Martin Arnold | Passage à l’acte / 1993

“i am”: reading from a language that no one heard in the original to kill a mockingbird

by Douglas Messerli

Martin Arnold (director) Passage à l’acte / 1993

 

Almost 33 minutes into Robert Mulligan’s film To Kill a Mockingbird, after a great many important events in the movie, there is a small scene at the breakfast table as Scout (Mary Badham) and Jem (Phillip Alford) are about to end their summer and return to school. It is a particularly important day for six-year-old Scout since it represents her first day of school to which, for the first time in the film, the tomboy is required to wear a dress.

     Evidently, the event is so important that the friendly neighbor, with an eye on Atticus Finch, Miss Maudie Atkinson (Rosemary Murphy) decides the share their breakfast. The central characters in the original film in this very short scene at the breakfast table are actually the family maid, Calpurnia (Estelle Evans), who has been responsible for the children all summer, and Scout whose important costume change—and alteration supposedly from a tomboy to a genteel young lady—is the focus of the scene. 

    In the original, Calpurnia, who has probably created and certainly had freshly ironed Scout’s dress and Scout herself are the center of attention, with Atticus looking kindly on over the occasion while Jem expresses is his adolescence impatience to hurry off to school, at one point bolting out the door only to be ordered back to the table by his father who declares it’s still a half-hour before school begins. Jem demonstrates his impatience with Scout, who hovers over her eggs, bacon, and milk, all the while pouting for having been forced into the dress in which she is not at all comfortable.

     Jem keeps attempting to hurry her throughout this breakfast scene as she testily tries to eat some food before, suddenly, she too bolts through the door with Jem, she returning briefly to kiss Atticus goodbye while Maudie and Atticus, playing the parental figures, inwardly giggle to themselves over the behavior of the children.

      Presumably nothing of great importance—particularly given the major tensions of the film that include rape, attempted murder, racial injustice, intellectual inability, a rabid dog, and one of the best courtroom scenes ever portrayed on film—really happens in this little interlude.

      However, since the narrator of this work is presumably Scout grown into the lesbian adult similar to the author herself, this scene, in fact, is terribly important since it represents one of the first of many times when males will attempt to take away the power she has held as a tomboy child, able to run and play with the boys, her beloved brother and the visiting Dill, while standing up to their worst possible bogeymen such as Mrs. Dubose (a neighbor who daily verbally abuses the children), Boo Radley (the next door adult who in those days was described as “mentally retarded” but whom the children perceive more as a terrifying idiot), Walter Cunningham (a nearby farmer who appears with the gang of men determined to hang the black rape suspect Tom Robinson, and who has been given special favors by the Finch family), and even the evil Lee “Bob” Ewell (the racist father of the girl Robinson is falsely accused of having raped). On this particular morning the focus is upon her transformation into a female who will no longer be permitted to accomplish any of these acts, and will eventually be assigned to marriage or maidenhood like Maudie herself.

 

      In Passage à l’acte Austrian-born film maker Martin Arnold has taken this scene and heavily manipulated it by speeding up events, slowing them down, and mostly repeating the tinniest of movements along with radically distorting the sound and language of the original. The title of his work refers to the French clinical psychiatric phrase that designates impulsive acts of a violent or criminal nature that often indicate an acute psychotic episode. Particularly in the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan, the “passage to the act” represents not just an “acting out” of such behavior, but an acting out that ends in the exit from the scene, which on a far more benign level is what happens in the original.

       David Herbert, writing in the Millenium Film Journal, argues for the necessity of intertextual readings with regard to Arnold’s Passage à l’acte, suggesting that Arnold’s “repetitions and reversals in the flow of images emphasize certain actions and gestures in such a way as to implicate and disrupt otherwise invisible formal strategies, products of the Hollywood cultural apparatus. Suspending the metonymic chain established in To Kill a Mockingbird, these repetitions reveal the alterity within the frames and defer their sequentially constructed meanings.” In other words, Arnold’s cinematic distortion of the original reveals previously imperceptible patterns in the narrative action of Mulligan’s otherwise traditionally-constructed movie.

     Herbert continues: “The disruption of the soundtrack also radically alters the functions of the original film. Similar to a hip-hop DJ, Arnold samples the original audio and creates a new orchestration through minute segmentation and repetition. Beats, such as a door slamming or the dropping of a fork, take on a new aesthetic prominence. At times, the audio composition takes precedence over the images altogether, as the film plays upon syllables and incidental noises as independent elements.”

