Nicolas Roeg | The Man Who Fell to Earth / 1976

fall of a god

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Mayersberg (screenplay, based on fiction, The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis), Nicolas Roeg (director) The Man Who Fell to Earth / 1976

 

No one has ever claimed that Nicolas Roeg’s fascinating 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth makes logical sense. All right, Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) is an alien from another planet who drops to earth to check out the possibility of shipping water to his own drought-stricken planet. That he happens to end up in the relatively dry state of New Mexico and. once there proceeds to hawk an extraterrestrial ring for just $20, when, we soon after discover, he is already loaded with a fistful of American 1000-dollar bills is unexplained. Maybe he just needed a little spending money for daily living, intending to apply the wad on hiring a patent lawyer, Oliver V. Farnsworth (Buck Henry).

       That Farnsworth can quite easily read the complex mathematical renderings which represent the vague inventions that our world has never-before known, I suppose, is something that we can overlook, just as we can ignore the fact that the film makes utterly no attempt to explain what these patents represent except to put him suddenly in the league of Eastman Kodak, Edison Radio, etc.; and how Farnsworth manages to sell them for millions of dollars so very quickly only reestablishes the fact that this newly-arrived “Englishman” has somehow chosen precisely the right person to head up his new multi-billionaire dollar industries.

     But why does Roeg spend so much energy early-on in his discombobulated film with the sex life of Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), a university professor who specializes in sex with his young co-eds is never truly established except perhaps to reveal how perfectly empty human relationships are in relation to this extraterrestrial’s longing for and gentle memories of his wife and family unit back home, which strangely seems modeled on the Norman Rockwell vision of heterosexual normality as opposed to the fetish world created by Bryce and his college-going girlfriend.  And why Newton should want to hire him, over all others, as his fuel-technician, planning as he does to build rockets to carry the water back and forth between earth and Newton’s unspecified planet is totally inexplicable.

     What attracts Newton back to New Mexico after visiting Farnsworth in his Manhattan apartment to establish his colony? Okay, it must have been easier to film there. And the landscape is certainly more beautiful, closer to, evidently, that of Newton’s world before this early fable of climate change transformed his planet into a dry wasteland. Foreign directors have long been driven to express the vast, empty spaces of the American landscape and its equally empty culture through desert locales.

    It is there, during a temporary hotel stay, that Newton meets the all-American girl, stone-dumb church-going, TV-watching, alcoholic Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), a woman so lonely and abused that she is delighted that someone might bother to listen to her—which  Newton does with a dazed (according to Bowie, cocaine-induced) stare into space; we perceive it as part of Newton’s inability to adjust to his new planetary locale, particularly given that the moment this hotel maid first encounters Newton who passes out in an elevator on its speed up to the fifth floor so that she must literally pick up and carry him into his hotel bed. Evidently the man who has recently fallen at incredible speed from his rocket, can’t deal with fast earth-bound movements; even an elevator ride sends him reeling.

      In any event, once Mary-Lou gets her hands on him, she is unwilling to let go until he too is hooked on TV and alcohol. But being an alien, evidently, he can watch not only one TV channel but simultaneously digest a whole bank of them, as if living in a world created by the video artist Nam June Paik.  

     Is it any wonder that their relationship begins to dull, and he turns to his new fuel technician for friendship? Although seemingly happy with his new job, Bryce, again without explanation, begins to suspect his employer and sets up an X- ray camera to capture the real alien look of Newton. It’s not a pretty sight, as we perceive, when Newton reveals himself to Mary-Lou who goes screaming out of their bed, and cowering on the floor of the kitchen, sick to her stomach in anticipation to the response the character Fergus will have in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992), who vomited and fled the place when his gal revealed he had a penis. Even if she still has a yearning for the monster, there’s no truly going back to “it” / him. 

     No matter, Bowie/Newton quickly gets beautiful again, and continues to work toward his goal of creating a rocket to bring the earth-water home. Betrayed by Bryce, again for reasons that are not entirely clear, Newton is stymied—arrested and locked away into a series of secret, incomprehensibly kitschy-decorated rooms, where, kept under alcohol sedation, he is prodded and poked by all sorts of scientists who try to determine who or what he truly is, also accidently, and for no reason whatsoever, sealing his human eyes onto his own alien slits. Farnsworth and his gay lover is defenestrated out a penthouse window, apparently by the conglomerate of the US government and a rival company aided by Mr. Peters (Bernie Casey) who lives with his wife and his several children in a lavish Malibu-like lifestyle.

