i don’t know what i
like
by Douglas Messerli
Eliza Hittman (screenwriter and director) Beach
Rats / 2017
If one ever needs a clear definition of what
the Q means in the updated LGBTQ sexual/gender gathering, Eliza Hittman’s 2017
film is a good place to start. As the hero of this film, Frankie (Harris
Dickinson) says time and again when asked about his sexual interests—in the
case the pick-up girlfriend Simone (Madeline Weinstein)—and the middle-aged and
elderly men with whom he connects many a night—“I don’t know what I like.”
Standing in for the Q in the rainbow moniker, this cute, somewhat hunky,
Brooklyn boy is not only constantly questioning his sexuality but feels “queer”
in the most general sense, a being who does not fit in to any of the various
societies in and out of which he slips.
Indeed, the three “buddies” he daily hangs with on Coney Island
boardwalk are twice specifically described by him as being “not my friends,” a
strange locution which they tolerate, perhaps believing that he is coding to
others that he and his “beach rats” are more than friends, when
he is actually speaking a kind of truth, obliquely suggesting that the three
homophobic thugs with whom he hangs out each day, and with whom he apparently
grew up, are at the heart of his sexual confusion. For them, he self-justifies,
he is forced to seek out his sexual encounters each night, hoping to score some
weed or other drugs for their daily pleasure.
For them, Simone, who flirts with him one day on the beach, has to
become, given his buddies’ expectations, his girlfriend with whom he nightly
“scores”—although the truth is something far different, as he toys with the
idea of a sexual relationship with Simone, abusing her verbally, after
what seems to be a necessary intake of cocaine, when he finds it difficult to
sexually engage.
When, at one point, she asks him “Am I pretty?” his mocking retort of
“Am I pretty?” by pointing to himself, becomes something more than mockery as
in his own self-loathing he seems to truly to be questioning his own beauty,
made far more complex by the fact that the on-line computer customers with whom
he makes late-night appointments are older, a tactic he uses to make certain
that the his “buddies” might never meet up with his those with whom he has
sexual encounters. We cannot help but wonder if Frankie might not be for
happier with a young man of his own age whose beauty is as obvious as his own.
Or, as critic Sheila O'Malley puts it in her Roger Ebert review: “Yes, I wanted
to tell Frankie to go find a local LGBT center and get a new tribe of more
accepting friends.”
Eventually Simone perceives him as being too much of a “remake” or
“upgrade”—as if he were a living room she would have to remodel—for her busy
life. At least she has a job. After a night with his various male
companions Frankie hangs out in a local vape shop to watch the professionals
blow rings through the air—somewhat like one might watch bubbles being blown
out of a pipe or the weekly Coney Island fireworks, which Frankie declares are
unromantic because they are always the same, but still uses as the opening
image on the homepage of his computer.
Yet Frankie’s inability to break through his torturous enigma is
precisely Hittman’s point. His “queerness” is not merely sexual, but a product
of his feeling out of place even in his own life as a member of a working class
family with a father dying of cancer who lies on a hospital bed in the middle
of their living room, a mother (the excellent actor Kate Hodge) whose former
good looks have been turned into a vision of an exhausted woman who badly needs
her hair done, and a sister who daily makes out with young boys on the
boardwalk and, like the empty-headed Simone, desperately desires a dangling
belly button ring. Is it any wonder that the confused son has abandoned his
former upstairs bedroom (of which, when his not so friendly “friends” are invited
into, one mutters “I didn’t know you had a little brother”) for his alternative
basement bear cave, where he keeps his computer and drugs.
Clearly, the director is fascinated by his beauty and the male body in
general, as, against the shoddy entertainments of the beach; she moves her
camera, lovingly held by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, across every crook and
cranny of the male psychic. Her quite obvious voyeuristic approach to Frankie
and his gang almost reminds one of the earliest of gay porno pictures, shot
often on the beaches of New York, Atlantic City, and, particularly, of
California and packaged as pretend “physique and muscle” magazines, very much
in the manner of filmmaker Gus van Sant, whose bronzed porno magazine heroes
briefly come alive as potential partners for who anyone who desires them
enough.
Indeed, the older men who meet Frankie for quickies in the bush or
one-night stands in local motels, can hardly get over their good fortune in
finding a kind of fantasy figure willing to be fucked in the flesh. No need for
Frankie to ask these often hairy, ragged elders whether or not he is “pretty.”
Even in his self-hatred he must know the he is what they have been always
seeking in their on-line chatrooms. When he accidentally meets up with one of
his late-night friends who is bartending at a Coney Island dance hall where
Frankie has taken Simone, he is embarrassed and flummoxed about how to react to
the free bottle of gin the bar delivers to his table, particularly when his
buddies suggest he and the bartender must be friends.
