behind the plastic curtain
by
Douglas Messerli
Sasha
Argirov (screenwriter and director) Personals / 2021 [12 minutes]
A
young, highly anxious gay boy (Riley Davis) responds to a Craigslist ad for a
glory hole encounter, only to find the shadow of a large, almost monstrous man,
behind a pasted up sheet, with a small hole in the middle cut out for the encounter.
Frankly this film by Canadian filmmaker
Sasha Argirov plays more like an idea for a film rather than any real sexual
encounter. No matter how unsure the young man is about his appearance, his
bitten nails, or even his ability to get an erection, he reality if he had even
a tiny bit of self-survival instinct left, he would have quickly turned and
run.
In fact, when the man behind the sheet
(Dimitri Vantis) growls at him for tearing away even a corner that is precisely
what the young man does. He leaves the place.
That he returns is pure fantasy, a kind of
demonstrative statement of the desire for any encounter rather than none.
Fortunately, as the camera makes the
shift to the other side of the curtain, we perceive that the real problem here
is not that the man behind it is monstrous, but simply an overweight, not very
good looking individual who is as socially anxious as the boy on the other
side.
If sex is now quite out of the question,
simply touching one another through the dangle of fingers through the glory
hole and pressing their bodies up against one another as they place their hands
on the imaginary chest of one another serves to allow them both a sense of
relief and comfort.
If I cannot imagine this happening in real
life, it works nicely as a metaphor for the intimacy they each desire but can
seldom find with people in the real world.
The metaphor actually makes for a nicely
visual expression; but it is still the stuff out of a dark fantasy that for the
average viewer has little direct meaning. Yes, we all have our insecurities, or
fears of facing one another face-on. But only the most disturbed of us would go
to this level. One ultimately must ask, accordingly, who was this film really
made for? Those of us in the world who truly see ourselves as monsters?
These two lost individuals cannot be
described as having truly “come out,” but remain in their closets, even if the
door is simply now covered over with a plastic sheet with a glory hole cut out
for possible pleasure.
The LBGTQ+ community in general has long
grown out of this perception of itself. So why must we suffer it yet again?
Societal anxiety can be better expressed in thousands of other ways.
Los
Angeles, June 24, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).
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