      Strangely, all this seems not to matter much. If anything Bowie/Newton, still staring off into space, gets younger, while Mary-Lou (whose name evokes the 1961 Ricky Nelson version of the song), evidently missing the old days, and looking like hell a few years after living in an alcohol-infused relationship with Bryce, drops by for a visit. After a long drawn-out sexual fetish dance of shooting one another dead, in which we get to spot Bowie’s penis, as she tells Newton she no longer loves him, and he, rather vaguely suggests he doesn’t love her either—suggesting that perhaps he never did.

      Soon after, he discovers that the door to his hotel prison has been left unlocked. Was it ever really a locked? Perhaps the open sesame was simply giving up his former girl. Does it matter?  He escapes, but no longer has any place to go, the people of his own planet probably having long ago died.

       In short, it’s hard not to agree with film critic Roger Ebert who described The Man Who Fell to Earth as being "so preposterous and posturing, so filled with gaps of logic and continuity, that if it weren't so solemn there'd be the temptation to laugh aloud." Reportedly when Paramount’s Barry Diller first saw the finished work, he refused to pay for it, claiming it was nothing like the film he was promised.

      Yet, Roeg and his cinematographer Anthony Richmond, have created in this film such a beautiful looking color work, and Bowie—even when staring meaninglessly off into space—is so mesmerizing that it’s hard to dislike this work. And at moments (even in little lines such as “I just need to sleep, Mary Lou”) Bowie deadpans his alien in a way that almost matches Peter Sellers’ brilliant portrayal of another kind of alien in Being There three years later. And, finally, this film has a lot of likeable music, organized by The Mamas and the Papas’ John Phillips.

     Moreover, we recognize that this film is also so coded that perhaps its director couldn’t fathom what to make of it. Innovative queer scholar Vito Russo was impressed by Henry’s portrayal of Farnsworth as a gay man whose life was not centered simply around his sexual activities and approving of the way his relationship was portrayed like any other without comment; but oddly he doesn’t mention that even he and his unintrusive lover had to eventually be killed off simply because of his connection with the far more significant “queer” Newton.

     Bowie’s character might be outwardly presented as basically normative heterosexual both before his trek to earth and after, yet as an alien he is inevitably a queer, an outsider, and—as nearly everyone around him, including Mary-Lou describe him—a “freak,” something even more frightening and ultimately detestable than a “puff” or “faggot.” “You know Tommy, you’re really a freak. I don’t say that unkindly. I like freaks.”

     But of course, she doesn’t really like freaks, particularly when it comes to that facts she discovers about her Tommy Sussex, Newton’s domestic pseudonym; underneath his convincing human garb may be an anatomical difference for which even the current LGBTQ+ doesn’t yet have a designation. If seeing Bowie’s penis is truly insignificant, seeing Newton’s penis brings up numerous other questions, such as is it merely part of his anatomical costume for human interchange or does he have a completely different system of sexual organs. Even if it appears that his alien society lives in Earth-recognizable familial units, how do they come to be perceived in his unnamed planet? Surely it can’t be as predictably hetero-normative that it appears to the human eye.

     The doctors who later probe his body in order to discover if he is or not a human being—they appear skeptical about his being what Mary-Lou, Bryce, and the movie’s audience know him to be, an alien—seem to be obsessed with his nipples and well as his eyes, but seem strangely uncurious about his cock, any semen it produces, or his neurological system that sexually attracts him to or disinterests him from different genders.

      Just before he and Mary-Lou play out their sexual fantasy of “shoot-em up” he admits to her that he has been thinking recently about male bodies, he presumably meaning the dead bodies of the many doctors and company traitors around him, while she immediately interprets it as a sexual interest, querying why he’s been thinking of guys instead of girls. Whose interpretation is correct?

      And later, sensing his deep unhappiness for being trapped for the rest of his days on her planet, Mary-Lou pleads with him to simply reveal himself to the doctors as who he really is and perhaps they will let him return to his own planet. Even in any earth-stuck movie this would have to be interpreted as a plea to come of the closet, which Newton, for his own reasons, simply refuses to do.

