Jan-Dirk Bouw | I Love Hooligans / 2013

hating the self that loves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jan-Dirk Bouw (screenwriter and director) I Love Hooligans / 2013 [13 minutes]

 

I Love Hooligans, an animated short film by Netherlands filmmaker Jan-Dirk Bouw, is a work with which it is hard to sympathize—although there is no indication that the director or the documentary-like character is particularly seeking anyone’s sympathy.

       Hooligans, if you don’t already know, are rabid soccer fans who not only cheer on their team with profanities, mostly homophobic, about the other team’s players and the referees, but who after each game—sometimes even before—seek out supporters of the opposition to beat them up, particularly if the “hooligans” team has lost the game.

     Presumably there are “hooligans” on both sides of the stadium, aching to confront one another. But the film presents the viewpoint only of the central narrator’s team who seem to enjoy their slugfest with any and every supporter of the other team they encounter. We never see the results, but we know from the newscasts over the years that several such victims have died and many such attacks have resulted in violent melees with numerous individuals hospitalized.

      What is even more strange in this cartoon telling is that the narrator is gay, an almost unthinkable fact given the intense homophobia of the hooligan friends. Our narrator admits, in fact, that just to survive he knows he must never reveal his own sexuality to his friends, even though some of his mates may be good looking. He not only must repress all his gay feelings, remaining completely closeted during game season, but must participate in their homosexual slurs, using his own inner identity as a cause for hate of others.

      Although he doesn’t talk about these possibilities, I should imagine that even apart from his boozed up and drugged affairs with his buddies at soccer games, he must be constantly careful that he doesn’t run into any of his hooligan peers while entering a gay bar, being seen with another gay man, or openly participating in any gay activities in which he might sexually desire.

       Indeed, given the extent of his suppressed desires, one finds it even difficult to imagine how he might even know that he is gay. He does tell us that he wishes life were different, that he longs for the warmth and security of love.

       But since his primarily love is the game, and the game as he lives it, having almost “inherited” the passion from his parents, denies any possibility of his expression of other love. He is locked into an inescapable conundrum. And even he realizes that when he dies it will have to be in the arms of his buddies while attending a match at the stadium.

       One wonders, do these brutal buddies love and protect one another. I’m not even suggesting the idea of sexual love, but simply the impulse to care for and help to keep safe another who wears the same colors. Perhaps, like gang members there is a deep fraternal love that may border, as it does sometimes in street gangs, on homoerotic love. But our narrator obviously must push even those feelings away for fear that he might get carried away, lose his footing as a presumed heterosexual filled with hate.

       Bouw seems to be asking the question how two such pulls, the deep bond of team pride which is expressed in hatred, and the private desire for another male body to hold can be experienced in the frame of one man. And I suppose our narrator becomes interesting in the very fact that he admits that he carries the emotional baggage of both within himself. But frankly, it’s hard to care knowing that if you ever met up with him or his friends on the street wearing the wrong colors on the right day, you might be dead or at least severely hurt.

      One can only say that in this character we meet someone who has to hate himself in order to love a sports game, not someone I could readily embrace under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, and which hints, perhaps, at why stereotypically so many gay boys are disinterested in team sports. Is violence inherent in such games? Is male hatred at the heart of the intense bodily contact of soccer, US football, wrestling, rugby, etc.? The hooligans seem closer to fascist support groups rather that what’s at the heart of such male-on-male encounters.

     In his defense, director/writer Bouw created this work, he reports, in order to promote a constructive dialogue about the issues surrounding soccer/football, wherein it is nearly impossible to discuss the reality of either players or fans being homosexual. But perhaps if Bouw had selected a less toxic figure upon which to focus, a player or a less rabid fan, he might have opened the discussion further than it can go in the framework of a hooligan who seems more committed to violence than his sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).