Stanley Donen | Royal Wedding / 1951 [dance only]

fred astaire, the ceiling dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alan Jay Lerner (story and screenplay), Stanley Donen (director) Royal Wedding / 1951

 

Perhaps the most famous of all film dances, the so-called "Ceiling Dance" of Royal Wedding, is less a spectacular feat of dancing—although Astaire performs with his usual panache—than it is a  technical wonder, so well it is achieved by both dancer and designers that it is, at first, difficult to even conceive how the overjoyed Tom Bowen (Astaire), could move from the flat floor of his hotel room up the wall and onto the ceiling, to gradually dance back down again, and up once more, balancing his body on paintings, wall-hangings, and even the chandeliers.

     In reality what we are seeing is a room enclosed in a framed wheel that is gradually turned, with the dancer timing his leaps within the slow movement of the rectangular room. The furniture and other trappings are clearly attached into position and, accordingly, are unable to move, allowing Astaire to pretend to balance his head on the back of a chair, climb the desk up the wall, etc.

     Some claim the idea was Lerner's, others insist it was Astaire's. But the fact is that it could not have been achieved without Donen's near flawless direction and Astaire's perfect timing, appearing to leap as brilliantly as Spider Man might today. But Spider Man, after all, has his webs to help him, ropes and pulleys. Astaire had only a machine which created a delusion within which he tapped, twirled, jumped, and turned upon his legs.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2011).

Gian-Carlo Menotti | The Medium / 1951, 1977 || The Consul / 1960 || Amahl and the Night Visitors / 1951-1962

strong but fragile survivors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gian-Carlo Menotti (writer, composer and director) The Medium / 1951

Gian-Carlo Menotti (librettist and composer), Peter Morin (director) The Medium / 1977 [TV production based on the Comus Music Theatre of Canada Production] 

Gian-Carlo Menotti (writer and composer). Bill Butler and William A. Graham (directors) The     Consul / 1960 [TV production]

Gian-Carlo Menotti (writer and composer), Kirk Browning and Gian-Carlo Menotti (directors) Amahl and the Night Visitors / 1951 [NBC Theatre Opera, Hallmark Hall of Fame production]

 

With Gian-Carlo Menotti’s death on February 1, 2007, the US lost one of its major composers of opera. Even though he had remained throughout his life an Italian citizen, living for the past several years in Monaco and Scotland, Menotti composed and performed his major operas in the US, where he lived for most of his life, companion for years with the composer Samuel Barber and, later, with conductor Thomas Schippers.

     I remember Menotti—as many of my generation might—for his Amahl and the Night Visitors, his so-called Christmas opera, performed annually from 1951 for a number of years on NBC television. The simple story of a poor young shepherd boy’s and his mother’s encounter with the Three Kings, the biblical wise men on their way to witness the birth of the Holy Child, was perhaps my first encounter with opera, a kind of treasured annual event in my house—although my other family members, I am sure, would not have suffered it if I’d not pleaded each year for that special 45 minutes of viewing.

     I’d also seen—although I can’t remember where (perhaps on stage at Waukesha, Wisconsin High School)—a performance of his short L’amour á trois, The Telephone, wherein a young woman, Lucy, is so infatuated with her phone that her lover, Ben cannot hold her attention long enough to propose marriage. His final solution is to telephone with his proposal.

     If the two works I’ve described sound somewhat simplistic and—here comes that terrible word—“popular,” Menotti’s works were just that! Despite my family’s disinterest in Amahl, millions of households did watch it, presumably with great pleasure, annually—at a time when television executives were still testing out various cultural activities (drama, historical reenactments, orchestral music, and opera) on the relatively new medium.

     Menotti’s other operas, moreover, The Medium (1946), The Consul (1950), and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), were all performed on Broadway—the first with a run at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in 1947-1948 of 211 performances; the second running eight months and winning the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics’ Circle Award; and the third, performed at the Broadway Theater (although with less success), also awarded the Drama Critics’ Circle Award, a second Pulitzer Prize and the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award. Menotti, in short, was popular. Through his highly dramatic plots and appealing, melodic music (the composer is often compared to Puccini), Menotti was able to bring together music, theater, and popular entertainment in a way that is nearly inconceivable today! As music critic Martin Bernheimer described Menotti, he is “a modern composer who writes old-fashioned opera for the masses.”

