little white houses
by Douglas Messerli
Norman McLaren (screenwriter and director) Neighbours / 1952
As Emilio Martí López noted
in his insightful essay on Norman McLaren “McLaren’s Closet: Expressing and
Hiding Homosexual Desire in Norman McLaren’s Filmography Through the
Reinvention of the Body and Space,” the mostly abstract and animated films of
the noted Canadian filmmaker were hidden and coded works since the author,
working before gay liberation at the basically liberal NFB (National Film
Board) of Canada which, accordingly, was carefully watched through the Cold War
by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. One’s dress and hairstyle or even a
casual discussion of opera might lead to one’s dismissal for being a
homosexual. McLaren’s cinematic contributions, accordingly, were definitely
part of what Vito Russo described as “The Celluloid Closet.”
Unfortunately, not all of McLaren’s films have yet been discussed in the
LGBTQ context, but with the help of Martí López and others such as Thomas
Waugh, I have been attempting to reconsider as many of his films as possible.
Perhaps one of the easiest of these is his 1952 eight-minute short Neighbours,
a bit easier to “read” simply because it involves live human actors instead of
animated animals and symbols. Even here, however, things often appear to
represent the opposite of what they seem to be suggesting.
This
film consists of two human cartoon-like men who, living next door, who
obviously get on well, even if they read the same news from slightly opposite
perspectives, one newspaper headline reading “Peace Certain If No War” and the
other “War Certain If No Peace.” But it is clear, even from the shape and
outline of their two cartoon houses in the background that they somehow are the
mirror image of each other and would be better off if they could join forces,
their seemingly “half” houses becoming a whole.
They sit with their bodies half directed toward in each other, both with
Oxford shoes, brown-toned pants, and blue dress shirts with ties hooked round
their necks, one a bowtie and the other a regular necktie. Both have black hair
and both are smoking pipes. Given the perspective they seem to be sitting on
the very edge of their property lines about as far away from their houses as
they can get which might be saying something about whatever is within and their
relationship to it. In any event, they seem comfortable at being mirror images
of one another, suburban-living males who still can treasure the trees and
grass growing around them. This reads almost as a Canadian version of Leonard
Bernstein’s suburban opera fantasy, Trouble in Tahiti, without, at least
in the few first sequences, any apparent “trouble” in their paradise.
That is until something strange happens. A small yellow flower, which
from a distance might almost be identified as a dandelion, struggles into the
sun popping up in the small distance between where they have placed their feet
about half-way between where they sit and their houses.
In
unison, they both stand and walk toward it, the man on the right (I’ll call him
the clean- shaven man, the other, the man
with a moustache) demonstrates his delight in its sudden arrival. The flower
itself seems to curtsey to each of them before bowing down for a second and
standing erect once more.
You
half expect the other one to be offended by such a weed growing on or so near
to his property, but he too sniffs it, showing his utter pleasure of its
existence. Clearly these are not quite your typical macho homeowners who might
immediately pull out their pruning shears and snap it off or, at the very
least, push out their lawnmowers and return their yards into a pure green
expanse.
Indeed, these men carry their joy a bit further, the man with the
moustache rowing through the grass in joy on his buttocks, as he returns to the
other when they both bend down again to smell the flower, wrapping their heads
in union around it in opposite directions and shifting them in the opposite
direction in almost what might be interpreted, from a distance, as a mutual
kiss.
They stand, look at one another, join hands and begin a series of
seemingly animated balletic movements, leaping into the air and pirouetting
through space, while spinning and reeling through the air in absolute
terpsichorean delight.
These are not at all your typical suburban male neighbors. In fact, you
can only say given their graceful maneuvers they are extraordinarily “queer” in
the ordinary meaning of that word. These suburban dwellers have something more
in common with Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote or even the Roadrunner than your
Sunday suburban family man. The East Texans have a word for folks who possibly
cross over the sexual lines; these men are definitely “loose in their shoes.”
But the same wild
energy they show in their pleasure remains buried within; and their obvious joy
becomes something that both men have so longed for that they now desire to hold
onto it, to possess as their very own, as if were something akin to their very
identities.
The
flower they might have easily shared becomes the source of a territorial fight,
a battle of possession which they express by both insisting that the flower is
growing on their property, not in that indeterminable area in-between. For if
they admitted that the flower belonged to both of them it would also mean that
they would have share themselves, at least regarding their own feelings about
the flower and, just maybe, the physical bodies wherein those feelings reside—a
total impossibility for the place and time in which they exist. To be good
neighbors is one thing but to actually “love thy neighbor”—which becomes, in
fact, the moral of this fable—is too dangerous of a concept to admit.
The only way these men know of how to truly touch —including expressing
their true feelings for—one another is through contact sports, in which they
soon engage. As they build a fence between them in order to protect their new
prized treasure, the very word quickly leads to the idea of “fencing” and
ultimately to wrestling, which ends in actual wounds and pain, the very
opposite of the pleasure they are trying to protect.
Their “sport,” moreover, quickly turns into battle and spires out of
control into the war of which the headlines warned them at the beginning of
this film. As we know, war nearly always inevitably ends by involving and
hurting the innocent who suffer the warriors’ increasing anger and frustration.
As
Martí López argues, like Dorian Gray, their hidden violence suddenly becomes
evident in their own faces, which is now revealed in the childlike war paint
they suddenly wear. As they tear down their cartoon edifices to reveal behind
them their wives and babies, they too are violated and destroyed as if they
were mere mannikins or dolls.
The
flower for which they are fighting has died in the battle, and at last both men
fall on the battlefield of their respective territories, apparently dead.
Martí López summarizes what I have been saying from a more traditional
psychological perspective:
The neighbours of
this film, faced with the appearance of (homosexual)
pleasure that the
flower represents, act with the violence of repression: the
very fence that
is erected is a metaphor of their internal defences, those
defences that
closeted homosexuals are specialists in constructing in order to
hide their
feelings and sexuality from the world and from themselves.
Furthermore, this
wooden barrier is yet another of the film’s phallic symbols:
the way in which
a neighbour threatens the other with one of its vertical slats
would be a
subconscious invitation to the sexual game with an erect penis.
Neighbours is
thus a tirade against violence, but also a reflection on its
causes,
fundamentally (sexual) repression, control. The fight between the
men would,
therefore, be a way of venting sexual tension, a theory that is
applied to
“contact sports, extreme fighting” but also precisely to “cinematic or
videographic
warfare”—safe means for the “heterosexual man” to exhibit
himself as well
as look at other men.
Having fought a symbolic sexual battle both within themselves and with
each other in space, and in so doing having done away with any pretense of
family ties, we see them in the last frames buried next to one another like a
married couple. Yellow flowers creep upon the grass-carpeted rise of their
graves, one on each, singular but matched as these two sexually repressed
neighbors were forced to be throughout their active lives.
So
does McLaren explore within his simple fable about waring neighbors a
sublimated tale of homosexual desire repressed by the “pretend” society in
which they exist. Just as in Bernstein’s suburban opera, “behind the front door
of the little white houses” in.... “Scarsdale, Wellesley Hills, Ozone Park,
Highland Park, Shaker Heights, Michigan Park, and Beverly Hills”...and yes,
even Scarborough, Etobicoke, and Vaughan
is homosexuality, loneliness, and fear. “Ratty boo.”
Los Angeles, July 9, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2021).
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