Luca Silver | The Naked Eye / 2021

i’ll be watching you

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luca Silver (screenplay and director) The Naked Eye / 2021 [15 minutes]

 

In a room bathed by yellow light, lies a handsome young man (Luca Silver) in his black undershorts. The room is lined by boxes, suggesting that he is either just moving in and has failed to unpack or is soon to leave the space. Ghosts of entwined male couples seem to be hovering over the space.

     Suddenly, the sleeping man’s eyes open. Has he spotted something? He, however, quickly falls back to sleep, but quickly is awakened again by what seems to be a figure. He soon realizes, however, it is nothing and stands on this seemingly hot night to run his hands across his torso, pull off his underpants revealing his half-erection, and even turn to the camera to seemingly demonstrate his butt—all the time fondling himself in erotic devotion.

 

      He returns to the bed, but just as suddenly does spot a figure and soon after witnesses, as we do, the shadow of a man (Michael Stewart) standing against the closed blinds, desperate to see what is within and enter. If previously we have heard nothing but the whir of the fan, we now the shadow’s fingers rubbing across glass, in full lust of the now covered and somewhat frightened young beauty in the bed.

      We cannot comprehend who this figure might be, a man alive or one of the vague ghosts we sense to be within the room. We even must ask ourselves if this figure is an emblem of our own lust for the man we have just previously witnessed entirely naked.

       In the next scene the room has turned to blue suggesting the light of early morning. Our lovely sleeper rises and enters the shower where we watch, apparently from an impossible view behind a glass encasement of the shower, the face of another young man who licks the glass, steamed up with the evaporation of the water’s heat, with his tongue to gain eye-level entry to the man within.

      In the next moment we see the shower from the traditional view, with five blue towels hanging over a black shower, all apparently used. In full blue and yellow, we witness only the arms reaching high above the glass as the young man soaps and washes his hair. He pulls down one of the blue towels.

     Is this our own erotic dream or that of the young man? We no longer are able to separate the two. We only perceive that we are now shut out as the credits role, our desires disappointed and put to rest. Has the young man all along been taunting us or whoever it is who so desperately wishes to watch him in his daily actions? Is he leaving became of the ghosts or inviting them in?

      This short film raises issues of voyeurism, pornography, and exhibitionism and our relationship to them without providing us with any coherent answers.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).