     One might, contrarily, describe Menotti—along with Leonard Bernstein and a few others—as an innovative composer in his attempts to blend popular theater with a so-called “high” art, a composer who would influence later figures such as Arnold Weinstein (whom I’ve written about in my 2003 volume of these cultural memoirs), Irene Maria Fornes, Stephen Sondheim, Mac Wellman (in works such as The Lesser Magoo) and even me—in my own operatic endeavor with composer Michael Kowalski, Still in Love!

     By the end of his career, however—a career perhaps also shortened by his entrepreneurial activities of the Festival of Two Worlds occurring in both Spoleto, Italy and Charleston, South Carolina—Menotti’s melodically based theater pieces were critically attacked. While his libretto for Samuel Barber’s Vanessa was praised, his own later works—as well as those of Barber—were often scathingly dismissed. Times had changed.

     The critics, in some respects, may be justified for their reactions. There is no question that Menotti’s art is often retardataire; that the high drama of his pieces can appear almost comical to today’s more cynical audiences. Although Menotti’s lyrical works are often as discordant as Bernstein’s, for example, he does not share that composer’s jazz idioms, so brilliantly played out in On the Town and West Side Story. Yet, there are many moments in Menotti’s work that are far more musically challenging than Sondheim’s compositions and match Bernstein’s inventiveness: the overture to Bernstein’s 1955 “comic opera” Candide echoes many elements of Menotti’s earlier “Dance” of Amahl and the Night Visitors, and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti shares many chordal moments with Menotti’s early works. 

     Menotti’s first major opera, The Medium (composed after a short one-act opera buffa, Amelia Goes to the Ball; another television work, The Old Maid and the Thief, and a failed opera seria, The Island God), seems to have been created in a hot-house environment. The very plot of the opera is, at times, absurd. Madame Flora is a medium who, with help of her daughter Monica and a mute, gypsy, servant boy, Toby, defrauds her customers—a couple, the Gobineaus, who are desperate to contact their baby boy, drowned in a decorative lawn fountain, and Mrs. Nolan, come to hear news of her more recently deceased daughter—in order to eke out a meager living. Meanwhile, Monica and Toby, innocently toying with one another during Madame Flora’s absences and drinking binges, have fallen in love.

     Madame Flora arrives home (she has threatened a neighbor lady to force her to repay a loan by sitting on her doorstep for hours) to find that nothing is prepared for the evening’s séance. She threatens both children, particularly Toby, whom she found on the streets of Budapest. The séance is successfully performed with Monica’s lovely interpretation of the two children (“Mother, Mother, are you there?) and Toby’s technical support with the lights and table risings. Near the end of the event, however, Madame feels a touch against her throat, and becomes horrified, demanding the participants depart. She is certain that Toby has somehow been involved in the event, and insistently questions him, later even whipping him as he cowers in fear; yet he cannot (or, Madame Flora is convinced, will not) answer her questions.

     Frightened by his silence and her own doubts, she determines to end the séances and return the money to the Gobineaus and Mrs. Nolan. A week later, however, they show up at the usual time, pleading that she continue the séances. Still affected by the previous week’s events, Madame rejects their pleas, explaining to her former customers just how she has tricked them. Incredibly, they refuse to believe her, insisting that the voices they heard were real, that she must have powers even she does not comprehend. Perceiving them as gullible idiots, she demands they leave her house, soon after requiring the same of Toby. Monica pleads that he is incapable of caring for himself, that he will die on the streets, but Madame Flora is determined to put her fears to rest. She locks Monica in her room and sends the boy off, settling down to drink and ruminate why she, a woman who has seen the worst of war-time events, should now be so frightened by death.

