By Frey Kwa Hawking
In an all-time bizarre unprompted interview moment, actor Jeremy Irons asked HuffPost Live in 2013 whether a father could marry his son to avoid inheritance tax. “It’s not incest between men. Incest is there to protect us from inbreeding. But men don’t breed, so incest wouldn’t cover that.”
As much as this sounds like reasoning from another planet of poshos obsessed with property, both academics and those keenly interested like Irons have long discussed what implications gay shit (technical term) and traditional family kinship structures have for each other.
It gets more complicated – fantasies around the incest taboo are also a recurring strain in eroticism, across orientations. PornHub’s front page is made up almost entirely of step-family titles. Jeremy Irons gave that interview in the first place to promote the new series of HBO’s The Borgias, most notable for portraying Lucrezia Borgia and her brother Cesare in a sexual relationship. Were his comments some kind of marketing attempt?
Basically, the taboo of seeming to break sexual rules is something that charges, and is something that a few films in Queer East’s programme this year utilised variously to their ends. How do these films exploit and subvert understandings of the family structure in order to highlight dynamics between these characters, and their worlds? I think the at times real, at times imagined spectre of (specifically gay and male) incest in these three films allows them to get at conflicting versions of things at once: to say and duck away from saying, simultaneously.
Tsai Ming-Liang’s The River (1997) features an anonymous sexual encounter between a father and son, part of a blood-related, domestic and distant Taiwanese family. Jin Ong’s debut feature Abang Adik (2023) centres around two undocumented adopted brothers in Kuala Lumpur, and is wholly concerned with the illegibility of their relationship, for both themselves and the film’s audience. Finally, in Bold Eagle (2022), Whammy Alcazaren unsettles and makes political criticism through a cacophonous juxtaposition of daddy kink and a father-son relationship.
THE RIVER – ACCIDENTAL, REAL
In The River, Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-Sheng) develops an extreme pain in his neck after stepping in to play a dead body, floating facedown in the Tamsui River for an old friend (Chen Shiang-chyi) working on a film shoot. They fuck after his star turn; it’s as if there’s something carnal-only about this boy, suggestive of a mannequin, that he’s just good for his body. Tsai compares his behaviour with that of his dad, going directly from Hsiao-Kang’s sex to Father (Miao Tien), a fastidious, fierce-faced man, ignoring the touch of a man of his own age on one of his frequent bathhouse trips. It’s not immediately clear they’re related, let alone that the family actually lives together: they, and Mother (Lu Hsiao-Ling), barely talk throughout. She works as an elevator operator and is having an affair with a man who copies and distributes porn tapes. There are no overlaps in the family’s sexual or indeed emotional lives. As Hsiao-Kang’s pain gets worse, to the point of disability, and Father tries to deal with a leak of Biblical proportions in his bedroom ceiling, their atomised existences are only punctured at the moment of crisis and transgression.
As Father touches his son unknowingly in the dark of another bathhouse, on a trip seeking spiritual help for Hsiao-Kang’s neck, they’re not looking at each other, facing away, to the viewer. Having seen both in sexual scenarios prior to this and with our own view of the scene, we have a more informed idea than the characters of what’s happening and why on multiple fronts. It’s as long as Tsai’s scenes tend to be, and difficult to watch, though it’s so tender. Father cleans Hsiao-Kang up gently after, before his turn, which is not shown.
This is the point at which Tsai cuts to Mother, acknowledging the torrential downpour leaking from her husband’s bedroom for the first time. Abruptly, Tsai cuts again to Father turning on the light in the cubicle and standing over his son, seeing who he is, just before he slaps him. Neither will reference what has happened after this. Mother, having already entered her husband’s bedroom for the first time in the film, goes further than anyone so far as she climbs into the flat above, finding the tap apparently responsible for the leak all this time.
Tsai’s cutting between the bathhouse and Mother back in Taipei seems to suggest that boundaries are being crossed in some definitive way: that things will be different now, whether Hsiao-Kang’s neck heals, or whether they can look each other in the eye anymore or not. That tap has been turned off, after all. The two have been forced, though in an unthinkable fashion, to acknowledge the tenderness and need of which the other is capable. It seems to stand in the film both as a metaphor, and as something real and awful that’s happened, and must be dealt with, somehow.
