i don’t know what i like
by
Douglas Messerli
Eliza
Hittman (writer and director) Beach Rats / 2017
If
one ever needs a clear definition of what the Q means in the updated LGBTQ
sexual/gender gathering, Eliza Hittman’s 2017 film is a good place to start. As
the hero of this film, Frankie (Harris Dickinson) says time and again when
asked about his sexual interests—in the case the pick-up girlfriend Simone
(Madeline Weinstein)—and the middle-aged and elderly men with whom he connects many
a night—“I don’t know what I like.” Standing in for the Q in the rainbow
moniker, this cute, somewhat hunky, Brooklyn boy is not only constantly
questioning his sexuality but feels “queer” in the most general sense, a being
who does not fit in to any of the various societies in and out of which he
slips.
Indeed, the three “buddies” he daily hangs
with on Coney Island boardwalk are twice specifically described by him as being
“not my friends,” a strange locution which they tolerate, perhaps believing that
he is coding to others that he and his “beach rats” are more than friends,
when he is actually speaking a kind of truth, obliquely suggesting that the
three homophobic thugs with whom he hangs out each day, and with whom he
apparently grew up, are at the heart of his sexual confusion. For them, he self-justifies,
he is forced to seek out his sexual encounters each night, hoping to score some
weed or other drugs for their daily pleasure.
For them, Simone, who flirts with him one
day on the beach, has to become, given his buddies’ expectations, his
girlfriend with whom he nightly “scores”—although the truth is something far
different, as he toys with the idea of a sexual relationship with Simone, abusing
her verbally, after
what seems to be a necessary intake of cocaine, when he finds it difficult to
sexually engage.
When, at one point, she asks him “Am I
pretty?” his mocking retort of “Am I pretty?” by pointing to himself, becomes
something more than mockery as in his own self-loathing he seems to truly to be
questioning his own beauty, made far more complex by the fact that the on-line computer
customers with whom he makes late-night appointments are older, a tactic he
uses to make certain that the his “buddies” might never meet up with his those
with whom he has sexual encounters. We cannot help but wonder if Frankie might
not be for happier with a young man of his own age whose beauty is as obvious
as his own. Or, as critic Sheila O'Malley puts it in her Roger Ebert review: “Yes,
I wanted to tell Frankie to go find a local LGBT center and get a new tribe of
more accepting friends.”
Eventually Simone perceives him as being too
much of a “remake” or “upgrade”—as if he were a living room she would have to
remodel—for her busy life. At least she has a job. After a night with
his various male companions Frankie hangs out in a local vape shop to watch the
professionals blow rings through the air—somewhat like one might watch bubbles
being blown out of a pipe or the weekly Coney Island fireworks, which Frankie
declares are unromantic because they are always the same, but still uses as the
opeing image on the homepage of his computer.
Yet Frankie’s inability to break through
his torturous enigma is precisely Hittman’s point. His “queerness” is not
merely sexual, but a product of his feeling out of place even in his own life
as a member of a working class family with a father dying of cancer who lies on
a hospital bed in the middle of their living room, a mother (the excellent
actor Kate Hodge) whose former good looks have been turned into a vision of an
exhausted woman who badly needs her hair done, and a sister who daily makes out
with young boys on the boardwalk and, like the empty-headed Simone, desperately
desires a dangling belly button ring. Is it any wonder that the confused son
has abandoned his former upstairs bedroom (of which, when his not so friendly “friends”
are invited into, one mutters “I didn’t know you had a little brother”) for his
alternative basement bear cave, where he keeps his computer and drugs.
Clearly, the director is fascinated by
his beauty and the male body in general, as, against the shoddy entertainments
of the beach; she moves her camera, lovingly held by cinematographer Hélène
Louvart, across every crook and cranny of the male psychic. Her quite obvious
voyeuristic approach to Frankie and his gang almost reminds one of the earliest
of gay porno pictures, shot often on the beaches of New York, Atlantic City,
and, particularly, of California and packaged as pretend “physique and muscle”
magazines, very much in the manner of filmmaker Gus van Sant, whose bronzed
porno magazine heroes briefly come alive as potential partners for who anyone
who desires them enough.
It is perhaps at that very moment, the
moment the young teenager has feared for years, that pushes him in the direction
of revealing his hidden world without admitting any involvement in it.
Having
hooked up with a rather sweet gay man, closer to his own age, he dares to admit
to the trio of boys that he sometimes goes onto gay sites to find sources for
his drugs.
