Jordi Estrada | Como en Arcadia (Just Like Arcadia) / 2015

come back

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jordi Estrada (screenwriter and director) Como en Arcadia (Just Like Arcadia) / 2015 [7 minutes]

 

Using a simple weekend gathering of beautiful Spanish youths as his metaphor, director Jordi Estrada attempts to retell the story of the Golden Age in his short film Just Like Arcadia. It was a time when even immortals came down from Olympus to live with mortals, in which there was no jealousy, no punishment, no anger, no hate.

      We watch these older teens enjoying the day, sharing a picnic, swimming, simply showing of, quite unselfconsciously, they beautiful bodies, a time in which mortals lived like gods. Among the actors, given no character names, are Marc Lerch, Albert Martínez, Alberto Rosás, Alejandro Rosás, Kevin Ríos, Samuel Savage, and Mamadou Sow.       

     Only one in their midst, however, has eternal life, and he clearly stands out among the others. One day we see the immortal beauty going off with another boy to a private place in the forest where they spoke and get stoned, talking about their dreams and nightmares, the immortal boy obviously having no nightmares, while other is haunted by them. What happens in that cave is made purposely unclear, but when the mortal boy cries out for the other to “come here, don’t leave me alone please,” his plea can only remind us of the call of one lover to another to “come back,” so common in literary history, * a cry to return to his side in bed.

 

      At that very moment, the other boys return, as the immortal youth sits on a nearby rock naked.

The winds come, so we are told, and the mortals must move inside to the caves to live far less enchanted lives, while the special youth, robbed now in white moves back to Olympus.

       The narrator, clearly the boy who called out to his lover suggests that even now he cannot forget him.  

       Perhaps all gay men and even many heterosexuals recall such golden days of youth, surrounded by the beauty of their peers and one special boy to whom they were especially attracted.

But to attempt to characterize it as a special Arcadian-like moment seems tenuous at best, since the very same moments are always filled in the minds of youths with angst and fear, with jealousy and envy. The idea of an Edenic childhood is always popular, but I suggest those who write of such moments have forgotten their own youthful difficulties, their feelings of awkwardness of alienation. The vision Estrada presents seemed only possible, in my mind as child, for the handsome heterosexual boys who hung out together without feeling any sexual pulls for the others, without the embarrassment of being different, without the fear of being seen as an outsider.

       I know now, however, that that too was a myth. There is no time in youth when one does not fully feel like an outsider, even in escapes on a sunny weekend to an all-male get-together. They had girls to worry about, the fulfillment of bodily images, the challenges of seeking dominance. But it’s nice to imagine such a time, and those wonderful feelings when you wanted simply to call a beautiful friend back to you to stay a while longer in the heaven of your arms.

 

*Among the hundreds of such works is C. P. Cavafy’s poem, “Come Back,” which I translated below:

 

Come Back

 

Come back and lay your hands on me,

the sensate feelings of a shiver. Come back

when the body is both open and on edge—

 

when desire is driven through the blood

that the lips and skin did yet forget

what our hands reached out to grab.

 

Come quickly, return me to love.

Come back and hold me tight into night

still lingering in kisses and our touch.

 

Los Angeles, December 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

 

Lenny Bruce and Jeff Hale | Thank You Mask Man / 1971

unnatural acts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lenny Bruce (writer and voice), Jeff Hale (animation and director) Thank You Mask Man / 1971

 

Describing the “plot” of a Lenny Bruce routine is a little bit like lecturing on jazz or rapping about architecture. It can be done: Nathaniel Mackey has written several fictions about jazz that fully convey the syncopations and rhythms of the music, and I suppose a hip hop artist might be able to take on the Empire State. But every time I’ve heard a different recording of Bruce’s famed “Thank You Masked Man” routine it’s somewhat different from the last, things left out, new elements represented, the comic emphases located in different parts of the “story.” And all the oral versions of the skit that I’ve heard, now some four or five various recordings, are different, sometimes substantially, from the 1971 Jeff Hale animated short film featuring yet another version of the work. In fact—and this is important—the routine generally titled in the recordings as “Thank You Masked Man” is called “Thank You Mask Man” in the cartoon film animation.

     A masked man is simply one of many of a kind, another male wearing a mask, while a “mask man” is a very particular individual, a man who himself represents the mask, a singular being who has come to be defined not only by his costume but what that element of apparel represents. The Lone Ranger of the film is not only wearing the mask but has become the mask, the “mask man.”

