Mary Feuer | Rock Bottom / 2002

fear and trembling

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mary Feuer and John Militello (screenplay), Mary Feuer (director) Rock Bottom / 2002 [22 minutes]

 

It’s late at night and the male and transgender prostitutes are standing at various corners of Santa Monica Boulevard. A car drives by slowly, the driver catching the eye of one cute, very young, probably underage boy, Jason (Timothy Lee DePreist). The light stops the car, and Jason moves forward but the car moves on when the light changes, the driver clearly uncertain whether or not he wants to go through with the meeting.

     But Jason catches with the car, driven by an overweight man, Billy (John Militello), and gets in the car, starting up a conversation which becomes almost a seduction, as Billy, still mixed in his emotions, is slowly swayed to make the commitment. They introduce themselves as Rick and Charles.

     Billy asks the outrageous question of the boy, “You’re not a cop are you?” To reassure him, the boy grabs his hand and places in on his cock. “Would a policeman do that?”

     When Jason asks him what he likes, Billy is still shy, perhaps truly unsure, as he turns the question back to the boy who answers with what sounds like an unsatiable appetite depending upon the price: “That all depends, I like to suck or get sucked, fuck or get fucked.” It’s 50 for a suck, a 100 for fuck. Jason likes to take care of business first.

     Billy suggests they drive to his house where he has his money, and the game is on, a game of fear and trembling given Billy’s near complete naivete and Jason’s smooth-talking reassurance that he’s a very honest person—despite the fact that the moment he’s in the house he uses the excuse of going to the bathroom to smoke cocaine and check out Billy’s bedroom where he discovers his paycheck laying upon a desk, at the same moment realizing that Charles is really named Billy.

      Meanwhile Billy picks up the boy’s pants from the floor, his billfold falling out of the back pocket, which when Billy opens it, he discovers from the boy’s license that Rick is really Jason.

    We’re not sure either if we can fully believe Billy when he describes himself as a writer now working for the Los Angeles Times. He seems so childlike we wonder if he really knows what he has gotten into. As if he were entertaining a guest, he serves wine with cheese and crackers, carefully placing his payment on the nicely arranged tray he brings to the coffee table in front of the couch.

      Jason meanwhile asks if he wants to party, to which Billy innocently responds in the positive. But when the boy takes out his drug paraphernalia Billy is somewhat taken about the appearance of drugs, insisting he wants no part of it. And we realize finally that Jason is an addict.

      Jason asks for a massage which Billy is only too happy to provide. As Billy moves up from kissing the boy’s belly, he moves in for a kiss, to which the boy violently reacts, almost unable to control his emotions, apologizing at the very moment that he continues to pound his hands together shouting out “fuck, fuck!” As for many male prostitutes, kissing is off limits. As even Billy suggests, it’s a strange restriction given that he seems amenable to both passive and aggressive sex.

       Billy ends up apologizing, holding him close to calm him, and strangely enough things return to normal, Billy suggesting that he’s ready for sex, the two moving into the bedroom for what appears to be a session in which Billy has fucked the young man.

       Jason is now almost gentle, pleasant after what might have seemed to be a tense situation with a heavyset man as his sexual partner. But now the violence has disappeared. Yet when he rises before Billy, he once sneaks into the other room where, we are surprised to discover the paycheck still remains, Jason picking it up once more without the viewer being able to determine whether he keeps it this time or once again returns it to the desk. But at the same moment he spots something else that detracts him.

      When Billy returns to the living room where Jason is still sitting, we discover that what Jason has found is a boxing robot game, which the boy insists he loved as a kid. Billy responds with wide eyes agreeing that’s why he kept it from his childhood.

      It is hardly possible to believe that these two very different individuals, of seemingly disparate ages, might share a similar childhood pleasure. But evidently they very much do, embarking upon a series of challenges with each determined to win the game, helping us to recognize that emotionally both of these individuals are still children, having come together at a low point in both their lives, Billy reaching out from loneliness and Jason from his need for money in order survive, having apparently “fucked up” the situation with other johns. But perhaps he needs an innocent like Billy for other reasons as well.

      His fear of kissing obviously has something to do with some terrible hurt he has received in the past. And Billy, child that he is, clearly makes Jason feel comfortable and safe. For suddenly Jason comments that “It’s starting to feel like home,” which delights Billy, but surely puts fear into an objective viewer. Is the boy about to take advantage of him in some further way we haven’t  yet imagined?

      As they sit pleasurably together, Jason ingests some more cocaine, this time inviting Billy to kiss him and, in the process, blowing the fumes into the other man’s mouth. Billy discovers he enjoys it, and they repeat the process.

       But now Jason discovers he has run out of the stuff, saying that if he can get some more money they can continue, Billy agreeing without hesitation. Suddenly the two are deep kissing as if they were lovers, having seemed to discover something in each other that as outsiders in judgment have simply not been privy too. It is a seemingly a kind of magical bonding of two opposites who clearly need one another to become full human beings, both supplying something that the other desperately needs.

      If it is difficult to describe this as love; it represents a momentary fulfillment, at least, for two desperately needy people who, just as they have with drugs, have emotionally reached rock bottom.

      Together Militello and Feuer—the latter of whom would go on to write and work on the TV series Dante’s Cove, With the Angels, and East Los High—created in Rock Bottom a work that is at once tense and gentle, a reconfirming story than still opens itself up to a great deal cynicism and doubt.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).