Adam Tyree | Green Light / 2020

removing the curse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesse James Rice (screenplay), Adam Tyree (director) Green Light / 2020 [8.45 minutes]

 

A male escort named Hunter (Jesse James Rice) is waiting, phone in hand, for his appointment to show up. The music is ominous, and we suspect the worst, particularly when, after texting a couple of times to “the mystery man,” Hunter finally receives a message: “black Mercedes to UR right.” He looks in the car’s direction and moves forward, his face reflecting the various green and red lights of the street’s neon signs, in tempo to the sonorously dark rhythms of composer Jongic Bontemps toward the car, whose window is slowly rolled down. “Hi.” Stepping back, “No I don’t lean on windows.”

     The window is slowly rolled up and Hunter steps into the car. The mystery man, clearly drinking what appears to be a beer, offers a sip to his pick-up. We can see little, as presumably Hunter also remains a bit in the dark before, finally learning forward declaring “Holy shit. You’re sexy as hell,” just as we finally get a quick glimpse of a well-chiseled black man.

      So begins director Adam Tyree’s pretense of a suspense flick, which, we quickly observe has turned into something else that we might never have expected. At first it appears that the film will be a sort of series of questions and answers, the kind one might suspect of a stream-lined noir of less than nine minutes. As the car drives off and finally parks, Hunter poses the first question, “So let me get this straight...why does a man like you...pay for...?”

      The driver, Derek (Narvaris Darson) fires back: “I have a few questions.”

      After a short pause, Hunter responds: “Okay. You can have three.”

      So begins a series of apparent intrusions into the private life of the young escort: Where did you grow up? What brought you here? both of which Hunter answers straight-forwardly but seemingly without any special significance. He grew up in a small town outside of Columbus, Ohio and he moved to his current location because it “was better than Ohio.” And yes, he admits, in what seems to be a kind of bonus question, he is happy where he now is.

        All this time the young man attempts to instigate sex, moving up and toward the handsome sexy being for which he has supposedly been hired to give pleasure. But finally, Derek pulls away with the oldest word in the sexually disinterested dictionary, “Sorry.”

         But it is the “last question,” which he has been holding back that finally helps us to comprehend the significance of this would-be sexual encounter. “How did you lose your virginity?”

         At last we comprehend this as a kind of odd method of identifying (and reminding) the sexual worker with whom he sits. And just as suddenly, as anyone who has ever attempted to return to the past knows, the man asking the questions is obviously involved with the person to whom he addresses them.

       If this were a more comic work we might even imagine that the interviewer is playing some game about the past a bit like the dreadful “telephone game” in which you’re asked to call up the first person with whom you fell in love and tell them, torturing yourself and the other in the act that Michael requires his “friends” to suffer in The Boys in the Band.

     In this case, when Hunter begins to recall an incident from boarding school when he was fucked by a lacrosse player at the age of 16, Derek cuts in with a blast of the car horn: “You promised me you’d be honest!” Just as suddenly Hunter knows he has gotten something terribly wrong. “The first time changes you. You would remember your first time” insists his interlocutor.

     Now, finally, Hunter, searching his mind deeply to call up the past, remembers there being a new boy in the neighborhood at the age of 7, a really nice kid with whom he played. For Derek their innocent sexual touching of one another evidently resulted in what he now describes as molestation. “Do you think the things we do as kids curses us for life?”

      Obviously, the game Derek is playing is the game of guilt, his own, which he must have carried with him all these long years. Hunter refuses to “go there,” attempting to explain that the incident did not affect him in the least—“I really liked you”—and reassures him that he is truly happy as a gay man—simple but honest words.

      Can’t we go to my place and have a drink and talk this over, he pleads. But Derek is now presumably married—the attentive viewer having earlier spotted a wedding ring on his finger—and insists he must return home, as he hands Hunter the previously agreed upon payment. Again, Hunter invites him to talk whenever he might desire, restating that he has his number and he knows his name, his real name.

      Leaving the car, he once again attempts to console the man, who now in tears, seems somewhat freed by the encounter but not yet entirely ready to release his feelings of wrongdoing. Yet, Derek’s final words, “Thank you,” suggest he has finally begun to come to terms with his misconception of what truly occurred.

