eros and thanatos
by Douglas Messerli
Zachary Halley (screenplay), Derek Gregor and Selda
Sahin (music and lyrics), Zachary Halley (director) Grind
/ 2014 [32 minutes]
It’s definitely hard to know quite where to begin in
discussing the original film musical thriller Grind. Although the music and lyrics are not entirely memorable—despite
Halley’s unnecessary putdown of Stephen Sondheim (in an interview with Jose
Sallis, he comments: “I’m gonna get in so much trouble for saying this but
everybody’s trying to out-Sondheim Sondheim now, so they’re all kinda too
clever by half. Sondheim doesn’t write pop songs, his songs don’t make much
sense outside his shows...maybe Barbra singing ‘Send in the Clowns’ but even
that has people going ‘what the hell is song about.’”)—yet Gregor’s and Sahin’s
songs, particularly “Stay the Night” and “Do It Anyway,” are better than many
contemporary Broadway shows.
On top of
this, Halley’s central figures, Vincent (Anthony Rapp), Autumn (Claire Coffee),
and Thane (Pasha Pellosie) are all deftly sketched by excellent performers,
particularly given most of their brief camera time in the 32 minutes of the
movie.
The
narrative includes everything from youthful love scenes, to a plot twist right
out of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and an overriding sense of
horror as we begin to perceive that most of Vincent’s dates end up dead.
Moreover,
Halley was lucky enough to have both an album of the songs and the movie, the
album featuring the voice of Eric Michael Krop singing the role of Thane.
The work begins in a bar where the popular
model Thane, who even admits “Is everyone’s type,” is looking for love, but
finding his cellphone communications with others ending up in stupid comments
and real abuse. In “Stay the Night,” he and all the others in the bar beg the
other cute boys to stay the night, even beyond the bar’s closing, so that they
can find the right guy.
In short,
as Thane confesses to his friend Vincent, despite his beauty, his feelings are
not only hurt by the other’s cellphone comments—nobody in this bar seems to
actually talk to one another, but communicates via short texts—but he’s clearly
not coming up with an interesting person with whom to go home for the night.
Finally,
he begs the intelligent, but far less attractive Vincent to go online a pretend
to be him but a “smarter version of himself.” He wants a partner who, like
Vincent is smart, who maybe even like Vincent wears glasses, but who is also
good looking and offers great sex.
In
minutes, Vincent is able to, as Thane puts it, “talk his way into [the] pants”
of a beautiful guy on the subway and arrange for a nearby meet-up. Although for
a moment, Thane suggests Vincent should go for the rendezvous, the latter
realizes it wouldn’t work out, and sends his friend on his way for a blissful
night.
Meanwhile,
Vincent is left alone in the obviously less busy bar, most people having hooked
up with others, while overlooking him. Walking the streets, Vincent hooks up
via Grindr with a man lying in bed with his lover (Drew Brody, script name:
“Cheater Boy”), as the underlying theme of this film begins to simmer in the
written cellphone messages, the first being “I guess you never really know who
you’re talking to.”
Vincent is
able lure him out of his bed into the park, which Vincent describes feels
“really
small,” and in which he hides in its shadows. He
confesses that he’s just looking for a spark and that it would be easier simply
to turn away, “but I do it anyway.”
Life is full of sinning
I’m not the only one.
So I’ll ignore the judgments,
I won’t miss out on fun.
Vincent
sings of the people we betray, and again sings the song’s refrain “I’ll do it
anyway.” This song also harkens back to a time when there were far braver
people who blazed the trail before him, despite being beaten and killed, who
also did it anyway. But finally, we begin to realize that Vincent does judge,
he does punish those who cheat, who meet up in dark recesses into which “we’ll
go in together, but I’ll walk out alone.”
Perhaps
the most serious problem with Halley’s dark musical is that once we realize
that Vincent himself is the grim reaper of whom the newscasters report, the
work loses a great deal of its steam at only12 minutes into this short work.