     But while Herbert argues that these audible transformations “eliminate the power of language,” I would argue that they merely increase it, forcing us to seek to comprehend not only the images, which themselves are totally altered, but to attend to the new language, “the unintelligible barks and yelps” as Herbert describes them, of Arnold’s deconstruction in order to make new meaning of the linguistic component of the film. My ears may not hear the same words that yours do, but anyone who has the patience to listen will have to concur that something else than what the film’s original overriding narrative expressed is being strongly portrayed in this small scene.

 

    Arnold’s work begins after Miss Maudie has arrived, Calpurnia has already served up the breakfast plates and poured out the coffee, and Scout has shyly and uncomfortably entered the room in her new dress. It begins, in fact, with what might be described as the male reaction to Scout’s behavior, Jem’s complete dismissal and rejection of her discomfort as he suddenly determines to leave for school without her, racing out the door when spotting, evidently, one of his male companions.

     That action is played out in a series of loud slams and noises, a seemingly nervous breakdown of Atticus, in this case an authoritarian, as he shouts out Jem’s name while pounding the table over and over in repetition. In that act he repeats his son’s name, gradually transforming it into “Jim,” “jess,” “jest” “dare,” “ass,” “fff” (sounding the f-word), “fmf” (female-male-female), “em,” “bam,” “damn,” and “jam,” and others before returning to “Jem.” He appears to be having muscular aberrations with regard to both his hands and his face, pounding the table as he hisses out the words, Maudie shaking her head nervously as if in shock.

 

   When Jem attempts to return, it appears that door is now locked and that he has to knock in order to get back in. 

    Now looking down sternly, Atticus begins repeating words that sound like “apple,” “half full,” “flub,” “affela” (a fellow?), “hello,” “sort,” “m’scoot,” “scoot,” etc. returning, so it seems, ultimately to the unconscious subject on both their minds, Scout.

     Eventually, Jem reenters, moving forward in a manner in which he now seems to be shaking, Atticus pointing and tapping the table with his hands as if to recreate order.

 

    As Maudie seems to shake her head from side to side in the negative, Atticus points back to the chair in which Jem previously sat, now mouthing a series of “s” words “myself, myself,” “sell it and sell it,” “sit one,” “sit on,” “so on,” and eventually moving back to the word “son.”

      As he finally settles his hands back down on the table, Atticus begins to stutter out words that sound like “wait,” “wait you,” “but wait,” “weight,” and “wake.” Then turning to Scout, he begins to stutter out a series of “sister,” “sister,” “sister,” “sister.” If anything, his endless repetitions of “sister” are even more unbearable than his shifts of language with regard to Jem, and soon with Arnold apparently using an echo device, the words clearly reverberate through that small kitchen as a negative assignment of her role, the female designation of a young woman who cannot but be compared with the more inclusive “brother.”

       So far Scout, hovering the foreground with her back to the camera, has does nothing but attempt to eat her breakfast. Yet clearly in the series of “sister” declarations, she is being scolded, it appears, for some unknown offense.

       Jem returns quite literally on edge to his chair, his emotions reiterated in Arnold’s version by the fluttering of his hands, as Scout reacts with a slight scrunching forward, itself hinting at a kind of impatience obviously to leave the “family” circle. Shaking his head nervously up and down, Jem now turns his criticism upon his sister, repeating over and over again with the application of the echo mechanism: “Well then hurry up, hurry, up, hurry up,” etc. After saying this four times, the repetitions are speeded up yet further so that the “hurry up” is spoken in jack-hammer manner for a long period.

      In this scene we finally catch our one and only glimpse of Calpurnia at the stove, a half body image from the back with her left hand beating in rhythm to the insistent orders of Jem, almost as in a part of a dance or nervous tic. And at the same moment, Scout, saying her first words, begins to interject a series of “am” after each demand to “hurry up.”

 

     The patter between them becomes almost comic, as if the scene proves that you can only state your point so often before it becomes mere patter and meaninglessness. The battle of “hurry up” and “am” is a standstill that might never end, one demanding movement, the other insisting upon the current stasis of existence in the firm placement of “I am,” surely the understandable reaction of the young Scout being told to grow up and become something other than the tomboy she recognizes herself as being. If nothing else, Scout is not at all interested in hurrying up into the female world into which she is expected to suddenly enter.

