Glenn Jordan | Mass Appeal / 1984

the priceless lunatic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill C. Davis (screenplay, based on his own play), Glenn Jordan (director) Mass Appeal / 1984

 

I come from a church-going family. Both my mother and father were Elders in their local Presbyterian church (the ecclesiastical equivalent of the local version of the US government’s Congress) and two of my mother’s male siblings became ministers, one Presbyterian and the other Methodist—which might suggest something about the Lutheran Church in which they grew up. As the first born child in a family which would eventually produce something like 36 first cousins, I used the banister of my grandmother’s staircase as a pulpit where I pretended to sermonize at family gatherings to the joy and laughter of several aunts and uncles. I dreamed of becoming a missionary—not because, I soon realized, I had any desire to spread religious doctrine but rather because I imagined it as an opportunity to travel to all sorts of exotic places throughout the world. I still love to travel, although long voyages no longer love me.

      My parents were not particularly religiously-inclined in our home, but we did attend church nearly every Sunday, and I sang throughout my high-school years in the church choir. Even during my first couple of years of college I continued to attend the campus religious center because I loved to sing chorale music and had a fairly-well trained tenor voice, participating in university chorale groups as well. But I had long since lost all interest in the sermons and other aspects of the service. Ministers, I had concluded, spoke a language to their congregations that invoked clichéd words of consolation and repeated moral homilies that had long ago lost any real meaning. I was convinced that many students had delivered better talks in my Speech 101 class. And soon after, when I realized finally that I no longer shared any of my fellow attendees’ religious beliefs, I stopped church-going altogether. As a humanist agnostic I have never since entered a church except for weddings and funerals.

       I begin with this confession to give some context to my feelings while watching, the other day, Glenn Jordon’s 1984 film Mass Appeal, based on a play by Bill C. Davis, in which a Catholic priest, Father Tim Farley (Jack Lemmon) does precisely what I describe above in his pre-mass lectures: appeal to the masses with folksy asides and commentaries that give a sense of inclusion by dropping the names each week of many of those in attendance. If he occasionally takes up serious issues, such as ”Should Women Become Priests?” he immediately dilutes any open candor and challenges with clever asides, wrapping his entire discussion within a comic riff:

 

                           Last night while I was thinking about our three C’s series [Current

                           Crises in Catholicism]...and I fell asleep. No, I was straining over the

                           most recent crisis that has faced our church today. and consequently

                           I dreamed that Bette Davis was ordained a priest. ...Of course I

                           remember when the big moral question was should we chew the

                           host or let it melt in our mouths.

 

     Meanwhile, a young man (Željko Ivanek) on his daily jog through the neighborhood who has dropped into Father Farley’s sermon turns the priest’s comedic toying on its head by pushing the priest’s postulations into a straight-forward challenge: “What do you think of women becoming priests?” Once more Farley attempts to deflect the question at the heart of his moral dialogue: “What do I think....I wouldn’t want to sway anybody’s viewpoint, so I’ll plead the fifth.”

     The intruder continues: “I think women should be priests.” “Well, that’s one opinion, isn’t it?” the slightly flustered priest snips back. “Don’t you want to know why I think women...” “By all means, don’t be shy,” Farley interrupts. “When Christ was crucified, only three people stayed with him until the very end, and two of the three were women. At the foot of the cross was his youngest apostle (“yeh, John” Farley quickly inserts to assure his congregation that he has not forgotten his biblical studies), his mother, and an ex-hooker. On his way to being crucified it was a woman who pushed her way through a very hostile crowd and wiped all the blood and male spit off his face. And the first person he appeared to after his resurrection was Mary Magdalene. Now don’t you think that the courage and loyalty that these women showed the actual person Jesus is in his image?”

     Farley’s nasty response summarizes his anger for this stranger having upstaged his act (which is later compared by the same man as being somewhat like a nightclub comedy routine): “You really should invest in a portable pulpit.”

     So we recognize in this interchange that beneath whatever large tale this story might wish to tell, the real focus of Mass Appeal is the crisis soon to be faced by this popular priest, who, after some bitter times, worked hard to transform himself into someone his parishioners love through white lies, pleasant banter, “stupid” consolation (Farley’s own words, arguing “Consolation should be stupid. That way a person in grief can realize how inconsolable their grief really is.”), equivocation, and escape (often through the wine he regularly consumes in his church office, giving Lemmon an opportunity at moments to reprise his role in Days of Wine and Roses).

