Ty Sanga | Come Clean / 2008

repeating violence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Johnny B. Dunn (screenplay), Ty Sanga (director) Come Clean / 2008 [12 minutes]

 

Ty Sanga’s 2008 short film, Come Clean, begins at a group therapy session where a gentleman has just finished discussing his long painful relationship with is male companion who has died of AIDS. The group approves of his open confessions and turns to Jeremy (David Wassleton), who has apparently begun the group several weeks earlier, but has gone missing from its last few sessions.

     He is still in terrible pain and suffers from deep guilt for having suggested he and his lover visit a new trendy gay bar, a meeting to which he arrived late. When he finally gets there he is greeted by the sight of his lover laying in a pool of blood, evidently a victim of a homophobic crime. Encouraged to post a picture of his lost lover to the group bulletin board, Jeffrey hulks out, clearly resenting the other members’ inability to comprehend his deep suffering and sense of guilt for the event.

     Sometime later we meet up again with Jeffrey, this time involved in the mundane action of washing and drying his clothes. Suddenly a young man, Mark (Jack Littman) comes rushing into the laundromat, blood on his shirt. He is being chased by two others in a pick-up truck, and Jeremy draws the conclusion quickly that he is suffering from a homophobic attack, suggesting he hide out in the back. When the two brutes come looking for Mark, he claims not to have seen him, but one of them suspects something and prepares to beat the “fag” who refuses to reply, the other pulling him away with the belief that Mark has escaped.

      They drive off, and Mark comes out from hiding. But when Jeremy suggests they need to call the police and attempts to see if he was wounded, given the blood on his shirt, the boy unintentionally tells him “It’s not my blood,” at the same moment when the boy’s cellphone (which  he has previously denied he has with him) rings. Suddenly Jeremy recognizes that, in fact, Mark was not the victim but was with the others, and gradually the story of an unintentional beating and murders of a gay for who Mark served as the decoy is told.

      Mark attempts to go on the run, but Jeremy holds him back, waiting for the police so that the boy will be forced to tell the authorities of how he was unintentionally involved in a homophobic murder nearby, the victim’s body still laying in a nearby alley.

       We hear the police siren soon after.

      And in the last frame, Jeremy pins his lover’s picture to the board where the other grievers of the group have left their evidence of lost love and source of their grief.

        Apparently, having been able to right this situation has helped to remove Jeremy’s sense of guilt for his own lover’s fate.

      I’m not certain that I buy into this psychological explanation of the resolving of survivor’s guilt, particularly since although Jeremy may have now finally brought justice to bear in this situation, the entire series of events, given Mark’s somewhat passive but still apparent homophobia is not truly resolved. A promise to never be involved in such a situation again seems an easy out for someone who has just helped to kill a gay man. And the entire scene in the laundromat is somewhat muddled, without Jeremey actually taking much of an active role, accept to hold back the kid. He cannot call the police, for example, because as he tells the group he’s thrown his own cellphone away. And, finally, the self-help group seems to me a little too programmed with snappy resolutions to such situations, as does the film itself. The quality of the print is unfortunately equally murky and muddled.

       Yet Sanga’s short attempts to provide a very different perspective on homophobic attacks on gay men, representing it from the point of view from those who are left behind and must suffer not only the loss of one they loved, but a fear and confusion of their existence in such a brutal society.

Since this film, Sanga has gone on to direct several films about what appears to be his native Hawai’i.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).