This is the last of it: Stranger by the Lake (2013)
Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao) and Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) in Stranger by the Lake, directed by Alain Guiraudie, 2013.
Every day, Franck drives down to the lake to cruise. He does this with such regularity that, presumably, he only exists at the lake. He previously sold produce, and now he is “thinking of what to do next.” Some days he gets lucky and another man jacks him off in the lush brush above the shore. This is the south of France and only white men exist at the lake. Some sunbathe in the nude on the beige pebble beach. Some watch Franck fuck. Some, like Michel and Ramiére, may have whatever is meant by a “swimmer’s build” and swim in the lake; Franck is also one of these, while his new friend Henri is not. Henri is a logger. The tree-cutter and the former fruit-seller sit together in the sun and mutedly discuss their estrangement from the raw materials of love. As a compulsion, the camera attends to their coming and going: ascending into the woods, emerging from the water, Franck’s leaving Henri behind in his doggish eagerness to sniff at the knees of Michel, Henri departing alone across the small rocks, tenderly treading the restless terrain toward his more intellectual depression.
Before they are expelled by the same warm, golden secrecy that binds them like a haze of midges here, the men browse the green brush and regard each other. No other animals roam among them, no wild turkeys with heads twisting on rope-cord necks. They revolve in patient appraisal, quite like satellites, casting their penumbras over this and that prospective encounter, intersecting their fleshed atmospheres in brief studies of texture, vapor, and visual tyranny, hoping always to detect the most cataclysmic magnetism possible in the man, beginning with his pleasing edges. He is otherwise nothing, ideally. In every other ecosystem on earth, he vies for and performs nomination, indeed is empowered by his name and ability to name. But this is hardly a garden. It is mere landscape. Here, nomenclature diminishes his ability to be anyone, his availability to be therefore a serendipity in the randomness of unintelligent design. Less needs to be known about him than about the species of vine beside which he and he will empty his swollen scrotum: that to find in its presence one’s life removed from the movement of time will not be regrettable.
Like this, the men could go on forever.
In another country—the wide ocean shrunk to a spit-shot between their respective regions of the imagination—arrives Stéphane Bouquet’s The Next Loves, translated from the French by Lindsay Turner. “Holy fuck!,” Maureen N. McClane blurbs: “Paris, New York, the remembered city of Rimbaud…Schuyler…O’Hara…blowjobs.” “O’Hara,” “Schuyler,” “Creeley,” rosters a review by John Steen, who writes, too, “What’s queer about Bouquet is not just that his desire is for men, but that his poems embrace desire’s strangeness, perversity, and multiplicity.” Queer is a breezy, lazy sundry here—rather than a bewildering malaise—inside the sort of semantic construction that becomes as probable as inevitable when the literature wishes to remain chained to its pillars of singularity and distinction while skimming the hot, bruised skins of a vernacular throng. What’s [gay] about Bouquet is not just that [he’s gay], but that his poems embrace [sex]. The Next Loves arrives as a tributary to a body of text that keeps milking hookups for inexhaustible tenderness (“indefatigable sweetness,” blurbs Garth Greenwell), for the seemingly ironic surprise of loneliness to be found there, for what it must say about everyone that among these men’s rapacious desire for themselves is the claustrophobia of an endless internet, the apathy of national borders their bodies freely penetrate, and no lasting satisfaction. The text, amalgamating its reviewers and influencers, reserves and replenishes the right to be solipsistically shaken by this, its own existence. Let’s apprehend from the text that only gay white men are dying while gay white men are fucking, that the one crisis amplifying in stereo sound while they spar with the boredom of empire is the suicides and persecutions of other gay white men—listed by name in Bouquet’s often-lauded long poem, “Light of the Fig”—who won’t or may not live to duplicate this practice of orgiastic irreverence. Their knotting and breeding boisterously like bushels of octopus eggs is infinitely transgressive, as it is the final and most modern stain of outlaw in their nature. And this stain is desperate to resist immaculation if the text is to continue representing the entire spectrum of experiences lived by any people who are, well, not heterosexual. “[I]mmortality,” Turner translates, “needs a global language.”
It is a mistake to grind this axe in the middle of pandemic and rebellion. No writing requires leaking self-consciousness from its seams to be seen as writing done well. With a film script, you can make Octavia Spencer mammy every central character through yet another integration fantasy—in this example, Guillermo del Toro’s slop-sweet Creature from the Black Lagoon remake—and leave her stranded in the rain with a cat-raising painter who’d rather watch Betty Grable numbers than acknowledge documented acts of state terrorism against Black people. And you can make Octavia call the cops to rescue Sally Hawkins and remain there, unbothered, at the bloody scene of the inexplicable murder of a family man, cat gay intact as the only other witness while Alexandre Desplat orchestrates solemn resolution out of mud. And you can still get the nomination for Best Screenplay. You can still win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Score.
Zelda (Octavia Spencer) with cops in the Shape of Water.
