Carlos Ocho | Relación abierta (Open Relationship) 2014

openly closed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carlos Ocho (screenwriter and director) Relación abierta (Open Relationship) 2014 [14 minutes]

 

Óscar (Eudald Font) and Sergio (Christian Escudero) have been in a gay relationship, happily together so it appears, for 5 years. But they are of quite different sensibilities, Óscar being a far more impetus and emotional person, while it’s quite clear that Sergio offers a far more intellectual and mentoring role in their relationship.

    One afternoon Óscar returns home, telling his love that he loves him, but then making a possible proposal or, perhaps, one might say floating an idea before him: He might like a so-called “open relationship.”

   He argues that he loves Sergio and would not leave him for anything in the world, but, well, “sometimes I feel I would like to have sex with other people.”

     “What? You don’t like having sex with me,” Sergio queries him.

     No, he loves having sex with Sergio, suggesting they together explore a lot of new territory.

“But sometimes,” he admits, “I feel like I would enjoy touching other bodies and kissing other lips, and trying something new with others.”

     “But it would be just sex,” he assures Sergio, “nothing more.”

     Sergio wonders whether sex between is not working for him, but Óscar denies it suggesting that it may just want “more sex and with other people.”

      “What’s wrong with the sex we have that makes you feel you need to have sex with other people?” asks Sergio.

       Óscar admits they have plenty of sex and he enjoys it, but “I guess sometimes we fall into routine.” With others perhaps we will discover new things.

       Sergio throws a pillow at him, gets up and says, “Go to Hell.”

     They face one another again in the bedroom, Óscar assuring him that it is just and idea, and it he doesn’t like it, “we leave it here, topic closed.”

     Now Sergio gets down to the brass tacks. If they have an open relationship, what kind of relationship would it be? For example, would it tell him about the other relationships or “do you prefer to keep it secret and feel free to do whatever we want?” Notice the shift to “we.”

       “Can we have sex with the same person more than once?”

       “Well…you know it’s not that we’re checking on each other all day, but…I guess that jealousy will be something new between us.”

       Sergio concludes that telling who they are meeting with is apparently not appropriate.

       But it is important to know where you are, Óscar concedes, just in case something happens to you.

     “Well, I’m not 15 anymore,” Sergio comes back. And then you want me to tell you if I have an appointment to fuck another guy, just so you know, like Ruben and Marcos.”

       Sergio asks, moreover, about threesomes. Are they allowed?

       But by this time Óscar is already getting a bit overwhelmed. “I’d rather be with just one person now and then.” And he realizes that perhaps it is best if he tells him if he’s with someone else, although there is no need to tell him how it went.

       Okay, good, Sergio concludes.

       “Are you getting interested?” wonders Óscar.

      Sergio admits that perhaps it is sounding more interesting, but he has yet further questions, Óscar declaring that it’s not necessary “to make a rules book.”

    “I assume without asking that I can meet with others without saying anything,” suggests Sergio.

Or should I tell you some details beforehand.

     “I mean, if it’s open, we have to feel free to go by…”

     Yet, Sergio points out that he hasn’t quite expressed that free attitude in his conversations so far.

      Again, argues that “threesomes” were not in his original proposal. Why all this discussion about threesomes?

      Sergio wonders when they are speaking about other people it is just to have sex? What about other kinds of relationships, his question insinuates.

       “But let’s not meet the same person twice in one week,” suggests Óscar.

       “Would you be jealous if I get to meet the same person twice in a week?”

      “No,” concludes Óscar, “but hey, there are a lot of men to choose, and you would want to choose the same one?”

      Although it’s clear that Óscar would prefer constant change, Sergio argues that perhaps he would not. “Well, then, can we repeat or not?”

       “No,” Óscar decides.

     “Let’s see…This looks more like a fling where you are informed on who I fuck with and not an exercise of freedom and confidence between each other.” A relationship “openly closed,” he summarizes.

    Óscar admits that perhaps he hasn’t thought very carefully about it. He’s beginning to feel overwhelmed, in fact, by all his lover’s “stupid” questions. This should be easier, he argues.

        “Well, if you don’t want to talk anymore and you think you have enough information…Let’s try it then,” Sergio proposes.

        Is that a yes.

       The logical Sergio suggests: “Let’s try: and I’ll stock with the idea that I can fuck others if I want…But I cannot repeat with anyone.”