     Toby sneaks back into the house to free Monica and take her away with him. Startled from her drunkenness, the medium reaches for her gun, shooting into the dark: Toby is dead.

    Such grand, histrionic events need to be performed and directed in a similar manner if the opera is to succeed. I purchased two DVD’s of The Medium, the first a televised production from 1977 by The Stratford Ensemble with Maureen Forrester as Madame Flora and Shawna Farrell as Monica. This was a toned-down production, Forrester speaking many of her lines, some scenes pared away, the set starkly barren. I found the production enjoyable—but somewhat unconvincing. The second production—the earlier 1951 Menotti-directed film with Thomas Schippers conducting the Symphony Orchestra of Rome Radio Italiana and Marie Powers and Anna Maria Alberghetti in the major roles—was wonderfully over-the-top and cinematically conceived. As the reviewer for the Time Out Film Guide expressed it: “With monstrous characters and images only conceivable in a fevered or operatic mind (where else would one find Toby the deaf mute gypsy boy, his defiant eyelids sealed with hot candle wax), yet fully realizable nowhere else but the cinema.”

     The 1960 Jean Dalrymple-produced television production of Menotti’s The Consul was presented in the drab, gritty black-and-white of early TV. But Patricia Neway’s performance of Magda Sorel captured the slightly mad actions of a woman psychologically on the edge. Her husband, after all, is an underground hero, forced in the very first scene of the opera to leave his home—to cross the frontier—so that he will not betray his compatriots. Their baby son, watched over by the husband’s aged mother, is slowly starving to death.

    This couple’s sorrowful duet of departure, transformed by the mother’s participation into a trio, is centered upon what are perhaps some of the looniest lyrics ever created:

 

                    Now, O lips, say goodbye

                    The word must be said but the heart must not heed.

                    ….

                    The rose holds summer in her winter sleep.

                    The sea gathers moonlight where ships cannot plough.

                    And so will the heart retain endless hope…

                    …where time does not count, where words cannot reach.

                    Let no tears, no love laden tears dim the light that charts

                         our way.

                    Leave the tears to the starless one who wanders without

                         compass in the night.

 

Despite being nearly drowned in metaphors, the audience recognizes that this is the language of believers, of the heroes Sorel and his wife represent. John’s only practical advice to Magda is to visit the Consul.

     We never discover what Consul she is to visit, in what country the police are terrorizing her, or to where she and her husband are trying to escape. And, in that sense, there is a sort of Ionescoian abstraction to Menotti’s opera. It is a no-man’s land and an everyman’s land simultaneously—it might represent any European city before World War II and any dictatorially run country after the war. Whereas John and Magda sing in a metaphorically based, dream-like language, the secretary of the Consul intones a bureaucratic gobbledygook. “May I speak to the Consul” Magda pleads again and again, only to be answered, “No one’s allowed to speak to the Consul, the Consul is busy.”

     Asked what she wants, Magda tries to explain her husband’s role as hero and leader of the underground, to explain her own suffering, relate her child’s and mother-in-law’s deaths, and warn that her every move is watched. For the secretary, however, there is nothing to be done; forms must be filled out. The hilarious, repetitively rhythmic interchange between the Consul Secretary and Magda is reminiscent of both Ionesco and Beckett:

 

                  Secretary:  Your name is a number.

                  Magda: My name is Sorel.

                  Secretary: Sorel is a name and a name is a number.

                  Magda: The hidden hunger waits for the heart-sick panther to return.

                  Secretary: I give you these papers. This is how to begin.

                                     Your name is a number

                                     Your story’s a case

                                     You need a request

                                    Your hopes will be filed

                                    Come back next week.

                  Magda: Will you explain [to the Consul]?

                  Secretary: What is there to explain?

                  Magda: Explain that John is a hero. That flowers bloom in the blood

                               that was shed.

 

     The secretary can only repeat the requirements: "Fill out the papers, Your name is a number,” etc. Like others visiting the Consul day after day, Magda makes no progress in communicating her plight. After so insistently demanding to see the Consul that the Secretary caves in, Magda is met at the door by his previous visitor: the chief of police who threatens her life. She collapses, returning to the Consul the next day without any hope of response, then returning home to kill herself at the very moment that her husband has himself returned to help his family escape.