      Hunter exits the car but almost immediately turns back, tapping at the window, and despite his previous insistence that he does not lean on windows, speaks once more to his childhood friend: “If what we did when we were kids somehow miraculously made me gay...then I owe you,” he concludes, handing back the wad of bills he has just been given.

      Clearly, he has been able to provide this troubled heterosexual a “green light” to move ahead with his life. That light is also the green light at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby which represents Gatsby’s own often confused dreams and desires that themselves symbolize the best of the ideals for his own generation.

     Both actors in this small gem of a film are excellent, but Rice, who also wrote the screenplay—working with Tyree as writer and actor in the director’s film, Open Mic, of a year earlier—is particularly excellent.

     Tyree is a regular contributor to the now vast repertoire of gay shorts, having released at least six films to date, some of which are also reviewed in this volume.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2020

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

Travis Bryant | Unravel / 2020

packing up his duffel

by Douglas Messerli

 

Travis Bryant (screenwriter and director) Unravel / 2020 [6 minutes]

 

One might almost describe Travis Bryant’s short film Unravel as a music video for Los Leo’s sad catchy song, “Take Sight.” The narrative of the film, otherwise, is a basic freshman 01 version of “breaking up is hard to do,” as the images, without hardly any dialogue, take us through those always pleasant times of gay love. You know, running out to the ocean from the beach, pushing one another fully clothed into the swimming pool, hugging each other just as you are about to get into the shower, and dozens of other sunset-time hugs as the two travel through time and space

     Here also one of the figures (presumably Travis Bryant) packs up the clothes of the other (Murat Simu Kilac) who is apparently determined to leave Travis. Yes they’ve had a fight, one even leaving the car. But we are given only a few clues of why they may be breaking up, or why the

film’s presumed “unraveling” of the relationship is taking the place.

      I suspect the fact that Kilac shows up at the door at the end in Army fatigues might be the most important piece of evidence. Has he gone off and joined the military without consulting his lover? We’re never told. In fact, we’re not told anything which is what makes this little sentimental journey through their former love life so frustrating.

     Surely there must have been more than a single fight in the car to justify all this outburst of nostalgia and rerun through their picture-perfect relationship.

      Yes, Kilac returns, and it’s clear that they still love one another. But we have the sense that he hasn’t come back to unpack that box but just to stall for a short while. After all, the military calls.

And we fear that after that experience it may make be difficult for him again to take sight of anything but through a gun, a phenomenon the so many returning soldiers encounter. In nothing else, their sunset hugs will take on a very different meaning.

      And if his actor is just wearing a military-like shirt without any intentions of joining up, either he has returned with further battles on his mind or the director clearly isn’t taking careful sight of the film he’s created and the images he’s projected upon the screen—the latter certainly a possibility given all the cliches Bryant has allowed to slip by without any questioning.

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

 

 

Sonny Midha | Untitled—Take Me to Your Leader Toshiba series / 2010? [commercial advertisement]

in need of a new cut

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sonny Midha (director) Untitled—Take Me to Your Leader Toshiba series / 2010? [37 seconds]

[commercial advertisement]

 

Toshiba has long been known for its general lack of sensitivity regarding the LGBTQ community. In 2013 Toshiba Canada received some flack for an advertisement titled “Math Notes” which featured Toshiba’s Excite Write tablet, which has the ability to convert handwritten notes and sketches into sharable files. In this case a guy asks his roommate for his calculus notes and, upon receipt. looks rather “dismayed,” so Queerty reported, and “almost repulsed, when he instead receives a drawing of himself reimagined by his roommate as a hunky centaur.” The sender responds, “Oops, wrong document.” If nothing else that ad was, as what GLAAD has described it, rather “homo-queasy.”

     But even earlier Toshiba apparently showed English director and producer Sonny Midha’s 2010 animated advertisement as part of their “Take Me to Your Leader” campaign which featured two aliens, one greeted with total disgust by the earthlings with whom he meets up, the other, who quickly assimilates to his/her location, seen as rather charming. 

