I’m Still Thinking About 'Pillion'

Photo from Cannes

If you read last week’s newsletter, you saw my strong recommendation of a new film called Pillion. I’m still not done talking about this movie. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to say even more about it. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, but if you’re planning to see the movie and don’t want to know anything else about it beforehand, maybe save this for later.

Some have called Pillion a “dom-com,” because it’s got the beats of a traditional romantic comedy wrapped in a BDSM casing. It’s all about Colin (played by Harry Melling), a shy, young, barbershop quartet-singing gay man who falls hard for someone who’s maybe his complete opposite: Ray (played by a smoldering, brooding Alexander Skarsgard), an incredibly handsome member of a biker gang who’s into rough sex that’s all about domination, submission, and sometimes humiliation.

I haven’t seen a film dealing with themes of queerness, love, rejection, and repression be this good in a very, very, long time. There’s not a wasted moment on the screen. The script is lean and efficient. Each performance holds a nuance and a depth often conveyed just through a glance or a small movement. The sex scenes are, dare I say, tasteful? Pillion manages to hit all the beats of a rom-com (albeit with a strong hint of sadness) while taking viewers into a world many wouldn’t find romantic at all: one full of sex in alleys and men with chains locked around their necks and rough penetration and meanness in sex as one of the goals of the sex itself.

I loved this film. Not because I like that kind of sex. But because the pain and the friction present in Pillion’s sex and romance weren’t just part of the pleasure the characters enjoyed; it ended up being part of their growth as well. It’s a movie about learning from heartbreak, and perhaps taking the biggest lessons in love from the ones who don’t last, or the ones who treat you poorly. That’s relatable, whatever your kinks.

I’ve been telling everyone I know to watch this film, especially my gay friends. And more than one homosexual in my life has told me how sad Pillion made them feel. In large part because of the friction and pain present in the film, those elements that I found particularly moving. Skaragard’s character, Ray, is the vessel that holds most of this pain. In his world, he only allows himself to find sexual pleasure when he’s expressing his sexuality in the most aggressively masculine and domineering ways possible. He needs Colin to sleep on the floor after sex, not the bed. He kind of likes it when sex causes Colin physical pain. He’ll maybe never, ever smile at Colin or tell him that he cares about him. But it works because at every turn, he allows Colin to not just submit to such behavior, but to actively consent to it. And Colin, through this process of consent, starts to figure out his own boundaries, what he really needs, and how to get it. Growth.

I watched this movie with my boyfriend. As we left the AMC at The Grove to go right next door to The Cheesecake Factory (as God intended), he told me how sad this movie made him, and how it kinda threw him for a loop. “Are any of those men happy?” he said of the characters living in Ray’s BDSM/biker world. What pain and hurt would make grown men only be able to experience sexual pleasure, or even love, through all this friction and pain and domination and repression, and subjugation? He was right to ask those questions. No point he made was incorrect. But none of that made me sad at all.

To be queer anywhere in this world is to have any self-discovery — any joy, any pleasure — sit right next to repression. There is nowhere in the world where a queer person gets to start figuring out who they are and what they want out of love and life without also figuring all of that out in a world that doesn’t want them to fully be who they are. That some grapple with this reality in ways that welcome pain isn’t surprising, and when done consensually, I don’t even think it’s wrong. What’s great about Pillion is that it takes these characters — taking part in those behaviors — seriously, and seeks no shame in telling their stories.

I can’t help but think all of these thoughts knowing that Pillion exists in the same world Heated Rivalry does. The gay hockey soft-core HBO romance presents another version of queer sex and love: one without any real pain or friction at all. At every turn, these incredibly attractive hockey players with butts formed on Mt. Olympus think they will suffer, but then they really don’t. One character, on his first try, is really, really good at bottoming! That same character, who’s deathly afraid to come out to his parents, faces no animosity, hate, or pushback from them when he finally does. When another hockey player comes out on the ice of a hockey rink after winning a championship, everyone cheers, and he just gets more famous. It’s all fantasy. Which is the point.

It’d be easy to say one of these stories is better than the other. One is real. The other, a pipe dream. But I — and my boyfriend, too — thoroughly enjoyed both. And don’t we deserve each of these things? As many different takes on love and sex and passion as the straights get? The enjoyable friction for me with all of this is parsing through all the things these stories are trying to tell us, all the ways they contradict each other, all the imagined realities they are trying to make imaginable, and relishing in the fact that we’re getting more and more of these very gay, very pieces of art. To be queer anywhere in this world is to live with so much friction. I am glad to be in a moment in which I see that being worked out, and sometimes even forgotten about for a spell, onscreen.

–Sam