pop! goes my cultural
balloon
by Douglas Messerli
Eric Ulloa (screenplay), Andrew Keenan Bolger
(director) Mickey's Army / 2023 [11 minutes]
Narineh Tahmasebian (screenwriter and
director) I Love Nancy Meyers / 2023 [15 minutes]
Ethan Fuirst and Patrick Ness (screenplay), Ethan Fuirst (director) Rumpelstiltskin / 2023 [8 minutes]
Blake Lucius Giffey (screenwriter and
director) Throckadacia / 2023 [13 minutes]
Eva Malmberg (screenwriter and director) Boybend
/ 2023 [14 minutes]
Apa Agbayani (screenwriter and director) Somewhere All The Boys Are Birds / 2023 [11 minutes]
Hannah Rafkin (screenwriter and director) Crush
Icebergs / 2022 [15 minutes]
Devin Rowe (screenwriter and director) The
Prince’s Dilemma / 2023 [5 minutes]
Nearly all my life, whenever I have interacted
with others in social situations, because of my preference for the difficult
and complexity in literature, performance, and art, I have been described as an
elitist, a term I detest and have come to perceive as being tossed out in
derision whenever anyone wants to ask questions instead of making popular
pronouncements.
Well, it’s just a pop form, I’d argue, as when Welsh miners in one
another’s company, suddenly fall into choral harmony, or when a few drunk
Germans can no longer resist getting up and dancing the zwiefacher.
Only a few years ago, Neil Patrick Harris, performing at the 2011 Tony
Award Ceremony revealed what many had long known about Broadway, however, that
“It’s Not Just for Gays Anymore,” suggesting that the dumbed-down musicals
which I no longer admired and now attracts busloads of tourists, senior
citizens, and suburban New Yorkers, young and old had changed the medium to
which as a child I had been so very attracted:
If you've seen a show
Then you already know
How magical theater can be
It's a two-hour, live-action
Barely affordable, un-lip-synced version of Glee
So, this song goes out to the rest of you
Those who've never seen theater before
Because Broadway has never been broader
It's not just for gays anymore!
If you feel like someone that this world
excludes
It's no longer only for dudes who like dudes
Attention every breeder
You're invited to the theater
It's not just for gays anymore!
The glamor of Broadway is beckoning straights
The people who marry in all fifty states
We're asking every hetero
To get to know us better-o
It's not just for gays anymore!
It's for fine, upstanding Christians
Who know all the songs from Grease
It's for sober-minded businessmen
Who yearn for some release
While he’s singing this wonderful ditty chorus boys and girls, gay and
lesbian, dressed as sailors and nuns dance around him, lifting him to new
heights.
All
those teenage years, when I thought I was merely engaged in the popular
culture, it turns out I was actually involved in a world that, according to
lyrics not included in the above, was beloved mostly by gays, Jews, and
intellectuals. No wonder nobody in high school could comprehend where I’d been
most days, after listening to and memorizing recording after recording of
everything from Carousel, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, Finian’s
Rainbow, Juno and The Most Happy Fella to West Side Story,
Do Re Me, Cabaret, Candide, She Loves Me, Greenwillow,
and Anyone Can Whistle. Since I didn’t know that in those days that
Broadway meant “gay”—and I didn’t even quite know what “gay” really meant—I
just thought I was sharing in popular culture, even if no one I knew in my
hometown Marion, Iowa was participating in my pop culture forays.
It
was the same thing, in my mind, when I began reading Marcel Proust, Djuna
Barnes, Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, John Hawkes, Tennessee Williams, Paul
Celan, Junichiro Tanizaki, and James Joyce. I certainly didn’t perceive myself
as an elitist. I just liked to think and challenge by own thinking.
I
admit it, I was wrong. I guess I really was an elitist all those years when I
was stupid and young. But now that I’d grown old and wise, devoting so many
years to gay cinema, certainly a form that depended a great deal on popular
culture, I thought I must have entered a new world where my mind might have
popped open: I mean, I’d even written several pieces on David Bowie, Elton
John, Queen, and Lil Nas X. Certainly I might be forgiven my obsession with
Jane Bowles, whose director felt he needed to hire a psychiatrist to help cast
members come to terms with her play In the Summer House.