    The young man who has just challenged Farley is a local seminarian, Mark Dolson, asked by Monsignor Thomas Burke (Charles Durning) to attend the priest’s mass. The faculty of the seminary have also been troubled by Dolson’s questions and moral intractability which has made them and Burke seriously wonder about ordaining him as a Deacon, the last step before entering the priesthood. Perhaps Farley, the Monsignor will soon suggest, might mentor him, helping to smooth away the rough honesty of his faith.

      But before that issue, the Monsignor has called a meeting to discuss the fate of two other soon-to-be deacons, good friends of Dolson’s, who are suspected of having a homosexual relationship. We never meet these seminarians, nor are we given any evidence of their relationship (although Dolson does attempt to defend them by suggesting that Christ may have had a “loving” relationship with John), but we are assured that, when ordained, they were committed to living celibate lives.

      One is tempted, obviously, to wonder how a church that has so long hidden and supported hundreds of gay men who later abused children could be so troubled about a possible homosexual affair between the two grown students studying to become priests. But that, in fact, may explain, in part, Burke’s position; he cannot abide any sexuality to exist within the confines of the church, which anyone might argue is at the heart of the problem with which the Roman Catholic Church is faced. People are born (a religious person might say “created) as sexual beings; and despite church desires, people are seldom saints. To deny them any sexual expression is a kind of sin of omission one well might argue.

      Yet, Jordan and Davis’ film, in the manner of the glib priest Farley, makes no attempt to truly explore these issues, instead putting any more level-headed considerations in the mouths of the ineffectual Farley and the rabidly righteous Dolson, as, against his inclinations, the Monsignor allows Dolson to become a Deacon on the condition that Farley make him over within the small time-frame of one month.

      Indeed the film turns its full attention, soon after the presumably gay seminarians’ dismissal, to the interchanges between the older and younger, affable and irascible opponents, Farley and Dolson. At first it appears to be a study in annoyance, as each of the two refuses to bow to the other’s demands; but obviously in such a structural set-up we know that both men will gradually discover values in the other from which they can benefit. From the beginning the more experienced Farley perceives Dolson as a “priceless lunatic” which, he argues, the Church needs in order to survive, while recognizing that such lunatics have little ability to sustain their own survival.

       Farley attempts to re-frame and refine a written sermon that Dolson has created, explaining the tactics of delivery and strategies of communication: when the listeners begin to cough, he warns his pupil, it is a sign that the sermon is not going well. Dolson’s first sermon results in nearly a contagion of coughers and hackers, but instead of retreating he moves frighteningly forward with passages that Farley had previously asked him to cut. The result is a near revolt from Farley’s parishioners with complaints filed to Burke.

       The intolerant Monsignor now suspects that in his support of and friendship with the two expelled seminarians, Dolson himself might be gay, in short arguing not just without evidence but positing guilt simply by association. Finally, Farley is forced to recognize the injustice of the situation, the priest, in turn, indirectly confessing to his disciple that as a child he had been beaten by his father who left his family, his mother remarrying a man he hated which resulted in his inability to show his mother any love until, too late for him to express it, she died.

     For his part, Dolson admits that before he entered the seminary he had explored love with both sexes, but unable to find the kind of love he was seeking took refuge in his commitment to the God.

      Both men, in short, have failed in love. And Farley gives the young man an opportunity to explore that topic in a final sermon in his church which he believes will convince both his congregation and the Monsignor of Dolson’s abilities.

     The sermon—in which the young Deacon reveals his failure for having lost the ability to hear the voices of those to whom he most sought to speak, namely the audience to whom he is presently presenting his message—is finally a successful one, with many of Farley’s congregation highly evaluating it, proof Farley believes that will convince Burke to change his mind.

     But it is already too late. Ignoring his mentor’s advice to keep his previous explorations of love a secret, the naïve “lunatic” openly tells Dolson that he has had sex with both men and women.

     By the time that Farley helps him to perceive that he has sealed his own fate but possibly endangered Farley’s own future in the parish he loves, Dolson has returned to his seminary bedroom to pack up his clothes, another victim of the Monsignor’s and perhaps the Church’s homophobia.

