Queer Men Grapple With Seeing Themselves in Plainclothes and Twinless

Sundance debuts Plainclothes and Twinless. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Ethan Palmer, Greg Cotten

Carmen Emmi’s Plainclothes unfolds like a bad dream: nonlinear, frenetic, and stressful. The director’s feature debut premiered Sunday night at the Sundance Film Festival, telling the story of Lucas (Tom Blyth), a plainclothes cop in Syracuse who lures gay men into public restrooms under the pretense of a hookup only to arrest them for indecent exposure. Lucas moves through the world with a twitchy confidence, trying not to let his own burgeoning sexual questioning get in the way of his job, until he crosses paths with Andrew (Russell Tovey), a mark with an undeniable aura. Dinky glasses, plaid shirts, the Russell Tovey of it all — listen, we get it. Can Lucas keep doing his job while romantically pursuing a person he’d attempted to ensnare?

Plainclothes is set in the 1990s, but Emmi’s subject matter is ever-prescient: “I saw an article in the L.A. Times in 2016 about an undercover police officer who was arresting men in a Long Beach park bathroom. Around that time I was in the last stages of coming out, and coincidentally my brother was becoming a police officer.” The confluence of these events led Emmi toward a lot of free-writing and journaling around this topic until that eventually became the script for Plainclothes. The film is a story of acceptance and self-discovery — “an opportunity to tell my truth,” Emmi said — but it’s also a movie about killing the camera that exists in your head.

Lucas’s story is told in blips and cuts toward in-scene footage shot on a Hi8 camera, a camera that Emmi himself once used to make videos when he was 10. “My editor, Erik Vogt-Nilsen, and I wove this Hi8 footage — most of which was shot on set between takes — into the final cut to represent Lucas’s inner thoughts: what he sees and what he believes he sees,” Emmi said. Watching the film is as anxiety-inducing as Lucas’s life. Scenes occasionally flash into third person, because Lucas can’t help but wonder what it might look like to get caught. Everywhere he looks, even at himself, he sees a crime — not only because of his work but his own prejudiced repression. Lucas isn’t a cop because he believes in justice or helping people. He did this work to make his family proud; that he deluded himself into persecuting men like himself is an act of self-inflicted violence. He would be a cop whether he had a uniform or not.

This act of both seeing and being seen — and of doubling or othering yourself in the process — plays a big part in Twinless, James Sweeney’s sophomore feature playing at this year’s Sundance as well. Though much different in tone, Sweeney’s film centers on two men, Roman (Dylan O’Brien) and Dennis (Sweeney himself), who meet in a support group for those grieving the loss of their twins, including their own, Rocky and Dean, respectively. For Roman and Dennis, losing a twin isn’t like losing a sibling or other family members; it’s like losing a version of themselves. At Roman’s brother’s funeral, a number of crying well-wishers embrace him and call attention to the fact that the twins looked so much alike, while Roman stands there like a living ghost of a brother he believed was the “better” one. Dennis struggles with a similar feeling of isolation, not because Dean was the superior of the two but because he’d long idolized what it meant to generally exist as a double.

What Twinless explores through the men’s unlikely friendship — they are opposites in every way; Roman is as straight, dumb, and aggressive as Dennis is gay, clever, and fearful — is the way in which Roman and Dennis begin to reflect what they lost in their brothers. Roman’s survivor’s guilt over his brother’s death is due in part to his homophobia toward Rocky. Through Dennis, Roman can ask all the questions he never thought to ask of his own brother; he can make peace with his once small-minded behavior. Dennis, on the other hand, has long struggled with his identity — not because he is ashamed of being gay so much as he is ashamed of being alive. He’s never been good enough, hot enough, or interesting enough to hold space on his own. He doesn’t feel like one person; he’s always felt like two. In Roman he feels partnership, so much so that Dennis comes to believe that the only way to keep getting closer to Roman is to ingratiate himself through a series of escalating lies.

In both Plainclothes and Twinless, the greatest transgressions are not necessarily that of sexuality but of overstepping the bounds of normal observation and intimacy into something more sinister. When Lucas runs Andrew’s license plates in an attempt to get closer to him, he’s too caught up in his own surveillance narrative to see this as a violation of privacy. In Twinless, Dennis resorts to stalking and spying in hopes of achieving intimacy in lieu of truthfulness. He’s too ashamed of himself to admit what he wants — so, too, is Lucas. They fear the judgment of their loved ones, and they use that fear as a weapon. The thing that is wrong with them is not who they are but how they act. In their pursuits, both Lucas and Dennis turn the objects of their affection into literal objects: projections of their own shame and lust to whom they can act however they want at the expense of what makes them human.