And
yes, I’d even finally assimilated the notion of the doll Barbie becoming the
major subject of a motion pictures.
When I saw that NewFest was this year offering a series of shorts titled
“Pop! Goes the Culture,” accordingly, I immediately ordered up a ticket,
expecting some of the notions of pop culture I’d assimilated after so many
years of writing on queer cinema.
You
can only imagine by depression when I discovered that I could hardly sit
through these 8 simple-minded and utterly tedious short films, aimed it appears
at the same audiences who sincerely relate to Madonna’s tenth face lift and
Britney Spears’ struggles to regain control over her own finances—although even
those seem intellectually provocative when you compare the empty-headed advice
that the three pop cultural surrogates, Lady Slay (Shuga Cain, a sort of drag
Of
course, they have to come down from their posters, wiggle themselves from their
on-line images, and pull themselves out from the under the bed—quite a
feat—before they can come together to provide him such profound observations
that “life is all about the choices you make and what inspires those choices”; moreover,
as Chad reveals, after being on his inner podcast on zen, the most important
thing of all is “self love.” He and Mikey go back and forth telling each other
things they like about themselves! A truly original idea!
The
singer keeps trying to rhyme words like “connected” and “accepted,” while Lady
Slay gets to the heart of the matter: Enough of this nonsense! What he really
needs is self-confidence. Wow, what a revelation!
Together they wear him into shape to be able to talk to a mother until
he realizes that the real issue, after all, is not the mother, she insisting
that he just tell his friend that he loves him! The problem has been Mikey’s
fearful revelation to the boy that he loves, not his sexual identity to the
open-minded mother. They make a date.
So
ends a film whose major figures, a support group of pop culture figures, has
already been put to work in Glenn Gaylor’s 2001 Boychick, where another
singer, resembling Britney Spears, comes down from the wall poster to provide
advice to a gay boy; Adam Baran’s Jackpot (2012), where a young man gets
lessons in how to protect himself from a model in a porn magazine; and in Art
Arutyunyan’s Christmas Coming Out (2021), where the endlessly reluctant
young man gets the courage from his childhood toy Ranger, “Captain Courage,” to
finally tell his parents about his sexuality which they have been endlessly
waiting for him to reveal.
Narineh Tahmasebian’s I Love You Nancy Myers began, at least, a
little more promisingly, with two lesbians, sharing dinner for the first time,
standing in a sparklingly clean kitchen island where Farrah (Charlotte
Benesch), having learned to cook in France, has whipped up a delicious meal to
impress her new girlfriend Beatriz (Paul Andrea Placido). Both seem very
compatible feminists, attracted to one another. What could go wrong? A choice
of a movie to watch proves the disaster in this case, particularly when
Beatriz, clicking through Farrah’s cellphone discovers it filled with the films
of Nancy Meyers.
If you don’t who Nancy Meyers is, well you’re just…well not a female. I
too had to look her up, although I had seen, rather unfortunately, several of
her films including Private Benjamin (1980)—you know? with Goldie Hawn; Irreconcilable
Differences (1984) with Shelley Long and Ryan O’Neal; Baby Boom
(1987) with Diane Keaton, for which she wrote the script which Charles Shyer
directed, The Father of the Bride 1 (1991) (2, now in its 6th edition)
with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton, Martin Short performing as the snobbish,
impossible to comprehend, wedding planner, Franck Eggelhoffer; and a very
successful remake of Disney’s The
Parent Trap (1998) with Dennis Quaid and Natasha Richardson with that
absolutely remarkably stable actor Lindsay Lohan playing the twins.
Of
course, these girls argue, Beatriz attempting to put some sense into Farrah’s
comically, romantically-stuffed head, only to discover that Farrah does
actually want all those “things” that Meyers’ characters movies want: a
beautiful home, husband, and kids who can gather round the kitchen island for
her good cooking.
Incidentally the kitchen island which Beatriz is now sharing with her is
actually Farrah’s mother’s and father’s and the whole evening’s been a ruse of
“let’s pretend.”