Suddenly,
as if the writer feels the need to explain what Grindr is all about to those
straights or clueless females who might be watching this film, the two gay men,
Vincent and Thane describing to their friend Autumn why connecting up on a
sleek cellphone is far better than meeting up in a bar. Now, they explain they
have made the whole neighborhood, the whole city, a gay bar. Autumn counters
that she has an app she uses to shop for shoes, which Vincent explains is
precisely the point, this app shops for sex. Once more Thane is attracted to a
guy, to whom Vincent writes. As “the poet” explains to the incredulous Autumn,
“I can say what I want to this guy, and Thane’s going to get laid tonight.”
Autumn
insists that Grindr wouldn’t work for straight people, wondering if her friends
don’t all fear for whom they might randomly hook up with. Thane answers that
the app connects with people that live only in the closest neighborhoods,
insisting nobody in this area is evil. Little does know, of course, he’s
sitting next to the devil himself.
But
Autumn finds it creepy to say I live 150 feet away and I can see you; imagine
she suggests, if someone left a piece a paper on your door saying just that;
why is it permissible to text on a cellphone, she wonders; “Don’t you feel
unsafe?”
Violence
between gay men, opines Vincent, is extremely rare. He looks over at Thane. “We
kill each other in other ways.”
As Thane heads over to his target for the
night’s apartment, Autumn declares that the act “is so dangerous.”
So begins
Vincent’s and Thane’s “End of Me”
Let it take control
Let it take me in
Let it be the end of me.
Across
the way where Thane has taken himself, the entire building seems to be seething
with gay sex.
In this song, moreover, we meet the “Glam Goth Boy”
and numerous other possible victims of the newscaster’s reports. While Thane
ends up in bed with the neighbor, Vincent connects up with the Goth boy, returning
home without the kid who lived across the street.
Thane’s
good sex ends, moreover, with the neighbor basically tossing him out after and
refusing to even give him his number, occasioning one of the saddest songs in
this short score, Thane’s statement of the frustration of attempting to find a
real relationship among all the cute one-night stands, “Easier Not to Care,” is
a song sung mostly as he poses in numerous costumes as a model for the
magazines.
I
don’t have the words
to
get the things I need
I
have all the looks
but I don’t have the speed.
Although this is a truly heartfelt ditty
about the difficulties of a cute fellow who represents “People” magazine when,
as Vincent puts it, his dates are expecting “Time,” the lyrics in this work
really fall apart, having little of the intensity of the other works in this
film. Perhaps it’s Thane’s inability to speak that really turns this into a
song about which, unfortunately, it is truly “easier not to care.” Sadly, Thane
is looking for something real in a world or Eros and Thanatos, of sexual
excitement and death.
When he
turns once again for Vincent help him find what he’s seeking, demanding his
friend not use French words to hook him up, his Cyrano turns on him and for a
moment shows his violent side, merely reconfirming for Thane that it’s easier
not to care.
We’ve
already seen the end of the world, played out in the first few frames of the
movie wherein Vincent meets up with a black man in what appears to be an empty
warehouse, drugging him just as they are about to engage in sex, afterwards, tying
him up and strangling him, the whole time singing a three-note ode of how he
finds life only in the moment of the terror the other experiences, that they have,
he argues, come together to be violated, the blackness of the room enveloping
them both in what “Used to Be You,” perhaps the least interesting song of the
five pieces of this work, maybe because it is a dirge sung not just to the
victim but to the murderer himself.
Vincent
returns home to find Thane sitting on the couch, finally wishing perhaps to
connect up with his roommate. But Vincent, briefly stroking the handsome young
man’s face responds, “Pretty boy,” pausing just long enough for us to fear for
Thane’s life, before ending the film with a release through the words: “I’m
glad we can’t.”
If this
US movie reminds one, in many respects, of the gay movie musicals of Canadian
film director John Greyson, Zero Patience (1993) and Lilies
(1996), we have to admit that it doesn’t contain half the wit and narrative
intelligence of those astounding cinematic works.
Los Angeles, September 19, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(September 2025).