     In short, the horse rider who rushes in to help his fellow citizens in peril is, in the animated version, not only alone, a man who ranges about the landscape as a loner, but is someone basically unknown to the society which he repeatedly helps and saves. He is an outsider, defined by his being apart from the people he regularly rushes in to protect.

     For that protection it is quite understandable why societal figures, the town leaders, their wives, their children, and even the local streetcleaners wish to thank him. After all, he protects them and helps them to maintain the society which they define. And surely we cannot wonder why they










 might wish to award him for his maintenance, his salvation of the normalcy for which they stand. The sheriffs and mayors who are grateful for his help would love to give him medals, it would give their wives great pleasure if he’d stay around just long enough to eat a slice of their freshly baked cakes. Their kids would enjoy personally thanking their parents’ hero. “Thank you mask man. Thank mask man,” would appear to be a lovely thing to come out of the mouths of these babes.

      But no, the mask man runs in to save the day only to escape before having any substantial contact with the citizens he protects. And frankly those perfect respectable and bourgeois folk are getting a little bit irritated with his highhandedness, with his clearly standoffish behavior.

      One citizen suggests that the mask man is in analysis, having discovered that he can’t accept love. A small town medical doctor even diagnoses part of the problem can is evidenced in the fact that he uses only silver bullets which, he argues, symbolizes Dr. Paul Erhlich’s struggle to discover the silver bullet—arsphenamine (compound 606)—that will cure syphilis. “He sees all of us, the entire society,” so speculates the good doctor, “as being infected with syphilis.” Not at all an appropriate way for their hero to characterize those whose difficulties he cures. Maybe he’s not such hero, after all, the town leaders suspect.

     

    Finally facing the gun—in Hale’s comic version both figuratively and literally—held by the local sanitation worker, they demand to know why he doesn’t hang around to accept their appreciation. The mask man attempts to explain that if he stayed around to hear a young boy say “Thank you mask man. Thank you mask man,” he might get used to it and even enjoy the praise heaped upon him. He’d possibly like it so much that he’d stay at home with the other society folks and wait for each day’s delivery of his fan mail. And then one day, when he didn’t find a single fan letter in his mailbox, someone might tell him that the Messiah had returned and made everything right again, and he’d find himself without a job, without even his identity. He’d have to go out and cause trouble, create a ruckus just so he might be required to come to the rescue. He’d have turned a good thing inside out, the savior transforming himself into the villain of the story. So that’s why, he concludes he can’t stay around for the praise. “What I don’t have, I don’t miss.”

     Still, just this one time, they insist, he take with him, just as a gesture or for their kid’s sake, anything he wants. The mask man looks around and dismisses the ash tray. He looks around again, ponders, and then, comes up with a brilliant idea, “Give me that Indian over there!” Who? Tonto? Yes, shouts the mask man, Tante. Give me Tante. It’s Tonto says the surprised street cleaner, not Tante (which in Yiddish means “aunt.”*) And what do you want him for?

      The mask man: (straightening up the feather atop Tonto’s head) To perform an unnatural act.

      The street cleaner: What??

      The mask man: To perform an unnatural act.

      The cleaner: O, the mask man’s a fag. Awwww. [sticking out his tongue] The fag man. A dirty fag. You damn queer you! The mask fag man, ain’t that a kick in the ass? [to the mask man] I bet you got mascarry under that damn mask ain’t you? A damn queer. I never knew you were a fag mask man.

       The mask man: I’m not a fag. [pause] But I’ve heard a lot about it and I’ve read exposés and I want to try to see how bad it is. Just once. I like what they do with fags anyway (wrapping his arm around Tonto’s shoulder). The punishment is quite correct. They throw them in jail with a lot of men, very clever (he laughs with a slight giggle).

       “Wash him up and get him ready,” he commands as he now strides forward in a walk that might almost be described as hip-heavy strut. Spotting a pink horse with a fluffy white mane and tail, the mask man pauses: “Hey, give me the horse too.”

        The cleaner: What do you want that horse for?

        The mask man: Some act...

      The street cleaner sticks out is tongue again in disgust and almost immediately the whole town is howling out “Fag, fag, fag, fag, fag, fag, fag as the Lone Ranger, no longer alone rides off into the sunset shouting heigh-ho, proving to the whole of society that he remains a true outsider worthy of his name, a mask man willing to experiment, at least twice, in sex. And we must remember Tonto remained loyal to him to the very end.

      You have to imagine the story I’ve just shared with you, however, being performed not by a pop intellect but a brilliant verbal storyteller who uses the syncopations and rhythms of music along with the riffs of a hip-hop artist to build up a satirical high rise whose structure, like the tower of Babel, comes tumbling down with the awe of a chorus of laughter.

