at the
boundaries of sexuality
by Douglas Messerli
Tiffany Louquet, Elizabeth Searle,
and David Shields (screenplay), Megan Griffiths (director) I'll Show You
Mine / 2022
If you’re not fully aware, for at
least the first third of Megan Griffith’s fascinating 2022 work I’ll Show
You Mine you might be taken in by the faux documentary for of the movie. I
mean, given today’s fascination with the open exploitation of the self, why
shouldn’t we believe and even be fascinated by a beautiful seemingly gay male
model named Nic (Casey Thomas Brown) suddenly fully exposing himself in front
of the paparazzi cameras and in the process quickly turning himself into a
pan-sexual sensation named Nicki who attracts such a large following that he
helps to assimilate an entire generation of young kids into the pan-sexual way
of life.
So today, as a married man with two children he’s slightly beyond his
shelf-life; he’s still fairly cute, flirtatious, and outspoken about issues of
gender, which is why his aunt (by marriage only) Priya Sura (Poorna
Jagannathan), an academically-trained feminist writer in the manner of the
recently named Nobel Prize for Literature winner Annie Ernaux, has decided to
interview him.
Her major problem is that she’s probing for evil done him as a child
which might explain his behavior as a “survivor,” while he sees his actions as
only natural and has long rejected the idea of survivorship or even original
abuse.
The film engages us with the battle between these two quite common
viewpoints (in respect for the openly confessional methods of the movie, I’ll
admit I side with Nic’s perspective more than with Priya’s, although what I
often write leads me into Priya’s territory).
In the first few frames of this film we
see, before her nephew’s arrival, Priya flashing on her cellphone a few images
of the beautiful young model Nic, and we suspect that what she really wants to
find out is how it felt to be so sexually wanted and open to what others might
offer and, more seriously perhaps, what is pan-sexuality all about? How is
having sex with several genders any different from being bisexual? But given
her training and the fact that she needs to get some material to her potential
publisher quickly, she chooses in the two days they’d assigned themselves to an
interview, to skirt around the issues that might most interest the film’s more
prurient audiences. She is, after all, seeking the dark secret of how Nicki the
tabloid sensation, now a porn cartoonist working to support his out-of-work
wife Christen, came to be what he is and, more importantly the sensation he
was.
Nic, on the other hand, to extend a common metaphor, is as slippery as a
fish out of water. He shows up to his aunt’s place in pajamas with buttons on a
pull down compartment over his ass and hand magnets to keep him calm. If he
craves the flashbulbs of the press, he is terrified by the piercing focus of
the intellect and does everything in his power, after months of negotiation for
the two-day session, to delay it by fiddling with his cellphone, asking for coffee,
and demanding that if she is going to probe into his private parts, he should
also have access to her’s—hence the film’s title hinting at the childhood game
of “If you show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
She frustratedly argues that the book is not about her, reminding him
that she’s known to have given up all her secrets in her books, which he owns
but obviously has never fully read. As if to satisfy him, she offers up the
story of losing her virginity in college to a man with the largest penis she’s
ever witnessed even in the years hence.
But Nic knows through her questions about when he first experienced
sexuality that she is not asking about a consensual first-time event. And he
finally settles in to answer her early query by describing that he was only 3
or 4 when a married couple who were friends of his parents regularly served as
his babysitter; they invited him into the tub for a bath, she asking him to
suck her tits while he rubbed and lathered his private parts.
Almost immediately Priya feels that she has found the key that opens his
entire sexual history and most certainly will explain his actions as a
“survivor.” But Nic just as insistently balks at the notion of survival and
refuses to describe the bathroom events which evidently continued for several
years as a terrifying or even influential event in his early life. His attitude
is that even if he
effected his sexual behavior it
worked out for the better, since he has no apparent regrets in his role as
Nicki or even in his current radical shift into seemingly normative behavior.
More interesting to him—and perhaps to a truly open-minded sexual
observer—is the story he tells being asked by a five-year-old girl if he’d be
her boyfriend. He rather liked the idea; she was pretty and he was interested
in performing the role. But when he later met her brother he was attracted to
him as well, and asked her if her brother might be interested in him, which
brought tears and anger from the girl as well as the end of their friendship.
