It is difficult to open a nineteenth-century novel without encountering an orphan.
Charles Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters filled their pages with dozens of unfortunate children who lived poorly in a soot-stained London, or their adult versions, subjected to the same chronic unhappiness, affected by the sociology of the time and seriously handicapped. when it was time to love.
From Oliver Twist to Jane Eyre, Victorian and then Edwardian literature chose the helpless young man as an emblem and allegory, to the point that some literary theorists have defined the 19th century as “the century of the orphan.”
Of all the examples, which are many,
David Copperfield
takes the cake: in addition to the protagonist, we have counted up to eight more orphans among his cast.
Dying young was more common a couple of centuries ago than today, but this literary overrepresentation seems demographically exaggerated.
Another explanation could be sought: rampant industrialization, the new urban culture, scientific advances and religious conflicts had left the subjects of the Empire blurred in modern life, without the reference points that once guided them, disoriented in a century for which they no longer had any map.
Charles Péguy said, in a joke not entirely without reason, that the world changed more between 1880 and 1914 than since the times of Ancient Rome.
A new orphan has arrived on the billboard: Adam, the protagonist of
Strangers
, as British and heartbroken as his predecessors.
Although his poverty is not material but emotional: his parents died in an accident when he was 11, his friends have married, mortgaged and exiled to the outskirts, and he has been left alone, living with the only company of his memories in a Contemporary London, but as soulless as Dickens's.
Like his 19th century counterparts, Adam seems to find himself at a crossroads, paralyzed by the fear of HIV handed down to him by the previous generation—when fucking was equivalent to dying, as a dialogue in the film goes—but also by consumer culture. unbridled sexual activity that the applications have encouraged.
He is a child and an adult at the same time, a victim of arrested development, an eternal pre-adolescent like another orphan like Peter Pan, in a triple interpretive somersault embellished by Andrew Scott, known as the
hot priest
of
Fleabag
and scandalously absent from the nominations for the Oscars that are handed out tomorrow.
He did not like that the film reduced homosexuality to a tragic identity.
In reality, it hints at a more complex idea: that one inherits, whether one wants it or not, the traumas of those who have preceded one.
His neighbor, Harry, is also an orphan, although his parents are not dead.
He is about 15 years younger than Adam and is lucky not to have grown up with the same homophobia in his environment: his parents did not kick him out of the house when he told them he was gay, although he has always felt “like a stranger” in his own life. family.
Coming out of the closet only highlighted this anomaly: he ended all ambiguity regarding the aberration that he represented in a space where
queerness
was conspicuous by its absence and condemned him forever to an uncomfortable otherness.
Adam is terrified of intimacy, while Harry gives it away for free to strangers.
But both of them experience a loneliness for which there may be no remedy;
something similar to a radical orphanhood.
They are the Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw of this story, two orphans in the same novel, forced to ally and love each other to survive.
Desconocidos
does not judge gay debauchery as something harmful and collects it in several sequences, but it is also concerned with representing homosexual culture as something else: as a community of orphans who look for each other and take care of each other to get ahead, just like those abandoned children who starred in variations of survival literature in the 19th century, when many authors began to sign facsimiles of
Robinson Crusoe
in a child's key.
The film is related to the loneliness of the gay aesthete that emerges from the works of Christopher Isherwood or Alan Hollinghurst (or, in Spain, Álvaro Pombo or Rafael Chirbes), but also to the new
queer
literature , full of literal orphans (Ocean Vuong) or figuratives (Édouard Louis) who must fend for themselves in a cruel world.
The writer Abdelá Taia remembers how the young people of his village came outside his house when he was 11 years old, Adam's age when his parents died, and shouted threats to rape him.
His family did nothing.
“There I realized that no one could protect me, not even my parents,” wrote the Moroccan author.
When faced with the spectral figure of his parent, Adam says something similar: “Why didn't you come into my room when you heard me crying?”
It was not liked, especially by the voices of the collective, that the film reduced homosexuality to a tragic identity, to the path of endless crosses, to a life sentence based on shame and loneliness.
It is a legitimate criticism—and understandable in a world that prefers bottom-up narratives—although the film actually hints at a much more complex idea: that one inherits, whether one wants to or not, the traumas of those who have preceded one.
This is, after all, a ghost story.
What is missing, in certain criticisms, is a small dose of empathy towards those who did grow up, unfortunately, with that feeling of monstrosity.
Or towards those who were not lucky enough to star in a reconciliation as beautiful as the one Adam experiences with his mother, when she sings
Always on My Mind
to him (and, not coincidentally, in the Pet Shop Boys version): “
If I made you feel second best, / I'm so sorry, I was blind.”
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