Greg Berlanti | Love, Simon / 2018

out of the blue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger (screenplay, based on the novel by Becky Albertalli), Greg Berlanti (director) Love, Simon / 2018

 

Watching the new teen comedy, Love, Simon, yesterday I realized it is not truly a gay story; in fact, we see little of young Simon Spiers’ (Nick Robinson) sexual desires, and even he admits that he is just like everyone else around him. His friends, a long-time (13 years) woman acquaintance, Leah (Katherine Langford), a black woman who has more recently moved to his Atlanta suburb, Abby (Alexandra Shipp), and a black-Hispanic male, Nick (Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.) might represent the most correct coalition of high school relationships possible. Simon is not just “normal,” but almost a model for what young folks should be in this world of anti-racist and forgiving sexuality. Both of his parents, particularly his psycho-therapist mother, Emily (Jennifer Garner), along with his father, Jack (Josh Duhamel) are liberal, and even their son admits that if he told that that he was gay, they would probably be quite accepting. Clearly, this studio movie argues, times have changed from The Boys in the Band, the play and movie which defined my own generation.

      No, the problem here is not in being gay but in admitting (or we might say simply “expressing”) it, in “coming out.” The problem is that in speaking the truth Simon will be perceived as someone else, as a kind of stereotype rather than just an ordinary kid. If his desires are not particularly expressed—he simply feels that he, too, deserves a good love story—the film expresses a great deal of angst about sharing his desires with others. Indeed, a whole sequence plays with the idea of what it might mean if “straight” kids had to express their desires to their parents just as do gay ones. It’s a great comic moment; but, of course, we recognize that normality, even in this fantasy world, will never be perceived as being homosexual; heterosexuals are simply privileged in our society.

     My companion Howard has expressed that his greatest fear of being gay was that he would become one of the mincing fairies represented in Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band, and, by and large, that is just what Simon fears, that in telling everyone he is gay he will become someone else than he is actually. Throughout the film, he keeps insisting that he is the same person that he has always been, perhaps suggesting that he has been a kind of perfect person. I don’t think all young people register that.

      I have never had those fears, but I certainly did fear speaking to my parents about my sexuality; and when I did, as I’ve noted several times in My Year volumes, they arose from the dinner table and left Howard and me in Washington, D.C., as they quickly made their way back to Iowa. It was a devastating act that, even if they later came to accept me, from which I never quite recovered. Now, in their minds, I was not the same son who had grown up in their house. So, I certainly do know where Simon is coming from. Being gay was not the issue, sharing the fact, particularly with parents and friends, was another problem.

   Fortunately, and quite by accident, Simon discovers, on-line, someone very much in the same position, a young gay man in his own school, who writes under the name “Blue” confessing that he feels that he is on a kind of Ferris Wheel, with terrible highs and lows, and that in his inability to express his sexuality, he is losing himself. Simon almost immediately bonds with him and writes back (how I wish we’d had computers in my day), signing his shared messages, just a few of which we overhear, with the name of Jacques. Together these two internet correspondents try to negotiate the problem they have had to face: how to remain the beloved kids they are while simultaneously having to keep such deep secrets.

      As the film casually explores, all young teenagers are in similar positions, being afraid to lay their emotions on the line, fearing to express love for one another because of the possibility of rejection or to tell of their own private fears because they might suddenly be mocked by their multiple interlinking “groups.”

     Perhaps, like Ethan (Clark Moore)—an apparently transgender student, who announces early on that she is also “gay”—being an outsider, as I was, may actually be an advantage. Being an “insider,” as is Simon, creates problems that doesn’t easily allow an admission of “outsiderness.”

    Much of this lovely film is simply a detective story, as Simon attempts to uncover the young man with whom is has now fallen in love. At first, he suspects Bram (Keiynan Lonsdale), but when he discovers him about to engage in sex with a female classmate, crosses him off the list.

     Later, he suspects a handsome local waiter, Kyle (Joey Pollari), but when that lad asks him about dating one of his female friends, the illusion is also destroyed. Who could “Blue” be, and how might he find him, a particularly difficult task now that “Blue” has come out to his father and has retreated to a WiFi free camping retreat to re-bond with his dad? What is the now fixated Simon to do?

     At last, he suspects a young gay-looking boy, who, when he finally confronts him, also leads to a wrong alley.

