Kenneth Macpherson | Borderline / 1930

the white gaze

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kenneth Macpherson (screenwriter and director) Borderline / 1930

 

In Kenneth Macpherson’s 1930 film feature, his only full-length cinematic work, Pete Marond (Paul Robeson) arrives in a small provincial Swiss village, much like Territet where the director, his wife Annie Winifred Ellerman (better known as Bryher), and her and his female lover Hilda Doolittle (the poet H. D.) along with H D.’s young daughter Perdita* had taken up residence and established a new film and publishing venture, The Pool Group, supported primarily by Bryher who was the daughter of a wealthy British shipper.

     In the film, a similar ménage à trois had already been played out between the character Thorne (the grandson of President Chester A. Arthur, Gavin Arthur who, like Macpherson, was bisexual, later becoming increasingly gay-oriented),** his lover Astrid (H. D.), and Pete’s wife Adah (played by Robeson’s real wife, Eslanda), who had been having an affair with Thorne.

     Add to the film’s remarkable story-line concerning what was still illegal under the miscegenation laws  active in 1930 throughout most of the US, the plot’s introduction of a Weimar-like bar-hotel run by Bryher (simply called the Manageress) and her lesbian barmaid (Charlotte Arthur, then married to Gavin), that featured a gay piano player (novelist, poet, and film critic—he contributed extensively to Macpherson’s film magazine Close Up—and editor of Life and Letters, Robert Herring) and one recognizes this long-obscure feature as having all the earmarks of a succès de scandale.

     Yet, the critics of the day, and many I am sure of today, knew little of the casts’ histories, literary or sexual, while being utterly puzzled by the director’s use of the expressionist tropes of German filmmaker W. G. Pabst—which Macpherson employed in his long histrionic-like gestures of psychological angst through Thorne and Astrid—or the radical cuts and montage influenced by Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, that he employed throughout the work. Surely they could comprehend even less about the various racially and sexually-charged reactions of his characters to one another. In fact, for many years the film was thought to be lost, and when copies were finally discovered, because of their rarity, few film scholars were able to see them. Only recently has the film become a work standardly taught in film courses.

     I am sure for many viewers even today that if the lesbian relationship of the manger and barmaid is apparent, that others miss the pianist’s sexual admiration of the black Adonis Pete who Astrid has summoned to this isolated hotel in order to restore relations between Pete and his wife in order to free herself of the jealousy she suffered over Thorne and Adah’s affair. The pianist, apparently, has not only already struck up a friendship with Pete but features a photo of the man taped to his instrument (all puns intended).

      Moreover, today’s viewers will find the locals’ racial hostility, particularly that expressed by the town busybody named The Old Lady (Blanche Lewin), intolerable. Even the obviously welcoming hoteliers are caught up in the white gaze of the black man, consisting simultaneously of desire, awe, fear, and disgust.

      British critic Ellie Jones, writing of the film in 2016, best captures one of the film’s most captivating scenes when, realizing that Adah has left him, Thorne picks up a knife and, uninvited, rushes to Pete’s hotel room with perhaps revenge on his mind. Jones writes:

 

“As the film reaches its climax, we see Pete and Adah together in Pete’s bedroom above Bryher’s café. Thorne, jaded by Adah’s rejection, storms through the café and charges upstairs. Sensing trouble, Bryher and the pianist follow him, quick to protect Pete and Adah from the intruder. The resulting stand-off is truly sensational: it marks an exhilarating moment in cinematic history. As Thorne bursts in on Pete and Adah, he is unwittingly caught in a constellation of multidirectional gazes. Stood separately within the confines of the bedroom, Pete, Adah, Bryher and the queer pianist jointly stare at him. For about forty seconds, a straight white male is subject to the devastating looks and smirks of queer and non-white men and women. Beads of sweat gather on his brow and slip down his face, melting away the stability of his own identity.

     In this brief interim, Pete and Adah are not strangers in the village. Neither is Bryher, queen of her own queer counterpublic in which the potentiality of a cross-cultural, alternative community is hinted at and made credible. In the café, Thorne is the stranger. Undone by the simultaneous disdain and desire for the black body, whiteness—the most elusive of social categories—is suddenly stripped bare. Instead of being the default position, white masculinity is uncovered as a specific and neurotic mode of being, paranoid to the point of pathological.”

