Aristotle and Dante Discover the Mysteries of the Universe
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About a month ago or so, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, based on the book by came out on streaming and I decided to watch it since I had spun up Starz to watch Mary and George. I knew nothing about it. Gay and Mexican American is definitely a very rare bird in the movie realm and probably not something that many of us gay Americans know anything about. That was definitely a big plus. I wish there were more.
[edit: I put this down for a good long time, so it's actually about 6 months after I wrote the first draft of this because I got sidetracked... because of it.]
The movie is set in El Paso in the late 80's which was of course a scary time to be gay and coming of age. It is told from Aristotle's -- Ari's -- point of view as a brooding boy almost 16 at the start who is an enigma both to everybody around him and to himself as well. He isn't interested in sex and doesn't know what the fuss is about, and wishes others would just calm the fuck down. He has inner demons like not understanding who he is, his relationship with his brother who is in prison, his uncommunicative father that he doesn't understand even though he emulates him, and generally tries to be invisible. He's street smart and doesn't take shit but he's not a bad ass and gets good grades which makes his mother -- a school teacher -- happy.
It's the summer of 1987 and Ari still doesn't know how to swim which is really inconvenient considering the heat of the desert. He's flailing about and catches the eye of Dante and after having a laugh about their names, Dante teaches him to swim. Dante is the opposite of Ari in many ways: he's open, accessible, happy, loves his family and very artistic and well read. So Ari is the teenage version of so many gay boys and Dante is the teenage version of what so many gay boys wish we could have been. I think BAS has pretty much confirmed that he wrote them that way. Reese Gonzales who plays Dante originally wanted to be Ari because he related to him so much, but it's hard after the movie imagining him as anybody else other than Dante. One of the things that I loved is getting to learn a new word. Dante struggles with not being Mexican enough and Ari calls him a "pocho". Ari has to explain that a pocho is a "half-assed Mexican" which Dante readily accepts. I suspect that the real life Reese is a pocho too. I don't know why it strikes me as funny, but it does. Apparently it was actually a serious slur for a long time, like a gabacho which I think has similar meaning but has been reclaimed.
It's pretty easy to tell early on that Dante is gay and is pretty ok with that. His main concern is that he won't give his parents grandchildren. Even before he goes to Chicago he's obviously falling for Ari and he's very nervous that Ari won't want to be friends when he finally gets back after his dad's stint as a visiting professor for that school year. He also often misreads Ari's stoicism for not caring like when he told Ari he was going away. Rewatching the movie, it's obvious the way Ari looks at Dante is more than just bemusement and that he's falling for him. But it's only in retrospect I saw this. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention?
At the end of summer Ari suggests to Dante -- who hates shoes -- that he give him a shoe and then ties one of each of theirs together and throws it over some overhead line. I have always heard that's sort of a gang thing to do, but what do I know? Next, Ari saves Dante's life from being killed by a car at a terrible cost to himself landing in the hospital with two broken legs and arm. Dante is despondent that he's the reason that Ari is in the hospital and extremely in awe of what Ari did for him. Ari doesn't like the attention saying it was just a reflex or something like that. Dante is also starting to read that maybe Ari actually has feelings for him back. In the book, before he leaves Dante said that he loves swimming and then ominously includes Ari in the things he loves. At least there we get a little inner dialog of his annoyance and confusion.
Their mail over the school year is basically a plot device for Dante to come to terms with himself and come out to Ari. It's a little odd way for Dante come out and so matter of factly especially in the 80's, but at some level this story is wish fulfillment for the author that a boy like Dante could exist in the world. Benjamin struggled deeply with his sexuality in real life and only came out when he was in his 50's. The good news is there are actually Dantes in the world, even way back then and they aren't always automatically picked on so long as you weren't too overt and had other redeeming qualities. Dante, for example, seems to make friends easily and moved through the world with an ease. Or at least acquaintances. We really never got much indication that Dante had anybody else serious in his life other than Ari. Ari on the other hand didn't even want friends so finding Dante for him was something of a revelation even if Dante is a very odd duck. Or maybe because Dante is an odd duck who intrigues him in a way he never felt before.
Ari gets an old Chevy truck for his 16th birthday and when his casts come off a dog follows him home who he likes taking with him when he goes out to the desert to brood in peace. Dante over Christmas sends Ari a pair of shoes, one red, one white like the ones they threw onto the wire which Ari adores and puts them onto his truck's rear view mirror. They are pretty much a totem for Ari and his friendship with Dante and reminds him that he actually has a friend and a really good one at that. How can such a person exist?
