Fantastic Queer Motions
The Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Bob Mizer
Watching Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s short film Mobile Men (2008), we aren’t given much in the way of narrative information. We know immediately from the anarchic blustering of wind, that dull nature that suffocates our audial landscape for the five minutes of the film’s run time, we are traveling. But the destination isn’t clear. A man stares down the camera with a direct coolness. Behind him, a constantly amorphous wallpaper of fields and sky. Trees blaze past, muddled with digital artifacts. The man juts his finger to his face, as if to say, this is what you should be looking at. Me. And the camera obeys, pushing closer. He lowers his finger slightly to his chest, and the camera follows his beckoning. Down the side of his jeans, around the rim of his sneaker. A second man changes the camera lens — screwing it on as the film continues. Our subject stands up and removes his shirt. He grins proudly, raising his arms above his head so that we can see his muscles better. He turns from side to side, showing them off. All the while, the world flies by him, loudly indifferent to the gun show. He takes the camera from the man who changed the lens and turns the gaze onto him. This move feels powerful. And almost…flirtatious. Our new subject giggles and immediately begins to show off his tattoos. The first, a large one, stretching down his arm from his shoulder. Then another near his waist. Another on his ankle. He smacks it a few times. Our cameraman presses his fingers to it, copping a feel. The man giggles again.
The camera changes hands once more. This time, Weerasethakul himself takes control. That’s right, he’s been here the whole time. Hanging out as these men tease each other. He films the first subject — his gaze still intense with the road hurtling into space behind him. This time, the camera presses up against his nipple. Just as the homoeroticism of the piece begins to take explicit form, the tattooed man grabs the camera, runs his hand through his hair, and shows off his tattoos again. “I got them to impress the girls. The pain was so intense, I cried out — ,” he emits a joyous, feral scream. An abrupt cut to black.
Weerasethakul has clarified that the men on the truck are migrant workers, and that Mobile Men is meant as a subtle comment on the rights of these workers. In an interview in 2009, he stated: “Here the situation is choreographed as a movie- making game to celebrate youth, beauty, and dignity. The film honors simple gestures that mark individuality through visual exchanges. I hope the viewers realize that, when the actors and a director are holding a camera and shoot, we are destroying a discriminating barrier. The pickup truck simulates a small moving island without frontiers where there is freedom to communicate, to see, and to share.” Whether explicitly intentional or not, Weerasethakul has invented a uniquely queer space. On this truck, these men, emboldened by speed and ferocious wind, are free to engage in hyper-masculine play. The extremity of their stage creates a sort of inverse privacy, leaving ample room for homoeroticism to take hold.
While Mobile Men is slightly enigmatic, for sure, Weerasethakul’s feature-length work can be downright spellbinding. Within his cinema — a universe constantly ruled by and pulsing with mysticism and romance, unceasingly transversing time and space — it seems that anything is possible. This “moving island” is potentially forever in-transit. But let us imagine that it has barreled down this rural road and transmogrified, in an act of magic, into seemingly new subjects; ones which still retain familiar traces of their old selves, except with a queerness now daringly open.
It is 1964. Our mobile men have touched ground decades behind themselves and assumed entirely new bodies. New names, too: Monte Hanson & Tony Gallo — emblazoned on a title card that they hold up for the camera, their faces holding the same boyish grins. Certain physical echoes of our former subjects live on. Monte Hanson runs his hands through his hair with the same carefree nature of the screaming, tattooed man. And he too carries a similar signifier on his shoulder. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is now or was Bob Mizer, American photographer and filmmaker — again making his presence in the film known, walking on screen with a clapboard, flashing the camera a goofy face. The island on wheels is now a studio. The camera now digests film instead of digital images, and it seems to sit on a tripod. While Weerasethakul’s small, portable camera spat out the roars of the wind in Mobile Men, the only sound in Monte Hanson & Tony Gallo is the sound of a projector — puncturing the film with an audible recursiveness. Here, mobility is transferred from the environment to our subjects.
Monte Hanson and Tony Gallo prove themselves to be truly mobile men. Clad only in loose g-strings, they flex for each other. Showing off. The men are buff. They are hung. They bulge. Monte sticks out his hand for Tony to shake it. Tony grabs it and Monte twists him around into a headlock, pinning him onto the floor. For the remaining duration of the film, they wrestle each other. Dancerly and lustful, they grab at each other’s thighs, rolling around on top of each other. They stuff their faces into each other’s crotches, press their arms against each other’s chests. They play around and rough-house like soldiers of ancient Greece.
These men are engaged in a dance with time — grappling with each other, with themselves, their role as beefcakes, the potentiality of queerness. That eruption of queerness. A queerness spoken in the space between their tattooed bodies as they feel the rush of a day’s air blow past them, in the handing off or stealing of a camera — that machine revealing this queer image — or the way their bodies feel against each other — the heat of Monte’s frantic movement, of his breathing, and the slam of Tony’s body against the floor. Their grunts and groans we do not hear. Where are they spoken? In that cathartic scream across time. In the pain of receiving a tattoo.
Bob Mizer photographed and filmed other wrestling matches. Some are straightforward — no story, like Mobile Men, just the interaction itself. But others contain the very same magic of Weerasethakul’s films — the anthropomorphically mythic Afternoon of a Satyr depicts a man and a “satyr,” or a man costumed to look like one, chasing each other gleefully across some boulders. Another film, Beat the Devil, finds the devil himself poisoning a handsome young man and wrestling the man who finds him laying on the ground.
Mizer spent most of his career building a queer fantasia of his own — a world where perfect men — or men-like beings, fauns or the like, with perfect abs can touch each other and play with each other and want each other. And even if Satan himself were to come around, the consequences would never be dire. As David Wenger wrote in The New Yorker, “Mizer’s achievement, as a photographer and a publisher, was to take the standards of male beauty as they existed and prove that gay men could satisfy them, and be satisfied by them, too.”
Weerasethakul and Mizer’s films, respectively, are set into motion through the theoretical queerness of space and the honest enacting of desire. The two filmmakers are linked in time through their exhilarating and mystifying visions of intimacy. Whether through the direct physical contact of men’s hands upon each other, or upon the camera, these men have made works that speak with a direct intentionality about queer desire and its flexibility.
