Sasha Ettinger Epstein | Wall Boy / 2009

standing in wait half-naked in the night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sasha Ettinger Epstein (screenwriter and director) Wall Boy / 2009 [17 minutes] 

 

Another Australian film, Sasha Ettinger Epstein’s 2009 Wall Boy, serves both as a kind of public message about the problem of the slave trafficking runaway children and a kind of “feel good” film in the fact that in this particular tale, based on a real-life event, the “wall boy” (Keegan Joyce)—real name Tom Sutton in the fiction of the film, a boy listed on a national “lost boy list”—was successfully whisked away from a pimp’s (Terry Serio) control and packed off on a return home to his family.

       But the real story here is not that Tom Sutton is saved by kindly Salvation Army workers (Ben Wood and Danny Adock), who each day show up in a food truck that offers homeless men and sex workers hot coffee, donuts, computers on which to work for short periods of time, and, if they wish, seek out the company of the youth workers, but the fact that others remain on wall vigil, young boys who even in the days that are clocked by the narrative structure which interleaves their daily appearance with a running digital clock ticking away their days, remain by film’s end under the vigilance of a pimp, who watches their every move with binoculars.

     When we first see “Tom,” he  his dressed in a pullover T-shirt, but each day the truck and workers return they see him stripped down, first to a lighter shirt, then a sleeveless tank top, and finally bare chested, as if he were gradually being stripped nude before our eyes just as we observe the pimp attempting to both reverse his growing lassitude and perhaps also controlling him with shots of heroin, drugging him into a state of momentary rejuvenation that in the long term leaves him in an even more passive and dead-like state.

     The wall boy in this tale knows what is happening to him, and attempts over the weeks that the youth worker’s truck visit to leave behind cryptic messages on the computer that might be read by the friendly worker, the first time simply saying “Don’t call the cops. He’ll kill me,” and gradually revealing further that he is under observation and is doomed if action is not soon taken.

      Even his entry into the truck is not only observed but is perhaps subject to some punishment, as each time, after briefly looking up his name on the list or shopping for roller skates—a pair of which he evidently enjoyed as a younger child—he quickly bolts to return to his stand along the wall. To be honest this skinny, acne-faced kid, despite his age of about 11 or 12, seems not to be popular among the clients. Indeed, none of these boys, on the edge of death, are terribly attractive to the patrons behind the near constant flow of cars which pause momentarily at the wall as if in memorial tribute before speeding away empty.

      When our do-gooder hero, the kindly youth worker, determines he must finally take action to save the boy, it involves a cloak and dagger event that might almost be stolen from an episode of a good adventure movie. Slipping off and out of view from the ever-observant pimp and camera view he evidently enters a nearby car driven by someone else playing a mean-minded john, who like the others, slows down in front of the kid, this time inviting him into the automobile before driving off, the pimp even jotting down the car’s license number.

       Moments later the half-naked boy hears the automatic lock of the vehicle doors, suddenly terrified of what might happen, particularly since the newspapers have recently headlined that a male boy hustler has had his throat slit by a local killer.

      From the back seat, however, the youth worker rises to assure the boy as they speed away to the airport where they hand him a ticket home, some money, and a used pair of roller skates the worker has pulled out of his own closet of old mementos. They assure him that authorities will be waiting on the other side of the flight to help facilitate his return to his family.

       The unfortunate truth, however, which in its celebration of the boy’s salvation Epstein’s film does not even begin to explore, is that many if not most of these boys leave home because of abuse or are forced to run when rejected by parents unwilling to accept their sexual orientation. And there is utterly no attempt to explore how this child deals with his return to “normalcy” after his near-death experiences in the city. Can he truly be expected to return to his roller-skating childhood after shivering and sweating out the nights against the wall? How will his sadly gained knowledge of evil interact with the youthful innocence of his peers?

        It is obviously a cause for celebration when such a terrorized youth is “saved,” but one cannot help but feel if less time were spent on applauding the particular and a bit more energy was spent on exploring the general problems that this narrative presents, Wall Boy might have been a richer film. And where are the police in all of this; why haven’t they swept down upon these wall-bound boys and their evil controller watching over them in the nearby car. Surely even a casual viewer might discern that many of these night owls perched against that wall are too young to be standing in wait half-naked in the night? Are kindly youth workers who devote their energies to kidnapping such kids away from their pimps the only solution to this serious social problem?

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2021).