Brandon, Pick up the Phone

By Karen - 30 July 2021

We are all thankful that we are alive, and at the same time we are all very afraid that we are alive.

For this fear, we can make all the shame that we can't directly look at ourselves, and incur everything for ourselves that may seem to others to be nothing but self-sufficient torture.

Brandon is a personality addict. Whether he is psychologically addicted or physical is unknown. He immersed himself in prostitutes, pornography, masturbation and one-night stands. But on the other hand, his longest relationship was only four months. "The idea of thinking that I will spend my whole life with someone... doesn't it feel unrealistic?" He said to his date.

And I understand the faint fear, the subtext behind that. "The so-called true fate is that you have played enough and you are tired. What you care about is no longer the quality of the arms, but the stable quantity. This is a symbol of the oldness finally defeating the young. And there will be so many things. Time, your youth will come back, and you will think, ah, how can I allow myself to live and work with only this person, and then you deceive you to cheat. This is inevitable."

Anyone can mean that no one can. This division and unity was vividly manifested in Brandon. He had sex with all the things he didn't care about: prostitutes, women in bars, women on the subway, and even men, as if he was the most fleshly, most explicit and dirty person in the world. But the people who really care, he became self-confident and alienated. For example, the black man ended up hastily; for example, his own sister Sissy, after she had a relationship with his brazen boss, he just wanted to drive her out.

The boss is a disgusting character: he is arrogant and incomprehensible, but he can threaten Brandon's hard drive as being too "dirty", completely ignoring his sordid sister who slept as a married man the night before. Work. Sister Sissy is a pitiful and hateful person: on the one hand, he has no self-respect and wantonly fucks, on the other hand, he hopes to get Brandon's pampering and true love.

Then the story has always been accompanied by the gloomy winter in New York, with almost never a trace of sunlight or bright colors. Brandon indulged in this repression, working, dating, socializing, and berating his sister. The only two brightly colored places in the film were when Brandon and Sissy were together: the first time was at the bar, with Sissy's blonde red lips, with Brazilian girls and soft lighting; the second time was Sissy cutting his wrist in the toilet , Blond hair and blood red full of screen, and Brandon of six gods without a master. And what this brightness is saying, everyone will have their own interpretation.

Almost everyone has desires, and these desires are our most vulnerable points. Shame used sexual desire, which is considered the most primitive and indecent desire, to refract the fragility of its carrier, making me realize that perhaps no desire is more advanced than others in terms of creating fragility to torture the host. Sometimes we want to be honest with it, even knowing that we will be beaten all over; sometimes we want to hide it, even if we need to pay the price of not being able to get anyone close to ourselves.