[Sorry it’s been so long. I’ve had lots of thoughts in the last six months but little time to write. Here’s hoping this will be the start of a new ‘season’ of essays - Brian x]
Last month, along with all the other artsy gays in London, we went to the cinema to see All of Us Strangers. Ahead of the film they showed the trailer for the NT Live recording of Andrew Scott’s one-man performance of Vanya. Scott is the star of both the film and the play, so the cross-promotion made sense. After I’d seen Strangers, though, the connections between the two projects appeared even deeper.
In his critically lauded stage show, Scott embodies every single character in Chekhov’s play. He adopts different voices and handheld props to indicate who he’s playing and sometimes finds himself talking animatedly to empty chairs. The Time Out critic concedes that this approach ‘inevitably loses some coherence and sense of narrative, but in doing so becomes almost agonisingly intimate.’
When one takes the birds-eye view of All of Us Strangers — as the final zoom heavenwards encourages us to do — doesn’t it reveal itself to be the same thing?
A lonely gay man talking to chairs?
[This essay will spoil All of Us Strangers; you may want to watch it before you read on – and certainly before attending artsy gay dinner parties anytime soon.]
When I was young boy, I don’t remember talking to chairs, but I did spend an awful lot of my time in the basement bouncing a rubber ball off the wall as I’d make up stories and create dialogue. This kind of imaginative play was my first stab at narrative-building, practicing the skills that I now use professionally.
My basement creations were usually cinematic riffs on the genre films I’d watched on cable television. I can remember making up Agatha Christie-style mysteries and glorious Technicolor musicals. I also dreamed up publicity campaigns to accompany them, featuring the names of fictitious actors who’d star in my work and a trailer voice announcing, ‘The latest from Brian Mullin, writer-director of….’
I remember one that centered on a young girl living with a bunch of siblings in a small Sicilian village who dreamed of bigger things, like emigrating to America. It was no doubt influenced by the headstrong young heroines of Little Women and Ann of Green Gables — possibly even Yentl — but it was also an attempt to imaginatively reconstruct the figure of my mother. Rosemary Sedita was the oldest daughter of an Italian-American family in Indiana, who dreamed of a wider world, visited Europe after college (where she tried escargots), and then left the Midwest for the East Coast.
The sentence above summarizes much of what I knew of my mother, who died of cancer when I was just two years old. Family members recall that during her funeral I walked around in a child-sized suit passing out Kleenex to other attendees who were crying, but I have no memory of that day — or of her.
Although I have some family snapshots and anecdotes to draw from, the imagined mother in my mind has always been a collage, built upon the faces of dark-haired actresses who sort of resembled her: Debra Winger, Annabella Sciorra, Irene Jacob. Initially, I would envision her as bright-eyed and affectionate but later I realized that growing up motherless also meant missing out on potential arguments and nagging. The 70-year old mother I don’t have today might more closely resemble a prodding Patti Lupone, who can say?
In All of Us Strangers, Andrew Scott’s Adam is a character very much like me. A gay man in his mid-to-late forties, he works as a professional narrative-builder, writing scripts for film and television. He even lives up the road (sort of) from my South London address. Writer-director Andrew Haigh wanted to shoot Adam’s nearly empty apartment block in the soulless expanse of new-build towers around Vauxhall and Nine Elms, but the multinational corporations who own them wouldn’t consent. (And so, although Adam goes clubbing at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and travels to southwest suburbs on trains from Victoria, the external shots of his building were filmed far East in Stratford.)
When we first meet him, Adam’s doing just what I did as a child, soothing a sense of loss through a kind of therapeutic narrative imagining; we learn soon that both of his parents died in a car accident when he was twelve. In the opening scene, Adam examines old photos and a beloved fairy ornament that once sat atop the family Christmas tree. These are the prompts, presumably, for some sort of screenplay inspired by his childhood. The only glimpse we get of it comes from a slugline on his laptop screen: ‘INT. SUBURBAN HOUSE 1987…’
The Adam we meet at the start seems to exist completely, almost absurdly, outside of community. He works from home and never contacts anyone. He hasn’t gone out dancing in years. When a fire alarm goes off in his (very tall) building, no other residents emerge.