        OK. Sergio quickly kisses Óscar, “I’ll make dinner.”

        As Sergio begins cutting up the carrots, potatoes, and zucchini for dinner, Óscar enters, hugging him, suggesting that he is still pondering some of he questions. Sergio simply asks him whether he prefers Catalan sausage or normal sausage with the vegetables.

        He now grants, since Sergio is fixated on threesomes, that perhaps he should permit that possibility in his relationships. But Sergio admits that he hasn’t really thought about the possibility, but only as a propositions of “if it’s only once, you can, right”

         But again, Óscar declares, “No.” “Because it would bother me.”

         Sergio cannot comprehend the problem, arguing “Isn’t it the same to have to different guys in one night as to have them in one month?”

         “No, it’s not the same,” argues Óscar.

         Only two minutes ago, Óscar has argued that he didn’t want any more rules or codes, but he now, contradictorily, is making another exclusionary clause. Of course, the point is, that both men, if they were to have such an “open relationship,” would have a great many things with which they are most uncomfortable. And that is, in part, the purpose of Sergio’s serious questioning.

      What this Spanish dialogue drama presents us with, obviously, are the kinds of questions and problems that come with any such proposal, which I am sure a great many married same-sex male and female couples or those in long-term relationships may feel. Change, alteration, freedom is always desirable and tempting. My husband Howard and I surely negotiated such problems in our most active sexual years. But Ocho’s film ultimately seems a bit glib in its solution, with the confused and tired Óscar simply abandoning his suggestion.

     Yet at least this film thoroughly confronts some of the problems inherent in what some couples blithely describe as their “open relationships.” They are perhaps even more difficult to maintain, I might argue, than are those of monogamous commitment, with occasional allowances and exceptions, including threesomes.

 

Los Angeles, August 18, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Ken Ochiai | Phoenix / 2006

two brothers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ken Ochiai (screenwriter and director) Phoenix / 2006 [6 minutes]

 

In this short, slightly hallucinatory, black-and-white film from 2006, then USC (University of Southern California) student Ken Ochiai, conjures up a story about a father (Kelwin Hagen), so devastated by his wife’s death, that although he has kept the piano upon which she played and taught her young song Ryan (Zachary Allan) to play, he has locked away in a meat freezer and will not allow Ryan to play or his loving older brother Karl (Stanko Zovak) to sit in wonderment, watching him perform.

     The very first time he catches the boys playing, after they have snuck into the freezer to practice the piano, he burns his younger son’s hand with a cigarette butt. He then puts a padlock on the door.

     Yet the boys dare to borrow his keys, and again sneak into the cold locker to let Ryan practice. This time the reaction is even more brutal as he tosses his younger son to the ground, injuring his ear, again insisting that they never again enter to room again.

    So enraged and hurt are the boys that they determine, while he is out to burn down their shop and home, leaving their clothing on the floor to simulate their own bodies, as they steal any cash in the register, pack some meat in a bag and run off. When he returns home, the father sees his home ablaze, presuming the ashes in the boy’s room to be their bodies. He vomits in horror.

      But the investigator assures him that the boys have escaped.

      The rest of this short film portrays an older Ryan (Max Shippee) performing his mother’s favorite piece, “Phoenix” on a grand Baldwin piano in front of an appreciative audience, while his loving brother Karl (Kevin Donelan as the older incarnation) watching from the wings, now evidently his manager and constant associate.

      There is no openly gay content in this short film, but it is clear that both boys have been closely attached to their mother and perhaps have a closer relationship with one another, bordering on an almost incestuous love, than to any women, of which we have no representatives in this short work.

      And this film, which I saw on “Gay Films Matter” seems perfectly at home in that company.

      Since this early film, Ochiai has made some 30 more short and longer films.

 

Los Angeles, August 18, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

 

 

 

Tsai Ming-liang | 黑眼圈 (Hēiyǎnquān) (I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone) / 2006

lovers and caretakers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tsai Ming-liang (screenwriter and director) 黑眼圈 (Hēiyǎnquān) (I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone) / 2006

 

Tsai Ming-liang’s 2006 film I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone is only tangentially a gay film. The major subject of this tender work is, in fact, are the caregivers who gently look after their near-dead and dying patients, a young homeless day laborer who cannot even speak the language of the country, Malaysia, to which he has moved (played by Lee Kang-sheng) and a paralyzed and brain-dead patient (also performed by Lee). Their caretakers are another unemployed day laborer, Rawang (Norman Atun) and the former maid/now a night waitress of the “Paralyzed Man’s” mother— whom some sources identify as the figure who abused him and mysteriously is responsible for his current condition.

