a queer paradise without fear or guilt
by
Douglas Messerli
James
Bolton (screenplay, based on the fiction by Jim Grimsley, and director) Dream
Boy / 2018
James
Bolton’s Dream Boy, based on a fiction by Jim Grimsley, begins in a way
that might support the easier interpretations of its title, suggesting that the
backwater territory of Louisiana to where Nathan Davies (Stephan Bender) and
his family has moved serves as backdrop to yet another tale of a neighbor kid,
Roy (Maximillian Roeg) discovering his gay dreamboat, in this case, the shy
Nathan.
But something about this film doesn’t
quite click into the gears of such now almost predictable gay teen romances, beginning
as they generally do with a few stuttering attempts to demonstrate what their
hormones demand followed by a longer period of angst about the direction in
which their sexual drives are sent them.
True, Roy has a Bible study girlfriend (Rooney
Mara in her first film role) with whom he has almost graduated beyond the stage
of intense petting while his best friends, Burke and Randy seem almost to be
hostile at first to the newcomer and perhaps just a bit envious of the fact
that Roy has found a apparently closer friend in Nathan. The young boys
themselves, Roy two years older than Nathan, perceive their sexual attraction
to one another almost immediately, playing it out with a gentle touch of the
hands in only their second homework assignment meeting. Over the next few days,
moreover, they sexually experiment at a speedy rate that is almost unheard of
in such “coming out” films.
Before long they have almost entered a
relationship where they feel such a strong emotional tie that Roy asks, almost
out of a sense of possessiveness, whether or not Nathan has had such homosexual
contact previously. Nathan admits that this is his first time, with which Roy,
without admitting so much, seems to take solace. That such gay virgins might
suddenly find themselves in the midst of such longing and desire seems a bit
incredible—particularly in an isolated world where, as Roy tells Nathan, hardly
anyone else visits. It might almost be a kind of lost paradise in which neither
boy feels the need for any feelings of fear or guilt.
Yet, when soon after Nathan begins to fuck
his friend, Roy suddenly pulls away, clearly shocked by the younger boy’s skill
regarding what he might imagine is a neophyte’s attempts to please him. He goes
so far as to accuse Nathan of lying about his previous experiences with a male
other.
Moreover, that the fact that the woods
nearby are filled with strange totemisstic locations, a common Christian cemetery,
an ancient Indian burial ground, and an empty mansion from the long ago slave
days which is said to be haunted, all suggest to the viewer that something is
slightly amiss in this movie if we are to imagine it as a youthful portrait of
two gay boys coming of age.
Gradually, the “dream boy” epithet shifts
from a notion of Nathan being a model of Roy’s sexual desires, to the
possibility of the entire story working within or at least beside a kind of fantasy
or a presentation of an unreliable realist narrative somehow intertwined with
dreams. In short, the love relationship between Nathan and Roy begins to take
on the shape of a work such as Andrè Breton’s surrealist fiction Nadja,
a mix of the Russian concept of “hope” and the Spanish “Nadie” or “No one.”
Things become even stranger when Nathan’s
father Harland (Thomas Jay Ryan), away for weeks at a time for his job as a
salesman, returns. The tension between him and Nathan’s mother Vivian (Diana
Scarwid) is subtle but somehow palpable. Even more apparent is the problematic
relationship of Nathan to his father, who does not at all appear to approve of
Nathan’s new friend and asks several times if they might just have a long talk,
which results in the seemingly obedient Nathan retreating into his bedroom,
longingly staring out the window for a glimpse of Roy.
Vivien insists that her now increasingly
drunken husband leave their son alone. And when we observe Nathan, as he
prepares to go to sleep, tying a piece of twine between his chest of drawers
and his bed post, we suddenly know that we are being told something far darker
than this tale might have led us to believe, particularly when the father trips
later over the trap, the fact of which sends Nathan scurrying to the nearby graveyard
in order to sleep out the rest of the night.
We now can comprehend how Nathan has
learned to “screw” so professionally. His father has obviously been abusing the
boy for a long while.
Despite the temporary tensions between
Nathan and Roy, when Roy discovers that his friend is terrified of returning
home, he arranges for Nathan to sleep in their empty ranch hand’s bed. And soon,
with Roy’s other friends, they “get away” for a weekend of exploring and
camping in the apparently magical woods and its wonders to which Roy has
promised to introduce his new lover.
In the haunted house, however, Nathan
begins to hear what appears to be his father’s voice, finding comfort only in
the arms of his friend as they hide away in one of the tents which they have
erected in the mansion itself. The next morning, as the other two boys explore
the mansion’s upper floors, Nathan and Roy once more enjoy sex, for the first
time Roy performing fellatio on Nathan. In the middle of their pleasure,
however, the other two boys return to catch them in the act.
Roy and Randy run off, but Burke remains,
raping Nathan, and, when realizing what he’s just done, breaks off an arm of a
nearby chair and clubs him to death. When the body is found by Roy, the police
are called, Roy no longer trusting his previous friend Burke. Nathan’s father
arrives and covers the body.
A funeral in the local Baptist Church
follows, but as Roy returns to the ranch hand’s room he has a vision of Nathan,
greeting the boy with a smile. Next door we see Nathan’s mother, suitcase in
hand, obviously leaving her abusive husband forever.
The next morning on his school-day bus
route, Roy looks once more into the rearview mirror to see Nathan’s face reflected
in it, the only rational explanation being that Nathan has either now become a dream
from which Roy will never escape or that he has been a dream-figure all along.*
*I
have never read Grimsley’s 1995 novel, but apparently it ends with a kind of
resurrection, with Nathan awakening in the Mansion to seek out Roy, the two
discussing how they might escape the others who might search them out and agreeing
to re-enter the woods and disappear forever from society. In short, Nathan’s
death is still an open issue by the close of the fiction. Yet clearly, within
any realist context, the events which seem to still partake of the realist
conventions of the rest of the book make sense only if they are perceived as being
a part of a dream world or a fantasy.
I
might also mention that Grimsley is also a noted playwright, and I believe is a
friend of one of the playwrights I published on my Sun & Moon Press, either
Mac Wellman or Len Jenkin. In any event, Grimsley sent me a manuscript, if I
recall correctly, of his collected plays Mr. Universe and Other Plays,
which was ultimately published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 1998, after
I passed on it because of my recognition that I could not continue publishing
books on that imprint, having just begun to produce new titles under my Green
Integer.
Los
Angeles, September 20, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September
2020).
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