Some of this disconnection is implicitly associated with his being gay and childless. All of his (presumably straight) friends, he says, have moved outside of London to raise families: what would he do in Dorking? When he was younger, life in the Big Smoke seemed like the answer to his prayers – but thirty years down the line he no longer partakes in the cosmopolitan world around him.
The sadsack emo gay vibe is laid on pretty thick. Adam’s had decades to process his parents’ loss and yet seems permanently untethered from the world of the living. Soon, though, Adam has two encounters that inject some excitement into his world of ennui.
The first is with Paul Mescal’s Harry, a scruffy-sexy millennial queer (the distinction between identifying as queer vs. gay is pointedly made) who appears drunkenly in a somewhat miraculous meet-cute outside Adam’s door and is apparently the only other inhabitant at this void of an address. After Adam’s initial hesitancy, the two begin an affair that progresses from horny hookup to increasing intimacy. Harry says he’s pretty sanguine about his coming out but acknowledges an unspoken distance that’s grown up between him and his family.
So far, so rom-com: the livewire stranger is nudging the withdrawn loner to open up his emotions. And yet, despite the charm of Scott and Mescal, the dialogue between them often sounds, frankly, more like one of my Substack essays than any recognisable post-coital chat. When Adam sits in the bath and opines that he grew up at a time where sex meant death, these two come off more as highly constructed generational avatars than characters.
Much of the film’s love story plays like an extended retread of some of the more forced elements of Haigh’s breakthrough film Weekend, in which Chris New’s character was some sort of conceptual artist, a conceit that allowed him to badger his one-night stand (Tom Cullen) with a recording device and ask for opinions about modern gay life, coming out, dating apps, etc. etc. All of Us Strangers would be richer if it actually set out to dramatise a relationship between two gay men with a fifteen-year age gap, but due to its claustrophobic construction this theme never expands beyond expository conversation.
That’s also because our focus, and Adam’s, moves elsewhere. Just as he’s taking tentative steps into a future with Harry, Adam is concurrently traveling back to his own past: on a screenwriting research trip to his childhood home, he meets his own Mum and Dad (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), fixed at their ages just before death, who seem to recognise him and welcome him in to reconnect.
It is this thread of the film that seems to resonate most with critics and audiences. For obvious autobiographical reasons, I’m a sucker for all dramas of parental loss: I cry without fail at the hospital scenes in Terms of Endearment and bawled for ages at the end of Aftersun (in which Paul Mescal himself takes on the role of dead Dad). In scene after scene here, Adam experiences the longed-for intimacy he never had with his deceased parents – and I was left totally cold.
Adam sits first with Mum and then with Dad for conversations that pulled the heartstrings of many audience members around me. It’s not long before he’s told them he’s gay and receives parental responses of the type spoken in hundreds of period coming-out dramas like, ‘They say it’s a very lonely kind of life.’ We in the audience are meant to flinch at the froideur that overtakes Foy’s otherwise affectionate Mum upon her son’s mention of homosexuality, but that reaction is complicated by the fact that… she’s right. All the evidence we’ve seen suggests that he is indeed leading an incredibly lonely life.
Theses scenes are distinguished, I suppose, from those in other films by the tension of Adam, a grown man, trying not to regress into the awkwardness and pain of pre-adolescence. With Mum, he takes up the mantle of educator, informing her that things have changed now, gay people can get married. But, she replies, he’s not married, is he? With Dad, he opens up about bullying at school and isolation at home. Father and son both felt contradictory impulses back then, each longing to share a comforting hug when young Adam was crying behind his bedroom door, but also afraid to instigate it. In this safe space of spectral projection, the long deferred hug can happen.
