Stars in Our Eyes: The Rapturous Pain of Starfuckers

The following review contains significant spoilers. It is very hard to thoroughly discuss a short without divulging critical plot points. I don’t think this spoils the viewing experience, but there is also something to be said for going in blind. So take this warning and head to Mubi if you’d like to do so.

I can’t get Starfuckers out of my head. It might be the best thing I’ve seen all year. I watched it alone in the dark, as one should be watching everything, but as rarely happens. It felt like a product of my dreams. It’s eerie, and for a fourteen minute short, it’s slow. It creeps and languishes in dusky tones and long takes, and a haunting, intermittent score of languid, droning strings in dissonant chords that sound like they are being stretched like taffy. 

A young man arrives at dusk at a secluded mansion on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He’s dressed like an adolescent, but how young is the man? It’s hard to say. He’s been hired for a kind of sex work. The man who has hired him sits on the bed and engages him in small talk as he changes into short trousers, short sleeved button down and tie, and sweater vest. He’s clean cut, with boyish blond hair. He looks like a young member of the Church of Latter Day Saints. The older man asks the younger where he’s from. Outside of Las Vegas. The uniform might be familiar to him. He asks the younger man for a kiss, and he obliges, on the cheek. “You are so fucking beautiful,” he says. “Thank you,” the younger says. He asks if he needs any water. He does not. He assumes a semi wide-legged stance atop a plastic sheet and silently, gazing above the head of the older man on a fixed point in the distance, pisses himself. The older man simply stares, unmoving. We do not see the conclusion of this act, but I think it concludes silently, with no fanfare. I don’t think the older man touches himself. I don’t think he touches the younger man. I think the younger man simply excuses himself to the shower. 

There is nothing so shocking in what we’ve seen. In many ways, it’s tale as old as time. But there’s more going on here. What we’ve stumbled upon is a plot. The younger man sneaks a friend in through the back door. A packet of powder is handed over. The friend seems to be aware of the older man. 

The young man is staying for dinner; there is more to this transaction than cash. The older man is a film producer, maybe a director, and the young man an aspiring actor. There’s a role on offer, and it seems that the piss act, this offering of debasement, may have been integral in securing it. This older man, not so good looking, not so charming, knows what power he does hold. He knows he holds the power to fulfill dreams, yes, but he also knows that holding this power makes him beguiling and that this is something wholly different. It makes him the embodiment of possibility, its avatar. Praise from him, guidance from him is divine and hypnotic. Predation is not a byproduct of his power; his power lies in his predation. And so young hypnotized boys with dreams do not chase him seeking actualization, they simply chase him. They see the stars in him. He has to do very little work.

Those secure in their power feel free to play games with it. The younger man has done what was asked of him to a T, but he’s come all this way to this house, a captive companion, and so the goalpost can be moved further. The older man has made dinner and they must talk about something. He asks the younger for a line reading. If he wants the role so much, this shouldn’t be a problem. “Look at me,” he says, “Say, ‘God, you’re so beautiful.’” The younger man stumbles and repeats the line that was said to him as he pissed himself for hire. It’s not good enough. Repeat it. The conversation, despite the strong subtext, had been cheerful to this point, but here the tone shifts. This is a breech of agreement. This is abuse for abuse’s sake. This is joy in debasement, in a human being being a toy, a nameless drug one takes for a quick boost of self worth. This is also a tale as old as time. 

* * *

What would you say to your abuser if you had the opportunity? It seems an easy question to answer; one only needs to look to victims’ statements read at sentencings for an idea. I remember watching some of the many victims of Larry Nassar confront him with his own crimes. In an endless train they each detailed the effects of his actions. How he’d broken them. How he may have regarded his time with them as limited and its effects insignificant, but that despite many of them going on to be successful people, his imprint upon them was indelible. That he’d be seen unwittingly in their thought patterns and destructive impulses. He’d left his victims insecure, some of them reclusive, many of them unsure if they’d ever have a healthy approach to relationships or a sense of self worth. It is an incredibly satisfying act to witness, and doubtless cathartic for the victims, but one has to wonder, does it make a difference? Does he actually feel bad?

