Elena Weinberg | The Weight of the World / 2013

no sympathy in sight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Duncan Coe (screenplay), Elena Weinberg (director) The Weight of the World / 2013 [8 minutes]

 

In this very short coming out film from 2013, Taylor (Jon Lee Richardson) has just come out to his father, the most important scene in the film which the writer and director have removed from evidence, draining their film from any true dramatic significance.

    Instead, our your “hero,” if you can describe him as such, rushes off to tell his best female friend Jesse (Brenna Sturdivant) what has transpired. Beginning with a metaphor, asking her if she has seen the flocks of parrots who have been tossed out of their homes, “Pets that have escaped or are now living in the east side. Bright green wings, pale gay forehead. Dark scalloped feather around the breast. Fragile, feral. Tossed out.”

    She reminds him with her comment: “Or escaped.”

    Evidently his father said nothing, just what he might have expected, and he will now be forced to live for the rest of his life, he fears, in total resentment of the man whom he still loves, or, even worse, resist becoming the full gay man he now identifies as. He is terrified of either future, that his whole life will now be “buried in his past.”

   Actually, if when I told my father and mother that I was gay and that Howard and I were in a relationship, they had said nothing, I might have seen it as a good sign, but getting up mid-dinner and driving from Washington, DC back to Iowa did not at all bode well. But even then I quickly got over it, knowing that when it comes to such revelations of sexuality, you have to free yourself from parental approval. It hurt and still does today, but I was not devastated and had no intentions of either hating them for their blindness nor resisting my own sexual inclinations. Perhaps Taylor is still simply too young, and since he apparently has still not found someone to love, maybe he just might have waited until he had left the house, gone off to school, and found someone to help support him in such a difficult act.

    Obviously, this sulky boy does not even find the open love which Jesse offers him to be enough, and he gets back into his beautiful SUV (evidently a gift of the father he supposes hates him) and drives away to god knows where, brooding, the title of the film falling upon his shoulders.

    Unfortunately, since we know nothing about the father and very little about the son, it is hard to sympathize with this character, and, in a sense, the vagueness of his future plans symbolizes our feelings toward him.  

    The film relies entirely upon our knowing the genre, and remembering how painful it was for others to imagine what this young man is suffering. But, in the end, we don’t even quite know what is in his mind, how his father has really felt about his admission. If the film’s intention is to simply mock such an extreme reaction—after all it is described as a comedy—this short cinema itself declares itself from the beginning that it is a failure, mocking the plight of its central figure.

       If we are meant to share in the young man’s worries, writer Duncan Coe and director Elena Weinberg might have first introduced their characters. As it is, I feel only for his friend Jesse, whose love is apparently not enough to begin to salve this foolish boy’s pouting.

      And who is the Erik she calls at the end of the film, perhaps a male who has long been waiting for this event before he makes his move?  That might be a nice ending if the movie weren't so lazy to even explain it to us.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).