Taken as self-contained short films, these conversations do have a special charge. The interactions between Adam Scott and Jamie Bell, in particular, walk a delicate line between paternal validation and subsumed erotic charge. Effective as all the acting may be, though, there’s something at the heart of these scenes that felt inauthentic to the experience of childhood loss.
If I were granted a precious conversation with my mother, is this what I would talk about? Just as Adam’s hookup chats with Harry kept circling around How Hard It Is to Be Gay, the interactions with his parents seem similarly fixated on his sexuality and the difficulties its brought him, as if there’s nothing else about his life to share with them. Perhaps there isn’t, since Adam barely seems like a fully rounded person.
In interviews, Haigh suggests that gay audiences will strongly identify with these depictions:
So many of us grew up feeling like that, and feeling like our lives would be filled with sadness and aloneness, and possibly death… I was growing into my sexuality in the early ’80s, so I saw a world in which there was no possibility of me having a fulfilled, happy life. That’s a terrible thing for a lot of kids to have to have dealt with... And so I feel like a lot of us felt like that, and still feel like that. It can be a very hard thing to shift.
As broad social analysis, this set of ideas is certainly familiar – but what does it tell me about a young man whose parents were suddenly and brutally taken from him? Elsewhere in the same interview, Haigh betrays the imprecise and offhanded manner in which he’s conceived of Adam’s past:
Obviously losing your parents at a very young age is a horrendously traumatic event. But lots of people experience all kinds of traumas, big and small, that become imprinted on your sense of self… It’s a word that someone used. It’s how you felt about something…
The risk with a premise that ‘so many of us’ have felt is that it becomes overly generalised. Instead of a particular person who’s experienced a specific (and highly unusual) loss, Adam becomes a cis gay Everyman upon whom audiences can project any of their own unresolved emotional pain.
The limitations of this approach are summed up perfectly in the headline quote from Haigh’s Guardian interview:
Many of us within Haigh’s age bracket might question this blanket diagnosis. Moreover, though, any artwork that tries so blatantly to encompass the experiences of ‘a generation’ risks becoming a story about no one in particular.
I’ve noticed that the friends who’ve reacted most emotionally to All of Us Strangers tend to be those who have complicated relationships with living parents, perhaps a history of estrangement or less than full acceptance of their sexuality. The same ghost-parent dialogues that struck me as untrue to the experience of grief may play very well as the cinematic equivalent of Family Constellations therapy, with A-list actors cos-playing as Mum and Dad.
By the time we arrive at Claire Foy trimming a Christmas tree as she recites very on-the-nose Pet Shop Boys lyrics to a pajama-clad Andrew Scott – and by extension to all the other insecurely attached little boys in the audience – the film is aiming for a cathexis that borders on camp:
Maybe I didn't treat you
Quite as good as I should
Maybe I didn't love you
Quite as often as I could
Little things I should have said and done
I never took the time
Speaking on the podcast Script Apart recently, Haigh implicitly endorses the therapeutic interpretation of Adam’s parental haunting: ‘I mean, look, essentially you can see it as a therapy session and in talking about the past it allows you to move forward in some way.’ Making the film may have served that function for Haigh himself. Indeed, the ghost scenes were filmed in the director’s actual childhood home and, in a pure manifestation of The Body Keeping the Score, eczema he’d had as a boy returned while shooting there.
Significantly, Haigh’s mother and father are still alive but it was in this same suburban house that he lived through his parents’ divorce, around the same age when fictional Adam’s parents die. This divergence of his autobiographical narrative highlights Haigh’s awkward effort to yoke multiple distinct forms of pain – both personal and generational – onto the thin frame of his ghost story plot.
Haigh’s taken his inspiration from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers (or, in the original Japanese, Summer of the Strange People). Wikipedia tells me that it concerns a protagonist who starts visiting the ghosts of people who seem like his dead parents, only to realise they are sucking the life from him. In broad outline, it’s giving me creepy psychological gothic of the Henry James novella variety.