      Finally, there is the case of his seeming inability to age. If anything, as Mary-Lou puffs up to middle age and Bryce is transformed into a grizzly old man, Newton remains forever young, even releasing like his alter-ego Bowie a musical album titled The Visitor which his alien wife might be able to hear over the radio waves. He is, accordingly, also a kind of Dorian Gary able to convince almost anyone of his innocence by his slim, youthful body and lovely androgynous face—the very gifts that Bowie employed throughout his career.

     Even if the movie doesn’t say as much as it might have wanted to about what we human Americans might do to a more intelligent and beautiful species, it does suggest that this galaxy-trotting, lanky Christ (literally carried to possible salvation by his commonplace Mary) might never get back to heaven, hinting—perhaps unintentionally—at a sort of Wagnerian fall of the gods. And isn’t that, after all, also what Bowie really was, a kind of alien-like god, having just a few years earlier turned his golden mop of hair into a frizzled red cap to create the first of many personae, Ziggy Stardust, also an alien from outer space?

     Of course, it doesn’t make sense; it’s show biz. Which makes it obviously worth watching.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2016

revised October 20-21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2016).

Dan Castle | The Visitor / 2002

surfing god

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dan Castle (screenwriter and director) The Visitor / 2002 [30 minutes]

 

This Australian short film is a highly evocative work that combines an older gay man’s life and a young surfer whom he has been watching for his pure beauty, and perhaps his memories of his long-ago former lover, Chris.

     Michael (Barry Otto), living at his beachside home in Australia is interrupted in his attempt to write by a noisy gang of young surfers, come to pick up their friend C.K. (Nick Carpenter) for a day of partying. The loud, macho, group quite irritates the solitary elderly man, who finally demands they shut up, whom they then proceed to taunt.

      C.K., however, is planning on surfing, and will have no part of their planned activities, and they finally drive off. But the fact that the beautiful young surfer is heading to the beach changes Michael’s plans and he, and his fellow friend, Angus (Grant Dodwell) head to the beach, Michael with a watchful eye of his neighbor surfing boy, who is a bit like a golden god.

     Angus teases him about his fascination with the young man, even somewhat flirting with him to draw attention. But his major present is a new book, inside of which he has pictures of him and Michael in a pool when they were young, as well as a picture of his former lover Chris, whom we know from a previous phone call, lies tying back in Boston. Michael, however, refuses his female friend’s call about his condition, arguing that they broke up long ago for a number of reasons and have some sort of agreement about not again entering each other’s life, although it also seems clear that Michael is still very much in love with his former lover.

     Angus leaves, and Michael watches C.K. take the waves, time and again wiping out, only to pull up and take the next wave. He is a true beauty to watch.

      At one point, however, the young man wipes out nearer the rocks and does not immediately rise up. But finally reappears. He goes to the open beach shower, undresses and bathes.

   Michael picks up his beach chair and gradually makes his way back to his home. But there, amazingly, finds the young man lying almost naked, on his couch.

      He is, at first, both confused and incensed. Why has he entered his house? Has Angus put him up to it? And what does the sudden appearance of this Greek god mean by intruding into his life, even if it was apparent that he served as voyeur most of the morning.

      The boy is vague, simply lounging enticingly on the couch, knowing that he is the focus of the older man’s obsession. He meanwhile picks ups some of his photos and asks about them, Michael finally explaining who they are. And suddenly they seem to have found some magical rapport, C.K. telling him he’s hungry, and Michael going off to prepare a meal.

     But soon after, when he returns with some fresh parsley he has cut from his garden, he sees that C.K. is no longer on the couch and seeks him out, almost as if he has been a ghost of his former lover who as visited him. He finally finds him asleep on his bed.

      Still a bit nonplussed by the “visitor’s” sudden appearance, he calls up Angus attempting to explain his strange predicament, where the object of his obsession has suddenly become someone with who he might actually have sexual contact. But he recognizes as an older man the impropriety of the situation, and cannot bring himself to take advantage of the situation. Besides, he’s still certain of what this beautiful surfer is seeking.

   There is almost a moment when Michael feels it is all a hallucination, as he enters his bathroom, where the boy has recently been, only to find blood on his towel. He enters the bedroom finally to confront the situation or perhaps even embrace the beauty, but when he attempts to awake him, he finds him lifeless, realizing suddenly that perhaps he has hit himself seriously on the rocks in that long wipe-out.

