Greg Pritikin and Gary Rosen | Totally Confused / 1998

the gay celibate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Greg Pritikin and Gary Rosen (screenwriters and directors) Totally Confused / 1998

 

It’s hard to imagine that in the same year that saw the first popular new movie versions of the gay “coming out” genre Get Real and Edge of Seventeen, with young handsome boys that made everyone wish they young again even if they might have to undergo the throes of gay self-identification all over; that brought us the smart and edgy queer group-family film Relax…It’s Just Sex; the multi-sexual musical extravaganza Velvet Goldmine; the sophisticated French art-based drama Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train; and the Swedish lesbian romantic comedy Show Me Love—to name only a few examples of the brave new gay cinema that was unfolding—would also feature a muddied Chicago-based gay comedy funneling a second-rate version of Woody Allen humor and impersonation. Woody Allen as an even more nervous gay man is not precisely what I look for when I attend a movie, no matter how open-minded I am to new LGBTQ perspectives.

      The Woody Allen figure in this case is a tormented young gay celibate, Wiley (Gary Rosen) who’s so uncertain of his own sexuality that he collects not only piles of gay porn but heterosexual magazines as well, leafing through the pages of both collections of sexual imagery simply to try to figure out to which he’s more attracted. He works in a used bookstore where he ogles a customer Stephan (Patrick LoSasso) and reads far too much, including the anti-homosexual literature of the 1950s. Indeed, Wiley is so angst-ridden that we’re not even sure he has time between his worries for masturbation.

      Wiley’s best friend, Johnny (Greg Pritikin) is a would-be rocker who is so deluded that he makes Wiley look like a model of sanity. Johnny’s agent Murray (Duane Sharp) has convinced him that the new demo, copies of which Johnny has paid to publish, will surely bring him a commercial label and a national tour. And somehow this liar (which some would argue is another word for “agent”) keeps him believing that the passing weeks of silence is normal considering contractual adjustments; moreover, he has found distribution in Europe—Greenland to be specific!

      So thrilled is Johnny about his new possibilities that he invites his girlfriend, Annie, to move in with him in the apartment he shares with a constantly arguing heterosexual couple, Cindy (Heather Donaldson) and Alistair (Darek Hasenstab) who Wiley dubs their personal George and Martha after Edward Albee’s battling duo in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?   

      Wiley warns him that a sure way for a couple to break is to move in together, but the delusional Johnny is a true believer.

       That is until Annie begins to crack through Johnny’s blind allegiance to Murray, noting that he keeps cancelling meetings and weeks have gone by since the original jubilation. Moreover, we discover Johnny can’t really play the guitar or sing that well. The inevitable breakup between Annie and Johnny occurs after he declares her jealous, accidently kills her pet bird, and basically ignores her as he focuses on the illusion of his career.

       Meanwhile, Wiley, growing even more paranoid about his presumed homosexuality—while, as the reviewer from Variety describes it, “snobbishly decrying gay culture as little more than the intersection between Village People and Judy Garland” and taking out his “frustration by waxing jealous about the duo’s straight coupledom”—goes into an even deeper funk when he discovers through a do-or-dare-like guessing game that Johnny has actually had sex with another boy years before. His best friend, in short, not only bests him with relations with women but with boys as well, a high school chum known to both of them, Sal Minos.

       Confused over what believe about his agent, his love-life with Annie, and his own talent, Johnny attempts to make it up to Wiley at least by proving his friendship and, after Wiley for the first time in his life actually makes a sexual advance as the two lay together in bed, beginning to wonder whether or not he’s more interested in boys than girls.

       At first repulsed by Wiley’s touch on the chest, Johnny returns to give Wiley a boost of real sex, which his friend turns into a somewhat regular occurrence. When Annie moves back in again, it is clear that trouble is ahead, particularly since Wiley is now convinced that he and Johnny have a real sexual relationship. When Annie discovers what’s been happening and Wiley learns that it’s all been a pretense at the very moment when Johnny finally wakes up to learn that Murray suffers from bipolar behavior, resulting in the belief that he can achieve anything he promises—he is left with no one and nothing in his life left but rage.

       He and Wiley fight what might be a dual to the death were it not that Annie intervenes and, at that very moment, Cindy bops Alistair over the head with a frying pan that almost kills him. Alistair survives, and, strangely enough, so does the friendship between these obvious losers who are so argumentative that they can’t even decide in which restaurant they might share a meal in order to celebrate their survival as friends.

       This might have made a wonderful TV sit-com of the day, but as serious LGBTQ comedy, it sucks, Wiley remaining at the end surrounded by heterosexuals without having a clue of how to even imagine entering a gay bar, let alone asking someone home for sex. At film’s end we’re not even sure whether having sex with your straight best friend entails “coming out.”

      It’s interesting, one must admit, to finally see a gay man who wasn’t born beautiful, and the film might have more seriously explored the ramifications of what that means in the gay world. But evidently co-writer and director Rosen himself didn’t have a clue what to do with his character except to continue to kvetch.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).