Caress, Denial, Decay: Queer Desire in the Nature of Nicholas

Pairing dark humour with psychological disturbances, Jeff Erbach's The Nature of Nicholas (2002) commences with an impulsive kiss. Bobby, whom 12-year-old Nicholas kisses, stands aside, gently wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and walks off. Those familiar with the thematic genre of youthful desire and transgression might rightly expect the narrative to now focus on how Nicholas might feel ashamed, given the prohibitive weight of what might be construed to be a homosexual secret. If Nicholas were to embody all the repressive significance of his conservative era--Erbach's dryly textured and isolated mid-20th century Canadian prairie--he might be thought of as leading a double life. And though such cliches describing the fraught nature of circumscribed lives are by far numerous, they are, in The Nature of Nicholas, quite appropriate. Nicolas's kiss, which turns out to be a gesture of inclement desire, does not result in a surreptitious duality; rather, the shame he might feel is literalized in Bobby's, as it were, recharacterization: he splits into two persons. Seeking out his friend the on the day after the incident, Bobby walks along a prairie road, on a bright day with a sun, and among expansive prairie fields that lack depth and breadth. He tells Nicholas he doesn't feel well: I shouldn't have let you kiss me, suggesting that the surprise kiss was not altogether unwelcome. Yet later, Nicholas discovers that this Bobby, who is beginning to turn green, is not the real Bobby. Nicholas, though disconcerted, remains one person, whole unto himself. He feels responsible for this decaying Bobby, somehow intuiting that the state of rot must somehow reflect upon his own nature. What Erbach thematizes here is not merely nascent adolescent sexuality, but the shame of being naturally different. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This is not to say that Erbach believes that Nicholas possesses a gay essence (a position that might vex social constructionists, who believe that sexual identification is mostly a social, rather than biological, construct). But Nicholas's initial inability to think that there might be something wrong with his desire signals how it might be that his feeling has been transmitted, much like flu. Through observation and deduction, he is able to come to a conclusion about what his kiss has come to mean. His kiss, a literal caress, a brush of one surface upon another--skin to skin--is reconfigured metaphorically as the touch of the same: male to male. Since the male-to-male kiss evinces social edicts that prohibit such conduct, Nicholas's world shifts instantaneously from youthful curiosity to the as-yet uncharted realm of adult (self-) regulation. Nicholas's otherness is revealed to him in that the kiss yields social meaning. And the consequences of it, perhaps intimated but never before known, become embodied as the surreal figure that is the decaying Bobby. That Bobby should split into two persons makes no sense to Nicholas, until he is able to better understand the ramifications of his transgression and the nature of his desire. Erbach compresses Bobby's adolescent desire, an element in constant flux, by extending it as parallel to the repression of mid-20th century Canadian society and, most importantly, as embodying the kind of ambiguity and tentativeness that we find in metaphor. Always a representative of a given thing, metaphor is (in paradoxical Derridean fashion) always beside the thing it denotes, although it is also seen to belong to it. Erbach's examination of the prohibitive nature of queer adolescent desire is similarly displaced, as the film's treatment of a homosexual theme can only be understood as a representation of a surreptitious desire whose ramifications, if fulfilled, reach beyond the normative. What Nicholas critiques, then, is the proposition that if desire among adolescents cannot be accomplished using presumably life-affirming heterosexual expression, it will find an abject manifestation in decay. …

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