       Again, he tries to arouse the sleeper only to quickly realize, to his horror, that the boy is dead. Suddenly his own past with his once suffering lover and C.K. comes horribly together, as he crawls into bed to embrace in tears the young man whom he had found so beautiful to watch. Past and present have melded together and his has been forced to face the end of his fabled life, reiterating perhaps all of his failures.

      Castle’s beautiful fable-like work is a truly remarkable short film given the wonderful acting of Otto and the pure silent beauty of Carpenter. This work appeared, when it was first released, in many gay festivals, including the Telluride Film Festival, the Australian Film Institute Awards, the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and the Honolulu Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

      Once again, I can only remark that some of the best short gay films were made in the first decade of the 21st century.  

 

Los Angeles, August 4, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

Claude Miller | La meilleure façon de marcher (The Best Way to Walk) / 1976

drama queen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claude Miller (screenwriter and director) La meilleure façon de marcher (The Best Way to Walk) / 1976

 

Claude Miller’s 1976 film, La meilleure façon de marcher (The Best Way to Walk) is one of the few films I’ve ever encountered in which I could not properly interpret its signifiers in order to comprehend what it was attempting to express.

     I’d like to think this film was a well-intentioned film about a gay man, Philippe (Patrick Bouchitey) who, teaching theater at a teenage summer camp crosses paths with the school’s macho athletic director, Marc (Patrick Dewaere), who upon discovering that Philippe may be a homosexual privately begins to mock and humiliate him. The fact that both men are clearly attracted to one another further complicates matters, particularly for Marc who finds his friend’s effeminate manners unbearable, particularly since his unrealized feelings for Philippe obviously reflect on his conceptions of his own masculinity.

     Philippe—who is not only closeted, but has not yet come to terms with his reasons for closeting himself—is still dating an attractive woman living in Paris, Chantal (Christine Pascal), with whom he would like to have a successful sexual relationship. The fact that his father is the thick-headed director of the camp (Claude Piéplu) who seems to have forgotten that both his childhood and his youth ever existed, further complicates matters. And given the fact that the various other camp directors, Gérard, Raoul, Léni, and Hervé behave more like the adolescents in which they are in charge transforms this drama, particularly given the tensions between the more intelligent Philippe and Marc, into a hothouse environment in which one can only wonder whether the howling students or the babbling adults will be the first to turn the camp into chaos.

      When Philippe suggests that instead of separating their students into those committed to the arts and those to sports that they join forces to permit their underlings a wider range of experiences—a suggestion, one suspects, that is aimed of working nearer to his torturer and source of unrequited love—the viewer almost holds his breath in anticipation of all-out war. And, in fact, that is almost what happens as Philippe, thrown into the swimming pool by Marc, almost drowns, and Marc, at a school going-away party, is stabbed in the leg by Philippe while translating Shylock’s poignant questions about his being Jewish into those of a confused gay man.

       I must admit, however, there are a few things I have left out in my telling of this basic plot. One night, when the lights fail during a poker game, Marc knocks on Philippe’s door to borrow some candles, only to discover him, all alone, costumed in a woman’s dress and makeup. Although he does not share what he has discovered with the others, it becomes the basis for his bullying of Philippe, and also results in a somewhat strange bribe for his continued silence: that someday his fellow camp counselor may be able to provide some unspecified “services.”

       Now I know that perhaps dressing up his character in drag was director Miller’s way of tipping us off that his “hero” was sexually confused. But it is difficult to know why he chose this method. Do most budding homosexuals dress up in women’s garb alone each night? Contrarily, I believe that those gays who practice cross-dressing do so that they might share it the outrageousness or success of their portrayal of the opposite sex with others. To my way of thinking, it is an open expression of something transgender figures have been previously forced to hide, and feel freed in public to express through imitation. And, of course, there are many wonderfully convincing drag queens who are heterosexual. 

      I think it is similar to the fact that when men and women who have long felt uncomfortable with their assigned sex become transsexuals one of the first things they want to share with others is the fact of that transformation (see my essay-review of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In from 2011).

        In my admittedly limited experience with these things, I have never heard of a drag queen who performs his art solo. But even more importantly, Miller has previously given us no evidence that Philippe might even be interested in garbing himself in women’s apparel, unless you imagine that in casting a young boy in an all-male camp as a princess he is speaking of his own private desires. Throughout the film, in fact, he continues to deny that he is gay and attempts, albeit unsuccessfully, to have sex with Chantal. Even if we might imagine that Phillipe is so smitten with Marc that he is rehearsing (an activity in which he daily immerses his students) a way to lure him closer—a bit like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Erwin who has a transsexual operation to become Elvira in hopes of attracting his former lover Anton Saitz—Philippe’s actions come as an inexplicable surprise in this movie.