      This is made even more apparent as the “am” comments begun to be followed with a word that at first sounds like “Francis” before turning into “Frank,” a shifting of a female name (Scout’s real name is Jean Louise) to a male surname. It is a similar relationship between Jean and John, the French François becoming the English Frank. She’s as insistent about the name “Frank” as is her brother demanding she “hurry up” or as she previously was with “am,” and it’s even more interesting when she begins to combine the words, “am Frank,” suggesting that she not only identifies with the male surname but that she is being “frank” or honest in her declarations, as the word “frank” gradually comes to sound like “grand.” Indeed, this is the longest dialogical moment in the entire 11-minute film.

      Slowly the repetitions, sped up even faster, become an interchange of “am for” and “hurt for,” which ultimately turn Jem’s words into a repetition of the demand to “stop,” while she insists now on “Frankie” and eventually even a word sounding like “Dave.”

 

     For a moment, it appears as if the adults, particularly Maudie, might enter into the conversation as they rhythmically lift their coffee cups to the patter of “Come on, come on, come on, come on” and to her chants of “Francis, Frank, and Dave.” The two women, in fact, Scout and Maudie each try to engage in drinking milk and coffee, stopped by the repetitious responses of Jem and by association, Atticus.

     Finally, Scout’s language turns into a series of single words, “Sis” transforming increasingly into a linguistic sound that reverberates with a sense of accusation like a “tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk.”

     After another long series of “come on’s,” the camera is focused on Atticus, as he also appears to judging the actions of the coffee-drinking Maudie.

     Finally, Scout gives up, tossing down her fork over and over, repeating words that begin to truly sound like “fuck-em up, fuck-em up!” that turns into simple “fucks” before transforming into a word that sounds like “fart,” that just as quickly alternates with the word “what,” as if she were exasperatedly questioning the entire transaction between herself and her family members: “what do you want of me?” or “what’s going on here?”

     “The words “slam, slam, slam” become transmogrified as “with lamb, with lamb,” that shifts finally into the word “family,” just as the two children began standing to move towards the door, singing out “some ways.”

    As Scout seems to actually touch her brother Jem on the run, the word “touch” quickly turns into the word “potty” and “comedy,” as both children, seemingly undergoing a physical breakdown, struggle to reach the door and run, Atticus and Maudie shaking their heads in negative horror at what they are witnessing.

       The terrible banging of the door puts a pasted, clown-like smile of terror on Maudie’s face, as Scout struggles through the open doorway, Maudie’s hands shaking with the tension of the entire encounter, alternating with what appears as applause for Scout’s actions. The sped-up sound track makes it sound like the bent over Scout is singing out “Cindy, Cindy, Cindy, Tootie, Tootie, Tootie,” as he returns to quickly kiss her father with several sloppy kisses before rushing off.

      If the above sounds like a kind of coded reading of my own creation, I openly admit it is. The sounds and images of Arnold’s manipulated version of the original short scene are electronically or digitally created in a manner that they can be interpreted differently by any viewer, and the above “reading” of the text consists simply of how my now very seasoned and unreliable auditory system has interpreted them, albeit after many careful listening sessions. How one interprets this text is obviously also a matter of how each individual perceives the language around them and interpolates them within the normative language of the film itself. As the children’s game of “telephone” makes apparent, we all hear what we want to.

      It might help to note, however, that in the original movie, soon after this breakfast event, on her first day of school Scout gets into a terrible knock-‘em-down fight with her male peers, she obviously not at all happy with her new role of supposedly having to behave like a young lady, actions which surely support much of my Steinian-like approach to language as I have interrupted it.

 

      I fully agree, furthermore, with what Herbert and other critics suggest Arnold’s reexamination of the original text more generally reveals, nicely summarized in Herbert’s comments:

     “The framing strategically circumscribes a portrait of a nuclear family eating a morning meal. The woman on the right of the screen, a neighbor in the original film, is now easily viewed as the wife and mother in this familial unit. Her immobility and silence testify to the passivity of female characters within traditional Hollywood narratives. Gregory Peck becomes a demonic father, whose verbal and gestural commands speak to a greater masculine authority. In this register, the scenario describes the indoctrination of the young male and female into the traditional gender roles assumed by the parents. Peck orders the young boy to obey, the young boy in turn commands the young girl, who in turn supplicates to the masculine authority and inherits her mother's passivity. Thus the film delineates a certain chain of command within the nuclear family, as an otherwise unremarkable product of the post-classical Hollywood representational paradigm.”

