inviting your boyfriend home
by Douglas Messerli
Kass McLaws (screenwriter and director) Together
Forever / 2021 [16.45 minutes]
I have to admit that I am not particularly
fond of LGBTQ horror films, a genre that over the past couple of decades has
been explored by an increasing number of young directors. Neither is it my
favorite genre in straight films, but there is something particularly
disturbing to me to see gays and lesbians terrified or tortured, particularly
by their own kind, when they have already had to deal with the daily
difficulties of being homosexual in a heterosexually dominant world. And if the
terror is being visited upon them from a heterosexual being I feel like it’s
simply a reassertion of the daily reality LGBTQ individuals have long suffered.
Kass McLaws’ 2021 film Together Forever, accordingly, is somewhat
unappealing to me on several visceral levels. The film begins in the pits of a
high school classroom as so many bullying and coming out films do; but in this
case the new boy, Ethan (Aiden Koeneman), despite the seeming disinterest of
nearly every one of his fellow classmates, is nicely greeted by the cutest boy
in the room, Liam (Miles McComas). Indeed, the two not only quickly become best
friends, but seem to feel free to openly express their gay love, walking
hand-in-hand and kissing one another from time to time on the cheek. They
appear almost immediately as the perfect teenage couple without anyone around
them interested in intruding upon their romance.
I
suppose that I should have hinted to us that there is something strange about
this fantasy. Where are the mutual taunts that they might be force to overcome,
bringing them together or pulling them apart? Where are the bullying hall boys
ready to put the fear of mockery and possible brutal beatings into their minds
and bodies?
The
most difficult issue that appears to come between them is Liam’s daring to
finally invite his new friend Ethan over to his house. We wonder, what kind
monsters might his parents be to make the decision to invite his friend over
for a visit so very difficult?
When Ethan arrives at the house it is startled by the very size of the
modernistic, glass-walled mini-mansion. And clearly, when greeted at the door
by his friend, he looks forward to exploring this new world.
But
only a few steps into the suddenly empty house, Ethan is struck from behind
with a heavy object, blood running down his face, he waking up after in a
walled-in basement-like tomb where he has been hand-cuffed to a shackle
inserted into the concrete of the floor.
Later Liam appears with a bowl of what looks like dog food, but offering
at least something for his friend to at least imagine as sympathy. We are
startled by his statement that he’s sorry for the situation but knows that
Ethan in a few days will realize that it has been necessary before they can
return to “normal,” since he is seeking to know that their relationship will
last “forever.”
That is certainly a strange way, one realizes, of asking for a permanent
relationship. But when Ethan even dares to question the foundation of his
logic, Liam again turns on him throwing away the bowl and kicking his friend as
he lies on the floor, insisting that he should be appreciate for taking out
time to feed his guest.
We
don’t know what Liam’s psychosis is all about, and we never really learn much
more except to glean the fact that he evidently lives alone, his mother having
died. How that might happen in a small town without the authorities having
insisted upon some familial supervision, or whether or not Liam himself has had
something to do with that death is impossible to discern given the dearth of
information that McLaws’ script provides. But it certainly suggests that this
kid is someone very different from loving being he has formally pretended to
be.
We might imagine that he wants a relationship with the boy while at the
same time being so self-hating as a homosexual that he must, as Wilde declared,
kill the one he most loves. The word “forever” is always related in some manner
with death, the only true “forever” mankind can imagine. We have sure entered,
if nothing else, a kind of romantic fantasy where love and death are intertwined.
Rather
inexplicably, Ethan finally discovers somehow to cut out a piece of the metal
bowl in which his food was delivered and break through his handcuffs. It
appears to involve almost a bloody process of immolation, but the camera
doesn’t tell us in detail what we are actually witnessing. In any event, he
returns to the main floor of the house on his way to escape when he again is
met by Liam.
Once more, the former friend begs him to stay,
explaining that this is all an expression of love; while at the same moment we
see the bat held behind his back.
When he finally moves toward for the attack,
Ethan greets him with the piece of cut metal which somehow gets lodged in
Liam’s forehead as the boy falls dead; Ethan is startled, shocked by the result
of his self-protection, but quickly escapes the house and the grounds on the
bicycle he has left parked at the entry.
We all know that such horrific behavior often cannot often be explained,
but the fact that we are given so very few clues about this abnormality of
behavior makes the entire work so highly abstract and completely unrealistic
that we have to rethink the work from the beginning. Perhaps this is all a kind
of dream conjured up in the new boy’s imagination. Certainly, we could argue
the first half of this film has been a bit like a fantasy. But we simply don’t have
even enough clues to put a name to what the film is trying express, the
illusional world of Ethan’s vision or the reality of Liam’s brutalization and
terror. Perhaps Liam has simply been transformed into the missing hallway jock
that we were waiting for after Ethan’s first classroom scene. But it is
difficult, given the vagueness of McLaws’ logic to even read this film as a
metaphor.
Los Angeles, May 26, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May
2022).
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