      All right, so Miller has now told us that his central character likes to dress in drag. Yet, it seems to have utterly no significance to the story except in the penultimate scene when he dresses as a Spanish dancer for the costume ball (the theme of which he suggested) where he illogically expects Marc to dance with him for the entire night, and, when rejected, almost as if out of revenge for the abuses he has had to suffer from Marc’s hands, stabs him in the thigh, presumably ending his days as a jock. But again, Miller supplies us with little logic for the act other than simmering anger, hurt, disappointment. Certainly, it is an extremely melodramatic gesture for the mostly infantile taunting by a hopeful lover. Perhaps he is disappointed that Marc never would explain what he meant by the services he might provide or simply that Marc never asked those services be provided.

      It is as if the terrible play about jealousy and revenge that Phillipe asks his students to perform is being played out to adult community for some mysterious purpose. Even Phillipe’s bourgeois and easily scandalized father, who has sent away one the camp counselors for having a girlie magazine among his personal belongings, seems merely somewhat perplexed and irritated by his son’s public actions.

      The last scene of this indiscernible work is the most confusing, at least to me. It appears that, despite all odds, Phillippe and Chantal, now living in Paris, have become a couple and are looking for an apartment. The real estate agent they have chosen is Marc, who shows them the space and congratulates them on their marriage. Marriage? What marriage? asks Chantal. As if on signal, she leaves the apartment, while Phillippe waits at the door for Marc to follow. Marc, forever the ladies’ man so it appears, politely says “After you” before the credits begin to scroll up.

      Has Marc finally recognized Philippe as a feminine force? Is Philippe still interested in his former adversary? Have Chantal and Philippe decided to move in together simply as friends? Is the best way of walking to wait until one is politely asked to proceed? I can only report, I have no clue as to the answer to any of these questions, and have no idea whether these are even the proper questions to ask. 

      I might add, this picture presented us with lovely sets and camera work, along with handsome actors and good acting. As I suggested at the beginning of this short piece, I wanted to like this film. But for what purpose? The only connecting thread I can find in this mysterious creation is that grown men often behave more childish than the children of which they require good behavior. Might I also suggest that these pretty actors lack all credibility as humans in Miller’s script.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

 

Max Baer, Jr. | Ode to Billy Joe / 1976

the predictable solution to a death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Herman Raucher (screenwriter, based on “Ode to Billie Joe” by Bobbie Gentry), Max Baer, Jr. (director) Ode to Billy Joe / 1976

 

It’s somewhat frightening to think that if you were to ask a noted Hollywood screenwriter like Herman Raucher (writer of highly successful pre-pic novel and film Summer of ’42) to imagine a back story to Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 hit song “Ode to Billie Joe,” that he might rather quickly arrive at the plot of this film, Ode to Billy Joe (1976). Let me remind you, as does the film, of the first few stanzas.

 

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day

I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay

And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat

And Mama hollered out the back door, "Y'all remember to wipe your feet"

And then she said, "I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge

Today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

 

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the black-eyed peas

"Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense. Pass the biscuits, please

There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow"

And Mama said it was a shame about Billie Joe, anyhow

Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge

And now Billie Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

 

And brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe

He put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show

And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night?

"I'll have another piece of apple pie. You know, it don't seem right

I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge

And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

 

Mama said to me, "Child, what's happened to your appetite?

I've been cookin' all morning and you haven't touched a single bite

That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today

Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday. Oh, by the way

He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge

And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

 

    Certainly we have established in the song that the girl is singing that she had some sort of relationship with the suicidal boy Billy Joe, and, given that she suddenly has no appetite at dinner, that his act truly means something to her that it apparently doesn’t to rest of the family. Indeed she’s been seen quite recently with the boy, and observed him in what appears to be an odd act—“throwing somethin’” off the bridge—that might lead us to believe that they had a relationship and that the unnamed balladeer may know more about the boy’s death than she’s saying.

