"Hereditary": A Gay Demon and his Boy Host

It was so easy to find gay subtexts in the gay free Midsommar that I thought I'd check out diretor Ari Aster's other movies.  Other than some film-school shorts, he just has one, Hereditary (2018).

Piece of cake.

Surly, depressed 16-year old Peter (Alex Wolff, who you may remember from The Naked Brothers Band on Nickelodeon) lives in rural Utah with his crazy artist Mom and wimpy Dad.  Mom forces him to take his little sister Charlie, who clicks her tongue and stares at fires, to a high school party.  While he mingles, smoking pot and talking to boys, she eats a piece of cake with nuts in it and has an allergic reaction.

Peter tries to rush her to the hospital, but while he is driving down the dark country roads, he swerves to avoid a deer and slams into a telephone pole, decapitating her.

Mom Annie (Toni Collette) didn't like Peter much to begin with, and now the gloves come off.  She tortures him by building a miniature of the accident, coming into his room at night and asking if Charlie is there, and forcing him into a seance to contact Charlie, who doesn't realize that she's dead.  In another weird scene, she climbs into bed with him, attempting a seduction.

Meanwhile Charlie comes back as a malevolent ghost, throwing things around and trying to set them on fire.

Dad (Gabriel Byrne) tries to keep the family together, lashing out at Annie for torturing their son (and trying to seduce him), but in the end he is ineffective and gets burnt to death in one of the dead Charlie's rampages.

Peter spends most of the movie hanging out in the same grey t-shirt, being morose and guilt-ridden, receiving hand-on-shoulder support from his buds, and crying in history class.  The wikipedia page lists a Bridget a "love interest," but the scenes where they fall in love must have been deleted.   Peter only interacts with boys.  He never discusses girls or looks at a girl twice. He is obviously gay. 

Eventually we discover that Annie's dead mom, Ellen, belonged to a cult devoted to the demon Paimon.  He's been trying to break through to our world, but he hasn't yet found a suitable human host.  He goes down the hereditary blood line and inhabits someone for awhile, but eventually they aren't good enough, and he decapitates them and moves on.  Ellen, Charlie, Annie's friend Joan, and then Annie himself.

Well, these have all been female hosts.  Maybe Paimon prefers men?

A buffed, naked man appears in Peter's closet (hang on -- I'm checking to see if there's a naked man in my closet) -- and leads him to the attic.  More homoerotic subtext: same-sex desire leads Peter to his destiny.

There he finds the decapitated heads of his family, plus Grandma Ellen's cult members  (all naked, penises and everything showing).  They crown him king.  I was right: women were ok temporarily, but for a permanent host, Paimon prefers men.

Sure, that's understandable.  Lots of gay men don't mind socializing with women, but when the lights go down and everyone gets naked, they want to be inside the body of a man. 

See also: Midsommar.

"Jinn": Arabic Teen Angst-Horror with a Gay Character

In the Netflix Arabic-language drama Jinn (2019), a group of high school students sets out from Riverdale...um, I mean Amman, Jordan...on a field trip to the ancient archaeological site of Petra.

1. Veronica...um, I mean Mira (Salma Malhas), who has just broken up with bad boy Reggie...um, I mean Nasser (Mohammed Nizar)

2. Good girl Betty...um, I mean Layla (Ban Halaweh), who is dating Fahed (Yasser al Hadi)

Ok, I'll stop with the Archie references.

3. The frizzy-haired know-it-all Hassan (Zaid Zoubi), who happens to be Mira's cousin.

4. The bullied good-boy Yassin (Sultan Alkhail, left)

5. The bellgerant drug-dealer Tareq (Abdelrazzaq Tarkas)

6. Tareq's gay-coded sidekick/boyfriend Omar (Mohammed Hindieh, left, the one in pink)

At Petra, Tareq, Omar, and Nasser beat up Yassin, who runs away and falls into a pit.   He is rescued by the mysterious Vera (Aysha Shahaltough).