Beatriz moves into a feminist analysis of what’s missing in Nancy
Meyer’s films, which only leads Farrah to insist that now she knows what her
role in life should be, to write a lesbian script for Meyers so that her women
may be truly representative. Beatriz, it appears, finally gives up with the
“heavy” talk and pulls the pretty girl into her childhood bed.
All right, if those movies hadn’t really captured my imagination, I
imagined that perhaps the next film, Ethan Fuirst’s Rumpelstiltskin might.
Although I’d never thought of the Grimm Brother’s tale and the numerous
international versions of it such as Tom Tit Tot (England), Whuppity
Stoorie (Scotland), Gilitrutt (Iceland), Rumplcimprcampr (Russia),
Pancimanci (Hungary), Myrmidon (France), etc. as being part of
pop culture, although I guess an oral tale more than 4,000 years old has to be
recognized as part of pop culture.
Nonetheless, perhaps you don’t fully remember that story; I had to
remind myself. A braggart miller spreads the word throughout the kingdom that
his daughter can spin gold from hay. The King calls for the daughter and for
three different nights, in varying sizes of rooms, demands that before morning
she turn all the straw to gold or she shall die. A strange imp appears each
night and proceeds to accomplish the task, the first time the girl awarding him
a necklace of glass beads, the second a glass ring, and third time admitting
that she had nothing left to give him. He demands her first born child, to
which the silly girl agrees.
The King marries the miller’s daughter and when her first child is born,
the imp reappears, demanding it to be handed over. Trying to buy him off now
with real jewels, he won’t accept them, giving her only one out: in three days’
time she must guess his name or give up the babe.
Distressed and hopeless, the queen wanders out into the forest where,
unbeknownst to the imp, she discovers him as he hops about his bonfire singing:
“Tonight tonight, my plans I make, tomorrow tomorrow, the baby I take. The
queen will never win the game, for Rumpelstiltskin is my name."
When he shows up again at her doorstep, she feigns momentary confusion
before providing him with the name, to which, depending upon which version you
read, he runs off never to return or flies out the window on a cooking ladle.
Some versions even have him digging himself a kind of grave in which he creates
a chasm in the earth.
But this imp doesn’t seem to mind since, he argues, he keeps them as
friends, he spins the straw of failed relationships into the gold of long-term
relationships. Yet given the empty and lonely nights he seems to be experienced
in the few scenes of this short film, we have to wonder whether his boast is
really true. Although these men all mention him as a “friend,” their
relationships still appear to be rather dour and off-putting. At one point they
gather to sing the wonderful Lionel Bart song from his musical Oliver:
OLIVER
Who will buy this wonderful morning?
Such a sky you never did see!
Who will tie it up with a ribbon, and put it
in a box for me?
So I could see it at my leisure
Whenever things go wrong
And I would keep it as a treasure
To last my whole life long
But his friends sing more like a dirge that the joyful song of the
original, and it appears no one is truly infected with the spirit of the
lyrics. No one is apparently willing to buy this imp’s gold, and apparently no
one believes his myth of eternal friendship after the bad beginning of a love
affair. This boy’s chorus is filled with sad faces, and the popular world our
contemporary Rumpelstilskin imagines appears to be one of folktale and myth.
The director of the fourth pop-oriented queer film on this NewFest list,
Blake Lucius Griffey has commented that he likes to combine things “in
surprising ways,” and is particularly interested in the genre of the variety
show, “a natural way to bring together different pieces that do not necessarily
match.”
That certainly does seem to be the case with what appears to be an
on-line talk show which Sterling (Blake Lucius Giffey) and his roommate (Jo
Ellen Pellman) act out a world that includes a true mix of arts in a satire of
something like a yuppy New York City version of Martha Stewart without any of
the talent and style.
Sterling’s and his roommate’s first endeavor centers around explaining
to their audiences that a 6:00 party means they have to prepare dinner, while a
7:00 hour suggests only hors d’oeuvres, which is why all their parties begin at
9:00 which means serving up something like their marvelous home-made deviled
eggs, a small plate of which they made up previously and proceed to taste,
commenting on the excellent flavor of the relish and the paprika they added at
the very last moment.