      In this case, the aliens visit a hair salon, headed up by an extremely fem hairdresser in a pink half-tank top and slim light-blue jeans, who behaves in a stereotypically gay manner and whines and moans in a very high vocal register.

     Meeting up with the coarse alien, pointing his gun, the startled queer reacts with horror as the alien yells out “Take me. Take me,” the hairdresser, putting hand to mouth aghast. A moment later, the second alien pops out from his/her hair dryer with high bouffant hairdo into and out of which fly bees, which quite delights the queen.

     Finally, the course manly alien yells out the full phrase, “Take me to your leader!” the femme hairdresser pointing to his left where we watch the Toshiba logo being spit out across the page.

     We all know such gay figures exist, but using such a stereotype to promote a product just doesn’t sit well with this gay viewer. Did Toshiba see this ad as an attempt to include the LGBTQ+ or even just the gay community? Did it expect us to follow the shears of this tired and stale view of gay men to the brave new world of Toshiba? Forget it. I’ll stay and have the hairdresser give me a stylish new cut.

 

Los Angeles, September 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Adam Tyree | In Half / 2012

reasons for a death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Tyree (screenwriter and director) In Half / 2012 [14 minutes]

 

There’s something basically unlikeable about Adam Tyree’s short, 14-minute film about twins, In Half. If not precisely unlikeable, at least it begins feeling like something is askew, that the central characters have not yet quite figured out on which side of the issues they stand. 

      It begins mid-way through a funeral, evidently being held of the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, although that simply may have been an available space for Tyree to film his work since it no way plays a role in the film itself. 

      We also recognize the brother of the dead man, James (Jake Brown), who we quickly perceive was a twin to the man who apparently has committed suicide. And we are just as suddenly introduced to the man who was the dead twin’s former lover, Travis (Adam Bucci), who has evidently attended the ceremony uninvited. The other figures are never identified with regard to their specific relationships to the dead boy, but we presume one of them is his mother and others are family friends and other relatives.

      When Travis attempts to introduce himself to James, he is quickly dismissed with a snarl, “I know who you are.” And others in the background also show their hostility to Travis. One, in particular, a black man named Sam (Kim Estes) seems to blame the brother’s death precisely on having had a relationship with Travis, as well as being gay, attended with what he presumes means drugs, diseases, and a destructive lifestyle.

       Travis, having overheard Sam’s homophobic comments, immediately speaks out for James, but whatever sympathy he might arouse in that defense is almost immediately muted when he rather violently accosts Sam, James being forced to pull Travis away from the confrontation by taking him outside the chapel, reprimanding him for behaving that way at the solemn occasion.

       Whatever judgment we might have suspended about Travis’ behavior is quickly dismissed, moreover, when all he can do in response is to offer James a joint, make light of the situation, and, skateboarding around the troubled brother of the dead man, accuse him of being the opposite of all the good qualities the brother represented while in the very next moment asking if he can “crash” at James’ place for the night since his current lover—yes, we discover, he had broken up with the brother over some vague notion that it was “time to move on”—lives in Pasadena.

       Far too old to be such an adolescent, wise-cracking, “smart-alek,” Travis is someone we quickly grow to distrust. And we are even more amazed when the apparently rather straight-laced James agrees to the share his apartment with him for the evening, where a few frames later the movie takes us.

      There, he further makes himself uncomfortably at home, prodding James even further in an attempt, evidently, to break through his shell of apparent heterosexual normative behavior. In the process he does, however, manage to convey just how full of life James’ brother was and how much he loved James. Indeed, he finally reveals that he knows just “how close” the twins actually were, insinuations that result it a near violent reaction from James—which ends in a crying jag on Travis’ shoulder, the two embracing and kissing, and ending up together in bed.

        Obviously, the twins did have a very close relationship involving sex, and we can now well understand James’ fascination with Travis in his attempt to get closer again to his brother to find, after they had broken off their relationship, how he felt and how he loved.

        Yet, Tyree’s film offers no rational solutions to James’ deep loss. The next morning, after Travis leaves, he goes to Sam’s house, knocks on his door, and makes sure Sam watches him from his bedroom window, as he puts a bat through Sam’s car windows and runs off. If we might applaud James’ return to the righteous fold of LGBTQ life, we certainly cannot admire his way of attempting to solve homophobia or come to terms with his own deep loss.