These thugs are strangely intrigued by
the fact, and even attempt, the first time he meets up with the man, Jeremy (Harrison
Sheehan), to get in on the act, as if eager to actually meet up with a
self-identifying gay man. Their actions immediately end the transaction. But
when Frankie suggests to his buddies that he and Jeremy meet up instead in the
woods near the Coney Island beach, where they can, so to speak, “grab the goods”
(the weed he has promised to bring along), they are even more intrigued than
before.
For them, we already suspect what Frankie
seems to not quite be able to admit, that it represents not only an opportunity
to get their drugs but to perform a kind ritualized gay-bashing, a brutality which lies deep in their bigoted
heats. For Frankie, as the BFI magazine reviewer Hannah McGill sensitively
perceives, the issue of “whether his friends would mind being around gay guys
if weed were involved, indicates his yearning to change everything without
having to change a thing.”
After these thugs run the sweet gay boy
into the water and begin to beat him, however, obviously everything does change.
If, at first, in the horror of the scene, Frankie hangs back, when his friends,
unable to find the weed, began to pummel Jeremy, he searches the waves nearby,
discovering the packet and thereby releasing the gay man without further harm.
But in that very “act of inaction”
Frankie knows that he has severed any relationship with his crew he may once
have had.
While he has been away for the night
another kind of major change has occurred in his life, as his mother, curious
for his shifting behavior, enters his computer and begs him to tell her, when
he returns home, what’s happening.
We don’t know if his mother has deleted
all of his computerized gay contacts or whether Jeremy has notified the heads
of the chatroom about Frankie’s actions, but he is now cut off from his
nefarious past.
As always in this film, Hittman leaves
the answers in the cracks of the few verbal communications in which her
characters engage. He tells his mother nothing just as she does not share with
her son whatever she might have discovered. And in the last scene, where
Frankie now walks the boardwalk completely alone, the weekly fireworks
crackling in the background, we, and apparently he, have still no idea where he
is going, physically or psychologically. We only know that he now has no
ability to return to where he was and has all the freedom to create a new space
of his own making, perhaps one that will truly allow him to find the love we
imagine (and, I remind you, it is only our imagination, perhaps not his) he has
been seeking in all those worn-out stranger’s faces, genitals, and hands.
If the writer/director has given us no
answers, she has, at least, opened up the possibilities, and not just those for
Frankie. The three boys with who he has spent so much of his life are even less
knowable that Frankie is. They are true ciphers whose names, after the film has
ended, are difficult to even recall (Joe, Nick, Alexei I believe). Yet, one of
them, perhaps Alexei, which I might describe as the “runt” of the group is
different from the others. At one point, when Frankie and two others pull off
their pants to briefly enter the ocean, this figure remains dressed, wearing
his heavy-looking shoes as he sits back to watch the others in their furtive
swim.
Later, when the same two move in to beat
Jeremy and grab the drugs he has brought with him, we see this same figure
immediately turn back and leave the site.
In these two actions we can readily
perceive that, like Frankie, he too is someone who is “queer,” not sexually gay
perhaps, but a figure uncomfortable with the activities of the others. And in
that sense, he too is a kind of questioning “Q,” someone who doesn’t quite know
where he stands in relation to those around him. One cannot make too much of
these two subtle acts, but they do suggest, if nothing else, a turning away
from the more normative actions of the others—even those of Frankie who behaves
under peer pressure as someone other than he truly is.
If nothing else, it seems to me, Hittman
is suggesting that people with clearly defined attitudes toward the world live
always simultaneously with others who admittedly “don’t know what they like” or
have little knowledge of where they are going. In the end, these figures are
always hiding in full sight, ready to surprise the often-unthinking believers
with an independence based more on questions than on preconceived answers. If
society is to make any significant changes, it perhaps is to these Q figures to
whom we must ultimately look. Those who seek no change sometimes accomplish the
greatest of changes in life. Sitting on a train that is not moving may seem to
be moving when a train beside it pulls out of the station. A bit like Einstein’s
train and the man left on the platform who observes the lightning strike, it is
a matter of relativity.
Los
Angeles, July 24, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
hittman likes to examine teens sexuality both straight and gay. She has a great eye for brooklyn nuances and young male beauty.Harris Dickinson is a real find. A British bomb shell who does a terrific job as the brooklyn gay thug hopefully out of touch with himself. A sad film, I'm from Brooklyn so I recognize these types and Hittman gets the Brooklyn down to a duh even using going to the city to indicate taking the train into manhattan. A sad film.
ReplyDelete