Ari is still seemingly asexual but tries to dabble in the straight universe just a little bit only to end up feeling used, but he's not terribly into it anyway. Ari's experience is very different than mine as I knew I was really attracted to boys even if I hid it and got by by being a sarcastic geek. It's hard for me to relate to somebody like Ari who is so in denial that he seemingly doesn't have little clues dancing around in his head even as he tries to silence them. His aunt Ophelia seems to know instinctively that Ari is gay which is a little fantastical -- she lives in Tuscon so is not in his life much. But that's ok. She does turn out to be a lesbian so I guess we chock this up to her gaydar and trying to drop subtle hints.
The movie has several references to the AIDS crisis which the first book did not. The author claims that was a blunder in the book but I think that he accidentally got it exactly right in the book. The pandemic was not uniform like, say, the covid pandemic. It was rarely on TV and then maybe just in passing even where it hitting really hard like San Francisco, LA and NYC. An out of the way place like El Paso would be very easy to be oblivious to what was going on and my suspicion is that's why it's truer in the book for him to have forgotten about it. Even when Dante was in Chicago unless he was going clubbing, he probably would have been very naive to what was happening. This was something the book got right, but the movie got wrong even if it was an accidental omission from BAS's standpoint.
The other main drama is Ari and his relation with his brother Bernardo. His parents won't talk about it and he was too young to know what happened. It's relatable about how his parents would be deeply ashamed to the point that they were oblivious about the emotional toll that that put on Ari. We eventually find out that a 15 year old Bernardo murdered a sex worker who turned out to have a penis.
There are a lot of idiots who saw the movie or read the books and say that the author is transphobic. It's utter nonsense and shows how absolutely clueless they are. In the 80's we knew nothing about anything trans. Even as a gay man who was pretty at ease in the gay community close to a major gay ghetto, trans was an oddity and people just would have no idea. I suppose that they are latching onto Ari calling them a transvestite. Well, that's a very believable thing he might have said. And frankly, all we really know about the character is that they presented as female but were biologically male. It's very presumptuous to read the mind of a character when there is nothing in the text to support they were actually transsexual in their head. Nothing. In this case, transvestite fits because that's all we know.
The second thing they seemingly latched onto is that he killed off somebody who is supposedly transsexual. Well here's what I have to say about that: IT STILL FUCKING HAPPENS TO THIS DAY! Demanding that authors to refrain from writing anything but happy well adjusted LGBT is an extremely shitty thing to do and frankly smacks of the transphobia they purport to abhor. Erasing people's realities and the things that inform our lives is extremely shitty. Not everything needs to have the bad parts, but telling authors that the bad parts are off limits, well here's what I have to say about that too: FUCK OFF.
Ok, enough with that rant. Yes it pisses me off. Dante is finally back next summer and they more or less pick up where they were before with Ari happy to bury the coming out part and not talk about it. Dante being Dante can't leave well enough alone and forces the issue by wanting to do a kiss experiment with Ari. It looks like Ari momentarily leans into it but in the end says it didn't do it for him. In the movie, he has something of a gay panic and acts homophobic, where in the book it's just majorly awkward. Dante is really hurt that his gambit didn't work and they end up going remote on each other to put some distance on the kiss. We're given no insight in either the book or movie how it really affects Ari and what inner conversations he's having with himself. I feel like the movie with the gay panic was trying give an explanation -- the homophobic homosexual -- but it just doesn't ring true as Ari as we soon find out is not homophobic. He's sort of just numb. I wish the movie didn't do the internalized homophobia because it's the cliche. Being numb makes Ari more mysterious and works.
Ari's mother's sister Ophelia has a fatal stroke (in the book it was while his mom was visiting her). So Ari and his dad are off to Tuscon for the funeral. Ari is curious why none of her family were there and finds out that she was a lesbian and that they didn't approve. His mother asks whether that bothers him and he says no, and remembers her lover. Again both the book and the movie don't give us any insight as to how that new knowledge affects him. I'm trying to figure out whether it was a mistake, or just part of Ari's repression that even though he has a very active inner life, he didn't have a conversation with himself about either Dante or Ophelia.
When he gets back from Tuscon, he finds out that Dante is in the hospital the victim of a vicious homophobic attack when 4 guys see him kissing a co-worker. That sends Ari into a white hot rage causing him to confront his coworker who fled and couldn't be bothered to find out what happened to Dante. Ari finds out a few of who did it. He stalks one of them and seemingly without any motivation from the perp's standpoint beats the living shit out of him without saying why. The scream at the end as they drag him off Enrique in the movie really captures how protective he is toward Dante and how protective he has been all along. You want to think it's also a scream of his love of Dante finally making its way to the surface. It's true that a bro might do that for his bros, but the intensity is what gives it away that it's not just revenge but that they tried to take away his boy, not just his bro.