His story demonstrates just early some children come to define their behavior
in terms of gender, and reminds for the first time in decades of my own
childhood experience at about the same age when after some time of me and a
neighbor girl playing “mother and father,” I insisted “This time I get to play
the mother,” to which she responded, “You can never be the mother!”
To be fair, there are also some loving moments between the two figures
of the film early on, when Priya praises her nephew for his bravery about
expressing his sexual being and noting how important he has been for hundreds
of young people, long before it was popular, who do not define themselves as
gender specific.
Nic, in turn, expresses how important she was to him as a slightly older
relative. Her visit when he was a child struggling with we later discover to be
a terribly homophobic father helped free him internally. “You were the only
person who spoke to me as an adult.” He also reminds her of a wedding they both
attended when he was about 14, when they danced together for such a long time
everyone at the reception felt they must be on drugs. And here he asks her, for
the first time, if she remembers what happened at the wedding; she appears to
draw a blank.
But for the most part, however, Nic is contentious, almost rightfully
dismissive of her parenthesizing and synthesizing academic mind that in an
attempt to open up new sexual territory defines that territory in trajectories
that presume a series of specific events. And at one point, it almost appears
Nic has chosen to close down in his revelations, their collaborative project
scuttled.
She does, in fact, get him to explain how he first decided to expose
himself as a model before
the cameras—it was a whim, and yes,
it felt good—and even to open up a bit about his homophobic father, who however
once his son became famous became his manager taking in a tidy sum through his
son’s numerous “performative events.”
For her part, we see reserve open slightly when she describes her own
father, brother to Nic’s dad, as an Alzheimer’s patient in a local
assisted-living home, whose calls she refuses to respond to, and not apparently
only because they might interrupt the interview. She has not seen him for six
months.
And when finally Nic brings out some wine, and later whiskey, Priya’s
mask gradually slips. When she suggests that like herself she believes there is
an element in Nic of a theoretical masochist, her nephew pushes it a bit
further wondering if she has ever actually experienced sexually masochist acts
of BDSM? She is quiet on the issue, but then denies it, reporting of course that
she has read about them through her research. But the way she speaks suggests
there is something that is not being said. And Nic is able to get her to admit
that she is not completely satisfied sexually by her husband, living as they
both do in their separate intellectual spheres.
For his part, Nic admits that he and his father are reconsidering
bringing Nicki, the pan-sexual wonder, back to life, perhaps doing an online
show. He and his wife Christen are having financial problems and he misses the
limelight. He is afraid that one day she will simply get tired of playing
“mother and father” and walk away from it all.
In between all these sessions—and they do feel a little like
“psychiatric sessions”—director Griffiths presents us with sexual cartoons in
the manner, presumably, of Nic’s own porn cartoon drawings. Each of these
interludes moreover is given a name, such as “Coercion,” “Resolve,” etc.
Frankly, I find these cartoons as fairly meaningless since the images often do
not seem to present any of sexual actions related to what they are discussing;
but the section titles give the entire discussion a sense of “heft,” somewhat
in the manner of the long Bergman dialogues about love and deception.
When finally they move back inside the house later at night their
revelations begin to pile up. Nic was confessed that in order to make money he
has been appearing on-line for sexual encounters with some of his former
elderly admirers, something his has not revealed to his wife.
And he finally returns to the subject of
the wedding party to remind Priya that after all her flirtatious dancing with
him she dropped her purse, the keys falling out which he took as a young
sexually horny boy to be an invitation. He used the key to open her hotel room
door….
At this point, the movie has completely
shifted away from its focus on Nic and his basically joyful sexual experiences
to something far different. And if the reader of this essay still has
intentions of seeing this film for the first time, I suggest he/she/they stop
here. For as anyone who has read this far in My Queer Cinema recognizes,
in an attempt to discuss the film fully I spare no details of the plot.
What Nic saw made him turn around and
leave immediately, his uncle, Priya’s father spanking her, or as she prefers to
describe it, “hurting her,” something that he had done so often in her
childhood, that she began taking joy in the act, finding a form of sexual
pleasure in the abuse. And for that “perverted pleasure” she cannot forgive
herself. Were her husband to know it, she believes he would have to leave her.
And she herself, who has never admitted this sexual aspect of her persona in
her books, would be outed as a liar for being a feminist who takes pleasure in
patriarchal punishment. More importantly, she danced that night with Nic so
that he would be forced to punish her, hoping that as an adult
experiencing it once again it might help her understand the situation. But it
is one thing to have it forced upon her as a child, but quite another to
encourage it as an adult, for whatever rational she might have had.