      In this opera the melodic references to Puccini (“Now, O lips, say goodbye) are darkly comedic in their relation to the Consul office interchanges, and, accordingly, the music seems much more dissonant and fragmented than the former opera. It is almost as if in The Consul Menotti has found the perfect foil for his melodramatic and sometimes overly sweet melodic moments. Without diminishing any of the true tragedy of his tale, Menotti also elicits a sense of the absurdity and meaningless of all acts.

 

    Having seen Amahl and the Night Visitors two or three times in recent years, I was satisfied to listen to a recording of that opera. The Royal Opera House at Convent Garden production with Lorna Haywood as the Mother and James Rainbird as the young crippled boy was a beautiful reminder of the joys of this true family event. Here too, particularly in his presentation of the slightly ridiculous King Kasper, Menotti was able to combine the absurd and the sublime. How could anyone with a shred of humor not be enchanted by King Kasper's fascinating catalogue of the contents of his marvelous box in “This Is My Box,” or the repeatedly chanted elisions of the wise men in “Thank You Good Friends” in response to the gifts brought them by the poor shepherds. The beautiful antiphony of “Have You Seen a Child?"—the wise men asking about the Christ child, Amahl’s mother responding with the news of her own son—marvelously personalizes the mythical and helps to explain her later attempt to steal the Kings’ gold. Only Menotti, moreover, could have conjured up the wonderfully absurd idea of presenting to the Christ child a gift of a crutch—reminding us all perhaps of how impossible it is to stand on two feet as a human being.

     If Menotti was an unabashed romantic, so too was he a kind of early absurdist, a theatrical trickster who could combine the tragic occurrences of the 20th century with a comic recognition of the spiritual emptiness with which those events had left its survivors. Madame Flora, Magda Sorel, even the abandoned Mother of the small crippled child, all inordinately strong figures, are brought down by nearly insignificant events and individuals—by a touch of the flesh, by an office worker demanding that human beings become a number, by three wandering kings mysteriously passing in the night who sweep up a mother's child from bleak reality into a myth of eternal proportions.     

      American culture has indeed lost something with the death of a man who could speak so eloquently—in both music and language—of the fragility of life.

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2007

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 8 (April 2007)

Darren Aronofsky | The Whale / 2022

 cruelty to animals

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel D. Hunter (screenplay, based on his play), Darren Aronofsky (director) The Whale / 2022

 

I like Brendan Fraser as an actor, and was pleased he won an Academy Award for his portrayal in The Whale as Charlie, described in the film credits as “a morbidly obese and reclusive English teacher.” The role was played with the truly wonderful help of make-up artists, who with the help of the prosthetics of Adrien Morot, Judy Chin, and Annemarie Bradley, weighing more than 300 pounds convinced us of the supposedly 600-pound human being beneath them.

     But the film itself is terribly problematic. Written originally for stage, Samuel D. Hunter’s script does not even attempt to reform its highly theatrical devices. As anyone knows, reading through my pages, I am a fan of artifice. But when it weighs down upon a motion picture—a medium simply because of its relationship to photography is nearly drowned in realism—in a manner heavier than even its obese central figure, it creaks in the manner of a closet drama.

      We are made to believe that because Charlie has lost his former male lover Alan to religiosity and guilt he has gone on a several year food binge in order to kill himself. Yes, this can happen. But everything else that surrounds his selfish actions seem strained and unbelievable.

      We can well understand that, after having left his wife Mary (Samantha Morton) for another man eight years previously, she might still be mad at him, particularly since, despite child support, she has been left to raise his young daughter, Ellie (Jacey Sink) all alone, and she herself has become something of an alcoholic. And we can imagine that Ellie herself might be confused and terribly hurt by her loving father’s disappearance. Perhaps we can even allow that Alan’s sister Liz (Hong Chau), raised like her brother in the cult-like New Life Church (in the play Alan and Liz were raised Mormon), has now chosen to devote much of her life to Charlie’s care, trying to urge him into hospital care while contradictorily enabling him to devour huge portions of sandwiches and pizzas. But that last is truly stretching our commitment to fictional disbelief.