There is a profound gulf between hearing and knowing, and a more profound one still between knowing and feeling, viscerally. Certainly, Larry Nassar was mentally competent to stand trial, and a very learned man. He knew what he did. He had an idea, intellectually, of what it was to be these women, girls at the time, because he’s been told so. But he is not a party to their subconscious; he can never really know. For all the literary postulating around malevolent characters such as these, I really don’t think they deserve the assumption of complexity. Lolita is an enthralling read, but most abusers are not Humbert Humbert. They are not wrestling with demons and obsessions, but simply narcissists with an eye for easy targets. I am not denying the mental distress involved in compulsion, but I cannot grant it full empathy. 

In the flower of our youth we have only beauty and innocence to offer, and profoundly misunderstand the currency. We do not understand the weight that youthful beauty and innocence have to someone acutely aware of being on the cusp of losing their own. And that perhaps they do not find us so funny, so interesting, so clever. Perhaps they want to suck the life out of us. To take our blood and spread it like retinol over their faces. These are realizations of hindsight and, significantly, of age. And the only true closure to be had is the diminishment of distance and the revelation that the the abuser is often a woefully deficient person, and deeply unhappy. This is little consolation.

So the fantasy of confrontation persists. And this is the crux of the plot in Starfuckers. The young man is a decoy, it’s his friend who snuck in through the back door who is on a mission here. And the friend has thought about this. He knows that empathy is not a goal, for if empathy were a thing that could be elicited, we wouldn’t be here in the first place. Better to subject him to the intrusive thoughts. To get him bound and gagged and force the subconscious upon him. This is done through a performance. A captivating piece of avant garde theater that presents a gestalt of disparate, fractured scenes, lip-synched and play acted over seemingly found audio. 

The friend is played by writer/director Antonio Marziale, who might be familiar from Brian Jordan Alvarez’s web series The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo, in which he appeared as the lithe love interest, Benicio. Here, he cuts a figure of exquisite suffering. There are no arrows, but clothed in a nude bodysuit with an angelic face and soft curls, the most immediate  association is Saint Sebastian. I can’t say this is intentional, but Sebastian has long been an archetype of pain eroticized, specifically queer pain. The entire film is remarkable, but the performance which comprises the second half is a true feat. The audio is actually not found, but written and performed by Marziale himself, altered to sound like a product of the mid twentieth century. It’s jarring, entrancing, and very effective. Marziale looks directly into our eyes as he performs, and the effect is to be implicated, to abandon analysis and simply experience the surreal truths knocking around another person’s mind. 

Non-linear and without context, Marziale’s performance is the alternative to a victim’s statement. It does not tell what residue abuse leaves on the psyche, it gives psychic flashes. In the wake of abuse, a familiar fantasy is to be made mythic by this suffering. To have been wronged in such a wrenching, awful way as to be set into a separate cast of humanity which possesses unique understanding and unique talent. The pain has transformed you into something exquisite which cannot be achieved otherwise. There is also the fantasy of success that allows for role reversal, for the victim to reject the abuser and make them jealous. And of course, there is the most primal fantasy of all, for the abuser to truly, deeply know the pain that they have caused. To be horror stricken at how they have destroyed another human. 

The title Starfuckers is doing a lot of work here. At first reading, it is self referential, and deprecating. That Marziale and other young naifs who chase the stars will fuck them to get there. This can also be taken from the perspective of the abuser, who casts their hopeful prey in this dismissive light. But perhaps the abusers are the ones chasing stars. Chasing innocence lost, opportunities past, a world that is no longer open before them. 

Starfuckers made its debut at Sundance last year and also played at Berlinale and Telluride. It is accessible on Mubi for another week. I implore you not to miss it.