       For those in the LGBTQ community who were offended by the use of the word “fag,” I might suggest they go back and carefully study the structure of Bruce’s linguistic construct. It is the society, as it has been through the ages, who calls this wise loner by names, not the comedian who tells the tale.

       And what a brilliant fable it is, demonstrating as it does, just how hypocritical these desperate folk so desirous to embrace their savior into their fold are. It is, as Jacques Derrida might have put it, la différence that makes it possible for the mask man—maybe even with mascara applied to his eyes—to save them. For it has always been the outsiders who have shown those inside how to survive.

       I’d like to have seen Bruce riff on Batman and his boy Robin as well.

 

epilogue

     I should just mention that in his skit “blah-blah-blah” Bruce also draws attention to the LGBTQ community. Arrested in San Francisco for obscenity, using a word that he describes as a common homosexual practice of ten letters, the comedian forces his audience to deal with homosexuality much in the way that Tim Miller does in some of his performances. Miller often opens his show appearing naked and sitting on an unsuspecting audience member’s lap, forcing them, in some cases for the first time in their lives, to actually make bodily contact with a homosexual man.

     Similarly, Bruce turns an adjective through the telling of the story of his arrest and his appearance in court where the policeman, the judge, the lawyer, and several others repeating it over and over—Bruce coding it as “blah-blah-blah” in his recounting of these events precipitated by his calling someone, apparently, a “fucking ass”—into a verb. An unlikable person suddenly is transformed into a sexual act which requires Bruce’s audience, each time he repeats the words “blah-blah-blah,” to imagine, for many of them, the unimaginable. It’s sheer genius.

 

*In one version of the recordings (“Thank You Masked Man” of 1972) The Lone Ranger is described as being Jewish, and speaks in Yiddish, yet another version of the outsider.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).

 

Eytan Fox | ללכת על המים (Lalekhet Al HaMayim) (Walk on Water) / 2004

the miracle

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gal Uchovsky (screenplay), Eytan Fox (director) ללכת על המים (Lalekhet Al HaMayim) (Walk on Water) / 2004

 

This movie begins innocently enough, with a man, Eyal (Lior Asshkenazi) on a tourist ferry in Turkey, camera in hand. He photographs seemingly a random, but catches a couple with their child, facing away from him, the young boy turning to witness the photo. Eyal waves briefly at the boy, but his father immediately forces him to turn away from the man, even for a second time after Eyal has put the camera away, insisting the boy not make contact with the stranger.

     Eyal gets up and moves off, entering a small water closet. There he takes out a needle and two small bottles, nestled neatly in a plastic case. He fills the needle with the liquid in one of the vials. They arrive at the port, the young child hurrying ahead with a large red balloon. He runs back to his parents and they turn in to talk with him, the father bending over a bit to better communicate with his son. At that moment Eyal walks by the couple, injecting the man with whatever the needle contained, the man quickly falling dead to the concrete, his wife screaming for help, the boy looking on as a single tear makes its way down his cheek, clearly realizing that his father has been killed or at least hurt.

      This does not seem the typical beginning for an Eytan Fox film, his movies having always dealt with oppositions and “the other,” but never quite seeming so centered upon what we quickly realize is a Mossad agent, a hitman targeting Israel’s presumed enemies. Eyal, returning quickly home, hurries off into a special airport lounge where he is toasted and celebrated by other Mossad leaders, finally arriving back to his own apartment, only to discover his wife dead, having drugged herself in their bed.

      The head leader of his group, Menachem (Gideon Shemer) almost immediately determines that he cannot put Eyal on further difficult assignments after having just experience such a traumatic events, demanding instead that Eyal help track down an aging Nazi war criminal who may have been responsible for the deaths of both his and Eyal’s relatives.

       This time, however, the case does not begin in Germany, where Menachem believes the war criminal may still be alive despite no one having seen Nazi in decades, but strangely in Israel itself, where Axel Himmelman (Knut Berger) has just arrived to visit his sister Pia (Caroline Peters) who lives on an Israeli kibbutz, the two adult grandchildren of the Nazi criminal. Eyal is asked to pose as a tour guide, befriending the two in order to gain access to their own knowledge and possible entry into Axel’s German home, where he lives with his parents, whom Mossad believes may be still harboring the old man.

      Actually, Axel has come to visit his sister to convince her to return for father’s 70th birthday celebration. But she quickly squelches any plans he may have had to convince her to return, explaining that even her Israeli boyfriend, discovering the truth of her background, could no longer remain with her. “It ruined everything. First he said it wasn’t a problem, not my fault, but he came back and he told me that he didn’t hate Germans, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He couldn’t handle it.”