That night, amid the sexual shenanigans, someone throws Tareq off a cliff to his death.  Guess who?

Later, a mysterious boy in an old-fashioned Bedouin costume comes through Mira's window.  His name is Kerasquoixian, Keras for short (Hamzeh Okab, top photo).







Keras has come from the other realm to warn Mira that she and her friends are in deadly danger: an evil jinn has been unleashed, with a murderous hatred of all humans.  They must find its summoner (the person who called it from the other realm) to push it back, or other jinn will be released, and everyone will die.

At a memorial service for Tareq, Nasser  pulls out a knife, says "We don't belong in this world," and slits his throat.

Two of the three bullies who harassed Yassir.  Do you have any idea who the jinn and its summoner are?

Meanwhile, Hassan returns to Petra to look for clues about the jinn.

Omar, investigating on his own, discovers that Keras looks like a missing Bedouin boy named Hosny. Was this all the insane ramblings of a deluded boy?

There are some game changers, some "Wow, I never thought that you were a jinn!" moments, and a pleasant cliff-hanging ending.

Heterosexism: The jinn and the summoner are always male-female, and jinn always wants to "unite" with the summoner so they can "be together forever."  Sounds like a heterosexual union to me.

On the other hand, Mira and Keras don't seem to be attracted to each other.

Beefcake: No.  Yassir takes his shirt off while he's in the pit.

Gay references:  No.  This is the Middle East.  What did you expect?

Gay subtexts:  Omar is quite obviously gay, in love with Tareq, and then he buddy-bonds with Keras.

Jordanian scenery:  A lot of Petra, not much Amman.

Side note: How secular is Jordan?  No hijabs anywhere in the city.

My grade: A-.

"Miracle Workers": It Would Take a Miracle to Make It Non-Heterosexist

Miracle Workers is a much hyped short comedy series set in Heaven, Inc., where doofus angel Craig (Daniel Radcliffe) is the only worker in the Answered Prayer division.  He is forbidden from using magic to answer prayers, so he manipulates natural elements to reveal lost gloves and keys.

When young, idealistic Eliza (Geraldine Viswanathan) is transferred from the dirt division, she pushes to answer more challenging prayers, but they always come with unintended consequences.

Meanwhile God (Steve Buscemi), a drunken slacker who hasn't done any real management work in thousands of years, decides to destroy Earth to make way for his new get-rich-quick scheme (an Asian fusion restaurant).  Craig and Eliza make a deal: if they can answer the most impossible of impossible prayers, he'll let the Earth survive.  They get God's harassed assistants (Karan Soni, top photo, Lolly Adefope) to help.

And what is the most impossible of impossible prayers?  Peace in the Middle East?  A reversal of global warming?

 Which is -- wait for it --

Getting a man and a woman to fall in love.  Specifically, God demands for them to have sex.

I agree that it sounds difficult -- what could a man and a woman possibly have in common?   Even if they were compatible socially, how could they possibly do anything sexual?  The man would have to become aroused in the presence of a woman, which I'm pretty sure could never happen.

But this particular man (Jon Bass, left) and woman (Sasha Compere) have already been on a date, they like each other, and each has prayed for "it to work out" with the other.  They've already expressed romantic interest.  Now all Craig and Eliza have to do is steer them through dates #2 and #3, and into the bedroom.

I was watching because I found the idea of heaven as a business, with a slacker God at the helm, amusing.  Besides, Daniel Radcliffe is so likeable, I'd watch him in anything.  But at that point I turned it off in disgust.  The entire force of Heaven invested in hetero-romance?  How heterosexist can you get?

I should have realized that the series would be about True Love.  It's an adaption of a novel by Simon Rich, who also wrote Man Seeking Woman.

Like it's hard for men to meet women.  There are women everywhere.

It was turned into a tv series with Jay Baruchel as the Man.  He gets supernatural assistance,too: the cast includes a variety of mythical beings, including Cupid, Mrs. Santa Claus, Jesus Christ, Zeus, Apollo, the Grim Reaper, and Gay Man #1.