      Similarly, Herbert is quite correct I believe in arguing that Arnold's film “relegates Calpurnia, the Finch family's African American nanny, to a mere half-shape on the right-hand side of the screen. Indeed, her role as moral authority in the original novel, already diminished in the film adaptation, is now fully negated. The moment from To Kill a Mockingbird which comprises Passage à l'Acte has no bearing on the previous film's major narrative conflict, the accusation and trial of Tom Robinson, which functions to singularly articulate the original film's liberal ideology and message of tolerance. Although the film analyzes and critiques the politics of representation within To Kill a Mockingbird, this critique is entirely manifested in gender and generational constructions within a White social frame. In this way, Passage à l'Acte may implicate the racial hierarchy within the liberal ideology of the former film, by construing the racial issues as a ‘backdrop’ to its real motivation, the indoctrination of the young female into a strict gender hierarchy. Passage à l'Acte reveals the extent to which the young girl, Scout, finds herself at the mercy of the male figures in her life. Just as Scout learns, from her father, invaluable lessons about the injustices of racial bigotry, so too must she conform to sexist social norms.”

      I’ve argued for precisely this viewpoint in my previous essay on the original movie.

      Except here, we perceive it at an almost subconscious and highly personal level, rather than through the larger narrative plot. Both linguistically and visually, we realize through Arnold’s version that Scout does not at all agree with the new role placed upon her, and that although she finally gives into her brother’s demands to “Come on,” she enters the new school world as a young woman who very much knows that she is not a Francis, a Cindy, or even a “Tootie” (the youngest wild child, one must recall, of Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis).

       Like Harper Lee, herself, the lesbian friend of Truman Capote, Scout begins on her long voyage—at least as I read the new uncoded film—as a “Frank, a Dave” or perhaps even a symbolic Boo, as the kind of scary figure who returns to her Alabama hometown in her original version of the story, Go Set a Watchman, a monster who returns home to discover the truth of Atticus having joined the KKK while showing herself to be a woman who hates the gatherings of small-town women whose lives are occupied in dressing up to visit one another in afternoons of meaningless gossip, drinks, and hors d'oeuvres.

    As I have long argued, To Kill a Mockingbird is not truly a film of racial revolution, of white embracement of blacks, or even radical change in racial relationships, but is a pat on the liberal white back for even caring enough to read a book about such issues. In her original fiction, Lee cut much closer to the bone, and showed us that Atticus Finch, her own symbolic father, was very much like the “demonic father” Arnold explores through his coded revelation in Passage à l'Acte.

    The real subject of that supposed racially advanced look into small town Southern life remains the young girl Scout, so terrorized that day back in 1932 when she was expected to be something other than she knew she was, reiterating it again and again in the stubbornly emphatic recognition of “I am.”  

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

 

Harun Baysan | Akif / 2018

required identity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harun Baysan and Çetin Kurt (screenplay), Harun Baysan (director) Akif / 2018 [30 minutes]

 

It’s somewhat difficult to know how to feel about Turkish director Harun Baysan’s 30-minute film Akif since the film’s central character, Akif is a slightly homophobic draft dodger who wants to use the possibility of being gay as a way to escape the military.

     Akif (Bekir Behrem) certainly has good reason. His father (Yusuf Eksi) is seriously ill and has no one else to care for him, being unable to even eat without the careful ministrations of his only child. In fact, Akif has previously saved up to join the military—soldiers in the Turkish military, at least at the time of this film, must serve six months without pay.

     The culture, moreover, which does allow gay men to serve in the military (just as was long true of the US and numerous other countries’ militia), encourages men who will not or cannot serve to seek the escape of being gay. But what that entails, the creation of a stereotypical view of LGBTQ people, is even more terrifying. As the true hero of this work, Ugur (Uzay Gökhan Irmak) explains to Akif, in order to prove one’s own sexual orientation one has to create a notion of homosexuality that has little to do with the reality. And once he has been declared gay, many job opportunities are lost and the people at large are likely to despise him, as we have already heard a grocer speaking to a customer of Ugar. Ugur was a school teacher without a job.

      It is to Ugur that Akif turns to help him in what is basically a “gay makeover.” But, in this case, Ugu—who identifies as a gay man, but might be described in his manner of dress and behavior as a transsexual—demands that Akif first learn everything he can about gay culture, assigning him basic gay texts such as the works of Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster’s Maurice and requiring him to watch a number of openly gay movies.