     Through a recording device, Eyal and his superiors quickly learn the truth of the situation, yet Eyal is requested to continue playing their tour guide, to gain the friendship, if nothing else, of Axel.

       So begins an endless tale of age-long hatreds that reverberated quite astoundingly with the Hamas-Israeli war expanding in the very days in which I saw and wrote about this prescient movie.

       Eyal quickly develops a liking for the handsome young German and his sister, despite Axel’s immediate request to visit a Palestinian village. The request flummoxes Eyal asking why he wants to go there. On their driving trip Eyal discovers his younger friend likes only female singers. Asking how many children he has, Eyal is told that Axel has no children but that when he spoke of “my children,” he meant the immigrant children he teaches. And Axel’s question, after a report of another bombing raid, whether he has imagined how desperate the Palestinians must be to go out and kill themselves, along with the German’s basically liberal values, and his general kindness to “others” clearly disturbs Eyal. “They’re enemies,” he explains to Axel. “There’s nothing to think about.” Soon after he calls into headquarters complaining about being stuck with a pseudo liberal who talks about suicide bombers’ motives. “I almost punched him.” In short, he argues, he doesn’t need to be hosting a German peacenik for the Ministry Department.

     Still on the job, however, he gradually grows to like both Axel and his sister, he and Axel experiencing a kind of macho brotherly bonding on an outing to the Sea of Galilee, where Christ walked on the water—hence the film’s title. There the two take a facial mud bath, Eyal rubs the

naked Axel with sun-lotion, the two discuss male circumcision practices throughout the world of which Axel seems particularly knowledgeable, and they even huddle together to keep warm by the fire, a trick Eyal claims he learned through his service in the military. They develop a sort of bromance, in short, that is almost surprising given, as Eyal admits, that he suffers from a problem of the tear ducts and that he cannot even cry.

 

     All of this, of course, radically changes when he discovers himself on another evening with Pia and Axel in a gay bar and realizes that Axel is dancing with a Palestinian waiter, (Yousef Sweid), with whom he soon leaves to have sex. And Eyal’s homophobia quickly kicks in even if, with Pia in hand, he can’t quite permit himself to express his full outrage.

      The next morning, Eyal discovers his charge has just bought a jacket from his friends at what he apparently believes is an outrageous price. Eyal grows violent, demanding Axel’s money back, and paying only a small fragment of the original price. Obviously, the scene does not go over well for Axel, but endangers Rafik’s own life for having been involved with Axel and being embarrassedly forced to refund most of the money. As they leave, Rafik asks to speak only one sentence to Eyal: “You Jews are so obsessed with what was done to you in the past. Maybe, if you just let go….” Eyal refuses to hear any more drives off.

      Before he leaves for Germany, Pia explains to her brother why she cannot return home, telling him for the first time the truth: that their parents were hiding their Nazi grandfather, the reason she left and moved to Israel. Pia does not know if he is still alive, but she cannot forgive her parents, and they were afraid that she might turn them in.

      With the significant break between Axel and Eyal it is all the more surprising when Eyal turns up in Berlin, reminding Eyal that he had after all invited him. And before long Eyal is eating a “curry wurst” and sharing a CD he has brought Axel of Israeli folk dances, the Mossad hitman even attempting to ask his forgiveness for…he can’t finish the sentence but it clearly includes his homophobic reactions and his violent encounter with Arab coat seller.

       If the first part of this film was fairly believable, if a little too predictable with regard to nearly all of the characters’ types, this portion of film turns almost into a fantasia, as Axel quickly invites Eyal to a gay bar where they have a discussion to being gay tops or bottoms (Axel admits he likes both), and even move toward a conversation about anal intercourse which Axel cuts off, realizing that perhaps it’s too much for Eyal for the first receiving such information. Rafik, Axel reports, is much better after sending him another 100 euro for his Uncle for the stupid jacket.

     Axel even introduces his Israeli friend to four transvestites to whom he runs into by accident in the underground.

       The girls flirt with the newcomer as the Eyal and Axel walk off in the other direction, only to hear a few moments the transvestites’ cries for help as they are being beaten by German punks hanging out nearby. Eyal runs to protect them, for a few moments turning the film almost into a action hero film, as he demonstrates his judo talents. But one hood grabs Eyal around the next, Axel coming to pull him off, eventually the Israeli freeing himself, only to be attacked beyond by

another in a broken liquor bottle, Axel warning him of the imminent hit, at which point Eyal pulls out a gun and threatens them in German: “Fuck off, asshole or I’ll blow your brains out.” The go on the run.

