You Love to See It: Boogie Nights

"You look at me sometimes." Five words, and in them we can see the entire soul of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Scotty, a lonely, socially awkward young gay man living on the margins of the 1970s California porn industry. Boogie Nights is a movie about trying again and again to spin the love you never got out of whole cloth, and when Scotty tries to explain why he thought Dirk might want to kiss him, that's all he has. A single  thread of human connection so delicate, so insubstantial that the mere act of speaking it aloud destroys it. A spiderweb woven out of of daydreams and blown to ribbons in an instant by a passing breeze. You look at me sometimes.

Scotty's feelings for Dirk are never mentioned again, though he follows the other man through life like a puppy. That single exchange, that pitiful admission, locks Scotty into a holding pattern which lasts for years. Imagine how starved for touch, for affection, for love one would have to be to think another person's barest attention was a lifeline. Imagine the trauma that forged that brittle emotional withdrawal, the lifetime of rejection and abuse behind such a quiet, desperate ineptitude at human connection. In Hoffman's thick, trembling voice and gentle shrug we see immediately how ready Scotty was for Dirk's disinterest, how odious he considers his own affections. "Please," he begs, his voice breaking. "Can I kiss you on the mouth? Please let me." As though being kissed is something hateful.

Scotty's cracked, trembling attempt at sounding casual makes it easy to see the quiet, chubby kid, the brutal parents, the long, slow retreat inward as every expression of self is met with rage and violent revulsion. You can see his boyhood room--bare walls, no door--and imagine the burning, white-hot agony of his first crush. His silence in the classroom, painful and humiliating. The contempt with which the other kids look at him. Fat. Stupid. Did he finish high school? I'd bet money he didn't. I think, like Dirk, he was thrown out like a rag used to wipe up something disgusting. It's there, if you listen. A whole life in those five infinitely fragile words. 

You look at me sometimes.