      But things get quite unbelievably complicated when Ellie, the daughter, visits to vent her hate and a young New Life Church missionary Thomas (Ty Simpkins) suddenly and quite inexplicably shows up at Charlie’s door to offer spiritual help. Even the pizza guy Dan, who never gets a glimpse of the human whale Charlie has become, seems to care, or is a least interested in finding out who is behind the man who orders all the nightly pizzas. When he finally gets a look he is totally disgusted.

      We realize now that we have entered a creakingly structured play that doesn’t even try to fully make logical sense.

      Despite the ghosts and figures of his past currently haunting him, moreover, and despite the fact that he is now near death, the central figure of this work remains an impossible optimist about the world around him. His obviously disinterested English students, who even before the COVID crisis he teaches on a zoom room on the internet, are all capable to brilliant thinking—even if we have little sign of it—and he reads their empty papers with deep appreciation. Even his daughter, a girl the mother is convinced is truly evil, is a “remarkable being,” who at age 8 (a talismanic number in this work) wrote a piece on Melville that praised the author’s establishment of his early relationship with Queequeg and is even sympathetic with Captain Ahab, but has utterly no patience with all “that stuff about whales.”

 

    She has visited her father in order to have him write her English papers, and returns because he has promised the 120,000 he has saved up to give her upon his death, guilt money we might describe it.

    Meanwhile, he’s told Liz, his caretaker, that he can’t afford any healthcare and has done little to support her attempts to keep him alive. When she discovers the truth, she too is angry and hurt.

   Moreover, and most improbably, Ellie establishes a relationship with the would-be missionary Thomas who admits the church group to which he belonged had long ago given up missionary work, and has himself stolen church funds to escape and to express his personal zeal, focused now on Charlie.

      We have now entered a world of an August: Osage County like melodrama, drama that wants to be so heavily significant that it loses its way in the process. Guilt, belief, love, and a soupçon of sexuality have been woven together to convince the audience that this is truly great theater.

     But actually, it’s even worse. While Vito Russo long ago argued that in the movies all gay boys must die, this film takes it fully to fruition.

     Alan, Charlie’s former lover has killed himself, as I hinted, out of religious guilt, and Charlie has transformed himself into a kind of monster destined for a quick exit.

       If honesty becomes his theme, the movie hovers behind numerous lies. Loving another man, even as Charlie argues to Thomas, is not a sin but something beautiful; however, Thomas never fully comes to that recognition as Ellie uses her cellphone to ship him back to Waterloo, Iowa (the city, incidentally in which I was born) and his parent’s highly unlikely forgiveness, which for Charlie only convinces him of his daughter’s cleverness. And Charlie remains deluded, it appears, about her honest integrity, even after Mary predicts that Ellie will probably use her inheritance for tattoos and drugs.   

      I’m sorry, but I can’t believe in Charlie’s white-light reformation into eternity. I agree with the Austin Chronicle’s critic Jenny Nulf, who saw the movie as cruel, observing: “Charlie is placed in a hellish purgatory in The Whale. Fraser often brings a warmth to Charlie that the film desperately needs, but his positivity is only an ember in a fire dying in the pouring rain. His daughter, Ellie (Sink), is a nasty character, an angsty teenager whose wrath is caused by her father leaving her at the age of 8. Sink isn’t given much to do but brood in a recliner, cracking jokes at the expense of her father’s stature, a terrible daughter whose hatred is spiteful and cruel. There’s nothing redeemable about her character outside Charlie’s love for her, his insistence that she is his greatest achievement, but nothing outside his innate optimism really shows Ellie’s potential goodness to an audience.”

      Charlie is left to die in what I can only describe as a pure theatrical delusion.

      I so much wanted to like this movie that when I finally saw it I felt like I was slapped in the face.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024).

