52 Films by Women Vol 3. 12. BEACH RATS (Director: Eliza Hittman)
One of my favourite film titles of all time is ‘What Rats
Won’t Do’. You have a rodent who noses around looking for food, biting
indiscriminately and spreading disease. Then there is something that it would
treat disdainfully, an invitation it would turn down. Incredible! At any rate
the film didn’t live up to its title; in fact it didn’t get a cinema release.
So ‘What Rats Won’t Do’ is still a mystery.
This brings me inelegantly to Beach Rats, a film written and directed by Eliza Hittman (born
1979), whose previous credits include It
Felt Like Love (2013) and the short, Forever’s
Gonna Start Tonight (2011). It is about a young man, Frankie (Harris
Dickinson), living with his mother (Kate Hodge) and sister in Brooklyn, who
repeatedly visits a gay chat room and looks at who’s on offer. To those who
ask, he explains that he doesn’t know what he likes. In a shot quite late in
the film we see him framed against a sign that reads ‘electric closet’. Frankie
is in the electric closet all right; he is on the brink of collapse. We spend
the entire film worrying about him because he acts but doesn’t talk. Actions
may speak louder than words, but they can also be irreversible. When he mocks a
girl, Simone (Madeline Weinstein) who is in his room, stripped to her bra and
panties, asking whether he thinks she is pretty (‘are you fishing for
compliments?’) Frankie doesn’t understand that language is a way of clarifying
consensus. If you just act, and not talk, then you’ll never be truly understood;
actions have a way of misrepresenting the person who performs them.
Frankie is struggling with his sexuality, but also with some
level of guilt. He is hooked on his father’s cancer medication, which he grinds
into powder and snorts. Dad is being cared for at home and is on his way out.
He doesn’t speak. There is the suggestion that Frankie is looking for a father
figure in his desire for sexual comfort. You find yourself leaping to the
conclusion that Frankie discovered that he was gay at the same time that his
father discovered he had cancer and that Frankie thinks there is a causal link.
At any rate, Frankie doesn’t want to talk about it, because he is part of a
pack, a quartet of guys who hang out on the beach, smoking weed and picking
pockets. The guys, all nameless, don’t talk much either. With her
cinematographer, Hélène Louvart, Hittman depicts them the way women are
frequently presented by male directors, with no attention to their personality,
only to their looks. Interestingly, this is one group that doesn’t have a
leader, typically a neglected male who masks disappointment with aggression.
These guys don’t appear to have homes to go to.
Whilst out with the guys looking at the 9:30pm fireworks
that take place every night in summer at Coney Island, Frankie catches Simone’s
eye. They have a conversation about the beauty of fireworks – Simone thinks
they are romantic, Frankie isn’t impressed. Fireworks in movies were once the
go-to cutaway to express orgasm. A couple kisses – cut to fireworks, because
you couldn’t show sex, only infer it. The fact that Frankie isn’t into
fireworks intrigues her – he is not a sexual predator. So after she and her
friends follow Frankie and his group to the dodgems (or bumper cars as we call
them in England), she gets into his vehicle. He takes her home because he can’t
tell her he’s gay in front of the guys; not even when they are alone. After
mimicking her by putting her own brassiere to his chest and asking ‘do you
think I’m pretty’ she calls him an asshole and leaves him.
By contrast, Frankie’s first attempts at male-on-male
intimacy go far better, meeting a guy and being taken to the beach. As Frankie
is kissed by a man we sense for the first time, the image slips out of focus as
the filmmaker were averting her gaze out of respect for a private moment. Sex
is not presented as an erotic spectacle rather as a release devoid from human
connection.
Nothing exudes sexual confidence in a man as walking around
with your shirt off, but Frankie mostly keeps his on. We watch him with his
friends playing hand tennis, though at one point the ball is whacked towards
him when he isn’t playing properly. He also hangs with his buddies in a vaping
bar – or vapery as I guess they will one day be called. Vagrancy in vaperies is not like pot pourri
to popery; in my other life, I was a beat poet, a dead-beat poet. After his
father’s funeral – he declines the opportunity to speak (‘I haven’t written
anything’) even when asked by his mother to ‘speak from the heart’ – he
reconnects with Simone. For him, she is the perfect cover, so he can continue
to hook up with other men and not be called gay. Yet he makes an attempt to
sexually satisfy her, masturbating before he gets into bed with her. He hooks
up with another older man and gets into his car. He sees a roll of notes on the
dashboard. You wonder whether Frankie will take it, but no, it is for a hotel,
where Frankie strips with the light on – and backside to camera – in front of
the other man.
In parallel to Frankie’s sexual disorientation, his younger (thirteen
year old?) sister starts sexualising herself, wearing a bikini to go to the
beach. When she sees Simone’s pierced belly button for the first time, she
wants – and later gets – one. This in spite of Simone trying to put her off by
saying the piercing got infected. Hunting around the house for valuables to
sell, Frankie and his ‘hangers-with’ (as he repeatedly says, they ‘are not my
friends’) spy his sister with a young boy; they usher him out. Frankie pawns
his mother’s earrings. The guys – and Simone – head for a party on a boat and
after being spotted by one of his male one-night stands, who then offers him
drinks of the house saying ‘I can’t resist a pretty girl’, Frankie doth ingest
too much.
The film’s sense of impending danger finally explodes when
the gang desperately want weed and Frankie admits that he can get it from one
of his pick-ups: ‘how do you feel like partying with a gay guy?’ He explains
that he goes on gay websites to get weed – messed up, but, y’know. So they
contrive to mug one of Frankie’s dates.
The film begins and ends on the beach. Near the start, in
what we discover is Frankie’s screensaver on his basement computer – he won’t
sleep in his own room, since his sexuality is literally underground – there is
a gull trapped on the beach by gently advancing waves. The bird, rather like
Frankie, seems directionless. The final image is of rolling waves, a familiar
signifier to turbulent sexual desires, but there is no one in the picture.
Beach Rats is so
well-observed that I could imagine that there were guys out there like Frankie
who might be caught in the perfect storm of a father dying whilst in the midst
of sexual discovery. A young person’s inability to express emotion – partly
from peer pressure and partly from a fear of labels – is a universal
experience. I’m not sold on the title – maybe Hittman saw Kevin Smith’s Mallrats and decided to react to it. The
advertising is misleading too. This is about one young man’s experience and has
a specific truth. It is not about group mentality.
Reviewed from a
screener copy provided by Peccadillo Pictures, Saturday 10 February 2018
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