     We can only recognize in this intense moment of a black man caught up in the white gaze that Pete must recognize it is the result of a myriad of differences in perception. For the pianist it is primarily what I already suggested, a sexual fixation for the man he can possess only in a photograph; for the manager and barmaid Pete it represents their attempt to create an alternative community to the normative white world that surrounds them and threatens their own identities as well; for Thorne it is more complex, involving issues of rage, patriarchal control of the female and, yes, clearly the sexual desire that he cannot admit even to himself let alone to others. If his rage demands action, his sexual desires push him into passivity, and the tension of the advancing and retreating motions themselves are the cause of his stasis in space and the perspiration that pours from his every cell. Robeson’s character, perceiving the push and pull of those who face him can only laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

     Twice the manager attempts to pull Thorne out of the room, only to have him return. Only when she pushes him down the stairs does in awaken from the fever that has overtaken his body, forcing him to literally cool off, in the following scene, in nature.

      He returns to his home and Astrid an utterly broken man whom she now further taunts for his lack of masculinity, taking up the knife he might have used on Pete to threaten him by slashing at his arms and face. She certainly knows that by doing so she is endangering her own life; after all she has just finished reading the cards which foretell her own death. But in her anger that he still mourns his loss of Adah, she cannot resist. To protect any of the male macho he has left, Thorne can only destroy her, obviously regretting it the moment he has committed the act.

       A bit like a mad Lady MacBeth he spends an inordinate amount of time ordering and cleaning up any sign of the assault before he goes to the police to report the violent result of his act.

       After a trial, Thorne is acquitted, while the innocent Pete is told by the mayor that he must now leave the town, adding to his sorrow for the fact that his wife has already left. As the stranger in a world in which he can only be seen as an outsider, a dangerous thing in a society, like the Swiss in general, who value racial and genealogical histories that tie the individual to the communal whole. As James Baldwin, who in 1953 found himself in just such a Swiss provincial community, wrote in his essay “Stranger in the Village,” after recognizing that no matter how long he might remain there he would always be an outsider: “They move with an authority which I shall never have; and they regard me, quite rightly, not only as a stranger in their village but as a suspect latecomer, bearing no credentials, to everything they have—however unconsciously—inherited.”

        The hotel manager, attempting to comfort Pete, expresses something like that sentiment in her simple statement and admission that they have both lost their battles to alter the status quo: “What makes it worse is they think they’re doing the right thing. We’re like that,” shifting from the other (“they”) to the self (“we”) in recognition that she can no longer dare to separate herself from those who create borders to the alternative world of inclusion she and her friends have attempted to construct. As Jones interprets the closing scenes: “The films ends, the café closes and with it our hopes of a queer utopia.”

      The lines of the borders separating human beings have been reconstructed as Pete awaits the train that will take him away to other societies equally segregated into absurd divisions of “them” and “us.”

 

*Strange to say, I once slept in Perdita’s narrow bed. Barbara Guest often stayed in Perdita’s New York Chelsea apartment when Perdita was traveling. And twice on my visits to Manhattan, I stayed in that apartment, once with Barbara and once alone.

**Later in his life Arthur was intimately involved with British poet and gay rights advocate Edward Carpenter and with Neal Cassady, the model for the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Arthur was also close friends to Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts, and was himself involved with early gay right liberation activities.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2020

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

Jean-Paul Civeyrac | La vie selon Luc (Life According to Luc) / 1991

without rational explanations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Paul Civeyrac and Pierre Guillaume (screenwriters), Jean-Paul Civeyrac (director) La vie selon Luc (Life According to Luc) / 1991

 

Something happened to LGBTQ cinema in the last few years of the 1980s that coalesced into a much more racially and culturally diverse and far darker vision in the early 1990s that came to be described as the New Queer Cinema. A great deal of the shift, quite obviously, had to do with the recognition of how AIDS was killing gay people as early as the mid- and late-1980s movies such as Buddies, No Sad Songs, and An Early Frost of 1985, Parting Glances (1986), and Longtime Companion (1989), all films that established the AIDS genre which would continue as a major cinematic concern throughout the following decade beginning with the grand theatrical summaria, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America  of 1991-1993 (not filmed until 2003).