When Ari gets home he's covered in blood and his parents confront him. In the movie he's still shaking in rage about what they did to Dante. His father who has been slowly coming out of his shell finally confronts Ari that Dante loves him. Ari weakly denies it but then dad drops the real bombshell: Ari is in love with Dante too. He finally gives in and says that he feels ashamed. His mother tells him he has nothing to be ashamed of both because they don't care that Dante is a boy, but also because they adore him. The book takes longer to get to that scene, but the effect is the same so the movie is fine to clip it down.
It's a little fantastical that after all of this that Ari accepts his dad's explanation. I suspect that given the ending, him having an inner conversation would have given it away which would spoil the surprise, but his dad's observation would certainly resulted in a lot of introspection on his part and confusion as to whether his dad was actually right. I don't know how repression works in real life, but I would think it's more of a process rather than a light bulb going off. Alex in Red White and Royal Blue repressed it too, and it was more of a process to figure himself out. I would suspect that is more accurate, but as I said it would give away the ending. I just went back through the final few chapters and it seems that the way he gets out of this bind was to not give Ari an inner dialog until the climax. Maybe we're expected to believe that he had that dialog, but just out of scene.
BAS does one good thing which is trying to dispel the notion that ethnic families are expected to be homophobic. That's a very fair point. I personally don't have much opinion about Latino's takes on gay people, but he's certainly right to point out that like other religions and ethnicities, judging them to be uniform is not right. Another aspect from BAS's standpoint is wish fulfillment that if somebody had clued him in early on that it was OK to be gay, he could have come to terms years ago. I don't know whether he repressed it or just suppressed it. I suspect the latter.
The final scene is quite beautiful. Dante, mostly healed, and Ari head out to the desert. Dante is in a bad mood. He knows the other boy is just an Ari stand in and he can't deal with his feelings for Ari. It hearkens back to Brokeback Mountain "I don't know how to quit you". Ari pushes a few buttons about love including the dangling shoes which causes Dante to snap telling Ari that he's killing him from the inside. Ari tries to play dumb which really pisses Dante off and he storms out of the cab. Ari follows him and brings up the kiss. Dante is now really pissed and hurt. Ari asks him if he remembers what he said to Dante. "it didn't work for me". Ari looks at him intently and says "I lied to you". Dante suspects Ari is fucking with him, but Ari grabs him and kisses him.
So while the ending is beautiful, it's a little far fetched that Ari would have come to terms with being in love with Dante so quickly and accept himself. As I said, I think this entire story was wish fulfillment for BAS's sake and that it went viral since so many people see themselves as an Ari. Maybe that's what makes it so good is that he first and foremost wrote it for himself. I'm pretty sure he's said basically the same thing. And that's OK.
A lot of us wish we had a better go of it in our high school years and that's doubly true for BAS who struggled so long with himself. I don't feel as bad because I basically came out at 18 and was pretty comfortable with it. The few years in high school I missed out on didn't terribly consume me, but for somebody like BAS who didn't accept himself until he was in his 50's it must have been cathartic to imagine a world where he could. It's also an interesting take on "not in the closet". Ari didn't know he was in the closet due to being so deeply in denial. About 2/3rd's of the way through the movie I was starting to wonder whether it was even a gay coming of age movie that I heard it was, so the surprise was just that much better.
So I understand why so many people love the book, and why so many people were disappointed in the movie. Ari's rich inner life is not easy to put on film as is the case with all subjects where the protagonist has inner turmoil that only manifests as anger or other emotions on the outside. The movie did capture that, but in its defense Ari's main conflict with Dante and his sexuality was not the subject of his inner conversations either. Ari really liked Dante but that was all we knew. We never found out what Ari really thought of their first kiss either other than telling us he lied. Did he actually felt the spark? And then what happened? Maybe Ari was actually telling him the truth that he didn't feel anything the first time, and it was only in retrospect that he realized the denial he was in? I guess it doesn't really matter, but it would be nice to understand how repression work for those of us that don't suffer from it.
So it was both a beautiful book, and a beautiful movie and I highly recommend both. Everything has problems and this is no exception, but it pulled off what it intended and then some. A+ and definitely recommend. I wrote up a sequel to this based on the sequel of Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World.
