Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth

17. L.I.E., The Believer, and the Sexuality of the Jewish Boy

316 17 and the sexuality of the jewish boy Steven Alan Carr When one looks at a Jewish boy, one traditionally looks away. Abraham looks away from Isaac before he is about to slit his own son’s throat, an averted glance that saves the boy’s life: God’s angel called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Yes.” “Do not harm the boy. Do not do anything to him. For now I know that you fear God. You have not withheld your only son from Him.” Abraham then looked up and saw a ram caught by its horns in a thicket. He went and got the ram, sacrificing it as an all-burned offering in his son’s place. Abraham named the place “God will See” (Adonoy Yir’eh). (Genesis 22: 10–14) God will see Isaac, but Abraham and other humans will not. Potiphar ’s wife desirously looks at Joseph, well-built and handsome, and he runs from her gaze: “Sleep with me,” she said. He adamantly refused. He reasoned with his master’s wife. “My master does not even know what I do in the house. He has entrusted me with everything he owns. No one in this house has more power than I have. He has not kept back anything at all from me, except for you—his wife. How could I do such a great wrong? It would be a sin before God!” She spoke to Joseph every day, but he would not pay attention to her. He would not even lie next to her or spend time with her. One such day, [Joseph] came to the house to do his work. None of the household staff was inside. [The woman] grabbed him by his cloak. “Sleep with me!” she L.i.e., The believer, L.I.E., The Believer, and the Sexuality of the Jewish Boy 317 pleaded. He ran away from her, leaving his cloak in her hand, and fled outside. (Genesis 39: 6–14) Looking away from Joseph preserves his integrity, for a longer look might evoke the boy’s sexual desire. Potiphar’s wife sees Joseph, and the reader sees her looking at Joseph, but one never sees Joseph looking at Potiphar’s wife. In “The Story of Isaac,” Leonard Cohen brilliantly reverses the perspective of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Astonishingly, the song dares to suggest that Isaac might have some degree of consciousness as his father is about to sacrifice him. You who build these altars now to sacrifice these children, you must not do it anymore. A scheme is not a vision (Leonard Cohen, “The Story of Isaac”) The moment is a rare instance in which one does not look away from the Jewish boy. Rather, the Jewish boy stares back, and sees plenty of modern-day Abrahams eager to sacrifice their children, with or without temptation from “a demon or a god.” Two recent American independent films, Michael Cuesta’s L.I.E. and Henry Bean’s The Believer (both 2001), prominently feature the sexuality of their Jewish boy protagonists. For a number of reasons both films have prompted a great deal of controversy. The Believer has yet to get a full-fledged theatrical or video release in the United States, purportedly after its narrative of a Jewish neo-Nazi received a chilly reception from Rabbi Abraham Cooper and a special screening at Cooper’s institution, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Cooper, an expert on extremist hate groups, has become a powerful voice within the film industry. Media executives, fearful of alienating audiences, extensively rely on Cooper’s imprimatur , as well as the imprimatur of the Wiesenthal Center, which remains active in areas related to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Israel. On L.I.E., meanwhile, although its video release now sports a so-called R rating, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) initially bestowed an NC-17 rating, usually reserved for highly explicit representations of violence, sex, or “aberrational steven alan carr 318 behavior.” While L.I.E. depicts a relationship between a pedophile and a fifteen-year-old boy, it hardly depicts this relationship or, for that matter, any of the film’s dysfunctional relationships, in hardcore fashion. For all of the controversy that both films have prompted, their distribution woes and subsequent status as causes célèbres in the press obscure a closer examination of...