        Visiting him in that room, Farley admits that he has been ineffectual because of his inability to give up what he has worked all his life to achieve, being loved and admired. “I need them,” he admits. “I really do.” Dolson assures him that he truly understands and consoles him (not so different from Farley’s own attempts at consolation) that he will find another place where they might take him—perhaps even in Iowa, the standing joke that Farley has made about where Monsignor Burke may relocate him. Actually, Iowa, my home state, might be a good place for an outspoken lunatic like Dolson; maybe he might convince younger versions of me that religion is not simply a dangerous farce.

         As a wizened, hopefully wiser old queer, I can only wish that all the Dolsons might return to the everyday human race to search out the love they never found. If the church is in need of such “priceless” lunatics so are our secular cities and towns.

        If nothing else, this young runner has jogged some sense into his head: “During those 3 years [when he was exploring love] whenever I was with someone I loved loved me, I did everything I could to keep it constant. Bit by bit I learned all the rules. What to say, what to give, what to withhold so I could keep that love constant. ....I found out that the constant was up to me. Promises are broken. Friends will be fickle and love goes its own course. And all of it has to finally not matter. [Shifting the conversation to the priest] What you believe has got to be more important than what your congregation thinks of you.”

        The problem lies, as Farley reiterates, in knowing what you believe.

        I believe this well-meaning film is not as profound as it believes itself to be.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2021

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

 

Amanda Overton | T / 2008

the homoneurotic world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amanda Overton (screenwriter and director) T / 2008 [6 minutes]

 

This film takes place in the future, in a dystopian society where government has controlled the lives of it citizens (any day soon), and now reinforces strict gender binaries and demands heterosexual behavior through memory deletion and reprogramming.

     Jade (Jenn Page) finds herself almost in a trance staring at a statue of a woman, and then as the general announcement of the 9:00 hour of the family Freedom act commands her to seek shelter since the neighborhood task force is about to restore safety to the streets, being forced to scurry away, set on the run as two soldiers (Jeff Hersh and James Crawford) march in lockstep behind her.

     Suddenly arms pull her in, a hand placed over her mouth. Almost as if she is being kidnapped, the other being, also a woman, Kiley (Abby Eiland), drags Jade inside an apartment obviously belonging to Kiley, whom we quickly recognize works as a photographer.

      There, behind doors, she gently strokes Jade’s face, and after a few minutes, Kiley returns the gesture, a bit terrified by her own actions, but obviously lost in the sensual moment. Almost immediately Kiley attaches a device to her temporal lobe, a spot critical in hearing, memory, language comprehension, and emotional processing.

      Over the next few moments, Jade experiences blips of memory from the past when she sees herself kissing the other woman and making love. It is quite apparent that before the governmental reprogramming efforts, these two women were lesbian lovers.

      Even as they come alive again, momentarily reliving the past, there are pounds on the door, demands to open up. Kiley quickly hides Jade in a backspace behind the door and opens it, as the task force breaks in having acquired the “deviant.”

      Weeks later Jade encounters Kiley now as a patient, having been fully divested of her memory, being dragged along the halls as Jade passes by. Only a slight smile of memory is what Jade can permit herself. Her friend has obviously given up her own life so that Jade can repossess the past of their deep love.

      Overton, now a noted television writer with series credits for Marco Polo, Severance, Edge and other popular works, notes that T was her first film at the University of Southern California as a student, shot on 16mm film. She admits, “I had not clue what I was doing!!” Yet her talent was obviously visible in this short sci-fi film.

      The biggest question of this work is what the “T” of the title represents: truth, the telling or transmitting of it, transgender, or perhaps just the image of the “T” itself, like a body shouldering the history of the past. We can only hope that Jade can someday nab Kiley back our of the conformity of this brave new homoneurotic world and reveal her their past all over again. In other words, the clue to salvation lies in discovering just how successful are the government’s attempts to wipe all memory from the individual mind.

 

Los Angeles, March 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

David C. Jones | Caught / 2008

musical chairs

by Douglas Messerli

 

David C. Jones (screenwriter and director) Caught / 2008 [10 minutes]

 

Canadian director David C. Jones’ short film Caught is a narrative without spoken dialogue set in 1948. The story is told entirely through songs, composed by Kevin McLardy with lyrics by the director that attempt to imitate popular songs of the era.

     After a short introductory orchestral piece, “School Daze” which is visually accompanied by students in a high school hall making out, teasing, and menacing one another, the typical terrors of a main high school hall lined with lockers just before the first class bell has rung. A banner strung along the corridor reads: “Class of ’48. Let’s make it great!”

