there is nothing in kropsdam
by Douglas
Messerli
Britt Snel and Matthijs van der Veer
(screenplay), Joren Molter (director) Dòst (Dust) / 2018 [41
minutes] [TV movie]
Appearing on Dutch television, Joren
Molter’s Dust almost approaches a feature film at 41 minutes, and most
certainly it has the depth and heft of a longer film.
This is a story, told so very often in LGBTQ+ movies, about a provincial
love that simply because of the world in which it takes place cannot possibly
survive. In this case the someone mentally challenged Alko (Henk Jan
Doornbosch) and Björn (Liam Feikens) are best friends, and have been clearly
from childhood. There is most clearly a love between them which perhaps they
both only slightly recognize.
Besides this is not a world of same-sex love, but of heterosexual
normality, with Alko participating in dirt cart dragging, a constant discussion
of girls, and possible kisses. Agricultural Netherlands is not the place for a
deep love of two boys.
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The movie begins with a down-and-dirty ride through the mud on small
open carts hooked up to what appear to be small go-carts. Alko wins the race to
the surprise of his friends. He is hugged by Björn and cheered on by the
others, despite their general disparagement of him.
Their conversation is basically about their first kiss by a female,
which one of them, when asked, replies, his mother, insisting that all of his
friends were probably first kissed by the mothers.
Here, they grow white asparagus for the
world’s best tables, and you see the boys working the fields, carefully pulling
up the tender stalks.
A local girl, Marie (Yamila Huft),
clearly interested in Alko, challenges him to an asparagus spear sucking
content, in which both of them attempt to put the still quite dirty spears in
their mouths, pushing it down as far as they can, obviously imitating the
process of sucking a cock. The girl wins this contest.
And, in some respects. Of these teenage
relationships are about contests, who can first kiss a woman? Who can first
have sex? Almost everything in this world is a challenge and a game, and if
you’re aren’t up for it, you are mocked by your peers.
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Alko evidently eats regularly with Björn and his parents, beforehand
which they wash up, helping each other, sometimes playfully, but often
tenderly, with their grooming.
Potato stew is generally the fare.
Early on in this story, as provincial
boys of this age often do, they practice French kissing together since, as
Björn insists, the girls expect it, and now Alko has a date with the
spear-sucking champion. They begin by simply darting out their tongues between
their fingers, but soon explore each other’s fingers, putting a smile on their
faces.
The date between Alko and his new
girlfriend goes mildly well, she attempting to explain to him once again how to
kiss.
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Soon after, Björn and Alko explore
masturbation to learn how it might feel with a girl, Björn jacking his friend
off. He dare not show how much he enjoys it. And in that single act, moreover,
something has changed. Alko now cleans himself alone, Björn given a turn in the
bathroom without the sharing rapport of earlier.
Alko shows up for a date with Marie,
who on this strange date literally bicycles with her heavy-weight friend
sitting behind her, through the flat-lands of provincial Holland, facing the
head-winds.
They break into the local swimming
pool, now closed, play silly games, and mostly eat, clearly a pleasure they
both share. But finally, through a piece of red licorice, which they share from
opposite ends, she gets him to kiss her, evening opening up her zipper so that
he can put his hands on her vagina. But when he tries to take a condom out of
his billfold, she forbids him: “When I’m sixteen.”
The game-playing, the challenges, the
awards are again demanded and promised for any heterosexual boy.
Now Alko hardly even talks to his
former friend, asking only if he knows when Marie’s birthday is. The others
boys bicycle past shouting, “Alko, Björn: Lien (Benthe Horlings) is again
kissing in the trailer anyone who wants to.”
A bit like the whore in Fellini’s
movies who titillate young men, Lientje, although much younger, literally
chalks up her kissing conquests by scratching the numbers upon her walls. Björn
enters first, she kissing him and declaring he was the best.
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But she herself is still only a child,
the kissing game is still child’s play despite the fact she is French-kissing
all the boys. Oddly, Alko doesn’t even bother with Lientje, since, presumably,
he now has his own girlfriend.
Now, at a local bar they celebrate
Björn’s conquest of the local kisser, drinking at a bar, topping beer evidently
with what appears to be whipping cream. When he refuses to drink, the boys all
ask “Are you a man or a woman,” gender demanding, quite obviously, a certain
kind of behavior.
They each swallow down their drinks,
some in one gulp, while Björn stands watching, an outsider to their activities.
It is clear that he has begun to recognize the he is not whatever the male
models are in his community.
With the peer pressure upon him, and
former teasing for being gay, Alko moves on to become friends with the rowdy
group. When Lien shows up behind the bar to ask if Björn has something tasty
for her, as Björn walks off.
As Marie and Alko dance, she whispers
that she will be sixteen tomorrow. Björn quickly shifts the music to something
that can’t be slow-danced to.
It’s clear he is hurt and frustrated
by the inevitable shift of his boyhood friend’s attention, no matter how Alko
may try to remain at least somewhat friendly. And it’s also quite clear now
that Björn, the true outsider as perhaps a gay boy, feels betrayed by his
friend Alko, surely never a lover, real or imaginary, but someone upon he could
count as true friend and companion. That betrayal is what so often hits the gay
boy or girl in the provincial worlds in which they grow up. There is ultimately
no one there any longer to depend upon.