      But alongside those dark chronicles of the times—and juxtaposed to what we might describe as an intermediate mode of the second wave of what I describe as the second B version of “coming out” films (works such as Whitnail & I, Friends Forever, The Two of Us, and What If I’m Gay? of 1987, Clay Farmers, 1988, and Fun Down There, 1989)—were a group of quirky new films revealing a  far more perverted, violent, and awkward representations of LGBTQ relationships. These films might themselves be characterized as the advance guard of the 1990s New Queer Cinema works: Prick Up Your Ears (1987); Apartment Zero, We Think the World of You, (1988); The Comfort of Strangers (1990), Poison, My Own Private Idaho, and The Adjuster (all 1991). Beyond AIDS—drugs, prostitution, violence, sickness, and death had embedded themselves into the LGBTQ lexicon in other ways that heralded a shift in gay filmmaking which permanently matured the queer cinema scene.

    One of these early precursors of the films by Cheryl Dunne, Tom Kalin, Gregg Araki, Marlon T. Riggs, and others who would define the new LGBTQ trends was French director Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s 1991 short La vie selon Luc (Life According to Luc).

     In a work of just 14 minutes Civeyrac crowds so many significant possibilities that the film becomes enigmatic, as if a long novel had been shaved down into a story of just of few pages. We can read all the signs but it is nearly impossible to definitively interpret them.

     Perhaps we should begin with what he do know. A young man Luc (Jean Descanvelle) is a good-looking, surly male prostitute, willing to participate in nearly any sexual act including kissing, sucking, fucking, and being fucked and perhaps, for enough money, other things. He hangs out, evidently, mostly at the urban stadium swimming pool and in a dark dance bar, picking up his customers carefully and participating in sex without any protection, about which the first partner we encounter warns him. Luc apparently doesn’t care. Certainly, he doesn’t have much of a life outside of tricking. He sleeps in what appears to be a temporary room in his sister and her husband’s derelict apartment, next door to a squalling newborn. And even that squatter’s-like room appears to be in question, since the first time in the film when he returns to count his money, his sister (Sabine Friess) reports that Ivan, likely her husband, wants his key back.

      From that same visit we also glean that his mother is in the hospital and that the sister and her husband are about to visit her; he refuses to join them, responding to the invitation with “You must be kidding!” He is resentful that his sister seems to be spying on him and has caught him with his precious money box wherein he carefully lines up the French banknotes with which he gets paid.

       We also gather from a man called Serge (Thomas Badek) who demands he be paid back for a loan, that Luc has evidently borrowed 10,000. We also know from the scene in which his sister caught him counting this money that he has now earned that amount. But we have no idea why he has borrowed the money or even if he has any intention of paying it back, although Serge appears to be a terrifying beast who threatens to kill him if he fails to pay off the debt.

      And there is another wrinkle in the story. It appears that Luc has previously had sex with a customer, Bernard (Alain Payen) who has befriended and possibly fallen in love with the boy. Evidently he has been a regular customer of Luc’s because the prostitute is teased by his peers who

describe Bernard as the boy’s sugar daddy or his “old man.” Clearly, Luc no longer wants anything to do with Bernard, the man nonetheless trying to track him down.

      When he finally meets up with Luc, Bernard tries to tell him he has arranged for a job to permit him to quit his job as a whore, but Luc is still disinterested and attempts to rush away. When Bernard finally pays him, as he would for a sexual encounter, just so that he’ll listen, he finally is able to explain that he has arranged for employment. But Luc argues that it won’t be enough; he can make more in prostitution. What amount do you need, Bernard asks? When Luc names the 10,000 amount, his friend tells him to meet him at the Stadium at 11:00 that night.

      It appears that Bernard is trying to find a way to release Luc from the burden of his sexual activities. But what kind of work might begin at an 11:00 meeting at the Stadium that might pay that kind of money? We can only wonder whether this job involves an even more dangerous activity such as robbery or something worse.

       In any event, Luc has no intention of keeping that appointment and, in fact, when approached again by Serge for payment offers up Bernard as the solution: “You want your money. Bernard’s there. Mess him up and help yourself!”