No one has to do anything. Not the first openly gay presidential contender, not his cops. They just have to be. Harvard Business School’s Jacob Meiner, Class of 2020, “want[s] to be the first openly queer U.S. Secretary of Defense,” in the most self-assured illustration of Chandan Reddy’s inquiries into US legislative enfolding of gays and lesbians after the 2008 election of Barack Obama. The thirst persists for firsts as ameliorative, sustained endorsements of social abjection. The internet insists young Joe Biden was a babe; Harvard (again) remarks “his formerly chiseled jaw.” An image of young, open-shirted Justin Trudeau interjects. Similarly, any of Bouquet’s Loves, transcending anonymity or not, opens like a tab and exalts a reliable set of qualities:
On Facebook someone posted & thanks
a youthful face reading a poem
[…]
I start you over on repeat
bright reader of the poem Adam Fitzgerald as
[…] on Youtube others have shared
their thoughts about you UR A QT says heyyoumillionaires
which is really
completely true
By page or by poem, Bouquet rotates from “youthful” “bright” “QT” to the next, and this action in itself appears, to those invested in the infinite transgression of gay (white) sex, nostalgic of the politically resistant. In this other country—where people like to hope for certain scenarios in liberal absurdity such as poetry’s existing, by default, in opposition to the values of oppressive regimes, or like fascist ideology’s final days somehow coinciding with the death of a roughly distinguished generation of voters (e.g., baby boomers)—Bouquet’s speakers enter, amid a fanfare of euphony, lucid and drooling:
His screen name Blue Adonis
6”1’ 21yo top eyes blue cataract of blondness
& in my stupid heart the pure curare of beauty
“Beauty” as a “pure” essence to which the “stupid heart” reacts—a heart, presumably, unassailed by intellectual haranguing ‘round the question of beauty as other than essential and naturally conferred. Beauty as providence: Hemsworth, Evans, Pratt, and Pine. His beauty is his structured sheen of chaos immunity. In this country, we’ve paid for the right to expect that, no matter what state-legislated genocidal act or industry-driven climate catastrophe happens, his face, his jawline, his blood pressure and credit stay steady. Unbothered in his vocation to bother, he is as attractive as expungement, or the distance between an Amazon warehouse and the front door. To gaze on him is not to look away from violence but to bend to violence’s incontrovertible convenience.
Nobody has to do nothing. The Discourse is tired and slouching forward into the shore. Like that clueless body of the stoned boyfriend in Jaws, it just kinda drops. The rocks wring it out. The spirit of the cruising spot speaks—toothful, dooming—something like, “You don’t gotta like [the text] to admit [it] tells [it] like [it] is.” A pre-med college roommate who sketched body organs for fun said shit like that about Trump, and everyone thought he was the sweetest because he played tennis and otherwise kept quiet.
Michel (Christophe Paou) seducing / disillusioning Franck.
There is horror in indiscretion. If the cops find out what Franck knows about Michel’s drowning of Ramiére, they shut down the beach and dissolve the one stage where Franck’s infatuation is allowed to play tragically out, and he resumes authoring his own bland protagonism with no respite of foray into fable. There is horror in anonymity, too. Your towel and sneakers could bake to a crust three days in the sun and no one say anything or assume the worst. Perhaps they may wonder where your body’s gone while lamenting what they would’ve liked it to do, which is a way of relating to others that you might have wanted shortly before you didn’t. Perspective used to follow you with its eyes between branches, its shiny tongue pulsing avian against the waxy leaves, and now not at all.
When the camera is no one, it surveys Franck’s face as Michel fellates him on the beach: his face in disturbed recognition of this pet-sematary sex, the exhumed blue bride of it: that what he’s wanted with so much heat has arrived not exactly as he dreamed it. His face, at the usual threshold at which he could resist Death’s solicitous narcissus…it’s hopeless. Death’s entire countenance is Desire. It has a scandalous stache. It eats good ass. Franck’s face, in the seconds the condensation between Michel’s jaws becomes audible, now in acquiescence: Franck will absolutely make love to this murderer. It’s clear from the breeze in the treetops and the bands of black waves on the lake that there is no reining this in. He will deceive and abandon not just himself to make this love forever.
Night rises through the ripples with straps and sweat. Submit to it. Only in the beginning is the water cold. Some pilot light of heaven blossoms indigo in the inner thigh. You are as easy there as the muscle of a pear. (I’m into this.) Everyone will meet disaster somehow. (I’m into this.) All will be destroyed. We can’t stop living, Franck tells the detective. If you want the end of the world to at least feel good, what if it could always be ending? What if, in order that you should easily become the queen of hell, it always has been ending somewhere, for someone else? In a way, what Franck does to himself isn’t abandonment at all. Not even close.
Cited
Bouquet, Stéphane. The Next Loves. Nightboat Books, 2019.
Del Toro, Guillermo, director. The Shape of Water. Fox Searchlight, 2017.
Guiraudie, Alain, director. L’inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake). Les Films du Losange, 2013.
Reddy, Chandan. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. Duke University Press, 2011.