Mechanisms of love 2

December 2024. Contains spoilers for the movies “Where are you going, habibi?” (Iben), “Weekend” (Haigh), “All of Us Strangers” (Haigh). I sincerely encourage you to watch at least “Weekend” and “All of Us Strangers” before reading this short post or skipping it. They’re absolutely worth the time.

«I can connect
nothing with nothing.»

The first thing I wanted to say is: what is up with two men biking dangerously on the same bike, made just for one? Yesterday was Christmas’ Eve and I had nothing to do so I watched “Where are you going, Habibi?” (Iben, 2015) and found it very charming, despite what the IMDB crowd had to say ¹. In this one scene, the two main characters (a gay Turkish guy and an allegedly-straight German guy) are walking side to side, until the German asks the other to hop on. With a little balancing, they bike away gladly, the guest’s legs stretched hazardously in front of him as they speed over Admiralbrücke (and surely part of the reason the movie got to me emotionally was that I could recognize the streets, that I have my own memories attached to the places they visit or pass by). After watching it and being somewhat disappointed with its shortness, I scrolled through the sugguested movies and found “Weekend” (2011), Andrew Haigh’s second movie, who recently directed my beloved “All of Us Strangers” (2023). As I was a little drunk and pleasantly so, I wanted to watch it too – maybe also to compare with the previous ‘bad LGBT’ movie. But the available streaming featured the usual disturbingly unnatural Italian dub, so I waited on the next day and I rented it elsewhere. In it, at some point the two main characters, who might be catching feelings for each other after a one night stand, are taking a walk home, carrying a bike by hand. I was not expecting for one of them to ask the other to join on, but he does, and so on they go, stiff legs, lots of laughs.

I was a little surprised to find the same moment in two different movies that, I thought, have nothing in common with each other but gay characters and me, watching them in a row. On second thought, though, more similarities appear: both movies deal with distincly gay moments, and in both of them a looser character who’s more comfortable with his sexuality charms another who’s either completely in the closet or mostly not out. Surprisingly, it is always the more closeted one to offer the uncomfortable bike ride together. So I started thinking: is there something about the bycicle itself which justifies its appereance in two very different ‘gay’ movies, produced for completely different markets? Does the bike work as a metaphor for motor, speeding, direction, loss of it, an instrument made for simple, singular consummation, which gays somewhat explode, twist, turn double, moltiplicate? Does it point to a desire that the more closeted gays have to be silly in public, to be seen together? In “Weekend”, Russel asks Glen to hold himself tight against his chest. They have already fucked at this point but later, when they’re home, Russel shyly refuses Glen’s kisses with a demeanor that, to me, seems to come from shame still, from the fear of having overdone it, of not being able to go back (is this good insight? Is this valuable?). But he invited Glen on the bike, before. For a little while, they were silly togethere, they touched each others’ bodies in public. In “Where are you going, Habibi?”, the supposedly straight guys has the (more) openly gay guy jump in the ‘backseat’, just after the latter said that he’s leaving. What could be the end of their relationships, that hasn’t even really started, is first accelerated by this bike ride that should lead him closer to the embassy, where he will get the papers necessary to leave Berlin, but then seems delayed (the movie’s open ending doesn’t give any real hints as to what will happen) with a long drunken trip to Tempelhof. On the bike again they are visible, bound together, recogniseable. Maybe the two-on-one bike ride is the only way that they compromise visibily, public affection, where for both couples a time limit (most clearly in “Weekend”) has been imposed upon their lives and budding relationships. Maybe the bike ride is an uncomfortable but effective means to expand on this time a little, to open other possibilities without leaving the present, its difficulties. Maybe they’re just boys, and they shroud themselves in boyhood, the common ground between them, and boyish playfulness in order to be close to each other. Or have I just really, really been alone these past days?