      Now it is Axel’s moment for justifiable hate, expressing his emotions to Eyal soon after “Too bad you didn’t kill him. Those people pollute the world. They turn everything into shit.” Eyal explains that his parents were born in Berlin, although they refused to speak it in his presence, only when they thought he wasn’t listening.

      Obviously, the two have now bonded in an entirely different way. How could Axel not invite his Israeli friend home and to attend his father’s birthday celebration?

      They drive to family villa, where in his own territory Axel now takes advantage of his own family, much the way the secret Mossad hitman did of the brother and sister in Israel. And now the tables are turned even further against Eyal as in a local café on their way to the villa, he sees Menachem nearby, who greets him with a smile. Obviously Eyal himself is now being followed to see that he keeps his promise to track down Axel’s grandfather.

       With all the guests present for the party, Axel, as a birthday gift, determines to teach them all a special dance, putting on one of the Israel folk dances and shows them how to dance, unknowingly, to a Jewish song. The performance is a brilliant put-down of their own ancient prejudices.

       But soon after the cake is rolled in followed by the grandfather pushing a wheel chair, both Axel and Eyal standing in horror as the rest of the family benignly smiles in joy of his final presence of family life.

       Playing partially dumb, Axel confronts his mother demanding to know if that’s why she has sent him to Pia in Israel, to bring her back to once more confront her family. His mother makes the excuse that she feared her father might never even reach this day, that they lived their lives too long as if they have been criminals with their phones being bugged—unable apparently to recognize that she and her husband are criminals, conspiring to hide a man who has killed so very many individuals simply because of their religion.

       Axel declares that had he known, he would not have come. “Too bad the old man didn’t make a political speech,” he sarcastically responds. Even she bitterly wonders if his friend isn’t from Mossad, Axel countering that if he wasn’t he might certainly want to join now.

       But actually, the opposite is suddenly occurring in this inverted fantasy world. Eyal no longer desires to kill. Like the hitman in Richard Shepard’s US film The Matador of the very next year, he can no longer face the idea of ending another life and is seeking for a way out, and he has immediately taken off in Axel’s car to return to Berlin to explain the situation to Menachem.

       Seeking out Eyal, Axel, after several unsuccessful knocks, enters his friend’s room where he finds hidden under the bed his overnight case in which he discovers a portfolio about his grandfather with pictures of him in his Nazi uniform and even pictures of his sister and himself.

      Eyal, meanwhile, has arrived back at the hotel where he checked in and where he now knows Menachem himself awaits in room 223. Eyal argues, “He’s very old, but we can get him out.” Menachem hands him instead a case of poisons much like the ones Eyal used on the Arab in the first scene. He is shocked, insisting “Let’s get him out and bring him to trial in Israel.”

       What Eyal does not know is that there is no car, no pick-up, just the two of them there to mete out revenge. “You have to finish this out yourself. Only you. Terminate him! …Do the right thing …for me, for your mother.”

       Eyal, as we the audience now suddenly realize that hate is so perverse that even killing a man, whether or not he himself as been a killer, is described as being “right,” as something appropriate and justified. A fair trial for a man of this age is out of the question.

      Axel hears Eyal’s return, watching him as he renters the villa, and following behind him—this time he playing the role of spy—watching him as he enters into his grandfather’s bedroom and takes out the needle, filling it with the poison. The old man coughs. Eyal turns and walks out the room, finally noticing Axel’s presence.

        Axel moves further into the room, sits down on his grandfather’s bed, briefly strokes his forehead, and reaches over and turns off the air to the old’s breathing apparatus.

        He leaves the room and enters Eyal’s bedroom, sitting down beside him. Eyal explains what he has refused to several times in the movie, what became of his wife. “There’s my wife. She didn’t just leave, you see. She killed herself. She left me a note. She wrote that I kill everything that comes near me. I can’t kill anymore. I don’t want to kill anymore. His head falls to Axel’s chest as he breaks into tears.

 

    This now having become a full fantasy, the very last scene is almost completely unbelievable, a miracle story itself, as we hear the cry of a baby, Eyal sleepily walking into the child’s room and picking him up to quiet him. We see Pia asleep in bed, as Eyal writes an email to Axel, asking him and his boyfriend to come and care for the baby for a few days so that he and Pia can get away. He tells of a dream where they were back at the Sea of Galilee, and Axel really was walking on water where he soon joined him. “And everything is so peaceful. And we feel good.”

     In Fox’s work, the gay man, for a change, actually serves as the redeemer.

 

Los Angeles, December 18, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).