connor’s confusion
by Douglas Messerli
Tyler Reeves (screenwriter and director) When
I Grow Up / 2019 [5 minutes]
US director Tyler Reeves 5-minute short When
I Grow Up is perhaps the most fun of the fantasies of which I’m writing. A
family has gathered at a local restaurant to celebrate their daughter Ashley’s
(Lauren Elyse Buckley) acceptance to college where she intends to study
creative writing.
Mother (Varda Appleton), Father (Jonathan Fahn), and Ashley’s younger
brother, Connor (Noah Dobson), slightly uncomfortable within his own slightly
chubby body, all toast to the girl, her parents expressing their excitement
that she gotten into the school of her choice. The moment they toast, Connor
suddenly observes two gay men enter the place and sit at bar table behind him.
A
moment later Connor is caught up in a fantasy of the couple working backwards
from their now seemingly pleasant workaday lives together, to their marriage,
the marriage proposal, their first drink in a bar, their early meeting and
first kiss, one of the two telling his parents he is gay, and back into their
high school days when it seemed like he would never meet anyone who might like
him, as the camera pans back to the boy conjuring up this imaginary voyeuristic
voyage into another’s couple’s past—while in the process conjuring up a future
which he hopes someday will be his.
It’s a rather remarkable, if hard to believe, fantasy trip for such a
young man to make, drawing as it does upon the hundreds of LGBTQ “coming out”
films since the 1990s, while still managing to include a lesbian-in-the-making
and featuring a gay Asian-American lead. It’s clear our young man must have
been secretly watching dozens of videos that he parents know absolutely nothing
about.
Obviously, it’s unlikely that high school freshman or a possible middle
school student would know all the tropes of those various genre films but it
doesn’t truly matter, does it, since it’s a fantasy about some future, any
future which will whisk him away from the world of heterosexual normalcy in
which, as a child, he is now forced to endure?
It’s
actually a kind of cute gimmick. But it’s not an honest film. Coming out, easy
or difficult, cannot be reduced to a moment of sitting down to tell your
parents you’re gay. An image of an erased text message does not fully express
the pain and doubt of trying to tell someone you love them before deciding not
yet to admit that feeling. A gay wedding cannot yet be summed up in a photoshop
pic of the cake, etc. In short, fantasies cannot truly represent life and, as
such, unfairly represent the imagination of any young boy hoping and praying
for a day in which he might begin to live the life he feels necessary for his
happiness. Even in this little family gathering, Connor is already an outsider,
so the director’s cooking up a fantasy that might be summarized by the trite
phrase “It gets better” is a kind of cop out.
When asked by his parents has he thought about his future Connor replies
“Not really,” which we know absolutely to be a lie. But that might have been
the starting more for a truly honest movie. As it is, this film is not about
our young uncomfortable teenager, but about the director posting the good news
for a possible future that probably will have far more suffering in it that these
simple gay scrapbook fantasies.
Fantasy, once more, has been used to renounce the serious job of a
writer/director as he refuses to create a story that explores the truths, joys,
and fears of the figure he has created. Cheerleading the character on is not
the director’s role. If I had my way, I’d start over at the moment his parents
ask him to come out of his reverie to join them in conversation, titling it Connor’s
Confusion. Maybe his creative writing sister might be able to provide him
with a script.
Los Angeles, June 6, 2021| Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).
No comments:
Post a Comment