It
is perhaps at that very moment, the moment the young teenager has feared for
years, that pushes him in the direction of revealing his hidden world without
admitting any involvement in it.
Having hooked up with a rather sweet gay man,
closer to his own age, he dares to admit to the trio of boys that he sometimes
goes onto gay sites to find sources for his drugs.
These thugs are strangely intrigued by the fact, and even attempt, the
first time he meets up with the man, Jeremy (Harrison Sheehan), to get in on
the act, as if eager to actually meet up with a self-identifying gay man. Their
actions immediately end the transaction. But when Frankie suggests to his
buddies that he and Jeremy meet up instead in the woods near the Coney Island
beach, where they can, so to speak, “grab the goods” (the weed he has promised
to bring along), they are even more intrigued than before.
For them, we already suspect what Frankie seems to not quite be able to
admit, that it represents not only an opportunity to get their drugs but to
perform a kind ritualized gay-bashing, a brutality which lies deep in their
bigoted heats. For Frankie, as the BFI magazine reviewer Hannah McGill
sensitively perceives, the issue of “whether his friends would mind being
around gay guys if weed were involved, indicates his yearning to change
everything without having to change a thing.”
After these thugs run the sweet gay boy into the water and begin to beat
him, however, obviously everything does change. If, at first, in the
horror of the scene, Frankie hangs back, when his friends, unable to find the
weed, began to pummel Jeremy, he searches the waves nearby, discovering the
packet and thereby releasing the gay man without further harm.
But in that very “act of inaction” Frankie knows that he has severed any
relationship with his crew he may once have had.
While he has been away for the night another kind of major change has
occurred in his life, as his mother, curious for his shifting behavior, enters
his computer and begs him to tell her, when he returns home, what’s happening.
We don’t know if his mother has deleted all of his computerized gay
contacts or whether Jeremy has notified the heads of the chatroom about
Frankie’s actions, but he is now cut off from his nefarious past.
As always in this film, Hittman leaves the answers in the cracks of the
few verbal communications in which her characters engage. He tells his mother
nothing just as she does not share with her son whatever she might have
discovered. And in the last scene, where Frankie now walks the boardwalk
completely alone, the weekly fireworks crackling in the background, we, and
apparently he, have still no idea where he is going, physically or
psychologically. We only know that he now has no ability to return to where he
was and has all the freedom to create a new space of his own making, perhaps
one that will truly allow him to find the love we imagine (and, I remind you,
it is only our imagination, perhaps not his) he has been seeking in all those
worn-out stranger’s faces, genitals, and hands.
If
the writer/director has given us no answers, she has, at least, opened up the
possibilities, and not just those for Frankie. The three boys with who he has
spent so much of his life are even less knowable that Frankie is. They are true
cyphers whose names, after the film has ended, are difficult to even recall
(Joe, Nick, Alexei I believe). Yet, one of them, perhaps Alexei, which I might
describe as the “runt” of the group is different from the others. At one point,
when Frankie and two others pull off their pants to briefly enter the ocean,
this figure remains dressed, wearing his heavy-looking shoes as he sits back to
watch the others in their furtive swim.
Later, when the same two move in to beat Jeremy and grab the drugs he
has brought with him, we see this same figure immediately turn back and leave
the site.
In these two actions we can readily perceive that, like Frankie, he too
is someone who is “queer,” not sexually gay perhaps, but a figure uncomfortable
with the activities of the others. And in that sense, he too is a kind of
questioning “Q,” someone who doesn’t quite know where he stands in relation to
those around him. One cannot make too much of these two subtle acts, but they
do suggest, if nothing else, a turning away from the more normative actions of
the others—even those of Frankie who behaves under peer pressure as someone
other than he truly is.
If nothing else, it seems to me, Hittman is suggesting that people with
clearly defined attitudes toward the world live always simultaneously with
others who admittedly “don’t know what they like” or have little knowledge of
where they are going. In the end, these figures are always hiding in full
sight, ready to surprise the often-unthinking believers with an independence
based more on questions than on preconceived answers. If society is to make any
significant changes, it perhaps is to these Q figures to whom we must
ultimately look. Those who seek no change sometimes accomplish the greatest of
changes in life. Sitting on a train that is not moving may seem to be moving
when a train beside it pulls out of the station. A bit like Einstein’s train and
the man left on the platform who observes the lightning strike, it is a matter
of relativity.
Los Angeles, July 24, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2020).