     But in Akif’s world even being seen publicly with Ugur is dangerous, and in his attempts to buy the underground tapes, he is discouraged by the seller, forcing him to explain that he is buying them for a brother attending the university, yet another ironic level of this hostile cultural milieu in which men like Ugur must live.

     After reading and watching to assimilate some basics, Ugar insists that Akif apply lipstick and makeup and put on heels (that look a lot like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz) to help him learn to walk more effeminately, a requirement if he is to behave as authorities expect him to as a gay man. One scene of the straight Akif putting on lipstick and eyeliner is so sad that it almost brings tears to one’s eyes. Even if he were a macho S&M gay man, it is a requirement to prove one’s homosexuality.

     We see the faithful son alternating between becoming someone else, a man that even he soon won’t be able to identify. The final catch is that there must be a picture, with his face fully visible, of him engaged in homosexual sex. It’s no longer legally required, but the military boards still demands it as proof nonetheless.

      It is at this point that the mild and passive Akif finally balks, demonstrating his own heteronormative cultural assimilation, insisting that Ugar’s entire efforts have been aimed at getting him to have sex, and, in the very worst of assaults, insisting that Ugar is after all still just a faggot!

     Ugar spits in is face, orders him out of the house, and demands that Akif never return.

     The very next day, Akif is fired from his job, his boss having been contacted reporting that Akif is a drat dodger, which no business is allowed to keep on their payroll.

    With no way out, Akif returns to Ugar and goes through the “ordeal,” spitting out the semen and almost vomiting much in the manner of Fergus in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) upon discovering that his lover is actually a transgender male.

      Ugar himself sits waiting for the ordeal to end, also in tears.

     Yet Ugar’s lessons and, evidently, the photo succeed. Akif is declared unfit for military duty, which probably will also make him now even more unhireable and a general outcast in his society.

He and Ugar hug.

    The young now suddenly “approved” gay man returns home to attend to his father, only to discover him dead. On the television, the reporter describes how a military until has saved a portion of the country from terrorists without violence, those saved singing out their ululations for their heroes.

 

     The mixed feelings I have about this film must certainly emanate in part from my own experience of being called up for military service for the Vietnam War in 1970. Howard and I were already a couple, and even as a gay man I was terrified that I might not be able to convince them that I was gay, an “out” provided by the misconceptions of US culture that LGBTQ men and women were undesirable because they were simply less capable and were subject to blackmail—the deep irony of which was that only in a closed, unaccepting culture which their attitude helped shape, might one have to worry about being blackmailed for being gay. I must have fit the all the psychologist’s preconceptions of what a gay might be, for upon reporting that I was gay, he handed a 4F rating, declaring me unfit for military duty. I was relieved, but angry at the same time that those gay men and women who might have wanted to serve might also be declared unfit just because of their sexuality. I felt my sexuality had saved my life, but at the same time it had declared me unable to fully participate in the culture.

     Akif, knowing now that he is a marked man, begins to laugh before falling into tears. I might have begun to cry before, realizing the irony of the situation, I began to laugh. I felt freed; whereas Akif knows that he is now imprisoned in an identity that has nothing to do with him. Of course, so was I.

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Mikael Buch | Let My People Go! / 2011

the difference between keeping it all in and sweating it out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mikael Buch and Christophe Honoré (screenplay), Mikael Buch (director) Let My People Go! / 2011

 

Mikael Buch’s feature film of 2011, Let My People Go! Might be described as a comic cartoon that deconstructs its own stereotypical images as it proceeds. Yet it’s still a cartoon, and the seriousness it longs for is never quite achieved.

 

   That is not to say that, if you can forgive the sometimes egregious stereotypes, that the film isn’t a great deal of fun to watch. Nicolas Maury is particularly charming as a kind of reformed Woody Allen in the role of Ruben, a young gay French man who in order to escape his nearly hysterical Jewish family decides to get an MA in “Comparative Sauna Cultures,” eventually moving to Finland in order to establish a sauna chain. The presumption is that he has taken the heat of his own family’s fireworks for so long, that it’s time to simply sweat it all out and wash himself down in the clear Finnish waters.

      He now indeed lives at the edge of a Finnish lake with his incredibly handsome Nordic, blonde-haired boyfriend, Teemu (Jarkko Niemi). Since the sauna plan has not panned out—Finland already having enough saunas to satisfy its endlessly happy population—Ruben now works as a postman, joyfully delivering up the morning mail in a small Disneyfied village that looks even prettier than the TV community of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), and wherein the happy villagers greet him, as they did Truman, with smiles, cookies, and salutations of love.