       After another sexual connection in a room behind the small dance hall, where we gather that the boy is about to be rather brutally fucked, we soon after observe Luc leaving the place, again meeting up with Serge who tells him, “You’ll never recognize your old man now.”

       Luc walks slowly away in a manner which he might imagine represents some sense of sorrow over his betrayal. But frankly, we don’t really know how he feels having so readily sold out the only person who appears to genuinely care about him.

      Luc returns to his room, adds in his new bills, and slowly turns all the banknotes in the proper direction, tapping them carefully together before he closes the tin in which he keeps them and, instead of putting it back into the drawer, hides it under his bed. We now perceive that he must have more in that box than 10,000 and that he will be able to keep it all since Serge has been paid through robbing Bernard of the money he had meant for Luc.

      Luc sits on the bed in the darkening light, finally laying down seemingly pondering the situation. The screen goes black.

      What does he plan to do with the money? We might imagine that he intends to make his escape from the life in which he has imprisoned himself. But we have no evidence that he has made any such decision or that he even wants to escape.

        As for the reason he has borrowed the money in the first place, any answer we might come up with tells us more about ourselves than about Luc. I have concocted a little imaginary plot involving the work’s title, “Life According to Luc,” which resonates for me with the Biblical text of The Gospel According to Luke. The apostle Luke, if you recall, was a physician as well as an artist, which was why the Apostle Luke is the patron saint of doctors and artists. The film’s Luc is certainly no doctor and has no interest in art as far as we can tell. But his mother is ill, in the hospital, and perhaps he has used the borrowed 10,000 to help pay for her medical bills, attempting to repay the loan through prostitution, the only way he might imagine in his poor working-class world to make that kind of money fast.

        But even if that were true, how to reconcile his seeming disdain of his mother and his unnecessary betrayal of Bernard remains an enigma. Luc is not a “good boy at heart” but a desperate man willing to do anything to get what he wants, including selling his own body. And unlike many male prostitutes who often insist that they are not gay and will not engage in kissing, in the few moments in which we observe his sexual activities he seems to enjoy them, quite ready to participate in the passion of the moment. It appears he is not at all suffering from his chosen (or even necessary) profession. Perhaps he has simply been seduced through his own previously innocent involvement in making love to unknown men. But that is 11 possibilities away from any evidence. And we have no logical end or solution to this Luc’s gospel. In a sense we know about as much about this Luc as we do about the gentile, possibly Jewish writer of the Book of Acts and his encounters with Christ, a man who was born possibly in Antioch and lived possibly in Troas near the remains of the ancient Troy.

      About this Luc we know only that he is a male prostitute who has a bit more than 10,000 in banknotes and intends to keep them. Luc is no homosexual hero even if we might imagine him as not being a total villain.  

       As I began this short essay, in this movie something is vastly different from most previous LGBTQ films we have previously seen. Rational explanations for apparently irrational behavior have disappeared.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2021

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

 

Cheryl Dunye | Potluck and the Passion / 1993

 

ending and beginning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pat Branch and Cheryl Dunye (screenplay), Cheryl Dunye (director) Potluck and the Passion / 1993

 

     Dunye’s 1993 short film, The Potluck and the Passion, is truly closer to playwright María Irene Fornés’ work. To celebrate their 1st year together, Dunye and her friends decide to invite a select group of each of their best friends, most unknown to one another.

    The funniest pair of these luncheon guests are a lesbian couple living in New York who travel down to the couple’s home without having the proper direction, losing their way, predictably, several times while attempting to buy their contributions to the potluck in convenience stores along the way. Eventually they eat most of the food when they again become lost and fear they’ll never arrive in time to be fed.

     They arrive after nearly everyone has dined and made friends with one another except for a white woman who has brought along a black lesbian woman she has just met, and who responds to her friend’s sexual interest in another invitee by storming out of the event at the very moment the stragglers finally enter.

       But it might be more appropriate to describe the white woman’s departure and the straggler’s arrival as the beginning rather than an ending, since the girl the white woman has left behind not only discovers that she has a great deal in common with another interloper, who has cooked up a delicious spicy chicken dish, but so enjoys the entree that she insists she must watch the other prepare a new batch. In fact, we might argue, the potluck is only the beginning as it leads into a night of new relationships, deeper friendships, and even the passions these women have quickly developed by simply being brought into the hot-house atmosphere of Dunye’s and her lover’s welcoming embrace.