I really liked “Weekend”. K told me not to watch it because it was sad but I think that’s what I wanted. I saw it with eyes that had already seen and loved “All of Us Strangers”, so I’d been primed to find connections between the two. And there is something to be said about a director who writes two movies with extremely similar situations (in terms of human happenings), but I don’t know what, maybe that that would qualify him as an auteur, whatever that means, an artist with thematic consistency, maybe (is that a desirable quality?) or maybe that there’s a biographical level to be unlocked somewhere, between interviews and other texts by him. But I don’t want to go there, as a form of respect for Haigh too – it’d be far too easy to reduce everything to an autobiographical exercise. There is though an undeniable familiarity to WK after having seen AOUS and maybe someone who watched them in chronological order felt the same about the last one. It’s been tempting for me (in the slow days after the first watch, as I extend the second one, break it into pieces, delay the last fifteen minutes of it) to imagine the second as another attempt at the themes and conflict of the first, maybe even imagining it to be what the other could not be. In order to find that out, I should look at the structures, themes, metaphors – the ‘systems’ of both movies to then discern whether they can be put into that kind of comparistic conversation, to justify the choice. Then, assuming a timeline, I could begin to ask whether Adam and Harry in AOUS manage what Russel and Glen couldn’t in WK – imagine, then realize, a love story that doesn’t bend and break to the rules of time. But the question is biased, I have my reasons for asking it, so, in real academic fashion, I’d probably find the evidence I’m looking for and discard whatever other complication does not serve my purpose, and that is probably the reason that I haven’t continued writing on AOUS, even though I have so much I want to say, because I think it’s a wonderfully complex movie and, without the necessary instruments or frameworks, I am left to my own devices, my own interpretative systems, and they exhaust me.

(I’m trying to find a way to write about what I love.)

But there are similarities. The shots of the tall building where Russel lives touch directly those of Adam’s isolated house complex; whereas in AOUS Adam repeatedly observes Harry from his window up in the sky and the return of the gaze from Harry signifies the beginning of their relationship, in WK Russell watches Glen walk away from his apartment and he turns away only once, when he has already failed to feign disinterest in him anymore, and one could read the tragedy of the movie already in this scene, because it happens just after the time limit has been established, once the relationship has become impossible. Then, of course, the in-bed scene-s. No bike ride in AOUS, thogh (does the metro count?). I want to believe that it’s not just coincidence, that Haigh was trying to create a line that goes from one to the other, that binds them together, that says something good, something worthwhile about both of them. I’m trying to understand the purpose of this.

(Every time they said goodbye I wanted Glen to stay.)

There’s a scene of AOUS I couldn’t really make sense of, and not because it’s particularly cryptic, but because I had an instinctive, simple reading of it that I couldn’t do much with. It comes just after Adam has decided to sleep at the house of his parents, when he goes into their bed at night to talk with his mother. His father, wearing a white tank top, makes space for him, then practically disappears from the scene. But when everything turns darker and the police car lights start flashing over the room, Adam turns around in panic and finds that his father has been replaced by Harry. After an initial moment of confusion – seeing his lover where his father was, wearing the same tank top – Adam mutters «You can’t be here.» Not just because he’s in a place which is not meant to exist for him too, but because he’s physically taken up the space of his father, just as he’s taken up the space of himself as a child, signified by the comically small pajamas that he wears. This scene reminded me of the first encounter with the father, where they followed each other around the city outskits with meaningful gazes, mostly in silence, offering each other cigarettes and booze – in a way that reminded me immediately of cruising. This troubling, repeated blending of the line between the familiar/sexual was hard for me to make sense of. It hinted at things that didn’t really make sense in this movie. But “Weekend” offers another interpretation.

