Idle Hands and Olive Branches

Peeling the layers of Chuck and Buck

Original art by Jason Haaf

Note: Contains moderate spoilers for Chuck and Buck (2000).

I know most people who've seen Chuck and Buck must cringe or hold their breath at certain parts.  It doesn't matter if you're gay or straight or bi or poly or monogamous or whatever the endless possibilities are.  The reason why we may want to look away from the film is because it's about intimacy, the intricacies of intimacy, it's about consent and the blurred lines between friendship and love, which human beings share.  Writer Mike White made sure he was going to make, I think, every type of human want to hide their face.  And he succeeded.

White also plays the role of Buck, one half of the title characters.  He does such a good job and his performance was so natural that I wondered if it was at least semi- autobiographical.  Buck, I believe, is a man who suffers from arrested development.  While other children matured into adults and sexual beings, Buck remained stuck, kind of like the mosquito in amber in Jurassic Park.  He never moved out and moved on from his childhood home, having to take care of his dying mother.  It can also be argued (or agreed upon) that Buck lies somewhere on the spectrum.  This is a conversation that was less likely to be had by critics at the time of the film's release in 2000.  His friend, Chuck, meanwhile, grew into his adulthood, gained a career and found a fiance, a woman who could have been written as one dimensional, but she's a Mike White character, and he doesn't do one note.  

When Chuck and Buck are reunited in their late 20s, it's obvious that Buck is in love or still in love with Chuck.  His love is unrequited and misunderstood and it turns into obsession.  The summaries of Chuck and Buck call it a movie about stalking, which is partially true.  Buck is a stalker but he's something more.  He's a man-child and doesn't seem to understand boundaries.  To me, it's also a game of cat and mouse, the audience anticipating who will reach the finish line. Will Buck get his way or will Chuck succeed in pushing him away?  While Buck is pretty fucked up and elicits some sympathy from the viewer, he represents what happens when queerness goes unexplored.  

Early on in the film, after Chuck and Buck meet again as adults, Buck (accidentally?) walks in on Chuck peeing in the bathroom.  Chuck relaxes after seeing it’s only Buck who walked in and Buck takes this opportunity to get closer.  He walks up to Chuck, cornering him and runs his hands down his pants, attempting to come into contact with him.  Chuck appropriately says no and is in a state of surprise, promptly leaving the bathroom.  Buck also has an understandable response and exits, crying on his way out.

Buck doesn't understand consent and watching the film, 24 years after its release, post Me Too, makes for an experience.  Later in the film, after a case of beer, Buck climbs into bed with his neighbor.  Neighbor guy is sleeping and Buck ever so lightly places his arm around his.  You can feel his desperation for intimacy.  Of course, Buck then takes it even further and runs his hand down his neighbor's torso, eventually reaching his groin, just as he did before with Chuck (who now goes by Charlie post-adolescence).  Expectedly, the neighbor wakes up, curses Buck out and leaves, leaving him in a state of sadness and disarray.

I kept waiting for violence to erupt during these scenes.  I waited for a gay man to be beaten by an unwilling and assaulted straight man.  Thankfully, the violence never comes and that is to Mike White's credit and his habit of avoiding tropes. Unexpectedly, what followed was forgiveness and acceptance and a continuation of friendships.  Buck isn't off the hook though.  He still has to grow up, he has to respect consent and show self-control.  Whether he learned his lesson or not, I believe, is up in the air.  I could get into the last shot of the film, which I believe is up for interpretation.  I don't want to give much away or what I thought of it because it's for the viewer to decide.  I'd rather explore what feels both uncomfortable and familiar as a gay person, especially one who grew up closeted in the early 2000s.

About 2/3 into Chuck and Buck, it's revealed that the characters were intimate with each other as boys, at 11 or 12 years old.  The semi-surprise is that it was Chuck, who is now engaged to a woman, who initiated sex.  Combining this fact and Buck's possibly underdeveloped nature, it gave us a reason to understand Buck’s behavior as an adult.  But he's not without fault because our understanding of him does not equal an excuse for him.  What stayed on my mind was the act of grabbing.  Why did Buck feel it was okay to do that?  Was it because he was trapped in a childlike state of mind or was it male privilege;  if you want, you get it, "grab 'em by the pussy," you may say.  What if it was a combination of both?