From there they move on to a kind of chat, the roommate insisting that
she always eats too quickly without proper chewing, to which Sterling comments:
“Well you always are in a rush: through life, through lovers/ through food :)
but that’s okay.”
His ex-lover, it appears, in now in love with his roommate.
Sterling reshoots the chatty scene, this time his roommate hardly able
to get in a word—a problem, it appears, for anyone attempting to
extemporaneously chat with Sterling.
A
short while later he has invited his ex-lover, obviously a former performer on
the short to join in a strange 1960s-like group dance, in which all three
performers dance in precision with Sterling while he sings.
Love’s a silly little game
With so many pieces to choose from
Will you be the top hat
Or the bag full of money?
Oh, it is all a shame
Oh it is so stupid
And foolish
This weary dreary aim
So jouv’nile
And facile
It’s really such a shame
To go to such lengths
To find such a real dud
I'd rather chew on cud
Oooooooooohh loooove it is just…..ahhgh
Giffey is clearly a choreographer as well.
After the dance, he tells his Roomate that she can leave and pulls over
his ex-lover to show how to properly arrange a flower vase, using the flowers
his ex-lover has brought for the roommate as well as others.
And finally, for the last event of this variety show, Sterling reads
from reader “mailbag.” Today’s it’s a poem:
“Dearest Mailbag,
I’d
like to share a poem with you.”
Okay
“I woke from the dream on a dark saturday
morning
Went outside to rinse it off myself
The moon was still high and the air was blue
What if I floated up to the ceiling
And then went through it
And never stopped going
“This
is the end of the road” i thought to myself
The men in black Cadillacs said it was over
One day I will regret that all I have to show
for my twenties is a bunch of pictures of myself
Is it legal to soft launch someone then break
up with them the next day?
We come back from commercial and suddenly I’m
fine
I never noticed how much things twinkled
Until I really started missing you
So this is how I am now?
At the mercy of a gust of wind?
From,
A dear reader”
Sterling, someone touched by the poem doesn’t quite know how to read it.
But we can perceive that it probably from his ex-lover, and through that poem
and reading through the lines of his ongoing dialogue for his former “skits,”
we can perceive that Sterling is one of the most monstrously self-centered
individuals that has even been recorded to such Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok
performances. He hasn’t a clue to his own emptiness, nor his effect upon
others. Cute and talented as he is, Sterling might as well be the undesirable
Rumpelstiltskin without even the alleged friends of Fiurst’s short film.
I
don’t know where or even what Throckadacia really is, but I certainly wouldn’t
want to go there, and didn’t truly enjoy my visit to what might have been a
smart satire which became a rather painful statement about a self-enchanted
on-line performer who, in this case, is uncomfortably close to the talented but
seeming clueless director of the film.
I
had far more hopes for Swedish director Eva Malmberg’s Boybend about
four 30-some-year-old dykes who wanted to explore the transition from young
girls who spent lives as boyband fans
We
watch the four members of this boyband, a bending of the usual genders,
dressing up in rather conservative male drag, which results in mostly trimming
their hair and pasting on some of those shorn curls into slight three-day
beards. The performers, Haspern Anna Hedman, Bob Linn Pettersson, Jessica
Engwall, and Kelly Werner each take on a fairly convincing persona, while
getting ready to perform in public and participating in celebrity promotional
shoots.
This group actually does write and perform music, but as the short film
moved on, it was clear that they were far more interested in demonstrating
their preparation for their gigs and their funny and quite satisfying
interrelationships with one another than in actually carrying their quite
brilliant metaphor into the real world. Although the performers do sing a
rather mediocre song about the fluidity of various forms of water, river,
stream, fjord, etc.—all serving as metaphor for their own clearly fluid notion
of gender—it increasingly became obvious that sadly the game of drag dress-up
was less interesting than their drag performances, that the metaphor was
stronger than the action to which it was attached. Too bad, since this truly
might have turned the pop imagine inside out or, at least, stood it on its
head, helping us to realize just how ridiculous was our worship of male youth.
