the cure
by Douglas Messerli
Aleksi Bardy (screenplay, based on a story by Bardy and Dome
Karukoski, with additional storylines and dialogue by Noam Andrews, Kauko
Röyhkä, Mia Ylönen, and Mark Alton Brown), Dome
Karukoski (director) Tom of Finland / 2017
I feel I have to begin this essay by
expressing my surprise in what this film reveals about the figure at its
center, the gay porn artist—all three words, I would argue, being equally
appropriate, his work being art, gay, and most often representing pornography
without any of the negative evaluations that others might attach to any of
those words—Tom of Finland, better known in his homeland as Touko Laaksonen.
I
have made clear my disinterest in the leather scene and S&M sexual
activities several times in my queer cinema essays. But I have to admit I have
always enjoyed Tom of Finland’s art—although admittedly shyly and on the sly.
Yet there is something so outrageous about the size and shape of his male
beauties’ statures, pectorals, bubble butts, and cocks that their rowdy sexual
activities become almost lovingly comic, along with their smiling, often
lustful, and never resisting faces. His men, dressed in leather or other macho
uniforms or simply naked seem to be having so much fun that any homosexual who
enjoys contact of whatever kind with another male simply has to appreciate
their orgiastic natures. Every one of his drawings is an expression of the
opposite of what so many people think of gay men, having so often been
represented by heterosexuals as weak sissies, terrified of world outside of
their private bodily domains. Kake and his kind gays are macho men who conjure
up equally virile beings to suck, fuck in the ass, and speechlessly gawk at.
There’s nothing better to get a gay man’s libido flowing by seeing a facially
well-chiseled hairy chested man with a gigantic cock up his butt, or to put it
another a way, by observing a bulbously erect penis about to be placed into a
pair of perfectly rounded hairy buttocks.
Critic Glenn Kenny writing on the Roger Ebert site describes Tom of
Finland’s art somewhat differently, but nonetheless appropriately:
“How to describe the art of Touko Valio Laaksonen, aka Tom of Finland? Shall I compare thee to
a Village People wet dream? No, that’s not quite it. His depictions of gay
masculinity, to my eye, are kind of a gender inversion of the iconography of,
say, a female bombshell like Jayne Mansfield. The men who sprang from the
imagination of Tom of Finland are perfectly chiseled, bubble-butted,
well-endowed boys who can’t help it. Their emotional range runs the gamut from
friendly (there are some big smiles) to intimidating (there are more
impassive-to-frownlike expressions, often camouflaged by thick mustaches).
Heterosexual males had their Vargas pinups and other varieties of cheesecake.
Tom of Finland drew their gay equivalents, but in a way that tended more toward
the surreal/irrational, at least to my eye. A part of the effect had to do with
the fact that so much of his artwork was done in black-and-white, pencil
drawings of such exquisite and varied shading that one could marvel at the
peculiar, painstaking craft as much as one might drool over the impossible
physiques.”
I
don’t know what I expected the man behind these images to be like, but
certainly it was not the fairly gentle, somewhat war shell-shocked, homebound
illustrator living with his plain-looking sister in a society so homophobic
that at one point in the film even our generally straight-faced hero jokes that
he’d have better luck selling his art in the Vatican than in Helsinki.
The
Touko (Pekka Strang) that this film presents us with is not even necessarily
involved in the motorcycle culture or S&M—the film in fact does not enter
the terrain of his private sexual activities, although we might certainly
recognize his fetishes by the pictures he draws—but establishes a longstanding relationship with
a handsome, somewhat petite dancer Veli (Lauri Tilkanen) whom he has met up
with once for sex in the park, but which his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky),
having developed what she perceives as a romantic relationship with the young
man, brings into their large home—a rare-commodity in post-war Finland—as a
boarder.
But before going in further I should perhaps take a few moments to
establish why our hero is having nightmares and can’t sleep due to images of
his wartime memories. It is somewhat strange that all the promotional material
on this film simply describes Touko’s service as being in the World War II
military, but in fact he is a lieutenant in the war Finland fought just before
and again during World War II with Russia, sometimes described as the
Finno-Soviet Wars or more specifically, in Finland, as the Winter War
(1939-1940) before the full outbreak of World War II, and The Continuation War
(1941-1944).
Even Helsinki Film describes Touko on IMDb as “serving his country in
World War II.” It’s clear they don’t want to remind us of the fact that while
the Allies, the United States, United Kingdom (including the British
Commonwealth), the Soviet Union, and China stood together against the Axis
forces of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Empire of Japan, the Finns were
fighting the Russians, one of the American-British allies.
