invitation to a sexual act
by
Douglas Messerli
Henry K. Norvalls (writer and director) Shower / 2012 [7 min.]
There is, at first, something rather charming about Norwegian director Henry K. Norvalls’ horrific short film, Shower (2012). A swimmer (Svend Erichsen) is showering in a public facility. Another hunkier man (Per Magnus Barlaug) enters and takes another stall. Within a few moments, the first showerer hears strange noises coming from the other stall, pauses the flow of water, listens, and returns to his cleanly business.
Soon after, he hears the sound of
pleasurable groans, and again he stops momentarily what he’s doing, only to
return to bathing himself. When it happens a third time, his curiosity, and we
can presume his hormones, are somewhat aroused, and he turns off the water,
darts out of the stall, and quickly moves into a stall closer to the sound of
the pleasure.
Finally,
witnessing the man openly masturbating in the stall, he chastises him for his inappropriate
behavior. Almost in total innocence, the man says, he enjoys it.
A bit flummoxed, the swimmer suggests
this not the place for that kind of behavior, with the man responding once more
about how much enjoys it, moving out into the changing room, presumably with an
erect penis.
Even more angered by the recalcitrant
masturbator’s behavior the first man once more expresses his disconcertion
about the second’s public sexual activities, although one might argue with only
one other being to observe him, his actions are just slightly “public,” and
Barlaug’s character even suggests something like that, arguing that if other
man truly found such behavior so abhorrent he might have left immediately, but
instead has stayed and even moved closer to the engagement.
Almost as in slow motion, Erichsen’s
character moves forward as if in a trance, putting his hand on the other’s
shoulder as the man again proceeds to jack off.
The
first man’s eyes widen in witnessing the immediate action, stuttering out the
words, “Is there something else you want me to do?” He seems to almost be
pleading for further involvement, for an invitation to participate in the sexual
act.
After what seems like forever in a 7
minute film, the second responds: “Kiss me when I come.”
It
is, when one thinks about it, a rather strange request. One might presume he
would ask the other man to help in the masturbation, to perform fellatio, or
even become involved in other sexual services, but the very innocence of asking
him almost to award him for the success of his self-pleasuring is a bit odd and
distancing even if at the same time there is a kind of utter innocence in the
request.
An even longer few seconds of only the
sound of the hand slapping across his penis ensues, followed by a growing moan
in the masturbator’s chest, as he cries out “Now, now,” the first man, wearing
a gold chain from which hangs a tiny cross, moving toward other’s lips for a
kiss.
Without warning, the first man slugs the
second, sending him to the floor, bending down to hit him again and again and
again—so many times that it is difficult to even believe what we are suddenly
witnessing immediately after his previous gentle and almost teenage-boy like
behavior. His obvious wonderment and even joy has turned, with a blink of the
eyes, into hatred, as the camera pans back to show the body of the dead
showerer, blood pooling up beside his head.
Every openly gay man probably has long
heard of such stories. Certainly in the late 1960s when I was active in the New
York City gay scene, I heard time and again such tales of how a simple sexual
encounter turned murderous the moment the act came to an end, legendary stories
of how a friend of the teller’s had been picked up for sex never to be seen
again, or, surely a common urban legend, how a stranger involved in fellatio
suddenly bit off the man’s penis the second the sperm began to well up. And we
all later read of the repulsive perversions of the Milwaukee madman, Jeffrey
Dalmer, who killed and sometimes ate parts of the bodies of 17 boys and men from
1978 to his capture in 1991.
These ominous warnings were part and
parcel of living in a hostile environment wherein homophobia was a natural
result of the culture’s general fear and even terror of gay men and the growing
LGBTQ community as whole. But to see it so lucidly laid out in Norvalls film
came as something of a shock. As commentator Ivan Kander writes:
“With one location, two characters, and minimum dialogue, Norvalls crafts an undeniably engaging scene that exposes its protagonist to his bare core, both literally and figuratively. ...In other words, it’s a character drama about sexuality, repression, and identity that essentially feels like a suspense film. Quite simply: it’s tough to look away from.”
As Norvalls himself described his response to an international short [movie] challenge that asked its participants to interpret the theme “naked”: “I came to the realization that naked for me meant to be caught in a lie or have a secret revealed, when others knew what I did not want them to know.”
It’s the “not wanting” others to know that
leads to the swimmer’s attempt to blot out the very existence of the evidence,
in this case a human being simply enjoying the pleasures of his penis.
Los Angeles, November 28, 2020
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November
2020).
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