     In comes the film’s only real villain, the clumsy, comical, and self-serving Martin Addison (Logan Miller), the true outsider of this school community, who has a crush on Simon’s friend Abby and who, after discovering Simon’s communication with “Blue” on a school internet connection, blackmails Simon into helping him get a date. In doing so, Simon betrays all of his friends, trying to rearrange their social involvements at the very moment when such young people are already simply “scared” to express them. In short, to protect his own neck, Simon makes their own “coming out” commitments impossible. When, after a completely failed and utterly comic attempt to woo Abby, Martin finally releases Simon’s on-line messages, the young hero is now utterly shunned. Unintentionally is has accomplished just what he most feared: he is now “someone else,” a person excluded by the very people he was fearful might abandon him.

     Since this film is a teen comedy, of course, things do work out. Simon, finally, is re-embraced by his family—despite, in one of the most painful scenes in the entire move, his younger sister, Nora, arguing that he should simply deny the gay accusations—and, ultimately, by his best friends, particularly after an ugly incident when both he and Ethan are mocked in the school lunchroom.

     After a high school musical production of Cabaret, Simon signs on again, this time pleading with the mysterious “Blue,” to show up on the Ferris Wheel after the production to take that wild ride of ups and downs with him. At first it does not seem that his plea will work, and even the always clumsy, John Belushi-like clown, Martin arrives to argue that he is actually “Blue,” the idea of which Simon, and we, reject. Fortunately, Bram arrives at the very last moment to take a seat next to Simon and ride up to the skies before returning to earth again. I can’t tell you why, but I knew Bram was “Blue” all along. Maybe, as an actor, he was just too convincing in the role.

     In the end, Greg Berlanti’s teen comedy does not truly plow deep territory, but its concerns about speaking out does, and I now believe it screams volumes about young people speaking out, particularly after what we have just witnessed when the Marjory Stoneman High School students from Parkland and millions of other teenagers have seemingly come to life and intelligently spoken up and out about something that has long been troubling them and the entire country—far more tragic than their sexuality! If my legs were stronger, I would have loved to have marched along with them on the very same day I was watching this movie. But my mind is still functioning, and my gift, I hope, is that I can still write.

 

Los Angeles, March 25, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2018).

Giorgos Lanthimos | The Favourite / 2018

17 babies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara (writers), Giorgos Lanthimos (director) The Favourite / 2018

 

As many critics and viewers with whom I communicated felt, Giorgos Lanthimos’ 2018 film, co-produced by companies from Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the USA, is an enjoyable comic romp about two women, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rael Weisz) and Abigail Masham, later Baroness Masham (Emma Stone) who vie for the “love” of Anne, Queen of Great Britain (Olivia Colman).

      Americans, the British, and evidently the Irish can’t get enough of the kind of “upstairs/downstairs” intrigue that this film, by the totally eccentric Greek director Lanthimos, provides. Here it’s all evident, as Abigail, sold by her father to a German in a card game, comes filthily into Anne’s court (she literally falls into the dirty mud and pig-slough as she arrives after a long carriage ride). Witnessing, from her new position as a scullery-maid, what is truly going on in this court, in particular that Sarah is evidently sharing the bed of the ailing queen, creating a kind of lesbian relationship that might or might not have been the reality of the historical Queen Anne.

     It hardly matters, since once Lanthimos, through the script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara takes us through an early 18th century romp filmed within the walls of the Hatfield House in Hertfordshire and at Hampton Court Palace in Hampton Court, Surrey, we have entered another world which is beyond any concept of realism. This is perfect Downton Abbey territory, with far more treacherous behavior, as the two possible queen consorts battle it out with graceful bows, guns, and drugs. Abigail ultimately wins out over the almost masculinely powerful Sarah, and she shifts the power structure from the Tory-based demand for war with France to a more pacific retreat which will surely allow property owners in the United Kingdom to achieve greater wealth.

     It is delightful at times to see these two powerful lesbian-aligned women fight it out, particularly given the current issues of Brexit, where many of that country’s citizens want to cut off relationships with the rest of Europe as opposed to allowing a deep interrelationship with the continent with which they are divided only by their island isolation.

     On the one side is Sarah, determined to conquer the European relationships, while on the other is the beautiful Abigail, who helps the Queen realize that the strategies of retreat might allow for better communication with the European continent. Given the historical context, I might argue that Abigail’s manipulation of the royal cunt (a word used quite often in this film) was highly beneficial.

       The much-manipulated Queen, however, is not so certain—particularly when she observes the newly acclaimed Keeper of the Privy Purse pressing her shoe against the head of one of her 17 beloved rabbit bunnies, representing the same number of children whom she has had to suffer their deaths. Why, one must ask, did so many innocents die in her palace? Something is clearly rotten in the Palace of Whitehall in the heart of London.