In the last moments they spend together in bed, their mouth full of sleep (and what a spectacular performance), Glen and Russel experiment with another kind of vulnerability than the one they had the night before, arguing and screaming and fucking. Glen asks Russell why, in the accounts of hookups and relationships he writes, he always focuses on the other person’s coming out. He admits that it’s because he never had one, being an orphan (and already I was thinking of “All of Us Strangers”, because the coming out of Adam to his ghost parents, who died when he was a child, is a focal point in his newfound relationship with them). Glen proposes a game: he’s going to play his father and he’s going to come out. Russel is hesitant, but accepts. There is so much that could’ve gone wrong with this scene – either of them (or the writing) playing this ‘daddy’ acting for laughs, exaggerating it. But it is my favourite scene of the movie precisely because of how it manages to create a moment of absolute sincerity in a fragile moment of (double) acting, just before they must say goodbye to each other. Russel finally gives in and turns sincere and open (with the almost universal languages of coming-outs – the stuttering, the “I don’t like girls” that either follows, as if to excuse its weight, or precedes, to introduce, the hardest thing to say, “I am gay”). Glen looks at him and says that he loves him nonetheless. That touched me deeply already. Then comes the touch of mastery (both from Haigh’s writing and Glen’s actor, Chris New): he adds that «I couldn’t be more proud of you than if you were the first man on the moon». The scene couldv’e collapsced here, fall into cheap comedy, or try to do, say too much. Instead it’s heartfelt, it’s true, and it does something to me (did my parents go beyond the usual, though lucky, declaration of unchanged love? I don’t remember. But I don’t think so).

Glen and Russell believe in this moment, they both need to have it and to give it to each other, and they make me believe in it, too. It latches beautifully onto what they didn’t say the evening before in their fight, it gives each of them a new understanding of how the other perceives them. There is a grace here – a sincerity and an affection – that they both extend to the other which I can’t describe. It reminds me of the beautiful lesson of the first part of Bartlett’s “Who was that Man?” and some sections of “The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions”: what we can do for each other once we find a space (a time) for us. What grace we can gift, what balsam can we pass over our wounds. If I want to be a little dramatic (and I do), this is the gift that they give each other – this is what makes it easier for them, and for myself, to make some kind of troubled peace with the ending, the closing of their relationship.

(What does this second writing, this tracing of the line, accomplish? Am I reminiscing? Am I reliving? Am I bringing anything closer to my heart?)

Looking back at AOUS after WK, at the scene in which Harry turns into Adam’s father, I can now find something different in it, I can bring to the surface something which I could always perceive, but remained hidden under the weight of my previous interpretation. The scene doesn’t go as far into the play-out that Russel and Glen indulge in, but it hints at the same fact: the reparative nature of their relationship, what Adam and Harry do for each other. As I’ve argued elsewhere ², I don’t and cannot see this movie as a tragedy – in my first viewing I already istincly refused to see the ending as the closing off of their relationship after Harry’s ‘suicide’, and with time I found the words to explain that, to me, in the final shots Adam is repairing time, saving the timeline, or creating another, opening up a new time for the both of them, recuparating the past before the moment of loss and avoiding it. This is what Adam does for Harry – more or less literally saving his life. But Harry offers Adam the feeling, the love that prompts his whole journey into the past, at the end of whch he can be saved, too. Harry provides the loving space of care and experience that Adam needs to rebuild his life; he drives him to go out again after his long loneliness, he takes care of him during the drugged-out experience that, somehow, brings him back to his long dead parents’ house, where he stays the night. He gives him love and sex and care – and the way that this happens is also through taking on, at times, the emotional role of a father, through repairing that kind of relationshop for him: whatever that means, it is the same playful but earnest reeancting of family roles that, in “Weekend”, is played out in the coming out scene. Not unlike that, as a matter of fact, the first confession of Adam comes after the night/dream where his father turns into Harry: as he wakes up, he settles down back into reality, into Harry’s care, and he tells him for the first time of how he lost his parents, what shape grief took for him. Adam sees Harry as his father, having melted together into the same body, because the care that is extende to him also means to repair that emotional wound, made from absence and detachment and things gone unsaid, which in turn allows him to patch things up with his actual father. This familiar reanactment is not as strong, not as intentional as in WK, but I think it still expands meaningfully on it.

