As a wise woman once asked, “Is this f*cking play about us?”
That will likely be how a lot of us gays react to p0laris’s newly-released short film, Instagays, which offers up a lot of commentary on the gay community, particularly the type of New York gays who vacation in the Pines. The in-your-face film centers on a “group of vainglorious #instagays whose trip to Fire Island takes a dark turn when they accidentally murder their token friend of color.”
P0laris channeled the spaghetti western genre for the film, which gives the already over-the-top story a feeling of high camp. There are Spring Breakers-esque bright colors and character deaths that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Quentin Tarantino movie and everything seems to take place in a slightly heightened version of reality.
All of which might give audiences the impression that the short is squarely a dark comedy, but as P0laris told So.Gay in an exclusive interview about his project, he does hope that people walk away from the film performing at least a little introspection. Whether it’s his commentary on our use of social media, drugs or Grindr or our collective obsession with perfection and aesthetics and getting ahead, there’s a lot in Instagays that might prompt its audience to reevaluate aspects of their own lives and values. And, as he told us, “the educational aspect of film is the cherry on top” of it all.
Keep scrolling for So.Gay’s full interview with director P0laris all about Instagays, which is available to stream here.
So.Gay: Where did the idea come from to create this short film? Talk to me about some of the themes you chose to focus on.
P0laris: The film was originally my grad school thesis film. The genesis for the idea of the film came in a few different ways: The first time I thought of doing something in that world, I was in Asbury Park with some friends, and we were getting drunk and having a bunch of fun and the apartment we were in had a really massive staircase up to the roof. When I was walking down the staircase very drunk I was like, “If I fell and died right now, I have no idea how these divas would handle it.” The idea of gays dealing with a dead body on a vacation sounded really funny, so that was the first piece of it.
Then I started to develop it in relation to my own relationship with the queer community and queer identity. A lot of that was looking at my own experiences with race in the queer community, because it can be very specific depending on how you present, I suppose. For me, there was always this sense of being somewhat accepted but not, like having some elements of the things that people look for in the community but still feeling very much like an outsider. And as I’ve grown as a human being, I realized that’s [how] every single queer person [feels].
I also looked at my relationships with the men in my life and my own relationship to sexualized violence and the queer community’s relationship to that. I’ve had a lot of white partners where there was a sexual domination aspect to the sexual part of our relationship.
At the time, I was also in a relationship with an older white male while the idea for the film was coming together, and that man was who brought me to Fire Island for the first time. When I started to research and started to understand what that place was, I thought it made a really good setting as a symbol for all of the things I was interested in as a filmmaker. It was really about the New York gay community with that sense of insider/outsider. The fact that you have to travel out there, the fact that it’s so exclusive, the fact that there are just 10 out of 600 Black homeowners? I thought that was the perfect stage to tell a story about this.
All of those things came together where I landed on a group of queer friends with a token friend of color. Because I’ve seen that in a lot of queer friend groups.
SG: The film contains a lot of satire and commentary about the queer community, particularly when it comes to our relationships with technology like social media and Grindr. Can you speak to that a bit and explain your perspective on it?
P: I have this whole theory — and this is what the film is kind of about — queer people really resonate with social mirror theory, which means we have to see how other people perceive us in order to understand our own worth. It’s hard for you to intrinsically understand your own identity without understanding how other people perceive it.
Social media and Grindr are both a fast track to putting those things at the forefront of our community all the time. You put your best pictures on Grindr and social media, you decide who you send a face pic or album to or not. All those things we do in the internet space, which I think is just moving cruising into the online space.
Even the proliferation of everyone becoming a model and influencer is also a queer community thing. Everyone wants to have that sense of creating and wants to be an Instagay. People will hit you up on Grindr to follow them on Instagram! Our queer experience as young people is very linked to technology, and that’s only becoming more prevalent. I was very interested in pulling those things together, because I don’t know if we’ve fully unpacked what we’ve done to our psyche by putting these things at the forefront of our community.
SG: You described Instagays as “a gay spaghetti western,” which helps to explain some of the project’s campier, more sensationalized elements. Why this genre?
P: My editor and really close collaborator came up with that language. I learned that westerns are so much about identity-building as a culture, because they were sort of the preeminent form of media when America was creating what America a cultural export was. So, a lot of the ideas of heroes/villains, cops/robbers, natives/settlers have been there from the get-go. Those movies are gay as hell, too! Most western are about male-male relationships with a lot of sexual tension within them.
For me, I really was interested in how queer identity building mirrors that, where we utilize media to understand how queer people should be. Media has given us a lot of our rights! Queer people have been inherently linked to the arts since the community has existed, and it’s where queerness thrives, in the arts.
SG: This being a short film, how are you planning to get it out there and connecting it to the queer community? How can people watch it?
P: It’s definitely been a bit of an experience [figuring that out]. I’ve decided to work with Pines Play to distribute it independently, and it’s available for 99 cents to watch. I’ve seen what the festival circuit is like, and it basically gatekeeps your film from the people who should be watching it from viewing it because of online rights. It’s brat summer, and it’s very brat-coded, so I was like, “Let me find a way to get this out to people.”
SG: What do you hope people take away from the film? Do you hope for a bit of introspection, reflecting on where we are as a community?
P: I hope people have fun watching it and are entertained. I would also love if there was some introspection and some unpacking on why the film happens the way it does. I think of all of the characters as somewhat culpable in their own demises. I don’t think of any of them as perfect angels, so I’d love if we could unpack why we want to create this idealized perfection of what gayness is. What does that mean for us as a community? Is that something that brings us together or is it something that’s not very ideal? Is there a way for Instagays to be more inclusive or ways for us as a community to value different things aside from the visual?
I’d also love for people to reevaluate their relationships within their own community. A lot of this film is about Luca evaluating the people he chooses to be around. Drug use is also something I’d like for people to evaluate. It can be a slippery slope, and those are things that I think we as a community should be thinking about and preventing what happens in the film, in whatever way that means. Can we take care of each other more? I do wonder about all of those things, because I think the educational aspect of film is the cherry on top. But I do just want people to have fun!
Watch “Instagays” here and catch more picture previews below.
