a queer noir drama with a giallo flair
A man returns to the punk nightclub where four decades earlier, in the midst of a “gay pandemic,” he was seduced by a mysterious older man. Today, in the midst of a very different pandemic, he realizes that he has become the older stranger.
Proof-of-Concept
The screenwriter has written and directed a ten-minute proof-of-concept for Narcissus entitled Doppelgänger.
Vision
Narcissus is a queer noir drama with a giallo aesthetic, an exploration of changing attitudes towards gay sexuality over half a century punctuated by two major pandemics as well as seismic changes in how people meet and communicate.
Though fictional, the film’s story draws on the screenwriter’s experiences as a gay man who came out over forty years ago when going out to a gay club was risky, and not only because being perceived as gay was more dangerous at the time. The emergence of a nameless but deadly virus that seemed to be targeting gay men, and reports of serial killers following in the footsteps of Gacy and Dahmer loomed large. Yet while the dangers seemed considerable, they somehow added to the thrilling aesthetic of the most alternative music and clubs of the period, making them all the more alluring. Those of us who were drawn to the “avant garde” were the “queers” of the gay community, well before the days of alphabet soup initialism made the moniker fashionable.
Narcissus is meant to provoke thought about how the transference of queer experience and wisdom across generations continues to evolve, engaging queer viewers of all generations in a consideration of how queer experience was once passed down (specifically by gay men during the AIDS pandemic when gay sexuality was particularly reviled) versus how it is passed down today in an age of heightened visibility. How will our story be shared across future generations during future pandemics in a world filtered through the Internet? Can queer people—haunted by traumas that could serve to unite us—find a way to pass down our stories to effectively fight for our collective survival?
Don Bapst 