The Winter War began with the Soviet invasion of Finland on November 30,
1939, before the official US involvement in World War II in 1941. Outdone by
the Soviet military strength with tanks and aircraft, Finland lost, but
nonetheless the four months ended with many Soviet losses and, early in the
struggle, seemed to be going Finland’s way. Seeing the early Finnish successes
as a sign that the Soviet troupes were weak helped Hitler to believe that he
could attack Russia with success.
At
the Winter War’s end, Finland was forced to cede substantial territories
despite the fact that The League of Nations had deemed the attack illegal and
had expelled the Soviet Union as a member.
With the general declaration of World War II in 1941, Finland resumed
the war, fighting this time with the military support, economic aid, and
military assistance by Germany, an alliance Finland justified for self-defense,
while they battles were mostly concentrated on regaining their lost
territories, most of which they had regained by September of that year. But by
1944, when the tide turned against Germany, Finland had again lost most of
those territories. Hostilities between Finland and the Soviet Union on
September 5, 1944 with the signing of the Moscow Armistice, which also meant
the expulsion and disarming of any German troops still in Finnish territory,
which in turn led to the Lapland War between Finland and Germany. Only with the
signing of the Paris Peace Treaties in 1947 did Finland’s involvement in the
war finally end. It’s estimated that there were more than 63,000 Finnish
casualties with the addition of 158,000 wounded during the wars, with 23,000
German deaths and 60,400 wounded. Soviet deaths range from 250,000 to 305,000,
with 575 estimated to have been wounded or fallen sick.
The war in short represented a strange episode in Finnish history that
tainted their democratic principles and put a blot on the everyday landscape of
Finnish life that led to the semi-nationalistic mood and dour attitudes in the
Helsinki landscape regarding sexual expression that we see through all of the
early episodes of Tom of Finland. It also explains why we witness in the
early episodes of the film Touko stabbing and killing a Soviet paratrooper and
his later regret for that act, as he turns over the body to see a young man who
will a few years later be recognized as one of Finland’s allies.
The guilt of the Finnish populace is almost palpable throughout the
film, and their inability to quickly recover the way the rest of Europe was
attempting to is apparent. It also gives context to Touko’s voyage to Germany
in an attempt to sell his drawings in what had become a more open
society—despite the taunts of a German prison guard when Touko is arrested for
homosexual activities and refusal to pay a hotel bill, “During the war we knew
what to do with your kind.” One imagines postwar 1950s Germany and Denmark to
be a more open society than it is presented in this film, but through Touko’s
Finnish viewpoint, and the fact that he has just been robbed of his “illegal”
drawings by a gallerist who decades later Tom of Finland discovers had issued
them as cheap pornographic books colors Touko’s lower continental visits.
If
nothing else this film makes clear that the sexually open-minded Europe that I
and others encountered during the early 1960s was not the same Europe of the
1950s (a fact to which Stefan Haupt’s Swiss-based film The Circle of
2014 also attests). Touko is almost trapped in Germany as even the Finnish
embassy spokesman is ready to reject the artist’s claim to be a Finnish
citizen, leaving him to the still brutal German prison system because he
admittedly is “interested in pheasants,” apparently a code word of entering gay
bars in Berlin. Only when he calls for the interceding of a Finnish military
officer with whom Touko had regularly had sex during the war who happens to be
stationed in Berlin is the artist finally released and able to return to his
homeland.
There, despite the joys and his relationship with Veli, he must now cope
with his own sister’s intense homophobia, meaning that he has to hide all of
his artwork behind panels in the attic. Although he and Veli might now attend
wild sexual gatherings at the mansion of his wartime officer friend, Touko’s
lover—who by now has encouraged Tom of Finland to begin printing and selling
his images abroad—dreams of decorating their house with yellow curtains which
are kept open during sex, and possibly even opening up the entire house to the
same kind of parties that the officer is
hosting. Touko reminds him that “yellow” is a sissy color and that Finland will
perhaps never tolerate such open mindedness regarding queers. As if to
reiterate his observations, a party at the officer’s mansion is raided by the
police, most of the participants escaping through a nearby balcony, with the
officer himself being arrested and sent to a clinic determined to help “cure”
him.
When
Touko visits him, hoping to convince him to escape the institutional
imprisonment, the officer insists he wants to be cured so that he will lose
nothing more than he already has lost, his job, hoping to still continue a
relationship with his life. Clearly, Finland is still a world in which guilt
rules, whether or not the person accused has anything to feel guilty about or
not.