     In this healthfully permissive world, Teemu’s mother Helka (Outi Mäenpää), who in her youth lived in a ménage à trois with two female Senegalese prostitutes, welcomes her son’s and Ruben’s wedding by capturing a wolf and setting it free in the forest. Nothing could possibly go wrong in this paradise—until one day it does through a series of very strange events which sets Rueben’s life reeling and whirls him back to his impossible family in Paris.

     On his morning route Ruben delivers up a package that the recipient, upon opening it, immediately rejects, demanding the postman hand him back the signed receipt. Inside the package is 999, 980 Euros, with which he refuses to have anything to do. Ruben rightfully refuses to take back the registered package, and the bickering soon becomes physical as the older man grabs the postman as he attempts to escape. Several times it appears the elderly gentleman Tilikainen (Kari Väänänen) is about to have a heart attack, and Ruben is forced to return just to check up on him. But each time it is only a ruse, the man attempting to force the package upon the deliverer.

      By the time Ruben finally escapes, he hears his customer drop to the ground, apparently dead; terrified of having caused his death and afraid to leave any evidence, the young postman has no choice, so it seems, but to grab up the package and escape back home where he spills out the rather unbelievable story to his school teacher husband.

      Teemu, however—as his mother declares—as grown so bourgeois, perhaps in reaction to his own liberal upbringing, demands his lover go to the police and explain the situation. But with the money in hand and a dead man in the yard, Ruben is rightfully assured that they will have no choice but to insist that he has killed him. An argument follows which ends by Teemu demanding Ruben leave his home and their relationship end.

     Without even time to think things out, Ruben grabs up three suitcases and clothes and the package of Euros and heads back, sick to his stomach, to his family just in time for the Passover celebration.

 

   We soon discover seemingly endless reasons for Ruben’s consternation. In Paris his luggage does not show up on the baggage carousel, and terrified that the authorities have discovered the money, he is forced to tell his waiting family that his luggage has been temporarily lost. That family itself, as I have already hinted, is a force to be reckoned with: his mother Rachel (played by the noted Spanish actor Carmen Maura, perhaps most famous for her anguished role in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pepa in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), is the controlling center of this coven who have made most of their money from the dry-cleaning business. She is only too happy to see her weak and underweight boy return home, praying that he has broken up with his hard-hearted “Swede.” Ruben’s sister, Irène (Amira Casar) immediately whispers into his ear that she is secretly about to break up with her husband, Hervé (Charlie Dupont), an out-of-work goy who Ruben’s contentious family have never forgiven for having married their Jewish daughter. Ruben’s handsome but also highly religious and slightly homophobic brother Samuel (Clément Sibony) has already told his slightly obnoxious son who wants to grow up to become a rabbi that Ruben has returned just to “stir up the shit.” And that’s just for starters.

     Over the next couple of days Ruben discovers that his father (Jean-Francois Stevenin), as he admits for the first time to any family member, has been seeing another woman for several years and now wants Ruben to meet his mistress. To escape his family, Ruben visits a local gay club, bedecked for Passover with an “Out of Egypt” theme, only to discover among the dancers the respected lawyer and respected family friend Maurice Goldberg (Jean-Luc Bideau), who is so excited to encounter “fresh meat” that he quite literally pulls Ruben home and into his bed, determining that now that Ruben has left Finland they will be become lovers.

      A great deal of the film is spent in Ruben’s attempts to escape his randy would-be elder lover, visits Ruben at home where he attempts to kiss him in from his his mother, and later is indirectly responsible for destroying the car Ruben has borrowed from his brother. Later, Goldberg further bollixes up his Finland romance as well.

      A drunken Teemu, meanwhile, falls into bed with an old classmate, now a friendly forest ranger (Olavi Uusirvita), and finally discovers that old Tilikainen is not only still alive but that he did not want to accept the money because it was secretly saved by his now dead wife having caused a greedy family free-for-all amongst his own kids.

      Teemu gets on a plane to Paris to make it up with Ruben at the very moment that Hevré throws his wife Irène out of the house, leading the macho Samuel to attempt to not only personally snip

off his foreskin but to castrate the goy. The father and both his sons end up, predictably, in jail just at the moment that Teemu shows up at the house wherein Rachel is spilling out her sorrows to Goldberg, the latter of whom tells the Finn to go back home since he and Ruben have now hooked up.

