the very moving interview he had with Thomas—that he may be exploiting the
tortured young man, abusing the boy in yet another manner.
This is made even more clear in a conversation with Professor Rappaport
who is fearful that in introducing the boy into the film will make them all
legally liable if someone were to notify the parents; since the film must be
shown to an open audience, he suggests that Larry cut out the scenes with the
boy—now the heart and soul of his film—Larry angrily responding that he might
as well put a black bar over Thomas’ eyes just as they have over all the
hospital and morgue children included in the film used as evidence of the
various kinds of torture children are forced to suffer.
It is difficult to hear his advisor’s viewpoint, since we quickly
recognize it an example of the worst kind of censorship that would turn a
potent statement into yet another meaningless sympathy card to all those
children who have endured and died from such abuse; yet we cannot help but
recognize that Larry has entered dangerous territory wherein he is making
claims that may open them all to libel, and might actually be a misreading of
the situation.
In order to convince Rappaport of the truthfulness of Thomas and his
claims, Larry suggests they all three meet for a Sunday brunch. At that
meeting, however, as the nervous Thomas is forced to endure the academic praise
of the various tools Larry has used to manipulate and move his audience, the
boy begins to behave badly, making loud noises as he drinks and spilling water
until Larry, horrified by the entire situation—trapped between his professor’s
fatuous praise spelling out his exploitation of Thomas and his life and, as we
are soon to discover, his fear that his advisor will perceive just how close he
has grown to the boy—jumps up from the table to escape to the bathroom, Thomas
following close behind.
When Thomas discovers Larry in the bathroom dousing his face with water,
he carefully takes up a paper towel to wipe Larry’s hands and face, the two
standing for briefly face to face before the boy demands a hug which Larry
joyfully awards him. But as he readies to return to the table, Thomas pulls him
back yet again as the two looking into each other’s eyes come together in a
kiss from which they obviously can no longer restrain.
At
that moment, the second narrative structure immediately breaks open to reveal
an illicit love story that transforms almost all of the director’s deep
concerns for children being abused into a new kind of abuse tale that no longer
has necessarily to do with a child being physically tortured but being abused,
in legal terms, through sexual contact.
The boy, he soon tells Larry, is only 14,
and when in the very next scene we discover they have left the restaurant to
return to Larry’s apartment where they now both lie naked in bed it seems ludicrous to describe them engaging in what one
otherwise intelligent commentator observed as “moments of physical affection.” No, they have
just had sex. And in crossing that line, no matter how much sympathy one has
for both of them, we cannot deny that Larry has according to the law just
committed child abuse in any US state, and in 1983 might have broken the laws
against same-sex relations in numerous American places.
Even if we argue, as I will, that Thomas initiated the act, it does not
matter since a minor in desperate need of love may act unthinkingly, while a
senior is able presumably to control such emotions.* Even worse Larry realizes
by opening their friendship up into a sexual relationship he may have even
further endangered the boy’s life. Surely, as Thomas hints, if his gay
sexuality were to be discovered, his parents would kill him. And when Thomas
does not show up the next Sunday, Larry can only fear the worst.
Larry returns to Dr. Bennett, admitting to him all that has happened,
and hoping for help in finding a way to check on the boy. Bennett not only
righteously admonishes his friend but now fears that, since he first told him
of the boy, that he too might now be found guilty for aiding and abetting his
friend’s acts. In any event, what could he possibly do, call the boy’s home to
inquire as a doctor who once saw him in the hospital, surely signaling possible
surveillance which might further endanger the child? Bennett rightfully, if you
see things from his viewpoint, breaks away from his friend.
Larry himself now recognizes the dilemmas he has created, fantasizing a
nightmare arrest as he returns home late after trying to drink away his fears
for Thomas, whom he now imagines as being involved in an attempted bathtub
drowning.