      In Raucher and director Max Baer Jr.’s retelling of the tale, the two figures, who become the teenagers Billy Joe McAllister (Robby Benson) and Bobbie Lee Hartley (Glynnis O'Connor) in the film Ode to Billy Joe (Gentry reportedly argues that the spelling of “Billie” was a typo in the original) they indeed do have a relationship, Billy Joe trying desperately to “court” the young 15-year old girl and encourage her to have sex with him. The location is the Mississippi back country of the late 1950s where the Hartley family does not even have indoor plumbing and where Bobbie Lee, dressed up in lovely dresses for church each weekend, is not even allowed “gentlemen callers”—a word right out of playwright Tennessee Williams’ lexicon, into which this film often dips—might certainly be, given her early maturity, longing for sexual contact. And since in real life, Gentry admitted that she had never met the legendary Billy Joe of her ballad, Raucher obviously felt free to imagine what these young people might be feeling and how it could relate to the boy’s ultimate suicide.

     Indeed, most of this film is spent of developing, quite convincingly, the young teenager’s growing relationship while around them her parents (Joan Hotchkis and Sandy McPeak) and brother James (Terence Goodman) who works at the sawmill with Billy Joe behave in ways morally and sometimes reprehensibly as adults generally do behave.

     These two young people speak far more cleverly and assuredly than you might imagine a 15-year old girl and 17- or 18-year boy might be capable of. Raucher is brilliant when it comes to the sexual bluff that young boys often present on the outside, while within they are frightened and often clueless. The early conversation between the two I’ve noted below will have to serve as an example of the heightened language of love these Romeo and Juliet wannabees express:

 

       Billy Joe: Hey! I been holdin’ up this bridge here for maybe an hour or more

                        awaitin’ a for you.

        Bobbie Lee: Right neighborly of you Mr. McAllister.

       Billy:  You know I could charge you maybe a half a dollar for my efforts.

       Bobbie: Ain’t worth but a quarter. Whole bridge ain’t worth but a quarter.

       Billy: [grabbing hold of her] Bobbie Lee, I want to talk to you.

       Bobbie: [pulling away] Don’t you, let me be. I’m 15 years of age. You may

                     think that’s old. But my pappa sees me nothing but as a child.

       Billy: Well your pappa is clearly behind the times.

       Bobbie: But he is also on the porch.

       Billy: Does your pappa also know that you been sportin’ a brasserie for at

                 least two years I known of.

       Bobbie: That ain’t the same one. The first one was a trainer. I’m up to a 32

                     now, B cup I believe.

       Billy: Well, I believe you’re gonna be a 96 and tripping all over yourself

                 ‘for your pappa lets you out of his sight.

       Bobbie: If I was a 96 I’d not be out of anyone’s sight.

     

      Suddenly their conversation turns to their earlier childhood friendship and a discussion of her long-time imaginary friend, Benjamin, the fact of which Bobbie Lee is embarrassed that Billy Joe has brought up.

      “Benjamin,” she responds, “is a childhood invention of mine to help pass the time and give me someone to talk to besides cows. And you are cruel to be talking about him since I only told you in a moment of weakness.”

       Billy Joe cheekily answers: “Well, there’s gonna come a time young lady when your little old Benjamin ain’t gonna do you any good. So I’m hereby volunteering my services as his official replacement.”

      If this antiphon between two kids echoing the refrains of writers such as Carson McCullers and Truman Capote seems a bit far-fetched, both Benson and O’Connor deliver the lines so charmingly and believably that we hardly question the various subjects—mock chivalry, parental control, sexual maturation, childhood fantasies, and the status of their future relationship—that their playful conversation invokes. For both of them their flirtation is entirely a linguistic bluff condensed from the language of Southern literature, romantic potboilers, and the expressions of their local dialect.

     And, as we might suspect, their courting, filled with this kind of humorous intimacy and, later, even more passionate implorations, will lead eventually to Bobbie Lee’s rebellion against her caring father’s restrictions and her gradual acceptance of Billy Joe’s sexual advances, particularly when, after a country musical celebration held at the sawmill he goes missing for several days before showing up in the woods near where she is brooding on his absence.

      Like Shakespeare’s lovers they finally do engage in a sexual encounter. meeting at the bridge. There, by accident he claims, he tosses her doll “Benjamin” into the water, symbolically proving he is now ready to take over as he long-ago promised. Perhaps not surprisingly, it does not end well, however, for the impassioned and over-eager young man who can’t apparently get properly aroused when he finally is permitted to fulfill his fantasies.

