By Hook or By Crook

by Anna Pulley

By Hook or By Crook (written and directed by Silas Howard and Harry Dodge, 2002)
 
By Hook or By Crook is a lo-fi, grittily-produced independent film, at times carnivalesque and ethereal, at others painfully sluggish and amateur, like watching marathon home video outtakes of your Great Aunt Luverne’s canasta tournaments. Remarkably, this film screened at Sundance, but then so did The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, which is about as riveting as a Miller Lite label, so, so much for the prestige of festivals, I guess. By Hook or By Crook is not a terrible film, mind you, especially if you consider the kind of macho, outlaw narrative it tries to emulate (Midnight Cowboy, most notably) The grainy, digital close-ups and perplexing camera angles create a bizarre kind of intimacy that can be endearing, sort of like watching Cops—you get off on the fact that the people are believable, regardless of what kind of incoherent druggie speak flies out of their mouths on camera.
 
The story (term used loosely) revolves around Shy (Silas Howard) a loner from small town Kansas whose dad has just passed away, leaving him jaded, closed-off and with nowhere to go. “I was like Dorothy,” she says in the voiceover. “Except with biceps and no dog.” Penniless and for lack of anything better to do, Shy hitches her way to San Francisco (the Queer Promiseland) where she meets Valentine (Harry Dodge), a cross between Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Between manic, incomprehensible monologues, Val is supposedly searching for his birth mother (by ripping out the Yellow Pages of random phone booths) and trying to avoid getting sent back to the mental institution. Together they embark on a series of petty crimes—robbing Coke machines and ripping off Home Depot equivalents—in the spirit of rebellious James Dean types, only with two butch lesbians playing the leads.

There’s something refreshing about the film’s incorporation of female masculinity and non-normative sexuality without the usual pathology or violence that clouds most queer cinema. Indeed, Howard and Dodge seem to have created their own alternate queer universe, where every background character is markedly gay and where gender variance is so transparent it’s often unreadable. Shy and Val switch pronouns more often than Lindsay Lohan goes to rehab and it’s neither explanatory nor stereotypical, but more like a celebration of gender complexity, one that creates a space for fluidity without lecturing or making declarative statements about one’s identity. “Are you a boy or a girl?” a group of school-aged children ask Shy. “Both,” he replies in a breezy but matter-of-fact manner. (I’ve noticed that I’m switching pronouns as well, which is mostly unintentional. (Is it?) While I read the two protagonists as dykes, their masculine presentations render them male in my mind, hence the masculine pronoun. Forgive the inconsistency). One of the more memorable scenes is when Val expresses insecurities about wanting to meet his birth mother. “She won’t like me,” she says. “I have a beard!” (Harry Dodge does actually have a naturally grown tuft of chin hair that she discusses at some length in Judith Halberstam’s and Del La Grace Volcano’s The Drag King Book). Shy responds with alacrity, “It’s a fucking great beard!” as if Val’s beard and not his mental instability was his greatest obstacle on the path to “acceptance.”

The film’s ultimate purpose is about friendship (bor-ing) with snatches of action sequences and seductions that are more parody than anything, like when Shy tries to rob a gas station with a squirt gun, only to be bitch slapped by the female attendant and shooed away like a meddlesome teenager. In true art house spirit, By Hook or By Crook is jagged but conventional, relying on the clichés of formulaic genre films, but with a smattering of queerness thrown in the mix, to make it appear edgy and uncouth.