       Lanthimos, accordingly, suggests a complete overthrow of the masculine world, where the males, dressed up in wigs, pale makeup, and rouged cheeks, are the true stereotypical feminine figures of this world, even if they still presume power. We know, through the back rooms of Queen Anne’s kitchens and bedroom, that they are, in fact, merely pawns in the power-struggle they imagine themselves involved with. Anne shifts positions as her vagina is entertained. She may even regret her changing decisions, but we recognize them as realignments with her lesbian associates. In this matriarchically-dominated world, the men are only spokesmen for the queen’s transforming perceptions, which is one of the major delights of this film, pretending, just for a few moments, that the issues of politics are truly controlled, in this instance, by women.

     In a larger sense, what Lanthimos is allowing us to perceive is a future male which we have not quite imagined yet. Except that the world we might not even have imagined will surely not be controlled by terribly arthritically pained woman, who can barely read her occasional major statements of governance (which surely must remind us of another now famous government figure). Since Anne could hardly read her daily messages, she made many of decisions based on the influence of her sexual liaisons. I believe that in this film Lanthimos has got it quite right, even if we cannot, finally, truly like any of the figures involved in the society which he has presented.

      None of his characters are nice people, none of them morally admirable. But then that is true in our own ruling leaders as well. And this film demonstrates just how sad that is—despite our utter enjoyment in watching how it might play out.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).  

 

Grant Singer | My, My, My / 2018 [music video]

rushing forward to sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Troye Sivan (performer), Troye Sivan Mellet, Brett McLaughlin, Oscar Görres, and James Alan Ghaleb (lyricists and composers), Grant Singer (director) My, My, My / 2018 [3:30 minutes] [music video]

 

One of the most memorable of gay Australian pop icon Troye Sivan’s songs, My, My, My was released on his second album, Something to Give Each Other in January 10th, 2018, and was first performed live on Saturday Night Live on January 20th. The song, he has admitted, was inspired by his then relationship with US model and photographer Jacob Bixenman, a relationship which lasted from 2016-2020.

   At the time, the song was described as a break-through declaring pure gay passion, and immediately moving to the heart of the issue wherein two men keep “Running from love” at the very moment that each night they “die” in one another’s arms. The constantly shifting frames of Sivan’s willowy figure (Sivan suffers from a mild condition of mild form of Marfan syndrome), mostly in black-and-white, with an open shirt rushing away as he moves in a kind of frenzied forward dance, help to reiterate the almost breathless utterance of the chorus:  

    

Oh my, my, my

I die every night with you

Oh my, my, my

Living for your every move

 

    The video begins with its general statement of what seems to be his nearly breathless condition of passion:

 

Shine on, diamond

Don't make me wait another day

'Cause passion is passion

You know it just as well as me

     This is followed by a pre-chorus that summarizes the difficulties of that fact:

 

Now, let's stop running from love

Running from love

Let's stop, my baby

Let's stop running from us

Running from us

Let's stop, my baby

 

    And is followed by the chorus which cannot even fully express its love, leading with the phrase “My, my, my.”

 

    The second statement even more fully exclaims their passion:

 

Spark up, buzz cut

I got my tongue between your teeth

Go slow, no, no, go fast

You like it just as much as me

 

    By the end of the song, the curly blond-haired singer (blond, at least in this video) cannot do anything except respirate his passion, repeating the chorus over and over.

    This short gay work almost smells of lust and sweat, as we see both singer and brief blips of his lover. The rush forward to sex says everything about the work we need to know. 

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Greta Snider | Hard-Core Home Movie / 1989 || Greta Snider | Our Gay Brothers / 1993 || Jill Reiter | The Birthday Party / 1994 || Rick Castro | Dr. Chris Teen Sex Surrogate / 1994 || Scott Treleaven | The Salivation Army / 2001

gay gangs, drag queen lesbians, and indulgent cross-dressing mothers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bradford Nordeen, curator Hardcore Home Movies / Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at Disney Hall, March 2, 2015

     Greta Snider (director) Hard-Core Home Movie / 1989

     Greta Snider (director) Our Gay Brothers / 1993

      Jill Reiter (director) The Birthday Party / 1994

      Rick Castro (director) Dr. Chris Teen Sex Surrogate / 1994

     Scott Treleaven (director) The Salivation Army / 2001

 

The crudely conceived, rough-cut, home-made quality of these gay and lesbian movies from 1989-2001, attempt in their audacious characterizations and their outré behavior to satirize, challenge, and explore sexual identity. Not all of them succeed.