Euros Lyn | Heartstopper: Boyfriend / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 8]

various sports

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Oseman (screenplay), Euros Lyn (director) Heartstopper: Boyfriend / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 8] [33 minutes]

 

O the endless problems of youth! And this is just the first season of this popular series. Tori begins this episode as well, calling out her brother for hitting his drums so very loudly and comically wondering whether or not he’s angry about someone or going through a new rebellious stage. The truth is, of course, he suffering both forms of madness. The guilt, as always has shifted back to the most bruised. Confiding in his sister, Charlie is afraid that perhaps he does just ruins people’s lives by being who he is. You can’t see clearly at his age, when everything and everyone sees you as an outsider and a villain. And even the usually level-headed Charlie admits perhaps it might be better if he didn’t exist.

     A sister’s hug and reassurance means everything.

    Charlie tries to make it up to Tao, but Isaac (Tobie Donovan) the asexual stand-in has to speak for him since Tao refuses. It’s also sports day at Truham Grammar School, and even the sports Charlie used to share with Isaac and Tao are now forbidden, since he is on the ruby team. Sports always seems to matter in Grammar School or “high school” as we call it in the USA.

      Before he became a Superintendent, my father was a coach, and later my brother, and his three sons. Which should make obvious what a disappointment I was as the eldest who didn’t like sports and wasn’t very good at them. So the long sports scenes is this TV series episode somewhat resonate.

      Charlie not only refuses to have lunch with Nick but talks to Coach Singh (Chetna Pandya) about quitting the ruby team.

     Finally, Nick and Tao meet up—something that happens alas only in movies—and talk about Charlie, realizing that in some ways they’ve both failed him. Tao summarizes it: “Look, I’ve known Charlie since we were 11, and he’s always had a tendency to believe that him just existing is annoying for other people.” Nick has noticed that, and now the two agree that what Charlie really wants is more than a series of secret kisses on “the down-low.” They bond in realizing what is best for their friend, but both also feel hurt over his temporary rejection of their love.

     The Higgs girls evidently join the Truham boys for sports as well, and Tara and Darcy try to comfort Elle for returning back to Truham (remember she was once a boy) for the big sports events. Maybe they might all three manage to sprain their ankles. No, Elle wants to return as who she is.

      Headmaster Truham (Stephan Fry) announces over the loudspeaker what they have all been waiting for: Truham School Sports Day, just as Elle and Tao meet up again, both afraid of being asked to participate, but secretly want one another’s company.

      Charlie crawls back into Mr. Ajayi’s art room, who today is not so very receptive, telling Charlie what he has long needed to hear: “Don’t make anyone make you disappear.”

      Back at sports day, Tao is assigned to the role as a runner, which since his feet move sideways is absolutely pointless. But, if you remember, Charlie is a true racer, who sorrowfully replaces Tao in the race, running against—you might have guessed it—Ben Croft. This is fiction, and obviously the plot cannot permit anyone other than Charlie to win. And Charlie finally speaks up, telling his ex-would-be lover: “You don’t get to have an opinion about anything I do?” Ben counters, “You want me to go around telling people about you and Nick.” Charlie answers in true cinema logic: “Do you want me to go around telling people about you and me?” Gotcha. Were real life only so simple.

     Inevitably, Charlie and Tao make up and hug, knowing what they have tried to do to love and protect one another. Tara jumps the “high bar,” Isaac tosses the javelin even if not as far as others, and Tao and Elle run off together to finally, well almost, express their love. They need the time it takes, and after all we’ve got a whole new season waiting.

      And now the feature of the afternoon, the rugby match is on, with Nick looking for Charlie, and Charlie secretly looking on in trepidation. Nick makes a goal, but suddenly he can’t move forward as in the magic of fiction, he spots Charlie looking on and wanders off the field, and out of his closeted world, to pull Charlie off, announcing in one of the final speeches of this season: “I don’t want to break up. I know people have hurt you. And you feel like I’d be better off without you, but I need you to know that my life is way better because I met you.” Isn’t that just what we have been waiting for? Nick is now fully out. And yes, there’s the final wonderful fully engaged kiss we’ve been waiting for through about four hours of TV history. Come-on, who wouldn’t tear up?