      Tony Rayns, in my always useful Time Out Film guide, argues that they are one and the same, the “Paralyzed Man” (as he is identified in the credits) dreaming of the other figure. I’d argue against that, since each of the Lee figures have slightly different trajectories, even if they often cross over. I’d rather suggest that Tsai has represented them as mirror images of those who care for and come to intensely love their patients.

      In the film’s earliest scenes, we observe a Malay street preacher promising the crowd of young and dreaming men surrounding him with the promise of money—if only they will pay him the small sums they hold in their wallets. How these needy Kuala Lumpur workers could possibly believe in his scam, that he will provide them with secret numbers which will suddenly provide them with great wealth, is a bit hard to believe. But all of them are desperate to return home or simply find enough money in order to eat, like our young hero, that they need to believe. They might be described as the true believers of great tribulations, people who have suffered so deeply in their lives that they cannot afford not to believe anything another person promises them.

      The “Homeless Day Laborer” strings along with the others, but when it comes to paying, the scam-man’s partners discover he has absolutely no money on his body, punishing him by nearly beating him to death.

      Meanwhile Rawang and three other friends, living illegally with him in a large construction site that was never completed, discover a discarded mattress near a garbage dump, carrying the heavy object back to their encampment. Along the way they discover the day laborer almost dying from his beating and, wrapping him into the mattress, carry him back to their shared “home” as well.

     They lay out the dying body and ply him with a home-made medicine from their probably also looted refrigerator. It seems not to matter whether this is the right medicine for the boy they’ve taken into their lives. If nothing else, it startles him back into living.      

     The next morning, we observe Rawang attempting to wash the new mattress from its previous filth while, suddenly observing the still weak boy he has discovered attempting to leave the Escher-like building, who he quickly retrieves, lovingly wiping his ass, and helping to allow him to urinate. It is the most sexual moment in this film, but one recognizes almost immediately that he is also attracted to the boy he is caring for. Before long they are sharing the mattress, while Rawang attempts to lower the boy’s fever with the cold liquid we have earlier seen him drinking, his very sustenance being used to help his young patient.

     In a parallel incident, the maid is seen washing her patient and then gently soaping and cleaning his hair, almost a reverse image of the previous—although we quickly recognize that she equally loves the man for whom she is caring.

      Just as the collective building dwellers fear to reveal the existence of their new-found friend to their Chinese landlord, a woman who evidently charges them small fees for living in the uncompleted high-rise, so too is the maid (Chen Shiang-chyi) fearful of the family whom she once served, who enter her space in an attempt to sell it.

      So has the director quietly revealed the situations in the Malaysian capital of those who are rather wealthy and those who have absolutely nothing. Yet, this is not truly a Marxist film, but a story about those who care and love and those who don’t, locked into a world, as Rayns argues, of Tsai’s often-employed images of “holes, water, and sickness.” And also, in this film, a smog that is so overwhelming that it even chokes off Rawang’s eventual attempt to finally show his love of the young boy he has saved.

     When he eventually discovers that his young would-be lover has been sneaking out most evenings to have sex with the maid/waitress, and that the boy now wants to move in with her carrying with him the bug-infested mattress, he falls into a temporary rage, threatening the handsome young man with an opened tin-can lid. His anger, however, quickly resolves itself into tears, which the young boy wipes away with his tongue—evidence certainly that he too has feelings for Rawang.

       In several of Tsai’s films there is no simple resolution of the secret desires people feel for one another. In this instance, moreover, the director’s film is basically a fable, as the story ends with an image of the three of them, the maid, the boy, and Rawang laying together upon a bed floating down from space as the “Homeless Guy,” embraces them both while the mattress floats into a sea below. I guess you might not have seen bi-sexuality expressed any better than in this image.

      Tsai, living for many years in Taiwan, returned to his native Malaysia to make this film, but was told it could be shown there if it were highly censored. He edited it severely; so sadly, that country missed out in a gloriously beautiful tale of the true giving-powers of empathic love.