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).

Cristian Franco-Tuñón | Luces del Centro (Center Lights) / 2013

imagining a world beyond his reach

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cristian Franco-Tuñón (screenwriter and director) Luces del Centro (Center Lights) / 2013 [8 minutes]

 

The Argentine film without dialogue from 2013 features a man, Mateo (Diego Nogara) obviously dissatisfied with his relationship and on the prowl for almost anyone, as he stands on his balcony in his undershorts to observe the lights and the sexual world below. According to descriptions of the plot he is actually interested in the man next door, with whom he has a fleeting sexual encounter, presented in quick cuts that don’t even bother to resemble queer sex.

    By the time this very short film comes to an end, he is back into the arms of his lover. What this film conveys is perhaps only a temporary fixation upon another world outside of the closed possibilities of a monogamous relationship, but the narrative is so very disjunctive that we are not quite sure. Is this the beginning of something else or the end? Does he return to his lover (Emmanuel Degracia) or is this merely the beginning of an endless longing for something other?

    Within the quick cuts there must be some artistry here, but alas, it’s difficult to know. Perhaps if they’d simply spoken some few words, explained what the problem between the two men might have been we would have, at least, sympathized with the obvious dissatisfaction of the couple, and the film might have provided us with some logic. This leaves us only with a sense of a man on the prowl.

     I know the feeling, but really, what is the point of the film? A return to rationality, to a temporary feeling of stasis, a supposedly sane submission to monogamy. I’m sorry, I missed the message.

 

Los Angeles, March 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2025).

James Lapine | Into the Woods / 1991

it’s the last midnight, the last wish

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Sondheim (composer), James Lapine (writer and director) Into the Woods / 1991 [TV (PBS) production].

 

I should begin as I move “into the woods” to tell you that artificial intelligence sites told me that this production never existed. I think we have properly entered into the dangerous world which Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s beautiful opera—and I do argue that in its original almost manic version it is an opera, not a musical as later performed—took us, using the “fairytale folktales of the Grimm Brothers into a new world we might never before have imagined.. I might also mention that the IMBd site, which fortunately artificial intelligence has not taken over, doesn’t even bother to mention the it was composed by Stephen Sondheim. We have certainly ventured into woods which I don’t want to enter. But, of course, I must.

    But then there was, after all, this PBS production, filmed over three previous nights at the then-named Martin Beck Theatre to remind us of what the original production was all about. Here all of our various illusions of transformative love and hate mingle together, both whirling up their characters into a sexually confused and terrified world as they discover themselves in their dark explorations of possibilities outside of the confines of their homes.

     Here we explore the wonderful myth of Cinderella (Kim Crosby) who longs to escape from her slavery to her stepmother and her sisters, the Baker and his Wife (Chip Zien and Joanna Gleason) who long for a child, Rapunzel (Pamela Winslow) who has been locked into a tower by her avenging witch of a mother (the real star of the show, Bernadette Peters) and longs for the man who climbs up the tower through her hair, and Jack (Ben Wright) and his mother (Barbara Bryne), who together just desire to survive given the fact the Jack’s favorite cow, Milky Way, which he imagines as a male friend, doesn’t provide them any milk. And there are the agonized Princes, Cinderella's always suffering lover (Robert Westenberg) and Rapunzel’s constantly frustrated admirer (Chuck Wagner) who long, of course, for their lovers but also in their agony for one another. It’s a confused mess.   And I haven’t even mentioned sweet, obedient Little Red Riding Hood (Danielle Ferland) on her way to visit her grandmother, who discovers the rather enchanting Wolf (also Robert Westenberg), who “wants to eat her.” Well, indeed we have entered into another world. Who hasn’t ever been wanted to be eaten by the Wolf.

     I saw a wonderful production of this work at the Wallis here in Los Angeles, and then the movie after, and I truly loved both versions. But this, fast-paced, brilliant original production is the one that truly works.