     Jonesy’s Fiend, for instance, shot in Super 8, shows clips from a “legendary sex party” of 1994, as the members of the queerchord band, Fagbash, tear off their clothes and, in solitary shots, masturbate. Yes, there are moments here of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, particularly in the fact that despite the truly “hardcore” images, there is nothing truly erotic about this film. Yet it also lacks the joyful innocence of Flaming Creatures, and in its presentation of such “solitary pleasures,” it participates in, rather than satirizing, the 1990s sense of self-infatuation.

     Greta Snider’s 1989 Hard-Core Home Movie, in fact, presents us with no hardcore images, but rather features teenagers and numerous others expressing their opinions of what hardcore images mean and why are they of interest. Filmed in San Francisco, the commentators are hardly able to express themselves, but are nearly all in agreement that such images are appealing, alluring, and important as expressions of societal disregard. Giggling, sticking out their tongues in mockery and tease, these mostly young interviewees clearly see themselves as part of the underground picture which Snider’s grainy images depicts.

     Far campier and wittily self-aware, Jill Reiter’s The Birthday Party (1994) depicts a sixteen year old girl celebrating her birthday with her only two friends, one a Jehovah’s Witnesses proselytizer and the other described as “a precocious slut.” Presumably the 16-year old lesbian girl can find no other friends, for which her “mother,” a hippie played by a drag queen compensates by requiring her boyfriend to lasciviously deliver up a birthday cake while a male dancer and female sex worker entertain them. Shot just like the 1960s homemade films, in faded out colors, the film takes family life by the balls, overturning any presumably “normal” conventions and forcing us to reconsider the whole concept of motherly and fatherly love.

     Perhaps the most disturbing and truly conceptual of these films is Scott Treleaven’s The Salivation Army of 2001, which documents the director’s and his friend’s fascination with outsider images of blood, sex, spit, and cult life. These images, he suggests, are always appealing to the young who feel separated from the world around them; and suddenly, through the early violent images of the film, we cannot help but make connections with some of today’s youth who, inexplicably to most, become attracted to murderous armies such as those of ISIS.   

     To promote their counterculture “gang,” Treleaven and his friends develop a zine, featuring events of mock violence and a blood exchange between members. One young “recruit,” however demands that they truly beat and rape him, which they somewhat unwillingly agree too, filming the images. Suddenly, their popularity not only increases but they begin to receive messages and films from others who take their violence seriously, apparently doing actual harm to their recruits, some of whose members seem determined to take their “mock” cult into true cult territory. The group, which have determined to have no coherent manifesto nor dogma for their acts, were suddenly faced with a dangerous usurpation of their purposely amorphous activities and beliefs. Faced with the brutality they have accidently bred; they are forced to close their zine and disband. And the film itself is transformed into a kind of shamed confessional, helping to make The Salivation Army a far more important document than the others included in this program.

     The most outrageous of these films, however, is Rick Castro’s “Dr. Chris Teen Sex Surrogate,” the third part of his Three Faces of Women—a kind of camp deconstruction of Joanne Woodward’s Three Faces of Eve. This portion of the triptych from 1994 features Fonda LaBruce and Vaginal Davis as two drag queen lesbians whose sex life has gone missing. Without telling David, LaBruce has called in Dr. Chris Teen, a sex therapist, to reenergize their love, which Dr. Chris proceeds to do with the introduction of several large dildos, foot-kissing fetish activities, and slightly sadist aggressions. Not only does it seem to work, but the hilarious, pyscho-babbling, cliché-spouting Dr. Chris joins them in bed. In an after-event discussion, Castro commented that in 1994, when the film was shot in Manhattan by the famed porn director, Bob Alvarez, they were attempting to take identity in directions which had never before been conceived, but which today have become quite ordinary.

     Greta Snider’s Our Gay Brothers (1993), finally, takes found film footage from porn movies, children’s instructional films, and sports scenes while various gay men express their opinions about the opposite sex. Many of these are, predictably, favorable, but an increasing number of their comments begin to build up a huge chasm of hostility gays and women, as words such as “fish,” “sticky,” “flabby,” etc. etc. begin to crackle through the air, while Snider closes out the film with a recurring image, reversed in direction and pattern, of a woman swimmer diving through mid-air that seems to contradict almost all the negative assertions that are being expressed.

