selected shorts 2011
a change of the reel
Monte Patterson (screenwriter and director) Caught / 2011 [12 minutes]
Obviously influenced by William E. Jones’ now-classic underground 2008 film, Tearoom, which used almost an hour of raw film data from a police sting of a men’s room in Massillon, Ohio, Patterson’s Caught does the same for what are supposedly tearoom scenes in Jonesville, Ohio where in 1964 a bathroom camera hidden behind a mirror filmed over 68 men having different forms of homosexual activity, leading eventually to 38 convictions.
Unlike Jones, however, who is fascinated with how the sexual acts
themselves reveal the sociological and sexual interplay of men seeking physical
love that they knowingly recognize as outlawed, Patterson, in his faux documentary,
is far more interested in the psychological condition of a heterosexual man (Gabriel
Gatton, to whose character I shall attribute his name) who, despite an
apparently loving wife and a young male blonde-haired child, Georgie, visits
the bathroom during this short film three times in order to find sexual
fulfillment.
The first two times quickly reveal the unpleasant frustrations and
dangers of such desires. The first time Gabriel enters he immediately is faced
with two rather heavy-set men in the toilet stall, one sucking the other
off. Our “hero” moves to the urinal
where he pretends to piss, one of the men from the stall leaning back to get a
view of the younger man’s face, whereupon Gabriel decides to opt out of that
day’s sexual adventure, moving instead to wash his hands below the mirror
behind which the camera is hidden.
The very next image is of his curly-haired son with his wife (Liz
Wicker) smoking a cigarette on the couch. Despite her greeting of “Hi, honey”
and a kiss on his cheek, her husband kisses only the air, quite obviously
dissatisfied with her standardized greeting.
The second time at the bathroom, dressed far more casually, Gabriel
encounters a handsome young man (Cole Simon) at
the next urinal, who when he turns to face him gradually moves his lips into a
knowing smile before flushing the urinal and going over to the mirror, where we
see the camera whirring behind it, to comb his hair. Soon, he returns to
Gabriel, putting his hand upon the other’s shoulder and messaging it
momentarily. A very unattractive intruder immediately enters while Gabriel
quickly scuffles off, obviously displeased with the interruption as he walks
quickly back to his Chevrolet.
After Gabriel’s first spoonful of eggs, Patterson’s camera immediately
cuts to Gabriel sitting in his car yet again outside the public bathroom,
swallowing down a final sip of beer as if to get up enough nerve to enter once
more.
At the same urinal he again encounters Cole, who this time stands behind
him, thrusting his lower body slightly forward as if to suggest he might be
interested in anal sex. This time we see the camera and the cameraman behind
the mirror, catching the kabuki-like scene their victims are playing out. Cole moves off to the open stall, pulling down
his pants and facing out. Eventually Gabriel follows, as the hidden camera
evidently stalls as, we later discover, the cameraman engaged in changing
reels. Accordingly, we see nothing depicting their sexual act, but know that
this time Gabriel has succeeded when he we observe him leaving the building
with a slight smile on his face.
Later, in the midst of the police-viewing of the camera scenes—wherein
we recognize several of the men we’ve previously glimpsed—and in in their later
arrestment by police before being hauled off to jail, Patterson briefly interrupts
the surveillance shots to show us what really happened during those lost camera
moments. Facing Cole, Gabriel pleads “Wait, wait, I’ve never done this before.”
Cole looks longingly at his new prey, while Gabriel asks, “What’s your name?”
to which Cole replies, “Shit, turn around,” forcing him into position so that
he can fuck him, probably Gabriel’s first and possibly only anal
penetration.
The next cut shows Gabriel, dressed only in his undershorts, opening his
door to collect the daily newspaper where he discovers through a headline that
police have arrested 17 men at the men’s room for “deviant behavior.” Each of
the men arrested (Cole among them, having been caught on camera with other
sexual partners), if convicted, is sent to the state penitentiary for one year.
In a highly ironic shift, our
ears are suddenly bombarded by the Bobby Vinton standard, “My Heart Belongs to
Only You.”
My heart belongs to only you
I've never loved as I love you
You've set a flame within me burning
A flame to stay within me yearning
It's just for you I want to live
It's just to you my heart I give
I'll always be your slave my darling
Through the coming years
Need anything more be said? He has been temporarily “saved,” but it is
clear that he longs for another homosexual encounter which he may or may not
chance.
Obviously, this is a kind of tragedy, not because of his queer desires,
but because of the restrictions put upon those desires by the so-called
normative society in which he lives. If he chooses not to chance it again, he
will have to accept a life of lies and dissatisfaction that will offer him little
else in the future but work, death, and the possible dissolving of his marriage
and the effects of that upon his little Georgie. Perhaps what he has now
assimilated is that although he has not been arrested, he too has been “caught”
and imprisoned for life.
Los Angeles, October 28, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
and World Cinema Review (October 2020).
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