The Second Coming

Director(s): Jack Walsh
Writer(s): K.M. Soehnlein, Jack Walsh
Producer(s): Jack Walsh
Starring: Al Girordano, John Connally, Jeff Constan

Ben and Carlos are two high school boyfriends living in a time when racism and homophobia reigns supreme. While a group named the Allied Forces of God becomes popular across the nation, those in minority and marginalized communities band together in an underground community to form a resistance. With stock footage of Nazi Germany juxtaposed against the fictional future, this experimental film delves into a dark subject matter about how the underlying fear of difference in a country as progressive as the US could eventually boil over into a second holocaust.

The filmmaker takes a slight postmodernist view towards filmmaking by making the narrative as complex and indiscernible as possible. While obviously a reaction to the era of war in the 20th Century, this 1995 film seems like its trying to sum up the last century and warn others about the next century. This film did make me think about the values I look for in good queer cinema. While this has neither the high production value, plot structure, and character development that I crave, it had the ability to make me think on a deeper level of hatred in the US. In which case, the film is definitely a post modern film. Could the world ever get so bad that outright homophobia and racism in the US becomes the norm once again? And how fragile is our government? History is all about the rise and fall of one empire after another. When will the US empire crash and which empire will be the next?