Eric Bizzarri | Cold Hands / 2017

bullies and their victims

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Bizzarri (screenwriter and director) Cold Hands / 2017 [17 minutes]

 

Canadian director Eric Bizzarri’s Cold Hands is exploration of high school bullying that goes far beyond and around the usual depictions. In this case the bullies are not, at least at first, heterosexual homophobes beating up on a gay boy, but a gay man himself. The victim is a new boy in school, Lucas (Carson MacCormac), a cute straight kid who is immediately attracted to the gay boy, Jonathon’s (Jordan Mills) best friend Paula (Cassandra Williams).

      For the new kid, school relationships, social, and sexual situations are all obviously unknown, but Lucas seems immediately disturbed by Jonathon’s inordinately friendly greetings hugging, touching hands, etc. from which he immediately pulls back. Clearly Lucas is fearful of male/male bodily contact of any sort, so much so that he first we might presume him to be a closet homophobe. 

     But Paula attempts to explain that with Jonathan it is “all a game,” obviously the description Jonathan and his male friend Casey (Dennis Nimoh, Jr.) attach to their gay sexual explorations or, as we later begin to perceive it, exploitations.

     In some respects, Paul attempts to protect the confused new boy Lucas, telling him when they suggest he join them for an evening in the forest, that he doesn’t need to go. Or explaining to him at one point, when Lucas asks why Jonathan keeps touching him, simply that “Maybe he likes you.”

       Clearly something happens in the forest, but for the central portion of this 17-minute film we’re quite literally left in the dark as suddenly the touching explodes into something far more serious about which Lucas and his entirely supportive mother take to the police and to a judge. We see Lucas beginning to explain that night to the judge, and we also see the police, at another point in time, explaining to the mother and son that all the others at the nighttime event have denied that anything happened; that Lucas doesn’t have a case, with the lame and standard justification of all female rape cases: “Boys will be boys.”

      Unfortunately, but perhaps intentionally, by interweaving events in time, the director Bizzarri doesn’t allow us to know quite how to feel. What was the level of the “touching” that went on in the forest. Was a momentary touching of a hand—which we have witnessed Jonathan doing to Lucas in the school hallway—or even subtle sexual threats by a taller, somewhat older, and more intimidating gay boy on the shorter and frailer Lucas worthy of describing it as sexual abuse?

       In short, the film asks us to question, without providing an answer, just what is sex abuse? Who determines when a joke, even a dare, or a touch is full-out abuse, particularly among individuals of the same sex, in a world that presumes boys are more able that girls to protect themselves and resist any non-violent incidents of abuse.

       When finally, however, we see evidence of what happened that night in the forest, our perspective inevitably is altered. It begins with the common high school game of “Truth or Dare,”—although we might argue that it begin even earlier when Jonathan lured Lucas to join them in their nighttime outing by promising to bring along Paula—Casey daring Jonathan to give Lucas a blow job.

       Lucas is startled, suddenly frightened by the turn of events, and once more Paula attempts to calm him by arguing that they’re just behaving like “jerks,” another common way of excusing inexcusable behavior. Even the two boys laugh, explaining their actions once again as just a joke.

But soon after, when Lucas attempts to leave, Jonathan also rises and pulls him away, while Paula and Casey remain by the fire ignoring the boy’s protests.

      Presumably, Jonathon attempted to proceed with Casey’s dare, although the film doesn’t show us that. But at least we now can imagine what Lucas and his mother’s attempt to take it before the justice system is all about.

      Certainly Jonathon loses our sympathy when he later confronts Lucas in the school halls after being questioned by the police, once more claiming it was all a joke, and attempting to intimidate the new boy by declaring that without them (whoever they may be) Lucas is nothing, nothing at all.

      A late night call from Paula to Lucas explains that her silence has just been the result of attempting to help both her friends. She begs him to realize that if he continues in his legal suit against Jonathon that the young man’s life will be ruined, to which Lucas coldly replies “Well, maybe it should be.”

      Turning the question, we have to ask “has Lucas’ life been ruined? Is he psychologically suffering? Was he actually raped or did he finally escape what might been a rape? Does that question even matter? These are important concerns that the movie doesn’t attempt to explore and which leaves us with an even more confused sense of what should be our moral position: a feeling that Lucas has simply overreacted or outrage on his behalf.

      In a final scene Lucas stands outside a classroom where we see two beefy students toss down Jonathon’s books as they push him into a chair and leave the room, obviously the two bullying the gay boy, a scene so common in gay high school stories.

     Having observed the incident, Lucas enters the room and helps Jonathon pick up the books, extending his hand as Jonathon introduces himself and Lucas provides his own name.

    What is this scene? A trip back to the day in which the two first met? An alternative to the relationship the boys have had? A complete change in the way Lucas now sees things? An attempt to rescroll the narrative of their relationship? We have no guide to help us in evaluating these events. But it least it suggests the possibility that none of us deserve our lives to be ruined by others, destroyed by those who would impose their reality upon others. And it forces us to see Jonathon and Lucas as bullies and victims both. Certainly after seeing this film we must realize that not all victims of gay bullying are queers but heterosexuals as well.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (June 2022).