The grief of our flimsy, orphaned protagonist barely has room to breathe in this film, so overburdened is it by both Haigh’s autobiographical emotions and his potted theses of generational gay trauma. Only in one tender moment where Adam confides to Mum in bed an imagined alternative timeline in which the family visited Disney World did I recognise the feelings of a motherless child.
In a curious way, All of Us Strangers suffers from similar problems to a very different film that also left me with a muted response, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Whilst Haigh’s script won’t move away from his ‘gay generation mourning their childhood’ hobbyhorse, Gerwig’s overstuffed comedy bombards us with a thousand theses at the expense of her imagined world’s internal logic. Much as Adam returns to the 80s to seek out his parents’ love, America Ferrera’s character travels back to the imagined Barbieland of her girlhood to… do something or other… and deliver a monologue about the frustrating pressures of femininity.
For all of the messiness of its plot, both Barbie the film and Barbie the doll arrive ultimately at the intention to exit the play-world and enter human gynecological reality – a conclusion that left some women near me in the cinema weeping. In All of Us Strangers, although Andrew Haigh suggests that Adam’s ghostly encounter allows him to ‘move forward in some way,’ is that what we actually see onscreen?
Through most of the film, we’re brought into Adam’s POV, in which it feels like his deceased parents are ‘really there,’ sharing tea and putting on records. The space-time reality of this hangs together about as coherently as it does in Barbieland: has Adam really taken the train to Sanderstead and broken into his childhood home? Some of these meetings must happening ‘inside his head.’ In the film’s final third, Harry seems to nudge Adam back into the present and toward the ‘real world’ when the two of them (appear to) go out dancing, but this scene also becomes hallucinatory.
Adam’s final meeting with his parents is the one scene that occurs very concretely in a ‘real’ location: a diner in Croydon’s Whitgift Shopping Centre.
There’s even another speaking character present, a skeptical waitress who says he’s ordered ‘a lot of food.’ After tearful goodbyes in the booth from Mum and Dad, the camera pulls back to reveal there’s no one’s at the table to share Adam’s ‘family meal.’
Just a lonely gay man talking to empty chairs.
Adam’s parents have never really ‘met’ Harry, though they’ve expressed a longing to see their son happy and settled and, maybe… in love? There’s a worrying whiff of the ‘extended adolescence’ trope here, whereby adult gay men present as Peter Pan figures, delayed in the stages of emotional maturation until they make a home with one partner, just like their straight families. If All of Us Strangers offered Adam this clichéd outcome, I’d have sighed with disappointed resignation. Even that unsatisfying arc, though, is foiled by the film’s final twist.
After that parental parting in the diner, Adam returns home to find Harry. We anticipate a heart-to-heart about how he’s finally ready to let love into his life, the emo-gay equivalent of ‘When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible’ from When Harry Met Sally... Once he arrives, though, Adam discovers that his Harry is actually a corpse. This isn’t a rom-com, it’s the gay ‘Sixth Sense.’
The odour permeating Harry’s flat indicates that he’s been dead a while. Although there’s an ambiguity to the final revelations, I interpreted them to mean that Adam’s dates with Harry have never been real. Instead, the only times he met ‘living Harry’ were the fleeting meetings at Adam’s door and in the lift before the got together. Feeling rebuffed by his one gay neighbour, Harry must’ve offed himself, after which his spirit arrived at Adam’s flat to begin a series of haunted hookups??
We’ve spent an entire film watching Adam process his parental loss so that he can say goodbye to their ghosts – and then conclude with him clinging in bed to another deceased person. The character has progressed from being orphaned and lonely to being absolutely and existentially alone, as everyone transmutes to stars in the sky to the tunes of ‘The Power of Love’.
Maybe Adam’s also dead? Or he’s just a sad, stunted man so haunted by loss that he can’t engage emotionally with any other living being? And we, the gay audience, are meant to feel there’s a bit of isolated Adam in all of us…
Ugh. Sad gays get sadder. Everything old is new again.
All of Us Strangers and Barbie were just two of the prominent films last year exploring the challenges of putting away childish things. Perhaps this mini-trend of stories about stunted growth is a result of projects conceived during the constrictions of the pandemic just now arriving on our screens.
Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, also a ghostly British gothic, is the elegant inverse of Haigh’s film. Adam in Strangers has been shattered by the loss of his parents, but Hogg’s protagonist can’t let her mother’s flickering spirit go until she’s drained it, like a well-meaning vampire, of artistic inspiration. Mother and daughter are so enmeshed that they seem like part of the same person, both played by Tilda Swinton.
Emma Stone’s Bella in Poor Things is another enmeshed mother-daughter hybrid, being an adult woman implanted with the brain of her own infant. Raised by her creator-father in a scientific setting as cloistered as Barbieland, she confronts the real world’s conventions and cruelties with a child’s fearless innocence and upends society’s accepted notions of maturity.
For me, though, the year’s most compelling portrait of stolen childhood came from a film about heterosexual marriage that feels far queerer than All of Us Strangers. In Todd Haynes’s May December, an act of sexual violation has left multiple emotionally stunted children in its wake. At its center is Charles Melton’s Joe, who at age fourteen fathered a child with an adult woman (Julianne Moore’s Gracie) to whom he remains married.
In Strangers, Adam’s tragic loss from decades past is imprinted on his muted demeanor from the start and never lets up. Melton’s Joe, however, morphs back and forth from a secure, square-jawed provider for his family into a nervous man-boy shunted too soon into adult responsibility. His repressed trauma response is contrasted with that of Gracie’s first son (Corey Michael Smith), an adult who still has an adolescent blond dye-job and whose experience of his mother’s boundary-breaking behavior has left him with the dangerous energy of an exposed electric wire.
Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch have rendered their characters with an unexpected emotional slipperiness. Joe raises monarch butterflies, but his emergence out of the chrysalis of his suppressed pain is fitful and uncertain. In their marriage, Gracie can switch instantly from motherly scolding to manipulative petulance, revealing the willful girl inside the predatory adult. These are neither plastic dolls nor paper-thin ghosts, but fully fleshed out humans.
Gay men have long been subjected to pop psychological analysis that assesses our progression, or lack thereof, against the benchmark of heteronormative maturation stages. How often have we been diagnosed with traits of the ‘Peter Pan complex’ — supposedly obsessed with youth, clinging on to hedonism and evading responsibility long after we ought?
Andrew Haigh’s thesis about his fellow gays feels adjacent and equally reductive. A generation that grew up experiencing rejection and death will inevitably remain, he suggests, caught in the loop of that grief. Despite the words of the song, the Power of Love has no real impact on Adam in All of Us Strangers; his attachments all remain facing backwards, fixated on objects that have been taken from him. Nor can the power of community help him, since Adam seems to lack one entirely.
As I know from repeated childhood viewings of Disney’s Peter Pan, if you chase the second star to the right and head straight on til morning, you arrive at Neverland. Mum, Dad, Harry and Adam all become stars at the end of the film. Fixed in time, lives cut short, they will never grow up.
As a boy, my Peter Pan complex was easy to diagnose. Sometime in the late 1980s, probably around the same time that Adam’s parents died, I could be found trick-or-treating dressed as Peter in a green outfit and feathered cap. It was my favorite story.
Yes, it was fun to fantasize about flying and pixie dust, but even back then I knew it was Peter’s pain that I connected to. In the Disney version, the action slows just before the third-act showdown with Captain Hook for Wendy to sing a song to the Lost Boys called ‘Your Mother and Mine.’ It’s one of those slow lullabies that so many children would zone out of, but I would remain rapt, never fast-forwarding the VHS…
After Wendy’s done, her brother Michael requests in a sleepy, babyish voice, “I wanna see… my mother.” By the end of the tape, he always got what he wanted. The Darling children were only visiting Neverland temporarily. Peter was not.
You can call it ‘never growing up’ but really Peter had to mature faster than most, he didn’t have much choice. Out of necessity, he created his own family.
For so many of us, learning to mother ourselves is the true work of our lives.