      Tsai appears to suggest that love is not about sex or power, but about saving and caring for another. These three deserve to ecstatically come together from the heavens to reveal their lessons, even if in the hovels in which they must live they cannot find the ability to express what they have miraculously accomplished.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2019).

Clint Eastwood | J. Edgar / 2011

ruling us

by Douglas Messerli 

 

Dustin Lance Black (screenplay), Clint Eastwood (director) J. Edgar / 2011

 

You have to admire Clint Eastwood's Hoover biopic if for no other reasons than it has a remarkably capable cast, authentic sets and costumes, and numerous well-edited and composed scenes. Eastwood is an intelligent and sensitive director of the old Hollywood school, who has presented us in this work with a thoughtful and strangely touching piece about one of the most powerful, irascible, and difficult men in American politics—although I am sure Hoover thought himself above and apart from the political scene; he was in fact one of the most political animals ever, and that ability is the reason behind his long survival through the governing of eight presidents, although both Truman and Kennedy wanted to fire him, but, fearful of the repercussions, did not act. Hoover primarily created the modern FBI, developed its sophisticated scientific investigation techniques, and promoted the organization to the American public through films, comic books, and other media.

      Eastwood steps carefully in revealing the less heroic side of this figure by allowing his Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio in, perhaps, the best role of career to date) to describe himself, or, to put it another way, to mythologize his concerns and actions through a long series of meetings with writers of a would-be FBI memoir. For anyone who knows about the FBI Director's activities over the years, it is fascinating, but also irritating, to watch and hear the chest-beating braggart strut his stuff. And the creaky plot structure that this device creates fills in a selective history, without moving the story forward.

     Of course, by film's end, with Tolson's summary of the lies Hoover has promoted, we recognize that there is a logic to this structure, but with the focus on Hoover's small selection of events, Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black are left with a highly inconclusive series of occasions that can hardly convey the scope of Hoover's vast pall over the whole of the American scene.

     The film begins with the 1919 and 1920 so called "Palmer Raids," headed by Hoover after mail-bomb attacks on several notable figures. The raids themselves rounded up few anarchists, but the result of these raids, and the fears raised by the FBI and other organizations, led to larger attacks against socialists, communists, and other groups whose principles did not accord with Hoover's and others' versions of democracy. As the former head of The Enemy Aliens Registration Section, Hoover manipulated the system to have numerous figures such as Emma Goldman (the example used in the film) deported. Yet Hoover's fury was far more extensive than the one example J. Edgar names, for he later was behind the expulsion of notable figures such as Charlie Chapin and numerous others, as well as influencing the little-discussed Mexican repatriation, ordered by Presidents Hoover in 1929 and Roosevelt in 1939, resulting in the return to Mexico of 35,000 American citizens who were originally born in that country. Indeed, J. Edgar, had Eastwood desired, could have had far greater resonance to the present than it does, had he simply chosen other examples as well. As the film quotes one agent, Stokes, "The crimes we are investigating aren't crimes, they are ideas." And one might argue that throughout his life Hoover's actions were based more upon what he saw as dangerous ideas as opposed to actual threats or truly terrorist acts.

     The second series of "selective" memories upon which the film focuses are the infamous FBI attacks upon robbers and gangsters such as John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and other criminal figures of the 1930s. By this time Hoover had developed a group of effective agents to serve him, but jealous of the attention his agents, such as Melvin Purvis (who killed Dillinger) received, Hoover lashed out against the brightest of his own men, demoting or firing them. This almost maniacal demand for attention drove Hoover to several of his most ridiculous actions, and is revelatory of his desperation for power and popular approval. Certainly, Eastwood's movie hints at this, but the few instances upon which it focuses make such conclusions fuzzy as opposed to a story that might more thoroughly reveal Hoover's contradictions.

     Finally, the film gets terribly bogged down in the story of the Bruno Hauptmann kidnapping of the one-year-old son of American flying hero Charles Lindbergh. Hoover—and the film—detail the investigation quite thoroughly, demonstrating how Hoover's forensic developments led, finally, to Hauptmann's conviction and death. To me this focus on one major event, delimits so much else that the film might have revealed about Hoover and almost exonerates him in his leadership. What the film does not precisely depict is that even the governor of New Jersey doubted Hauptmann's guilt, and years later a large number of FBI files and other material were discovered in the governor's records that suggest some of the evidence was planted by FBI agents, bringing into to question several aspects of Hauptmann's guilt.