Comparison works here because it sheds light on a moment that would’ve otherwise remained blind in my reading, by which I mean in my understanding of the movie and of my feelings about it. But what is to be gained from the next step I feel tempted towards – proving that Glen and Russels’ story finds its completion, its happy ending, in All of Us Strangers – that its refusal of the rules of reality, its slipping into the tones of fantasy, is a strategy meant to avoid the queer person’s Mr. Melancholy, its sworn enemy (time) by creating a sideways time, a repaired nest where time can be rearranged, stopped, changed? That the two days that are given to Russel and Glen, the only night that Adam and Harry spend together in ‘reality’, are made to explode, to give away into queer time, the rearange of the rules of temporality which makes the happy ending possible? What is it but my well-meaning, childhish desire to make the pain cease, to repair heartbreak over a sad ending?

(But in romance, isn’t every sad ending just an editor’s choice – the focus on a moment of a life – won’t there be another love for them, in Nottingham or Portland? Isn’t it possible as well that that they will remain in contact, that Glen will call Russell to admit that his plan is not working, that America was not the new start he had imagined to be, that he must come back home, come back to him? Or won’t they wait the time out, wait in the absence of each other, Russel wearing out the tape of that first mornign together, or never listening to it, and then one day, many lovers past, each deserving their own movie, Glen will show up at the door, or he will be seen up from the window again, and something new can begind?

I thought this would help, but it doesn’t. There’s seventeen fanfictions about “Weekend” on A03, mostly written by the same three people. Do they get it? What happens if I wrote one, if I read them?)

Is this good? Does this make sense? I believe it does – but does it expand on my love? There is so much that is worthy of love, which means, that I love, in all of these films. When I started working on AOUS, immediately after seeing it in March, I watched it twice in cinemas and then planned to do so once more at home, so that I could stop it at my will and complete the chronological notes I had sketched. I wanted to say everything that I could, find meaning into everything, leave nothing unseen. I wanted to love it completely, love it despite its obscurities and flaws, which meant, to light up the obscurities and justify the flaws. I didn’t get very far, of course. I read the book that the movie is vaguely inspired from, made some notes on that, and never managed to watch it a third time. I was trying to be academically rigorous. But I also wanted to do right by the movie, by my love. There was a system, a rule to its story, which if I had understood would have proved my love, solidified it, made me able to write on it and do so intentionally and powerfully, would have set me apart from its other enjoyers, would have proved an unquestionable connection between me and the movie. So why couldn’t I finish it? And why has it taken me this long to get back to these notes, too?

(I need to put love to rest, at some point. I need to stop writing, stop thinking about it. Otherwise love – and also the basic fact that a story always ends - could break my heart. I felt this way for “All of Us Strangers”, too, and for “Looking”, that I saw when I was nineteen and again last year, after I found out it was written by Haigh too, in anticipation of AOUS. I’m thinking about watching it again. I thought writing would help, but it’s mostly forgetting.)

I took part in a literature analysis contest at my high school when I was eighteen. The trial tests I had taken before and the observations I made in class made it seem somewhat evident (to me) that I’d win. But someone else did and, when the winning text was read, it seemed to me like it wasn’t saying anything good or worthwile about the analyzed poem. It was a formulaic, by-the-books reading, and I decided mine to be better. At some point during the reading I also left, halfway trying to make a scene and also because I couldn’t really contain my tears. I needed this win as a sign that, in my constant struggle against reading, books, intelligence, meaning, I was getting somewhere, I was making progress. Later that day a teacher of mine who had watched over me during the whole process sent me an email. What I remember of it is that she said that the criticism I had expressed before in other attempts was well thought, but it also came from a space of personal resonance, and that the poem that we were required to analyzed for the contest just hadn’t awakened the same in me. She meant to say that I was a passionate student (did she call me a writer?) and not a critic, because a critic’s job is to always find something to say. After this incident, which happened during my last year of high school, I took a break from writing³. I didn’t plan an end date to it but it would last for some six months, until I began writing bad but genuine poems in German in Prague. But I thought about this email all along, and I have kept thinking about it in the following years. I’ve been thinking about having a blog since I was sixteen, seeing it as some kind of requirement for the life of a writer, and now that I have one I’m finding it exciting, yes, but also very difficult, and not to find things to talk about (as I feared when I was younger), but to find a way, a methodology, for talking about them. The process always falls in on itself, the drafts pile up, and then I get to moments like these, where I question why I am doing it at all.