      But certainly, we can well understand, when a day later Billy Joe’s body shows up in the river that in the small town world of this Mississippi back land that folks might gossip about the connection between his death and his obvious lust for the innocent Hartley girl. In such small worlds, there is little else of importance to talk about but sex, death, and intruders to their isolated world. And Raucher’s friendly neighbors have every right to imagine that Bobbie Lee might be pregnant and the careless tadpole of a boy terrified of the complications that his acts have wrought.

       Yet, as any screenwriter would perceive, to have the central figure of your narrative to suddenly do himself in because he impregnated his girlfriend puts the whole story into jeopardy. Surely no one can feel much sympathy any longer for such a coward. In the film, her brother and others seem to expect that she will disappear for a day or so and take care of the situation. I wonder, with the increasing restrictions in just that state against abortion these days, what they might expect a 15-year-old girl to do? The brother himself notes how much shame has already been cast upon her parents, stripped of their church duties and faced with the loss of many of their previous friends.

In any event, those actions would transform the earlier delight we felt in the characters into a bitter reminiscence of the dangers of young sex and turn Gentry’s mournful ballad into something like an angry dirge.

     Moreover, as I’ve already suggested we’ve been privy to the fact that their first sexual experience turned out, like so very many first sexual encounters, to be unsuccessful. If Billy Joe is pregnant, the plot has failed to present us with enough of the story to make it credible or would have to take its viewers into even deeper waters. The film, on the other hand, was a true box-office success.

     As I suggested in my first sentence of this essay, Raucher, however, quickly perceived a  predictable solution—that predictability making it all the more frightening. Calling up the ghost of Williams’ Blanche DuBois’ young lover or perhaps digging deeper into his library to recover Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (my favorite of her works), he postulates that Billy Joe has had a homosexual encounter on the night we last saw him wide-eyed as he watched the various hookers performing in the sawmill shed. Evidently we mistook that look of a deer whose eyes are caught in the headlights for wonderment and fulfillment of all his normative heterosexual dreams, but it fact, when we look back upon the scene we realize now that it must have been absolute terror of the full feminine body in the flesh.

  For that night, without explanation, so the narrative—after a seemingly endless series of postponements—tells us through his confession to Bobbie Lee, Billy has had sex with another man—Dewey Barksdale as Bobbie Lee and we later discover, the owner of the sawmill where the boy worked.

     Certainly, we might argue that we’ve had no clue about this possibility in the plot, except that if we watched carefully we would know we were mistaken; for earlier on when the boss comes upon his employees, two of them, Bobbie Lee’s brother and his friend playing their harmonicas in practice for the upcoming musical celebration, Billy Joe remains hard a work in the background. The camera stares over the loafers’ shoulders to observe Robby Benson’s thin sweat-drenched chest and mid-riff for several seconds, matching up with the eye of the boss to whom they are speaking.

      It might have been rape, which also could have sent any young innocent from the iron girdle of the Tallahatchie Bridge, but our movie also tells us that it’s not the case. Even though Bobbie Lee assures her failed lover that at another time his sexual performance with her will be different, he shakes his head in disbelief. Although even Barksdale suggests to him—so he reports—this may be his only homosexual act, the boy knows different. Apparently he has enjoyed the pleasure that his upbringing taught him to be an unnatural act worthy of self-destruction. It’s clear he realizes it’s not simply something that he will grow out of.

    Moreover, in the very last scene, we see Barksdale on the bridge where Bobbie Lee, heading away from home meets him, the man willing now to go to her father and explain what has truly happened. He encourages her to return home, and, knowing she is not pregnant, let time prove that fact.

     But she is now a woman, no longer an innocent and has carefully thought it all out. Even if she never bears a baby, the gossips will presume she snuck out one night to have it taken care of. His admission of his involvement, she argues, will only get him arrested and, furthermore, destroy any legendary status that Billy Joe has now attained, the only thing that might sustain his memory. No, she argues, it is best for her to go away. As she reminds her rival for Billy Joe’s love, she’s still 15, what does she know of the world?; sooner or later she’ll have to come back.

      We all know that far too many young boys, when faced with the truth that this fictional Billy Joe was, find death the only solution. But to imagine that reality for an unknown figure whose unexplained leap into the waters is heralded in a popular song is very close to an expression of homophobia. “He must have been gay to do such an explicable thing” is a truism that I hope will soon disappear from our ridiculous game of “clues” to suicidal death.

 

Los Angeles, August 13, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).