    Surely contemporary theorists on gender and queer studies will make enormous claims for these independent experiments. But, unfortunately, they remain too raw, poorly conceived, and anti-intellectual to truly challenge our cultural thinking. At the most they are titillating caricatures that suggest directions rather than thoroughly exploring them.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2015

 

Michael Brynntrup | Narziss und Echo (Narcissus and Echo) / 1989

pattern and repetition

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Brynntrup (screenwriter and director) Narziss und Echo (Narcissus and Echo) / 1989

 

The always clever German filmmaker Michael Brynntrup begins his Narziss und Echo with the following statement:

 

“A film in the form of a riddle is a special kind of entertainment film where the film’s content must be deduced from the film’s structure.”

    

     For those who might be frightened off from his challenge, I might only suggest that he begins this comic film with precisely the structure he is hinting at. The wealthy Echo Tima the Divine, a performer in drag, flanked by her three women-in-waiting is at her boudoir dressing table counting her fingers in alternation of the left and right hand, repeating the phrase “He loves me, he loves me not” 20 times, as her ladies (Petra Krause, Lina Androwna, and Ovamaltine, also men in drag) twitter in alarm, particularly when her litany ends predictably with “He loves me not.”

     She applies her lipstick, handing it over to one of her domestics (the duo played by the twins Patricia and Sylvia Jung), when there is a knock on her door.

     Outside stands Narcissus’ two domestics (two male twins, Carsten and Rolf Grunwald) who hand her their master’s calling card. Echo waves them to permit him to enter.

     Narcissus (Helge Musial) strides forward with great confidence. He kneels before her, asking for her forgiveness, and she offers her hand, telling him to say nothing. Bending to kiss her hand, he instead pulls her fingers into his mouth. Shocked by the act, she stands and slaps him as he pulls her close to him in a deep embrace, she pulling away, declaring she hates him, and sends him away. He leaves but not before grabbing up her  alabaster image of him and tossing it to the floor where it breaks into fragments.

      This might be described as the first act, and in case you hadn’t observed, most of what we witness in this scene is repeated, Echo’s questioning of Narcissus’ love or not loving, her two twin female domestics, Narcissus’ two male twin domestics, etc. Accordingly, we can be sure that the rest of the film will repeat either through inversion or doubling the same pattern.

       It is now Spring, and Echo is sexually aroused and certainly on the prowl as she determines to visit Narcissus. As she moves to the palace she is seen between three stone curvatures of the wall, reminding us of her own three ladies in waiting. But when she reaches her lover’s palace he is nowhere to be found, she calling out to him in repetitions of his name: “Narziss, Narziss.” Only his domestics appear, barely responding to the visitor, far too busy as they are with their own lovemaking, images as they are of one another.

       After a number of calls, Echo begins to lose her voice but encounters the two servants on the grand staircase, who finally greet her (and incidentally alternate from being both dressed in white tights to one dressed in white, the other in black). Narcissus stands now as a stone stature looking at his former “real” image trapped in the mirror, in his time apart from Echo having fallen in love clearly with his own image.

       When Echo gets a glimpse of what has happened she faints upon the stairs and from thence forward can only repeat part of what Narcissus has to say about the situation of her having come to him in desire, just as he in the first act, had come to her.

       “Is anybody here?” he asks.

      “Here, here,” Echo responds.

      …. “Come, let us get together!”

      “…get together, together,” repeats Echo.

     His domestics campily add, “together,” looking intensely at one another and beginning to sing a little song made up of the words.

     Finally looking down up her as she sits up with hands in hands in the air, Narcissus shouts out “Keep your hands to yourself,” repeating the words.

      His serving boys sing another song about “hands to yourself.”

      “I would die before. I would die before…” Narcissus shouts out. “You think I gave you a chance at me!”

      “I gave you a chance at me,” responds Echo, suddenly realizing the import of her words.

      We suddenly see Echo back at her vanity putting on her makeup and Narcissus now plays the game, “I love me not, I love me” upon his fingers, predictably ending with “I love me.”

      Back in her boudoir, the three ladies mock her with three calls of “Cheersy” as they toast her with glasses of champagne. She stands, knocking her glass off the same stanchion where Narcissus’ stature had formerly been, her glass breaking into fragments.

      Bynntrup’s quite brilliant short work is both a campy and a totally serious retelling of the myth using, of course, the answer to the not very difficult riddle, pattern and repetition.

 

Los Angeles, November 20, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).