      Suddenly the scene shifts as a boy new to the school (Brian Hayashi) is seen being introduced to some of his fellow students outside the school building, while a different song, “New Kid” (sung by Tomoko Uryu and Hayashi, the latter who, in fact, is the “new kid” the song is about) drops into position in our imaginary juke box.

 

                       ....I met the new kid in town

                       He made me happy

                       Oh so happy

                       But I never even knew his name.   

 

                       What a shame!

 

      The scene begins with clips of various students, although we do get a longer glimpse of Adam (Joshua James), and soon, as the lyrics change, we realize that despite the vocal being sung by a woman, it reflects the feelings of that boy, as the camera focuses on the interchange between actors Hayashi and James. 

              

                       Then one day when we’re alone

                       Just me and him

                       Then he told me, yeh he told me

                       His name was Jim.

 

       We soon see them walking beside a river together, hamming it up with girls in the school yard, playing darts, and finally with Jim laying upon a bed while Adam talks to him from the floor—the music having changed to the instrumental “Frazzle.”

        The boys argue and mock wrestle, a father briefly entering the room to tell them, evidently, to quiet down and go to bed. Obviously, they are sharing a “sleep over” night. Before we can even adjust to their change into pajamas, a new recording evidently has fallen onto the turntable from the record stack, “Games We Play” (also sung by Tomoko Uryu accompanied by the director Jones):

 

                       When we were kids long ago

                       There were games that we played

                       They seemed when laughing so happy and gay

                       O but baby, those were old days.

 

         Adam and Jim wrestle, the former lays out on the bed flat with an open pajama top, while the other is shown spread out face down without his top.

 

                       Now that we’re older

                       I’m feeling much bolder

                       They’re so many different games we play.

                       O but baby, I’m winnin’ today!

 

       While we hear the lyrics we observe Jim’s hands caressing Adam’s stomach as they gradually move down into his friend’s pants. The next moment they are both under the covers on the bed, kissing gently at first but quickly intensifying, as the music picks up in tempo:

 

                        Red rover, red rover, won’t you come over!

                        Allee-allee-allee-ox-en-free!

 

       From the look on Jim’s face Adam is obviously providing his buddy with a blow job, which is soon after reciprocated.

       So has this little musical version of the dozens of films, feature and short, about coming sexually of age seem to come a joyful end. But subtly something else happens, unrecognized by Adam, as immediately after sex, Jim pushes his friend away and Adam, rising from the bed to go the bathroom, accidently steps on a sharp object, returning to the bed to be ignored by his friend. Even the film’s frame seems briefly to break down, catching on fire.

       The next morning Adam sits at the family breakfast table and walks down the very same school hall of the first scene absolutely, as the cliche goes, “beaming with joy.” A new song has dropped (sung by the composer McLardy) :

 

                        Good morning!

                        It’s going to be a great day for me today

                        with you by my side.

 

                        The sun is shining of my face.

                        I think I’ve finally found my place

                        with you as my bride.

 

     But almost instantly we recognize that the faces of his school fellows and even the school faculty are saying something quite the opposite, most of the people passing Adam with expressions of rejection and disdain, some violently pushing him as they pass, one mouthing what is clearly the word “fag!” We see Jim attentively standing with a girl before giving her a long kiss. Obviously, he has spread the word throughout the school about what happened, likely spinning it to suggest his own complete innocence in whatever he has described as occurring between them.

       Shunned, totally crestfallen, with his foot hurting even worse because of what he has stepped on during the night, Adam stumbles outside, sitting in pain and isolation under a tree—until he spots a girl, evidently the same one who in the first scene had briefly put her arms around his neck as she passed. The boy hurries over to her, kissing her over and over again as if the act he might blot out all the hate he has just suffered.

       In that scene, however, this formerly “cute” flick has suddenly transformed into something else, which if not exactly misogynistic expresses the views of a misogamist. For suddenly we see a gray-haired man in his late 50s or early 60s (Doug Cameron) sitting at a home desk, leafing through a scrapbook of photographs. He directly faces a handsome younger black man working on his patio at whom he stares with obvious pleasure if not lust. A woman, presumably his wife—one imagines it is the same girl upon whose face he planted all those kisses long ago—appears behind, quietly gathering up the scrapbooks and spiriting them off to some shelf or drawer elsewhere. The narrative seems to blame her as much as the homophobia of the school yard of 1948 as having “caught” or even trapped this apparently gay man in a lifetime of sexual “normalcy.”