        I can’t say as I admire this short work about gay twin love that refuses not only to explore the roots of homophobia, its possible solutions, or the reason for James’ brother’s early death, leaving us only with the characters who, in their own failed behavior in life, may represent a few clues of the reasons for the latter.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021). 

Florian Gottschick | Zwillinge (Twins) / 2010

love at first sight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Florian Gottschick and Denise Langenhan (screenplay), Florian Gottschick (director) Zwillinge (Twins) / 2010 [15 minutes]

    Florian Gottschick’s film concerns two brothers Daniel and Jan (Stefan and Tobias Schönenberg) who meet up again, after a year and a half self-willed hiatus, at the bachelor party for Daniel who the next day plans to marry Sofie (Natalie Krane).

   When he answers the doorbell, dressed in a bunny rabbit costume, Daniel is shocked to see his brother, whom he almost hints is not welcome at the event. Nonetheless, he cannot resist inviting him in, and over a night of partying that extends evidently to a local nightclub, he ends up inexplicably handcuffed to a pipe in the women’s bathroom, his brother sitting at his side, who releases him only after a deep kiss.        

     The two men have been justified in the uncertainty of the reunion as they find themselves sharing a bed again. And in the morning, when Sofie enters the kitchen where Jan is now hunkering

down over his coffee, she is startled after sharing a kiss and confidences with him to discover he is not Daniel. Apparently, it is she who has invited him to the previous evening’s stag night, and as soon as the two get a moment to know one another, she wastes no time in laying out the territory, openly asking him if he and Daniel are still fucking. She adds that she’s not the jealous type and knows that in marrying Daniel she is marrying both of them.

       Although apparently they have invited no one to witness their private ceremony, she dresses, in her bridal gown with only Jan in attendance; soon after, again with his brother at his side, Daniel begins to dress in his blacks and whites, wondering out loud whether he’s made the right decision in agreeing to marry.

     Jan says it probably is for the best, but as the two lock eyes, Daniel suddenly undresses as they engage suddenly in a quick act of coitus. Daniel redresses—at least we presume it’s Daniel—and heads off to the marriage ceremony, the other sitting on the bed in contemplation of their obviously unresolved sexual relationship with each other.

     Surely, Sophie has married both of them, and Jan and Daniel may now not even attempt to live apart.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).

 

Douglas Messerli | "Sleeping with Yourself: Two on Twins" [Introduction]

sleeping with yourself: two on twins

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gay men—I honestly have no idea whether or not it is true of lesbians as well—have long been fascinated by the sexual allure of the identical twin. One might immediately jump to the conclusion that this attraction has something to do with the Narcissus complex that underlies so much of gay mythology; for many decades psychiatrists attributed homosexuality as being a manifestation of a severe condition of narcissism which explained the attraction to the same sex. I think, given the crippling self-hatred experienced by so many gay men throughout history, however, that we can quickly dismiss that notion.

     Perhaps it is just the possibility of finding someone of the same sex who shares so very many things in common without having to go through the difficult process of finding a compatible other in a world in which, given the LGBTQ minority, there is so much less possibility of selection that attracts us to the twin—someone who knows and loves you completely from birth—makes everything else so easy. And if you like your own appearance, that makes it even better. It is certainly the most succinct example of the metaphor of falling in love with someone “at first sight.”

     Moreover, identical twins are themselves born outsiders, a minority that seems queer to the normative world simply because of the deep bond and interconnected thinking of brothers unavailable to others. As I’ve often written, the idea of doubles and doubling have long been intertwined with gay consciousness.

      And finally, since a 1980 study of twins and homosexuality—as I have noted elsewhere in these pages—found that 65.8% of monozygotic twins (identical twins) were diagnosed as having a homosexual orientation, while only 30.4% of dizygotic twins showed that orientation, there is not only evidence “supporting the argument for a biological basis in sexual orientation,” but some statistics arguing that identical twins “have a shared genetic predisposal to same-sex sexual behavior.” In short, identical twins not only seem to prove that homosexual behavior is genetic but that monozygotic twins themselves are prone to same-sex desires. 