I think back to my teen and early college years, when I was in no way out.  I flirted with the idea that people thought I was bi and I attempted to present that way, when in actuality I was celibate because I didn't know what to do, where to go, how to come out, how to express myself.  It's why I felt bad for Buck and I tried to understand him and I hoped he saw the graciousness of these straight men he accosted.  Then I thought, I don't even need to compare Buck to my 17-year-old self at the time the film was released.  Buck resembles gay men of today.

Currently sitting unanswered in my inbox are texts from gay men, some of whom I've hooked up with and most of whom I have not.  They text me a picture of their dick either saying they are horny or "Now?"  My immediate response, my defensive response is no, not now.  You don't know what I'm doing, it's 10 fucking AM, and I'm watching NY1 News with my husband.  Can I get a "Good Morning" before your erect cock blows up my phone screen?  I admit, I'm going through a contemplative period as of late.  I want to know why I go through changes of desire as I do and what my body means to me and why I treat it like I do.  I'll also admit that I can come off very strong when I want something.  I understand the need and impulse for sex.  What I want to explore is Buck's expectation for reciprocity and why, as gay men, we often expect the same.

What Buck had when he was young, his straight best friend initiating sex as exploration, is not only a popular subject in gay porn, it is a fantasy that many gay men wanted but never had the chance to have.   

When I was 17, I worked at a movie theater and one of the managers, this beautiful Middle Eastern man named Ivan, a few years older, gave me a tour of the upstairs projection room.  He took me to a kind of dark cove, overlooking the theater below.

"And here, you can do whatever you want and no one will see," he said.

There was a silence, a weighted silence.  As an adult, I understand that that silence was an invitation.  I was too scared to take it.

I remember a friend of a friend, who was always picked on for being gay when we were kids.  I talked to him on the phone a few times and he asked me over and over to hang out at his house.  I knew what this meant, on some level, even if I couldn't vocalize or intellectualize it to myself.  The invitation was never met, the phone calls remained conversations.  

When I should have known better, that was in college.  I lived with a southern Abercrombie and Fitch model, who constantly joked with our other roommates that we were going to make out.  I have a reoccurring memory of him standing at the edge of my bed, in nothing but boxer shorts, pulled tight from the imprint of his dick.  He asked what I was doing as I lay there.  I remember him reaching his arm up to see if it could touch the ceiling as he half-smiled, looking down at me.  His chest, his arm, his armpit, his bulge were staring back at me, testing me.  I didn't do anything and I failed the test.

Maybe these encounters, our first encounters, our lost encounters, stay with us as adults.  As we grow and explore as gay men, I don't believe that our first instinct was to fuck.  Fucking is up there at the top, for sure, but what we needed was real intimacy after such a long drought.  But once you're out, and I'm speaking for gay men, especially of a certain age, we had to learn the ropes first.  And they were difficult to climb.  

I was 25 when I moved to New York.  My roommate's good friend, who was gay and red-haired and gorgeous and had been out longer than me, invited me to Phoenix, a gay bar in the city.  I thought we were on a date.  As the night went on and shots were taken, we stood outside, smoking cigarettes.  And then another young man, with a thick brown beard I could only dream to grow, went up to him and they kissed.  I watched in silence.  I held my emotions, not really understanding why I was there or why he was making out with someone in front of me.  When I got home, long past 4 am, I fell asleep, crying drunk on the floor.  I felt so stupid and naive.  I wondered how I could have read a situation so wrong.  

At the end of Chuck and Buck, it's a question if Buck has grown, which, again, watch it and make your own assumption.  If this movie were released today, there would be an entire Reddit filled with vitriolic commentary.  It's a different time now, especially in terms of how we think of consent.  What does remain as relevant as it did 20 years ago, is the fact that Buck was a gay boy, who needed to grow up and learn all of the lessons that would hopefully turn him into a man.