      Admittedly, in 1948 anyone exposed as being gay were left few alternatives: either deny it or face social and parental rejection and even possible arrest. But suggesting the woman who our character used to help create a lie is the villain of the piece, or even to implicate that our metaphoric Adam has been saddled with sexual orthodoxy simply because of one joyously gay night that ended badly is an idea difficult to accept—even if we know it has happened numerous times with thousands of men in our culture having come to terms with their sexuality after marriage as exemplified in the film Making Love (1982) or more comically expressed by a wife’s later lesbian coming out in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), themes again explored by both sexes in later works by Todd Haynes and others. However, if the flaw is in the society, it is the individual who ultimately must be blamed for lack of courage. The wife has not “caught” our hero by her desires, but it is he who has been caught in his own lies to her and himself.

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2021

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

 

Ty Sanga | Come Clean / 2008

repeating violence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Johnny B. Dunn (screenplay), Ty Sanga (director) Come Clean / 2008 [12 minutes]

 

Ty Sanga’s 2008 short film, Come Clean, begins at a group therapy session where a gentleman has just finished discussing his long painful relationship with is male companion who has died of AIDS. The group approves of his open confessions and turns to Jeremy (David Wassleton), who has apparently begun the group several weeks earlier, but has gone missing from its last few sessions.

     He is still in terrible pain and suffers from deep guilt for having suggested he and his lover visit a new trendy gay bar, a meeting to which he arrived late. When he finally gets there he is greeted by the sight of his lover laying in a pool of blood, evidently a victim of a homophobic crime. Encouraged to post a picture of his lost lover to the group bulletin board, Jeffrey hulks out, clearly resenting the other members’ inability to comprehend his deep suffering and sense of guilt for the event.

     Sometime later we meet up again with Jeffrey, this time involved in the mundane action of washing and drying his clothes. Suddenly a young man, Mark (Jack Littman) comes rushing into the laundromat, blood on his shirt. He is being chased by two others in a pick-up truck, and Jeremy draws the conclusion quickly that he is suffering from a homophobic attack, suggesting he hide out in the back. When the two brutes come looking for Mark, he claims not to have seen him, but one of them suspects something and prepares to beat the “fag” who refuses to reply, the other pulling him away with the belief that Mark has escaped.

      They drive off, and Mark comes out from hiding. But when Jeremy suggests they need to call the police and attempts to see if he was wounded, given the blood on his shirt, the boy unintentionally tells him “It’s not my blood,” at the same moment when the boy’s cellphone (which  he has previously denied he has with him) rings. Suddenly Jeremy recognizes that, in fact, Mark was not the victim but was with the others, and gradually the story of an unintentional beating and murders of a gay for who Mark served as the decoy is told.

      Mark attempts to go on the run, but Jeremy holds him back, waiting for the police so that the boy will be forced to tell the authorities of how he was unintentionally involved in a homophobic murder nearby, the victim’s body still laying in a nearby alley.

       We hear the police siren soon after.

      And in the last frame, Jeremy pins his lover’s picture to the board where the other grievers of the group have left their evidence of lost love and source of their grief.

        Apparently, having been able to right this situation has helped to remove Jeremy’s sense of guilt for his own lover’s fate.

      I’m not certain that I buy into this psychological explanation of the resolving of survivor’s guilt, particularly since although Jeremy may have now finally brought justice to bear in this situation, the entire series of events, given Mark’s somewhat passive but still apparent homophobia is not truly resolved. A promise to never be involved in such a situation again seems an easy out for someone who has just helped to kill a gay man. And the entire scene in the laundromat is somewhat muddled, without Jeremey actually taking much of an active role, accept to hold back the kid. He cannot call the police, for example, because as he tells the group he’s thrown his own cellphone away. And, finally, the self-help group seems to me a little too programmed with snappy resolutions to such situations, as does the film itself. The quality of the print is unfortunately equally murky and muddled.

       Yet Sanga’s short attempts to provide a very different perspective on homophobic attacks on gay men, representing it from the point of view from those who are left behind and must suffer not only the loss of one they loved, but a fear and confusion of their existence in such a brutal society.

Since this film, Sanga has gone on to direct several films about what appears to be his native Hawai’i.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).