bashing back
by Douglas Messerli
Tom DeCerchio (screenwriter and director) Nunzio’s
Second Cousin / 1994
If Tom DeCerchio’s short, 18-minute film is
centered upon a message to those who strive to attack members of the gay
community, yet it is nonetheless quirky enough—at times almost surreal given
its central character’s mother and his own delusions—that we don’t feel this
work as being heavy-handed in the least. Over-acted perhaps, a bit too dark in
its earlier scenes that end up with almost comical results, but never
overstated. Like its title, Nunzio’s Second Cousin lives in a kind of
fantasy no-man’s-land which delights us more than teaching us its obvious
message: gay-bashing is a dangerous activity.
The narrative begins as two macho men, one dressed as an S&M
leather boy, the other simply a hefty man who can clearly hold his own in a
good fight, leave a Chicago bar, kissing and fondling one another as they walk
down the dark street.
The boys, all from Cicero, have just unknowingly attempted to accost a
police sergeant who could easily arrest them for battery and assault if not for
a hate crime if doing so would make it clear to his fellow police buddies that
he is queer. Consequently, he forces the men instead to recite in unison “Gay
people are nice people” and other such lines, including a commitment to never
attack a gay man again.
Before he lets them go, however, he pulls the most handsome of the
bunch, Jimmy (Miles Perlich) who is clearly their leader, out of the line and
demands that he accept an invitation for dinner at his house the following
evening, threatening that if the boy doesn’t show up he’ll round him out for
more severe punishment.
The boys run off, Jimmy promising to keep the appointment, as Tony’s
date, Levon (Harry Waters, Jr.) laughingly pleads they too hurry off to consume
a big steak.
In some respects this entire scene reminds me some of the gay-bashing
scene in PJ Castellaneta’s 1998 film Relax, It’s Just Sex when one of
the gay men attacked by bashers turns the table, fucking one of the terrified
boys who attacked him. We almost wonder whether Tony might have something like
that in mind for the cute kid when he retorts: “Sometimes fags bash back.”
As the following day’s dinner time approaches we see Tony in his home
with his queer—in the more traditional meaning of that word—mother (Eileen
Brennan) who has spent the day cooking for the event, delighted that her son
has finally invited one of his friends to the house. When he provides her with
the last name of Jimmy, Serantoni, she recalls once knowing a Nunzio Serantoni,
and quickly convinces herself that Nunzio must be the boy’s second cousin.
The boy arrives on time and, strangely enough, is treated like a special
guest, with Mrs. Randazzo serving up several courses and demanding he eat
everything on the plate. Yet each time she returns to the kitchen, the
implications of Tony’s conversation grows darker, questioning, at one point for
example, whether or not the boy might have wondered if he was going to fuck
him, responding: “We’ll save that for after the meal.”
When the mother leaves the room Tony confides, “You know, I think when I
was on the wrestling team and all those boys were rubbing against and I was
rubbing against them, that’s what made me a homo.”
At
another point, when Tony’s mother asks her son about a date he had the evening
before, she asks, “Was she a nice girl?” When she asks him to bring the girl
around, he says he will, that he might even marry her someday, breaking into a
hearty laugh and prodding to see if Jimmy also doesn’t think it’s funny.
Unpredictably, he turns almost violent again, demanding that Jimmy tell
her about his date, and when the boy demurs, he slaps him and insists to his
mother that “Jimmy has something tell you about me.”
The boy wiggles out of the dangerous corner by finally responding, “I
was the wrestling team captain.”
In
a sense, this scene plays like a slightly less clever and menacing scene out of
a Harold Pinter or even Edward Albee play. We are most definitely, if nothing
else, in game-playing territory, a world just as perverse as were Jimmy’s own
actions the night previous.
The meal finally comes to a end after a desert of cannoli, with Mrs.
Randazzo insisting that her guest take some of the desert leftovers home. Tony
tells his mother that we will walk the boy out, and exits the house where he
once more confronts the delinquent, holding on to the youth’s athletic jacket,
“I got news for you Jimmy boy. Bashing fags ain’t going to stop you from
becoming one. Trust me, I tried it,” He kisses the boy intensely on the lips
and pushes him to the ground, the sweet’s ricotta, cream and chocolate mix now
plastered upon the wrestler’s cheeks.
Tony, it appears, has fucked the boy over more certainly than if he had
literally raped him. For the rest of his life Jimmy will now always wonder
about his own sexual identity.
Los Angeles, December 7, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (December 2020).
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