     Somehow, in the midst of these and numerous other extraneous Saturday Night Live-like skits, Ruben gets word to Teemu of his real love for him, his suitcases (money intact) are delivered to the family house, and the dueling trio of musketeers are freed. Teemu returns for a late Passover celebration, and, finally introduced to this zany family, is made to feel welcome as the only remaining evidence of true and faithful love.

     Obviously in such a busy farce, not every comic moment works, and after a while the viewer wishes, just like Ruben, for a well-deserved rest, maybe even a little nap. But who can complain ultimately about such a totally accepting movie that features the daily failures and tiny triumphs of human beings as represented by Ruben’s hot-headed and Teemu’s cool families. Perhaps the Paris folk might try out a whipping themselves in a sauna once in a while to let it all out, and Teemu might come back to Paris on occasion just to warm up in the ridiculousness of such spirited family love.

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Douglas Messerli | The Dangers of the Male Touch: Harold Lloyd Becomes Macho [Introduction]

the dangers of the male touch: harold lloyd becomes macho 

by Douglas Messerli

Although in Harold Lloyd films there are some occasions, as I have registered throughout these pages, of him crossdressing, and several instances of his being mistaken for a homosexual, in the end there is something almost homophobic about Lloyd’s films. 

     Perhaps because he is generally characterized as a weak and wimpish figure while still determined to get the film’s heroine, the writers generally go out of their way to prove Lloyd is a man in the most stereotypical of ways presenting pejorative attitudes toward sissy boys and gay men. Even touching another man is perceived as dangerous territory in his films. And manhood is defined by violent and bully-like behavior, which for much of the film is dished out to Lloyd himself before he proves that he can be just as violent and capable of bullying.

     In connection to these issues, I discuss three of Lloyd’s films, A Sailor-Made Man (1921), Grandma’s Boy (1922), and The Kid Brother (1927).

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Ted Wilde, J. A. Howe, Lewis Milestone, and Harold Lloyd | The Kid Brother / 1927

coming in contact with male flesh 

Howard J. Green (screenplay), Ted Wilde, J. A. Howe, Lewis Milestone, and Harold Lloyd (directors) The Kid Brother / 1927

 

      Something similar to what occurs to the central character in Harold Lloyd’s Grandma’s Boy (1922) occurs also to Lloyd’s character in The Kid Brother (1927), directed by the team of Ted Wilde, J. A., Lewis Milestone, and Lloyd himself. As early gay film commentator Vito Russo points out, when a local medicine show burns down, leaving his new girlfriend Mary with nowhere to go, Harold invites her to spend the night in the home he shares with his father, the town Sheriff, and his brothers. Before she can get settled down, however, the wife of the man who has accidently set the show on fire shows up and takes Mary with her, feeling it inappropriate for Mary to be left for the night in a house with only males.

     Harold’s macho brothers, Leo and Olin, thinking that she is still there, sleeping behind a curtain, as Russo describes it “take turns reaching through to pat her hand, making increasingly bold advances until they discover that it is the sleeping Lloyd they have been fondling, not the woman.” As in Grandma’s Boy Harold takes a beating for their having even accidently come in contact with male flesh.

     The film ends, moreover, with Harold capturing a thief, saving the others of his family, and beating up his nemesis to prove he is “a real Hickory,” like his father and brothers, a strong masculine man.

 

Los Angeles, July 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).

Fred C. Newmeyer | Grandma's Boy / 1922

granny’s advice in how to turn a queer wimp into a man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hal Roach, Sam Taylor, Jean Havez, and H.M. Walker (screenplay), Fred C. Newmeyer (director) Grandma’s Boy / 1922

       

Fred C. Newmeyer’s Grandma’s Boy with Harold Lloyd is often lauded as one of the early pioneer full-length comedies which successfully combined gags and coherent narrative. It was a big success in its day, and remains one of Lloyd’s most popular works even today.

      The story of a weak and cowardly young man bullied from childhood into his young adulthood—still today one of the stereotyped patterns of a gay boy—is repeated in the first third of the film as Grandma’s Boy (a variation of the usual Boy which Lloyd long portrayed), attempts to court His Girl (Mildred Davis), despite the numerous difficulties of his outdated and cheap suits provided by Grandma (Anna Townsend), his general shyness and clumsy nervousness, and the endless evil machinations of His Rival (Charles Stevenson), who generally pushes him out of the way, steals any evidence of good intentions to the girl or her mother, and tosses the Boy into a well.