      Gay porn, with its many famous twin sexual performers, might certainly seem to argue for their gay appeal: the early Bruce Weber shoot of the Carlson twins (who later claimed not be sexually active with one another), and the numerous porn films featuring the Peters, Mendez, Goffney, Fischer, Studding, King, Aston, Boston, Stax, Mercury, Odyssey, Rosso, and Otov twins, as well as the Visconti triplets—twins are a staple of the gay-porn diet.

      Several films have approached this topic, but in 2010 German director Florian Gottschick rather straightforwardly took on the subject in his Zwillinge (Twins), not to be confused with Ivan Reitman’s 1988 comedy of the same title which improbably paired Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, about to be, so I read only today, revisited in a sequel.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Julián Hernández | Atmósfera (Atmosphere) / 2010

coming out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emiliano Arenales Osorio, Ulises Pérez Mancilla, and Sergio Loo (screenplay), Julián Hernández (director) Atmósfera (Atmosphere) / 2010 [20 minutes]

 

So prescient is Julián Hernández’s short film Atmósfera that if you were given no date, you might imagine that he premiered this work in 2022, as most of us gradually came together after long separations due to the pandemic COVID-19 and its variants. But this 2010 film features three individuals who are isolated and terrified because of undetermined previous epidemic that plagues a Mexican coastal city, where public speakers announce (with the voice of Patricia Madrid) every few minutes to “Be calm. Do not touch objects or other people,” as well as suggesting that individuals who have come down with the disease thus far evidently have gone on “shopping sprees” after being exposed to the sun or water.

     Although the epidemic’s symptoms are evidently still in question, the announcements caution the population to stay indoors, to remain in the dark, and to drink only bottled water, which one of the first figures we observe Cecila (Damayanti Quintanar) does in great quantities. She is a photographer who has evidently sneaked out, as later it appears she regularly does, to snap photos, often leaving them where she has taken them (her camera is the automatic self-developing kind) before rushing back to her room and closing off the blinds.

      She is the first one to observed, after one of her raids on the sunlit terrace of her apartment complex, that touching her body brings about great pleasure, not terrible suffering, and that doing so her clothing begins to take on color in a world that Julián Hernández otherwise presents as being in black-and-white. Her dress grows purple, and as she puts on lipstick, her otherwise gray lips turn red, the color of which remains on the black-and-white glass window to which she presses them.

       Two other men in the complex, Alberto and Felipe (Harold Torres and Guillermo Villegas) also begin slightly to break the rules, one skateboarding the terraces of his complex as he darts in and out of the sun, and the other taking a nice hot bath in his tub, both feeling, it appears, rejuvenated from the experience. The skateboarder Felipe (Guillermo Villegas) finally faces the sun, enjoying the feeling it has upon his face and the bather Alberto (Harold Torres), hearing the movements of both the skateboarder and the stealthy photographer, checks out the terrace, discovering some of the photographers’ planted pictures.      

     Increasingly over a few moments in time, as the public announcement system continues blasting its dire restrictions, they all escape from seclusion and move, as Cecilia already has, to the beach, joining her near the place where she sits.

      The dark blue water and the golden sand are so irresistible that finally Felipe strips naked and walks in the water, waving the others to follow. Cecilia does the same, and finally Alberto, all of them discovering the joy of just standing together in the plashing waves. As Cecilia sets her camera to make a self-photo the three gather in the incoming waves to have their picture taken, which soon after they paste along with others to Felipe’s surfboard before returning to the waters as they move out further for a swim, suddenly disappearing from view as the film ends.

       The epidemic, it appears, perhaps spread by local tourists, is simply one of enjoyment, of a sense of freedom and communion with each other, which these three disobedient youths have suddenly discovered. Just being with others is a lure that this trio could not ignore despite the societal warnings.

      Atmosphere is certainly not one of Hernández’s best films, but is utterly fascinating, particularly given its new pertinence in our post-epidemic days. This short science-fiction tale may reveal an entirely new meaning for “coming out” movies.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).