Gay boys, recognizing also that they
can never be friends with the most popular and successful boys of their crowd
seek out those also ostracized or ignored by the society in which they live.
Certainly, that was my experience, seeking out friendships with my peers that
were not entirely satisfying to either of us. One of my friends, when he
discovered I was gay, completely cut me off. Others simply moved away into
heterosexual marriages and disappeared from my life as I knew they would. They
were temporary friendships formed out of desperation and desire for the other
relationships I knew might cost me painful abuse in their mockery and refusals
to even imagine a friendship. We gay men do this to ourselves in small-town or
rural areas in order to survive, but we also know at the very same moment that
our relationships are lies, imaginary replacements for beautiful boys we might
wish but fear to seek out.
In Molter’s work, Alko is the epitome
of the gay female hag, a boy friend (not a boyfriend) that serves as a
temporary stand-in for what might someday be. But the betrayal hurts as much as
if he were the one someone Björn is really attempting to befriend.
Accordingly, when such friendships
collapse, there is not only the pain of the loss, but the recognition of one’s
own delusions and, you might even describe it, a kind of abusive friendship
that mattered only through accident and coincidence. Moreover, Björn perceives
his friend is no champion, now a part of the heterosexual crowd, but a confused
youth who has been convinced that finding a girl will answer all of his
problems and bring him into the general crowd.
It’s enough to make a grown man cry. And I did.
When Alko, worried about the state of his former friend, puts his arm
around him to comfort him, Björn leans in for a kiss. Alko kisses him back, but
we know and he knows this truly means the end of the relationship. Björn is a
fag.
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For the rest of his days Alko will join
the rowdy, heavily drinking local party boys, with no room in his life for real
love and friendship.
Björn even goes further, stopping by
Alko’s house apologizing for last night and suggesting that if he wants he can
“hit him.” Alko’s mild “it’s okay,” however, is in someways even worse, a kind
of false forgiveness that never again result in their possibly being together.
Alko buys a treat of decorated pears for Marie’s birthday. But others
have seen Björn’s kiss, and Marie now accuses him of being gay and will have
nothing to do with him, bicycling off when, at the old pool, he has attempted
to meet up with her so they might finally celebrate her 16th birthday.
The other boys equally now abuse Alko for being queer and he is mocked
by the very ones with whom he thought he might have joined in the club of
hormonal heterosexual admiration. Björn, realizing what has happened, can no
longer have anything to do with Alko, nor that boy with his former friend. The
breach has been made by the community who have outlawed both as perverts.
Working side-by-side with the other boys, it is Alko wo receives the brunt of
behavioral betrayal, called a faggot. Björn has apparently long been seen to
have been “different,” but now one of their own has shown they cannot trust him
as a friend, even though he has long been treated with mockery.
When he attempts to explain to Marie what the situation is, she gives
him the finger.
The entry back into so-called teen normality, once someone is perceived
as having left it, is terribly difficult, if not impossible. The truck home
from the fields leaves both Alko and Björn behind.
When Alko returns to the bar, they all scream that Alko is here. For a
moment he is pleased, but when the song begins “If you don’t jump now you’re a
faggot,” he realizes it is another attempt to mock him. But this boy, never a
deep thinker, does begin to jump, even though soon after he is held down by two
others.
The next day at work, when Björn attempts to comfort him in his dejected
state, Alko finally screams out to keep his hands off him, to stop trying to
French kiss him, etc., screaming out and pushing him away for all to hear that
he is not interested.
All stop work in the midst of their washing and cutting the white
asparagus for shipping, as Björn leaves,
no other choice allowed.
The next day, his so-called friends are attacking another young man (who
probably is Björn) for being a dirty faggot. Alko observing it briefly, walks
off in another direction.
Finally, rejected still by Marie, he accuses her, as she makes out with
another man, of getting half-raped, which leads the other boys, given the
context of his and her words, to presume that it was he who was “half-raped” by
Björn, and they go after the gay boy again. Alko hardly resists their actions.
When they ask if he touched him, Alko cannot respond. And they assume
the worst. We have seen the masturbation sequence, a truly innocent act given
their ages.
Björn’s fellow works explode a soccer ball through his windows, Alko
contributing to the general chaos, and running away with the rest of them like
scared rabbits. Alko is now one of “them,” but he has no longer any place to
run to. He will always be suspect in the local community, and he no longer has
any escape of friendship with Björn and his family.
We last see Reinert and the other bully boys on their way to a group
field party, drinking small, hotel-like containers of alcohol. They celebrate
the may pole, again noting its phallic significance. Singing, as the flames of
their usual bonfires go off, about how there is nothing “in Kropsdam,” their
imaginary community which director Joren Molter takes up as a subject in
another film.
As Alko watches, he spots Björn with another man, his old friend holding
up a young child an showing him love, as he stands alone, finally joining in on
the son “There is nothing in Kropsdam.” Clearly there is nothing there any
longer for him, where Björn has evidently found a loving community.
If Moler’s film is not a great work of art, it certainly comes close to
it in its bringing up of terribly profound issues about how to live in a world
intolerant of gay beings. We might presume that Björn will soon move away and
find a new life for himself, while Alko and his gang must remain in Kropsdam,
trapped in their nothingness.
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Los Angeles, July 27, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(July 2026).
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