     And predictably—since all gay boys these days must visit the beach—Nick takes Charlie on a trainride to Herne Bay in Kent. They eat fried shrimp and chips, take their picture in a photomat, and kiss and hug themselves into cinematic bliss. I don’t even care if it’s so hokey. The background music score is all pop, and the bubbles and kisses and flowers and sweet little fireflies of the animated background we’ve had to suffer through before is just fine since we’re now entering a gay world where most young men and women have never truly been but surely wish they might have experienced or, like me, once did or imagined themselves having done so. Does it matter? Heartstopper is a wonderful TV myth.  

     Nick even comes out to his marvelously loving mother, Oliva Coleman. Who could ask for anything more? Tune in to season 2 in 2023.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

Euros Lyn | Heartstopper: Bully / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 7]

the mirror cracks

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Oseman (screenplay), Euros Lyn (director) Heartstopper: Bully / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 7] [27 minutes]

 

Again in the very first frames of this tearful TV series, the substance of the story is revealed, this time by Tori (Jenny Walser), Charlie’s older sister, after being finally told outright by her brother that Nick and he have begun an intense relationship; she agrees to keep it a secret. But you can see that she’s disturbed, particularly since she knows what her brother has gone through. She’s evidently pleased about his going out with other friends, but you can perceive that she’s worried, which is, after all, what this episode is all about: a return to the bullying world which so many gay boys have to endure in order to come to terms with their life. And the issue here, most obviously, is what it all might mean for the neophyte Nick.

     Even the first moments of this film take us back to his abusive former relationship with the horrible Ben Hope (Sebastian Croft), a self-hating gay who can’t and perhaps ever will fully accept his sexuality. These are often the bullies who hate other gays with a desire of vengeance and coverup bluff.

 

    Charlie is attending an event where Nick has promised the bullies won’t show up, but even Charlie’s father Julio (Joseph Balderrama) is bothered, and we know that Charlie is now going to encounter the world he has previously attempted to skirt. “It’s going to be all right,” he assures his father, when we know it’s going to be a very rough night.  

   They’re just going to a movie, but it is the kind of evening where even there in the halls of the dark heaven of dreams you might be attacked. Charlie can’t even consume the requisite popcorn. But suddenly and rather amazingly Nick has given his beloved Charlie a nickname, “Char,” which strangely means everything has changed. They’ve entered a private world, just between the two of them.

      There is, of course, the usual secretive hand-holding, the crackle of emotions if not the crack of corn beneath the teeth (after all this was a graphic fiction, recreated with animated moments).  Love in movie-theaters is a gay genre all by itself.

      But the bully here, Harry Greene (Cormac Hyde-Corrin) cannot resist abusing Nick’s new friend. “Do you like Harry Styles? He’s pretty sexy.” a comment which might suggest his own sublimated need to be loved by someone like Charlie. But when he adds, “What about Nick?” Charlie chokes up and returns back to his denial. “Nick’s not even my type.”

     Despite the open refusal, meant to protect him of course, Nick still demands Harry stop. Such intrusions make for only more suspicion, which is precisely what Charlie is attempting to deflect. Nick chases after, but Charlie admits what every gay has long ago lied about: “Honestly, I’m used to it.” The film knows that a gay boy can never become used to the open abuse. It’s simply a ruse to escape from the one you want to protect from the hurt you’ve suffered.

      There is always more when you’re under such gang attacks, Ben confronts him asking his ex-lover it it’s really true that Nick and he are a couple. Like Christ’s disciple Peter, Charlie denies again, allowing Ben to attack him where it truly hurts: “As if anyone would go out with someone as desperate as you. You actually thought I liked you? You were just there like some tragic loser with barely any friends, who ate lunch alone and let bullies walk over you. I never liked you. I’m not even gay. I just felt really sorry for you.”