He
almost succeeds in psychologically cutting himself off the from the boy by
throwing his energies into the re-editing his movie, but the question of one of
the authorities he has filmed keeps coming back to him: why do some children
remain in abusive situations while others escape? He reconnects with her in a
further attempt to comprehend the various kinds of abusive cycles that occur
within families, reconfirming and further explaining information provided to us
earlier in the film—another brilliant maneuver on the part of Bressan that
provides us with further information by pretending to reeducate the fictional
filmmaker.
She tells the story of one boy being taken away from an abusive home
only to recreate the same kind of abuse, evidently involving sex, with his new
foster parents. It was only when the child finally decided to himself to break
that cycle, that he turned himself in the authorities for protection. In his
fears, Larry has withdrawn all the money from his personal account, planning to
run off with Thomas in order to protect him. She warns Larry that such an act
would be completely self-destructive. Surely he would be arrested and the boy
might claim that he had been abducted. If there were to be any hope of true
escape and a future relationship, the boy must leave his parents of his own
will and seek out Larry’s help.
Larry finally appears to give up on his attempts to save Thomas, just as
we have seen all the others abandon the terrorized boy as if he was simply a
“situation” instead of a human being, citing the lack of evidence that is,
nonetheless, clearly marked across the boy’s body and their own inability to
involve themselves which merely informs us of their own lack of true caring and
courage.
We
see the scene which finally forces the boy to leave home, his father punishing
him this time not simply with a lit cigarette but a lit cigarette torch,
burning a deep gash into the boy’s stomach. Thomas shows up to Larry’s
apartment at the very hour that the filmmaker’s movie is about to premier to a
selected audience (another way he and Rappaport have found to get around the
possibility of someone not sympathetic to the film’s viewpoint attending the
film).
Since Larry has not yet appeared, Rappaport asks his secretary to
telephone him, she receiving a recorded message that he no longer lives at that
address. Clearly, Larry has escaped with the boy to wherever they might imagine
they can find refuge.
I
am afraid that far too many viewers of this film might very well agree with The
New York Times critic Vincent Canby’s assessment: “If Abuse were a
better film, one might be able to call it sordid. It's only tacky. In style
it's of the sort of pseudo-educational, same-sex movies made in the 1950's,
especially Kroger Babb's Mom and Dad.”
In hindsight, I alternatively agree with Vito Russo’s response: “[Abuse]
is not just the best gay film I’ve seen this year, it’s the best film I’ve seen
this year.”
To my way of thinking Bressan’s film is so important because it portrays
a moral man who breaks the law in order to save a boy the system refuses to
protect. Love is always involved with such moral decisions, and sometimes that
love goes beyond mere beneficence of the heart, to involve both the brain and
the dick. All the other so-called righteous beings in this film simply will not
help to release this child from the pretense of both parental and societal
love. Even feelings of good will, however, do nothing to protect anyone from
evil. Only true love, whatever kind you have to offer, can accomplish that.
In creating such a conundrum Bressan has not only puts his character at
danger for his life, but places himself equally in the position of being
accused of the very villainy which his film is bemoaning, transforming his
work, in the end, from a domestic romance back into a documentation of a moral
solution to an impasse. Who finally, in this film, might be most properly
described as the abuser: the parents, the central character, the director, or
the society, parallel to our own, which it depicts? In some respects, all of them
might be called abusers. But there is abuse and abuse. It takes a truly
moral person to comprehend the differences. I’ll gladly join hands with the
character and his creator before I reach out to any other others.
*As I described in my essay on several films
of the early 21st century in which young boys, having come to terms with being
gay, sought out older men for the experience of sex and sexual education, what
Thomas seeks in Larry is a kind of double opportunity, a wise man to help him
escape and a sexual partner rolled into one. Literature and filmmaking has a
long history of just such juvenile matchmaking. Only in our times have we come
to demean such opportunistic “marriages” in males. With regard to women we seem
to have less difficulty whether they be heterosexual or same sex commitments.
We generally describe the later as a “mentoring” relationship or a
“mother/daughter-like alliance.”
Los Angeles, May 27, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (May 2021).
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