     Upon a second visit to the Girl, this time having replaced his shrunken suit with one of his grandfather’s articles of clothing that Grandma has kept from the 1860s, the terrified Boy battles moth balls buried deep without his suit coat, kittens attracted to the guava paste jam with which Grandma has shined his shoes, and the general thrashings of the Rival, particularly after the two run into the kitchen to wash out their mouths after having consumed some of the moth balls the Boy has tossed into the Girl’s box of candy. 

      But the film shifts significantly when men arrive to report that a drifter (named in the film as "The Rolling Stone," played by Dick Sutherland), has been seen robbing a store and has shot a townsman attempting to detain the criminal. The whole town is in an uproar, as the Girl’s father, first the Rival, and, then the Boy are made into Deputy Sheriffs, required now to join the fray of finding the thief and murderer.

      The Boy, returning to retrieve his hat, misses the car to the event and is forced to stumble by himself, but can get no further than the barn where, in the dark, he is terrified by chickens, a horse, a pig, and a harness that falls upon him in his clumsy maneuvers to escape the animal outrage. By the time he’s finished in the barn he is so frightened that he races back home, pulling chairs, sideboards, and tables against the door as he retreats under of the covers of his bed.

       By morning, he is embarrassed by a timidity that has now reached the level of pure cowardice as he explains in tears to his beloved grandmother. She, in turn, tells a tale about his Grandfather (also played by Lloyd) who similarly appeared to himself as a coward in the Civil War. Having been sent to get Yankee secrets, the young Confederate soldier is terrified of even getting near the enemy, but now finds himself strangely at the very headquarters of the Yankee leaders.

      A gypsy woman provides him with a special token that she insists if he carry with him will protect him, and the young Rebel is suddenly able to make his way indoors, overhear the Yankee battle plans and steal the secret document by serving up a potent alcoholic drink to the soldiers. He wins the day and is rewarded by his Rebel leaders when they arrive to find everyone passed out.

      Granny, to help her grandson find his own mojo, presents him with just such a token. And the last third of the film is devoted to a hilarious series of events where the Boy joins the other members of the city posse held up in a gun battle with the violent villain just outside of town.

      Amazingly the Boy is able to enter the cabin and knock out “The Rolling Stone,” but when he comes to the others race off again in terror, and it is left up to the Boy to chase down the thief once more, and then a third time, finally bringing him to town and justice in a baby pram.

      All the girls now have fallen in love with the Boy, and His Girl is ready to flirt when, once more, the Rival shows up, this time the Boy ready to take him on. A seemingly never-ending brawl takes place, as the two roll about the barn and fields before the Boy, losing and then rediscovering his magic charm, finally is able to deliver his Rival into the well, demand the Girl’s love, and win her assurances that she will marry him. Grandma explains that the lucky charm is really just the handle to her umbrella, lying simply to help her grandson realize his own innate powers.

     Everything ends in a happy heterosexual marriage destined, so we perceive, all along—despite the Boy’s and our own suspicions of his being a homo weakling. I presume that this is the reason—along with the male hand-holding scene, when the Boy and his Rival hold hands behind the Girl’s back, each thinking that the other’s hand was that of the Girl’s—that Grandma’s Boy is listed in most LGBTQ compilations.

     Let me suggest that if it remains on those lists it should be read as a warning not a recommendation. The film may be charming if you believe that it is necessary to find a way for a “meek, modest and retiring youth,” whose “boldest moment is singing out loud in church”—in other words, a queer boy who everyone except his grandmother in the film mock—should naturally seek to marry a flirtatious and rather blind young girl who is equally interested in the school bully. It is a delightfully comedic work only if you think that everyone has the right and does carry a weapon and shoots on first sight; that homeless men should immediately be shooed off; that a posse is necessary to scare of such a terrifying threat; and that, most importantly, the best thing possible for a young timid man is that he capture a criminal and himself become a bully to prove his worth to a girl who he can now demand that she love and marry him.

      This is a lovely movie for all who believe that Grandmas should encourage their men into civil war, mature into violence, and lock themselves away in heterosexual marriage in small town USA.

      I’m sorry, but I think for a more encouraging LGBTQ message I’ll look elsewhere.

 

Los Angeles, July 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).