     This time through I not only cried for the Baker and his Wife’s desires and later desperation, but realized that the central figure in this film was actually the queer young boy, Jack, who couldn’t even realize that his beloved cow was a female, but kept longing for a friend. His mother even describes his as queer. And unlike any of the other figures, with his beans, he climbs into a new world of "Giants in the Sky,” which no one else imagines, bringing back the golden harp of Orpheus and mythology.

     There is, obviously, a punishment for such an action, which effects all the characters who must now deal with the Giant’s dreadful wife (Merle Louise), who destroys a great many members of the cast, including the truly caring and desirous Baker’s wife who dares to have a tryst with one of the wandering Princes in the woods into she has been drawn by the drama.

      In Lapine’s and Sondheim’s vision, stories get mixed up, confused, and intertwined, but it’s clear, nonetheless, that the queer boy Jack has been the major aggressor for just reaching for the sky. He felled the giant; he dared take his wonderment and desires out of bounds of the local society. And even worse, he is an innocent, since he can’t even recognize that his climbing the beanstalk might even have been a sin. In the end he gets another mother and a friend. After all, that’s what he truly wants out of life. Even in fairy tales you can’t truly settle down with a male lover.

     I have to say, this production once again brought me back to the immense enjoyments of Broadway theater, which always bring tears to my eyes. The numerous wonderful songs, such as the Wolf’s wonderful attempt to seduce Little Red Riding Hood, “Hello Little Girl,” Red Riding Hood’s realization that “I Know Things Now,” Jack’s wonderful recognition that there are “Giants in the Sky,” the final recognition between the Baker and his Wife that “It Takes Two,” the terrifying rail of the Witch of “Last Midnight,” and the full company recognition of “Children Will Listen” make this a true operatic delight. The tears fell as they generally do with such remarkable songs and performances.

     Despite my absolute delight of this original production of the musical (sans one performer, Jean Kelly, replaced by Cindy Robinson), I do have to say that Johnny Depp’s performance in the movie was so very much more enticing, I would have gone with that Wolf anywhere without any question. And, as much as I truly love Bernadette Peters, well I do have to say Meryl Streep in the film took it to a level that I mightn’t even have imagined, knocking it out of any Broadway stage into the West 45th Manhattan Street and spilling it over into our theater imaginations. She was a true Witch, a true wonder, a singer to deal with.

Shh!

It's the last midnight

It's the last wish

It's the last midnight

Soon it will be boom

Squish!

 

Told a little lie

Stole a little gold

Broke a little vow

Did you?

Had to get your Prince

Had to get your cow

Had to get your wish

 

Doesn't matter how

Anyway, it doesn't matter now

It's the last midnight

It's the boom

Splat!

 

     Yet, this fast-paced version of the Sondheim masterpiece is one I might recommend to anyone who truly loves Broadway theater. This is what it’s all about.

 

Los Angeles, March 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).

Douglas Messerli | In and Out: Some Comments on Sondheim and Lapine's Into the Woods / 2025

 

in and out: some comments on sondheim and lapine’s into the woods

by Douglas Messerli

 

In 2014 I saw both a stage production and the film version of Into the Woods, strangely for someone so in love with theater musicals and particularly Sondheim works as I am, long after the original Broadway production of 1988. I felt that I had been sleeping through the late 1980s when I finally saw my first production of the work on the stage of the Beverly Hills Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts based on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Production of the musical masterpiece in 2014. The film flashed through my head soon after, and I fell in love. It wasn’t until 2025 that I actually got a glimpse through the 1991 PBS production of the same work of the original, which I now believe to be far superior to the two later visits I made to that Sondheim delight.

    After seeing the movie version, I did not even imagine including this work in my Queer Cinema volumes. Although I knew that some critics saw the original in 1988 as a metaphorical statement about AIDS, the woods representing the dangerous sexual world where people entered and often died, none of that had been apparent in the 2014 film nor apparently in the Wallis Center stage version.

     It wasn’t until viewing the PBS television production of 1991 that I realized that the true center of the film was the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, where a sexually confused gay boy had quite literally taken a voyage up a large erect anatomy that had suddenly sprouted in his own back yard to discover a world of giants. It is his act that brought the wrath of the giant’s wife upon the society, destroying so many of the character’s lives. And Jack, even at the end, still seeks women out as mothers instead of lovers. In Sondheim and Lapine’s work, Jack remains a permanent gay adolescent as if he were locked to some sort of Freudian notion of what homosexuality is all about.