     In short, by employing the device of Hoover's dictated memories, the film jumps and skips over some of the most egregious issues of Hoover's career. While we do see him developing private files, one containing a letter in which Eleanor Roosevelt addresses a lesbian lover, another containing information on a sexual encounter with a foreign agent by John F. Kennedy, and a tape of an illicit sexual encounter with a woman by Martin Luther King, these are often so incidentally mentioned that anyone not immersed in the period may not comprehend their significance. Hoover's wiretapping, his extensive eavesdropping on thousands of American celebrities, and his involvement in the destruction of hundreds of lives of individuals whose only crime was in questioning or disagreeing with his strong moralist and political stances—which included a kind of xenophobic view of the world, an abhorrence of all things sexual (particularly involving homosexuality), and a patriotism that might have made even Thomas Jefferson seem like a "commie." It seems almost comical that, had he not died, Hoover might have finally met his match in the equally righteous, but law-breaking Richard Nixon.

      What the film does quite brilliantly reveal is all that is most private and, within the context of the story writing, most fictional. We cannot know precisely what Hoover's relationship was with his mother, but J. Edgar presents us with a claustrophobic home-life wherein it is hard to imagine how Hoover was not smothered to death in love. Judi Dench brilliantly portrays a woman obviously doting on a young man whom she had molded through speaking lessons, moral homilies, and motherly affection. The film carefully tiptoes around the claims of Hoover's cross-dressing tendencies by showing him, upon his mother's death, in a fetishlike mania, donning her beads and dress.

       Upon his admission that he cannot bear to dance with women, she repeats the story of a childhood acquaintance who, dressing as a woman, was mocked by neighbors through his nickname "Daffy" (for daffodil). Her summary comment is one of the most horrific statements of the film: "I would rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son." After which, she puts her arms around him in an attempt to teach him how to dance.

      Many of the critics whom I read seemed to suggest that Eastwood and Black barely touched upon the momentous hypocrisy of Hoover's life, his own, possibly homosexual, relationship with his assistant, Clyde Tolson. Yet I see this as, perhaps, the central focus of this work, or, at least, its most well-developed subject. From the moment he first meets Tolson (played by Armie Hammer*), Hoover goes into heat, actually breaking out into a sweat when he interviews Tolson for a possible FBI job. The man is, at least in the terms that Hoover has laid out—total commitment to the organization, complete sobriety, and utter faith in him and the organization—unqualified for the position. Yet not only does Hoover hire him, but within a few months, makes him second in charge. For the next 45 years the two dined with each other for lunch and dinner and traveled together on vacations where the two shared bedrooms or adjoining suites. They worked every day at the office side by side. The film suggests that, at least on a few occasions, they kissed; that Tolson was furious over Hoover's affair with Dorothy Lamour and outraged at Hoover's suggestion that he might marry. Tolson, apparently, chose Hoover's suits and ties and coached him the niceties of societal behavior. Once he met Tolson, although he had outlawed liquor for all FBI employees, Hoover began increasingly to drink. Together the two gambled, went to the theater, and attended late-night clubs. Does that mean that the two were lovers?

      Despite the long-time insistence of Washington D.C. gays and political insiders (I lived in that city for 16 years during his tenure, and regularly was assured of Hoover's homosexuality) and the rumors that he had been seen at gay orgies in full drag with a bevy of blond-haired boys, I would side with the moderate views of this film. I suppose the question is whether a deep male camaraderie without sex might still be described as a homosexual relationship. There are plenty of couples, homosexual or heterosexual, I would argue, who seldom have sex. I certainly cannot imagine a situation such as the one between these two men as not being understood as a kind of marriage, one of the dictionary definitions being "an intimate or close union." Indeed, more than anything else, it is apparent, Hoover craved love, and Tolson daily offered it up.

     Hoover's grabs for power, which ultimately corrupted him and led him to hypocritical actions that are almost incomprehensible, never grew evidently out of that need to be loved.  Power, as every backyard bully and world leader comes to comprehend, means the ability to influence and control others, particularly potential enemies. As Hoover himself said, "No one freely shares power in Washington, D.C." Year after year, like a king overseeing the election of new presidents, Hoover stood on the balcony of his FBI office, waving at the inaugural presidential parades. He had power, but in the process lost his sense of the very values that he imagined he was so carefully protecting. He, indeed, had become a kind of ruler, not a democrat.