Her second book failed, she believes,
because she did not have the courage to tell that story. But it is still a
secret that she cannot admit.
We all have secrets, she argues, even
Nic who has not told Christen of his new on-line occupation. But in all of long
series of admissions is there still anything, she wonders, about the subject at
hand, Nicki and his pan-sexual celebration, to extract for the publisher? She
is afraid not. That is until she finally asks one last question: Did Nic ever
see that couple after they had abused him.
He finally admits that he had indeed
seen the woman; at one of the final blow-outs for his Nicki character, the
woman showed up seemingly frightened for his response. Enjoying her fear, he
flirted with her so openly that his father pulled him away, reinserting him
instead with a group young fanclub members. But out of control by now he begin
to flirt with one of the young fanclub boys, not a child but still underage. In
the near distance he saw a bush where he as a child and a little girl had once
played “I’ll show you…,” during which, after pulling down her pants, the girl
ran away in tears. And that bush stopped him from continuing, prevented from
pulling the boy into the bushes as well. That was the point, he explains, that
he stopped being Nicki and turned back into Nic.
Yet even here, he refuses to permit her
to describe it as the behavior of a survivor. Angrily, he argues that she needs
to stop even trying to forgive herself, insisting that there comes a time when
you have to stop seeing oneself as something broken needing to be fixed, and
accept that it is okay to be broken. For me, that is the apotheosis of all that
Nic stands for, the acceptance of oneself as one is as opposed to the being one
should be or might be or might have been.
By this time the viewer feels so
exhausted that even Tomo Nakayama’s brilliant musical score hints we have
reached the point in the film near the end, as in the final sequence of Mike
Nichol’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But there is that final
sequence remaining, “the Betrayal,” where as Nic gets up to pee before the walk
he has suggested they take to get some fresh air, Priya discovers that he has
been taping all of her private confessions, when she has long ago turned off
her tape as the conversation shifted from the public to the private.
Confronting him when he returns, he admits that he thought of using some
of it—with her permission of course—as part of his demo for his new show.
Infuriated by his betrayal, she forces him to unlock the phone and delete it,
bellowing that he has now destroyed everything, their entire project and
relationship by even imagining that their intimate and private lives should
become public. She now realizes that the real problem with Nic, in her
estimation, is that he has no boundaries! But people need them; she needs them.
Even presumably Nic needs them in order to survive sanely in the world. A world
without boundaries, she might argue, is a world without a definition of self
and one’s position in the world of moral values. Priya does not specifically
argue this, but we comprehend that a treasured and pleasured body and a being
with an inner self are very different things. Priya brings the discussion back
into moral significance. It is not simply okay to take a child into the shower
to play with sexually, not all right for a father to find sexual joy in beating
his daughter. Perhaps it is not even okay to enjoy parading one’s body on the
internet for the pleasure of some of his older admirers, even if, as he has
admitted, he rather enjoys it.
Nic, for his part, truly apologizes and tells Priya before he leaves,
that he still believes their book is a good idea, but that the book she never
wrote about her sexual life should finally be written, that it would be an
important like the first one she wrote.
So ends Griffith’s truly significant work of cinema. While it is true,
the film is itself delimited in its use of contemporary tropes of sexuality and
by the language and interpretive strategies of popular contemporary feminist,
LGBTQ, and psychological theories; and given that Griffith does not yet have
the cinematic skills of someone like Nichols or a genius like Bergman, her
movie nonetheless mines its conflicts in intelligent and probing ways that help
us to better comprehend the age old battles between the innumerable sexualities
open to human beings and the boundaries we unnecessarily and sometimes
necessarily put upon them.
And important questions arise from this work. Are our sexual habits
determined by childhood experience or do we simply invent them, using the
debris of our past, as move forward in life? Even in using the term “broken”
aren’t we presuming some sense of normalcy, positing a previous unbroken being
whether or not “it” can or cannot be fixed? Even if we feel open to all
possible sexualities, finally, need we or even can we partake of them
all in one single lifetime? And, as I suggested above, what is the body in
relation to the mind or what we describe as the “inner self?”
Any movie that can bring such questions to mind is what I’d describe as
something quite remarkable.
Los Angeles, October 14, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (October 2022).