I don’t want to be a critic. There is so much that is profoundly uninteresting to me or that makes me mad in a way that isn’t enjoyable to write about or to read. At best I am a writer, whch means I’m always autobiographical, if not a little autofictional, and it must not come as a surprise to anyone that anything I write about is ultimately about myself. If I do this well, I’m not just enamored with the sound of my voice or the quest for myself, and all of this can mean something to someone else, too. But I’ve known for a while now that whatever writing means to me, it is connected essentially to my memory and to my love, and I’m trying to understand what the instruments (of fiction, of analysis) I have can ultimately do for my love – for this essential love that I feel for certain films, a little more rarely for books. When I finished watching “Weekend” it seemed natural to me to find a way to write about it somehow, to allow writing to be a continuation of my love. A way to understand the confines of it, its color, to extend it in time, to give myself a chance to feel it before it’s gone. But when I found the bike, this idea of parallels, trying to understand what they do for me or for anyone, weight accumulated on my love, and I couldn’t write anymore. I think I am coming back to this because I want to, because I want to want it and I want to do it, to have done it for myself, because I am trying to extricate the “I want to” from the “I should”; because A. told me to write out of love, if at all, and even if I always knew it, it’s easier when someone tells you.

But if I were to compare and contrast the use of the bike in both movies, if I were to create a definition of this unstable affectionate bike ride as a vehicle of expression of homosexuality/homosociality, the only one afforded by the protagonists of these movies, caught in between the desire to express their love and the clawing hands of heteronormativity/straight time, would I get any closer to what I love in them, would I be able to upend my love, make it last a little longer, inform my other days a little more strongly?

(The truth is that “Where are you going, Habibi?” was made specifically for me. The white German ‘straight’ guy was of rough but ultimately tender kind I’ve dreamed about often when I was younger and closeted, and there’s a boyish beauty to the other one which is extremely striking to me, a certain cleanlines, in the sense of directness, to his face which made me develop that sort of romantic attention that I am certainly not new to. In one scene, he is meant to play the human lamp in a stage rehearsal led by his uncle, which translates to him wearing a lamp head over his and a house robe, for some reason. Two actors come up to him and the boy among them takes the lamp off, unveiling the Turkish’s guy face stretched into an exaggerated smile. The other guy just stands there, clearly taken aback by his beauty, that is strangely so evident in that moment, and I felt the same. What can I do about this but forget – or try this small recap, a writerly exercise by which I run my fingers over his face and type over it some words to describe his beauty, make it mine? What can I do to make this feeling part of the mechanisms of my mind?)

I’ve read reviews arguing that “Habibi” doesn’t go anywhere, that it’s too fast or too slow, and that’s all true somehow. Part of me wishes that I could write something more elegant, more detached, to change their minds, to clean the slate of the film. I wish I could tell them that the last scene, where the straight? and the gay guy are running around Tempelhof, getting drunk and almost totally naked, was very sweet to me. That it reminded me of my adolescence, of the nameless desire I had then which has remained nameless today, sated temporarily by the straight boys I had short-lasting but intense friendshops with that always lapped on the sentimental, the romantic. That sometimes running around at night and being a fool with your straight best friend is all you can have. That sometimes it’s what you want, too, that sometimes, many years later, you wonder if that was what you really needed, what your heart wanted. But autobiography is a defunct genre now, autobiographical feeling always entails something suspicious, and people are very quick to dismiss it today.

In bringing these two movies together, they begin to form a memory, a hard core that I hope I will not forget. The sense of these days (these weeks alone, the passing of Christmas, a few of those numb days before New Year’s eve) coagulate around it. I still do not know what criticims, or writing in general, can do for my love. And it’s not even criticism – just sustained, more or less rigorous thinking. It’s not academia. It’s not pure writing because that’d be fan-fiction, which, in its pure form, I haven’t really tried. It’s an essay in the sense of an attempt. Zine writing, maybe. A blog post.

Same as when I was a child, I do not know what to make of my love. But it must go somewhere. It must.