ABANG ADIK – PERFECT PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY
In Abang Adik, the idea of family is about the only thing worth clinging onto: Abang (Kang Ren Wu) and Adi (Jack Tan), as the two men call each other, meaning ‘big brother’ and ‘little brother’, live in hard poverty in Pudu, Kuala Lumpur. They share a bed, food, and a pre-food ritual where they crack a hard-boiled egg on the other’s forehead. While Abang is keen on working with social worker Jia En (Serene Lim) to get Adi back on the map, documented, even able to hold a bank account, Adi’s head is in the sand. Again and again he screws up, gets mixed up in heavy shit, and Abang self-sacrificingly comes to his rescue, to a fault. It’s an overwrought film compared to The River’s delicate impassivity, though brutal, featuring some heart-rending eating.
I don’t think Abang Adik was screened at Queer East purely because of Ms Money (Kim Wang Tan), the brothers’ stern, affectionate trans neighbour. Just before things start to fall apart, there’s this moment between Abang and Adi at a birthday party for Money, who’s just been reassuring Adi that he mustn’t be jealous: Abang will always love him the most, even if he gets married to the girl he’s been seeing, a neighbour from Myanmar (April Chan). We see Adi sometimes with an older woman who pays him for sex, but she wants to leave KL; everyone does.
Dancing among other couples, they hold each other stiffly around the neck, unsmiling and awkwardly staring at each other, before Adi relocates Abang’s hands to his waist. Suddenly Adi leans in, as if for a kiss, but hugs him tightly instead and they stay embracing, Abang’s hand on Adi’s neck, revolving without seeing the other’s face. While Adi starts to smile, Abang remembers the neighbour girl leaving KL with her family, clearly pierced by it.
As a scene, it’s a perfect double-bind, able to be read either way, like the whole relationship; at once a hanging and emphatic moment of speechless, ambiguous intensity between the two men, and yet containing within it a reference to Abang’s thwarted heterosexual attempt. Directly after this (perhaps fuelled by it), Adi has a pivotal confrontation with Jia En, as she tries to force him to acknowledge his biological father. It’s one or the other: whatever Adi and Abang are to each other can’t coexist with knowing his blood father, nor with any female love interest.
Would Abang Adik have been made if it were any more definitive about Adi and Abang’s relationship? It’d lose its plausible deniability and be something else entirely: their wrestling with the exact nature of their bond, unrecognisable to the state and its organisation of social structures, like many queer relationships, is Abang Adik’s entire subject.
BOLD EAGLE – WHOSE DADDY?
Alcazaren’s short Bold Eagle is at first a more familiar, fun and springy treatment of gay male sexuality, which played in April Lin 林森’s shorts programme “Harvesting the Fruits of Monstrosity”. In a film which has more fun than you’d think possible playing irreverently with meaning-making and methods of censorship, to get past the Philippines’ Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, Alcazaren frenetically adopts different styles, but returns insistently to Bold’s (credited as @luckymaybe1923) cybersex with strange men, alone with his cat during the pandemic, fathers, and the idea of escape to Hawaii.
We seem to be on firmer, straightforward daddy kink ground here, listening to the kind of over-explicit dirty talk which implies physical distance, along with a phone on a stand or Instagram-blurred jacking off. At least Bold isn’t touching anyone but himself. Voiceover throughout addresses “Daddy”, but is uncomfortably accompanied by flash frames of dads (loads of them!) in photos with their kids, smiling LSD-distorted emoji grins. Informed by this, the voiceover becomes hard not to wonder at: who’s the intended recipient of “Am I a good boy, Daddy? Are you finally happy?” We’re not sure, though Bold’s literal arsehole replies “I love you.”
Denying us a clear view of Bold’s face, the film plays into an increasing identification of Bold with current Philippines’ President Bongbong Marcos, the son of deposed dictator Ferdinand. As the images flick between the dads, digital debris (cats and muscleboys), and details of old porn mags, we also see bits of news articles about the Marcos, quotes from Imelda, toy soldiers abandoned on the floor, and Bold poses in a military uniform, with harness and heels. Does he want to go back to Hawaii, site of the Marcos’ family exile? Throughout, a version of the hyper-upbeat nationalist anthem ‘Bagong Lipunan’ plays, but its lyrics are wrenchingly direct: “If only I were no longer like this / Tired, not knowing what I want.”
The effect of putting all this playfully pornographic gay sexuality uncomfortably close to this paternal material both invites you to connect the two inextricably (I want this because of my relationship with my dad), and simultaneously it also defies any easy interpretation. Like the half-there censorship, there’s enough for us to come to some conclusions ourselves. Whether this lonely, dick-hungry fag with daddy issues is the President, to some extent, we’re left with the same clues of characterisation adding up to something, inconclusively – a portrait of someone, maybe slightly familiar to us.