Several critics have complained that the film is slow going and somewhat
impenetrable up until this point, its sudden shift of gears in the last third
of the movie being unjustifiable. I’d argue that, in fact, just under the
surface the film up to this point has been quite dramatic, but that director
Dome Karukoski’s graceful subtleties of text have simply flowed below the more
loudly-pitched radar of US viewers. Unlike an US film of this sort, which
probably would have treated the subject more as a documentary, Karukoski does
not shove forward token characters in order to elucidate the events that are
happening just below the surface. For those who know nothing about Finnish
history or unable to glean what has happened to make Tom/Touko the strange combination
of outrageous sensualist and quiet and even slightly paranoid everyday man that
he is. How is someone so out of touch with a truly communal gay experience able
to imagine worlds in which so many openly gay men express their love of all
things masculine through various uniforms, methods and transportation, and
trips to various paradises where sex of any kind is openly permitted? How is
such a dour man living in such a repressed world, in other words, able to
create such bacchanalian urban and wilderness fantasies? In order to survive,
obviously, he has no other choice. In a sense, drawing such images was Tom of
Finland’s “cure.”
Meanwhile things are mostly improving. Money through sales of
photographs he has taken and bound of his artwork are selling throughout the
world and he has just been invited to the US for a tour of Los Angeles, New
York, and other cities. Veli has a cough of which he can’t seem to rid himself,
but perhaps the California air will help. When Veli stays behind, we worry a
little about the possibility of AIDS, while recognizing that in the mid-1960s
the disease had yet to surface, let alone make its way to Finland.
The
vision Karukoski presents through Tom of Finland’s
eyes of the hippy-like paradise of mid of late-60s Los Angeles, is as outsized
and outrageous as the artist’s drawings. Everywhere men in tight shorts hold
hands, kiss in public, and seem ready at any moment to let the sunshine tan
body parts that usually are hidden away from the sun’s rays. Invited by the
successful entrepreneur Doug (Seumas Sargent) who has grown up from a skinny
gym rat into a happily “coupled” gay publisher mostly due to the influence and
later sale of Tom of Finland’s art, Tom discovers a sybaritic paradise where
when the police show it’s not to raid the place but to politely inform the
celebrants that a criminal is loose in the neighborhood so they should be on
alert. One of the policemen looks so much like a Tom of Finland cop, that Touko
asks to take a picture of him, for which the office proudly poses as if ready
to be transformed into another male fantasy creation.
What Touko Laaksonen hadn’t realized back in Helsinki is just how much
of a gay cultural icon he has become in the USA and by this time in the rest of
Europe, where seemingly every gay man, drag queen, and even straight women have
seen and used his art to help better stimulate their lives. The film that until
this point has been a sad commentary on Finnish sexual provinciality now
suddenly becomes a kind of wild sexual fantasy that grandly overstates Tom of
Finland’s influence on gay culture and turns the gentle artist into a cultural
hero for the entire LGBTQ community.
Having been there, it’s a hard tale to swallow, despite its cheerful
embracement of a myth that is not unpleasant to believe, as if pornographic
cartoons were at the heart of gay liberation. But, like Tom of Finland’s art,
its such a friendly, likeable movie by this point that it’s hard to just walk
of the theater or turn off the DVD. You want to toast it’s silly meme and sing
along at film’s end with Sylvester’s disco prayer “Take Me to Heaven.”
Fortunately,
the film briefly takes Tom and the film’s viewers back to earth before sending
us to heaven as Touko returns home to find his boyfriend ill with tracheal
cancer. Even though he buys him those “sissy” yellow curtains it ends sadly
with Veli’s death, just as his coming out to his sister with a private gallery
showing in own his house of his artwork ends badly with her dismissal of his
work as embarrassing and disgraceful porno scribbles. A call from the US helps
to heap upon the poor man’s back another mountain of guilt when he’s told that
people are dying throughout the world with the new AIDS virus and conservatives
are pointing to his art as the cause. I guess time has passed.
Were it only that simple, to believe that a few books of drawings of
over-endowed joyful gay men “caused” AIDS and brought on a series of denials
and inactions that buried hundreds of others. In fact, every LGBTQ figure in
some way or another had to carry that underserved hatred with them, often to
their graves.
By
this time, however, our hero is tired of being blamed for everything, and
recognizes that, if nothing else, in a time when gay men are being treated as
outcasts and being asked to give up the very sexual actions which define their
existence that what we need is not less of such graphic sexual pornography but
more, as he works to create a new collected anthology. When completed, Tom,
Doug, and friends search out a press to print it throughout the entire city of
Los Angeles, from A to Z, before they find the Jewish printer of sacred texts
Zagat (Manfred Böll) who astoundingly agrees he’d do with a little bit of
help—which dozens of Tom of Finland’s followers immediately sign up to provide.
We’re ready now, Mr. Karukoski, for a room full of shouting
leather-wearing faggots to applaud the artist who provided them their wardrobe
and enough fantasies to play out for the rest of their lives. Put on Sylvester
and cheer along with those of us who can’t get enough of Tom.
Los Angeles, November 24, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema (November
2021).
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