    All is a splendid coverup of his own feelings while doing the very bullying he presumably is dismissing. Oh, that’s the wonder of such beasts, whitewashing themselves from the act they are in the midst of committing. Attack and denial at the very same instance: these magic tricks are what bullies do best. How can you talk to even an understanding and sensitive father about that? Young kids carry burdens they don’t even know they needn’t. Guilt is embedded in the blood of being different from even their parents who love and might seek to protect them from such hate.

     And then it gets worse as Nick attempts to return and confront his rugby friends about their abuse, which ends in a nasty battle where he too, ferried to safety by his mother, can’t truly share the problem of his black eye. With the wonderful Olivia Coleman as a mother, any son might finally open up: “I lost it. I’m just so angry at myself for not seeing all my friends…suck.” It’s an important recognition that all gay or bi boys must make, straight kids not only hate, they just don’t understand what it means to be someone who is perceived to be “abnormal,” to be moving off it a direction that they have not even had to consider as a path to recognize themselves.

     She realizes that Charlie is “a very special friend,” and comprehends the suffering he is going through. I wish more gay films would focus on the suffering the parents who do understand and sympathize but can’t possibly resolve their son’s or daughter’s suffering by openly confronting them. Not all parents are monsters, even as they must endure the process as well. They too must come “out,” perhaps even a greater challenge for the old than the young. Coleman’s performance brought this home. Nick’s simple two-word admission says everything: “He is.”

     Both boys suffer internally the consequences of the other's behavior. It pulls them apart at the very moment when they have grown so close.

     But at least, Charlie soon discovers, Nick is willing to fight for him, that the things he has "gotten used to" are not permissible and are worth fighting about. Charlie doesn’t want Nick to dump his friends for him, but Nick admits that even the nice ones just “stood there,” not responding, not rejecting the hurtful words of the bullies. We have clearly entered new terrain.

   Charlie returns to the corner where he has hidden out for so many days in his art teacher’s, Mr Ajayi’s, protective den long before this series began.

     And Tao is now sorry for having himself verbally been sparring with the bullies, trying to protect his beloved friend. Sometimes just ignoring hate is the best route. But he has done precisely what Nick now is demanding Charlie do, to stand up to hate. But how?

     Charlie certainly doesn’t seem to have an answer. And Elle admits that Harry did the same to her, never confronting it, never even seeking the help of a teacher. And finally in the midst of this, slow-minded Tao realizes that Nick and Charlie are really a couple, that what everybody knew about, he has been thoroughly blind.

     Elle visits Tao at his house, his mother being thoroughly welcoming—parents in this first season at least are more than accommodating. Tao, however, is confused about another matter. Why hasn’t Charlie shared the truth with him. Did the new friendship matter more than their love?

Young people, we perceive, already have developed such jealous loves. Tao admits that he is, after all afraid of being alone, and Elle shares the fact that she too felt that angst. Being alone for a young person is a fierce terror, I recall. It’s why we often seek what an acquaintance recently described as “alternate friends,” not people with whom we might truly feel a kinship, but those we know also have no friends, a kind of second-rate substitute for those for whom we truly might seek a relationship. They know it but are just as appreciative to find a new friendship, even as a substitute; and we lie to one another, as I did as a child, pretending we were naturally akin, while knowing each other was all we had left. Even friendships can be burdens when you know in your heart they’re not truly serious, which is why bullies like Ben can so easily dig into your guts. Losers hang out with losers, and that’s how they come define themselves. Coming out is not just declaring but adjusting to the limitations of everything you’ve previously done to protect yourself, all the lies you have told yourself and others. And it never truly ends. The guilt goes on forever. And then it gets worse, when late in life you discover some of the people you most wanted to be wanted to be with you.

      But I’ve gone off the tracks. This series makes me do that.

     As Charlie attempts to back out of his lovely relationship with Nick, Tao saves the day by actually engaging in hand-to-hand combat with bully Harry Greene. And although Nick quickly rushes in the save the day, Tao is angry about Charlie’s inability to be honest with him. Charlie is left with what he can only perceive as another burned bridge. The mirror has cracked.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).