    Yet he has also helped all the other locked-in-and-up characters the freedom to explore the world outside of their narrow folklore positions. Even the Princes discover that loving beautiful women is not always truly fulfilling and seek out one another’s company to vent their frustrations and, frankly, display their beautiful anatomies. Cinderella abandons her magical world of the castle, Rapunzel becomes frustrated for being locked away in a tower by her corrective witchy mother, and the Baker’s wife discovers, for the very first time perhaps, that she is attractive even to the most handsome of men. The poor Baker loses everything but discovers a world of new friends. And Little Red Riding Hood finally grows up to see how her innocence has nearly destroyed her life.

      I think even the Brothers Grimm might be amused to see where Lapine and Sondheim have taken their characters. These tales, as the writer and composer make clear are, after all, figures who children attend to, wonder about, attempting to unwind and reweave their actions. Folklore and the accompanying myths are those that help to make us imagine who we will grow up to be. Jack and his giants, Cinderella and her grand ball, Rapunzel and her hair, the Baker and his Wife’s much longed-for baby are what we all were as children, imagining the world which we were about to enter. Are we pretty enough? Willing to explore worlds we never imagined existing? Do we want the ordinary joys of a family life? Children do listen, and wonder, and imagine.

 

Los Angeles, March 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2025).

Josh Eliot | Sacrament / 2022

children will listen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josh Eliot (screenwriter and director) Sacrament / 2022 [22 minutes]

 

This short film might be described as one of the first to deal with the world that US President Trump created, a broken society that must make choices that never before were they asked to make.

     A gay married couple, Tommy (Faye Strange Bascon) and Dustin (Jace Greenwood) have been fairly accepted by Tommy’s religious family, who have come to accept him basically through what appears as their Episcopal orientation. But Dustin’s own religious background, which we never have fully explained, has evidently been far more confrontational, and he has suffered the punishments of attempts at conversion therapy clearly imposed upon him by his family and church.

     The couple has agreed, having just adopted a new baby girl, that they will not involve her in their religious backgrounds until she is of an age to decide for herself. But Tommy’s highly religious, if loving family, insist that she be baptized in the family tradition, celebrating her arrival by presenting Tommy with their traditional baptism bonnet.

    Dustin refuses, and a battle of family and religious tradition suddenly becomes an issue between the two loving men. Even though Tommy backs down, suggesting to his family that he will wait until Dustin is ready, the family intrudes their beliefs upon these two men, along with the battles of Trump supporters storming the capitol with crosses (not something I quite remember), becoming a further issue in the breakdown of the two men’s relationship.

     I have no longer any sympathy with religious indoctrination, and surely side with Dustin; but this short film is truly fair in its attempts to make it clear that not all views of Christianity are the same. After all, Tommy’s family have worked hard to accept their son’s gay sexuality and his marriage to Dustin. Tommy tries to convince Dustin that “We are the good Christians,” yet behind his lover’s back he has arranged for a baptism in the church.

     Dustin, who has actually been the more obvious father to their new child, rushes out, goes to a bar, and nearly falls into sex with a bar stranger. Yet, Eliot’s film being a truly moral consideration of the problem, gives his character the opportunity to bolt, even arriving at the church.

    More importantly, at the last moment Tommy, despite his parents almost masked (this was after all the time of COVID-19) presence and imposing approval, backs out, finally agreeing that it has to be something to which is child decides when she has grown. They have lost their young Christian goat, the sacrifice that so many parents offer up to their alter before the child itself has been involved.

   The two men kiss, and raise up their child to be her own woman, to make her own decisions with regard to religious beliefs. This is a film quite obviously made by a director who grew up in a religious world, but who came to recognize that religion is not a sacrificial rite, but a sacrament to be approached when a child has come into full consciousness. Yes, some churches have come to accept homosexuality, but basically the Christian folk have not been totally accepting, and have over and over shown themselves as a mean and ugly congregation that is not trustworthy of demonstrating the teachings of Christ.

 

Los Angeles, March 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).