 

*One of the ironies of the film is that Armie Hammer's grandfather, Armand, was a long-time target of Hoover, who questioned Hammer's close ties with the Soviet Union.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2011

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (January 2012).

Joel Ashton McCarthy | Why Does God Hate Me? / 2011

a lie to ease our conscience

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joel Ashton McCarthy and John Morrison (screenplay), Joel Ashton McCarthy (director) Why Does God Hate Me? / 2011 [16.31 minutes]

 

If Patterson’s film, reviewed above, uses one of the numerous times in history in which members of the LGBTQ community suffered bigotry and hate by governmental civil authorities which reiterate his rather obvious conclusions, Joel Ashton McCarthy’s commentary on religious fundamentalists’ determined efforts to destroy sexual diversity reads almost like a propagandistic text written by gays for youths suffering those prejudices in their homes and churches. Even the movie’s title, Why Does God Hate Me? appears to be a loaded question which allows any liberal- minded human being to subscribe to the film’s easy answer, which we know even before the movie presents its first image: God doesn’t hate anyone, only bigoted people hate in the name of God.

     Particularly given that the mean-spirited parents whom we hardly get an opportunity to meet in this work are made to represent the worst of hateful stereotypes, being folk who block all stations not broadcasting religious sermons, chastise their elder son for arriving home a few minutes late, and lash their youngest boy, Matthew (Dakota Daulby), for even asking why gays are the subject of his family’s vitriol, we wonder if there is any flesh and blood behind their views.  As Matthew says in the voiceover in which he expresses his struggles with his mother’s and father’s values: “I didn’t know how strict my parents were until they kicked my brother out,” evidently because of their discovery in his room of small quantity of marijuana.

       These are the kind of parents who enjoy taking their son on an outing to express their hate for women who have chosen abortion, any faggot still standing, and anyone else might even avert their gaze in a direction other than the ones upon which they and their fellow church members are focused. There is simply no room in their cross-eyed view of the universe for deviation.

        Such people, of course, do indeed exist. But it’s too bad that we might not have been presented with bigots with a little more meat on their bones and less grey matter in their heads. Many children suffer enormously because of parents who share such beliefs, but in order to understand the complexities and difficulties of such family imprisonments, it might have served the director better to allow these monsters to have some carnal appetites instead of presenting them as simple-minded as the badges of hate they pin upon their chests and the posters of damnation they wave through thin air.

        Their son Matthew, having grown up believe such rot, seems amazingly nonplussed to discover his own gay feelings and is so unbelievably well-adjusted that he is even able to suffer the abuses of his girlfriend Esther, who kicks him in the balls every time his eyes scan the handsome school jocks parading down the hall, purposely sharing her cold with him so that he might get out of sharing a few weeks in an all-male summer camp, dropping a cinder block on his leg so that he is refused by the wrestling coach, and prays over him like she were a vulture impatient for a taste of carrion.

         On their first missionary outing to San Francisco, he holds back from joining the others ready to scream out their hate to anyone with a set of ears. And on his second such voyage to San Francisco with his parents to protest the gay pride parade, he momentarily skips over to the other side, amazed by a gentle gay man who speaks kindly and honestly to him and even attempts to call him back after spotting the WE HATE FAGGOTS badge Matthew has been forced to wear.

       Returning back to his home in Redding, Matthew calls up his brother living in that evil den of iniquity, San Francisco, and arranges for his own escape from his pompous jail keepers. When Esther, inexplicably asked to come see him off, reminds him that he hasn’t yet been cured, the now savvy Matthew suggests that perhaps he is not the one who needs “curing.” and blithely skips with his suitcase out of the house, repeating his brother’s facile adage, “Sometimes you just have to fuck the rules.”

       Unfortunately, this is not the way young gays and even heterosexuals escape their parental jailhouse of the mind and spirit. Many young gays and lesbians, forced to survive on the streets and engage in prostitution just to survive may still feel quite strongly that God does indeed hate them for simply being who they are.

        As nicely as everything seems to come together for the young hero of this fairy tale, in the real world the bigotry of belief has deep sinkers on the souls of such innocents, and the pain they suffer for their so-called sins is real and enduring. A slug in the balls or any other part of the body, a brick tossed in anger, and a contagion of any disease such as COVID-16 more often kills than serving as a reminder of what such youths have abandoned. McCarthy’s film is a lie to ease our consciences.

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (October 2020).