The
more poignant film about the dangers of fanship was presented in Apa
Agbayanni’s Somewhere All the Boys Are Birds. The Philippines-born
director’s work concerns a heavy fan, Benjie (Miko Tiu-Laurel) who has spent
most of his youth following the music career of the popular singer Jaime Reyes,
who evidently had a boyfriend name Paulo.
Tired of all the constant attention and noise around him, when he broke
up with Paulo, Jaime (Alfredo Reyes) evidently moved to New York City to escape
into a private world of quiet and obscurity. But clearly, he was no more
accepted in his new world, than he was as a real person in his homeland. And,
it appears, that recognizing that fact he committed suicide by jumping off the
building in which he lived.
Apa Agbayani’s film begins with Benjie’s arrival in the city and his
climb up the stairs to the roof of the building from which Jaime jumped. There
he meets up with ghost of the popular singer, telling him of the spectacular
three-day funeral that was celebrated in his homeland (no, his beloved Paulo
did not attend) and of how he is still loved by fans around the world such as
him.
Jaime attempts to help Benjie to dissociate himself from the past, and
realize all the potentiality of his youth. But apparently it is not to be,
since near the end of the film, the ghosts asks if he’s ready just as he
disappears. Will Benjie also take the leap, leaving his hand-colored photos and
drawings of Jaime behind, or will he walk back down those steps and return to a
real life. Alas, we suspect by the title and Benjie’s fanaticism that, like
Jaimie, he may be one of the boys who feels that he too can fly off like bird
to escape a world that does not fit his imagination.
In
many respects, this too is a kind of empty work, but at least it sees its
characters through sympathetic or even pathetic eyes, allowing us to imbue with
some small sense of dimension.
Hannah Rafkin’s comic take, Crush Icebergs, on what it means as a
young LGBTQ figure to have crush on others also provides some sort of
dimension. While, she argues, that childhood heterosexual crushes are usually
quite apparent and sometimes openly shared, focused on teachers, fellow
classmates, and celebrities, queer crushes are very different, more like
icebergs which have a small view at the top and a deep mass of ice below. At
the top gays and lesbians mostly present themselves as being in love with
likeable and shareable people of the same sex, handsome sports figures, music
icons, and sometimes unlikely people of the same sex such as male or female
action figures who saved people of the same of the opposite sex, so that the
individual with a crush could imagine that he or she were the one being saved
or that he or she was busy doing the saving of people just like them.
I
remember seeing a pictures of the tightly panted (clearly revealing his cock)
and open-shirted (featuring his hairy chest) picture of Bee-Gees’ singer Randy
Gibbs which almost knocked me out with desire. I had utterly no interest in the
music of the Bee-Gees and knew such fan magazine pictures was meant for female
idolizers of this pop sensation; but in my imagination none of that mattered
below the water where my cock stirred. He was all mine! even if I wasn’t sure
what I would have done with him, having utterly no experience with sex.
Accordingly, I found Rafkin’s metaphor rather entertaining, and believe
that, regarding crushes, she is probably right. But everyone, including the one
who has the crush, also knows it to be totally meaningless. The “crushee”
generally doesn’t even know the dreamer exists, and if they were someone he or
she might know and existed in their world, it was dangerous even to reveal an
attraction.
Crushes occur to teenage boys and girls, who soon outgrow them, just as
my interest in this short, if somewhat insightful, film was not even worth the
distraction. Any real interest in this film would be part of a world of sexual
nostalgia that isn’t even fun to visit after a certain age when you realize how
much more real your life might have been if you’d only dared to speak out and
act.
Pop culture, at least as represented in these films, accordingly did
little for me. Obviously, there are far more complex issues needed to be
approached, issues perhaps hinted at here, but never fully explored. And one
might certainly hope for more profound-thinking writers and directors. Pop
doesn’t have to explode into thin air; it needs to be questioned as a far
deeper social series of issues that might reveal the hearts of those in a time
which seem so basically at war with one another. A work such as Todd Haynes’
documentary The Velvet Underground or, for that matter, any film by John
Waters or Andy Warhol is far more experimental and exploratory than the younger
writers and directors of these short works might ever have imagined.
Los Angeles, October 24, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).
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