Across the Lines: Ira Sachs’s Class-Conscious Debut

Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. Americans have long been encouraged to buy into the foundational myth of the American dream, with its egalitarian implication that we can transcend the class into which we’re born. On a parallel track, sexuality has been long been sold as fixed, a definitive, biological understanding of identity. This ideological contradiction is at the core of Ira Sachs’s 1996 debut feature, The Delta, a film that stands out in the New Queer nineties canon for the way it foregrounds questions of class and race alongside its depiction of gay struggle.

A selection of the latest edition of the Criterion Channel’s Queersighted series, Class Acts—spotlighting films that explicitly acknowledge the ways in which the pursuit of non-heteronormative identity dovetails with matters of American caste—Sachs’s film rewrites the rules of the coming-of-age drama in ways both invigorating and unsettling. Though the film received acclaim at both its Toronto and Sundance Film Festival premieres and notably received domestic theatrical distribution, The Delta is perhaps not as widely remembered as other cornerstones of the New Queer Cinema. This is likely owing to the way it refuses to provide easy answers to the questions it poses about the social, economic, racial, and sexual divides that define life in the United States.

An initial glimpse at The Delta’s original marketing materials gives no indication of its ambition and curiosity, or its sensitivities toward the experience of nonwhite immigrant communities. The majority of New Queer Cinema breakthrough hits were made by and starred white men, and their theatrical and home-video ad campaigns capitalized on stars who conformed to the period’s racially coded standards of attractiveness, who were often baring skin. Strand Releasing’s poster for The Delta is a prime example of leading with beefcake, featuring only a shirtless, smiling Shane Gray. Yet this conventionally handsome white teenager, who plays closeted upper-middle-class high schooler Lincoln Bloom, represents only one half of the film’s pair of starring roles, the other being the nuanced, wildly charismatic Thang Chan, a half-Black, half-Vietnamese first-time actor cast as Minh Nguyen, a gay, biracial immigrant from Vietnam whose life intersects fatefully with Lincoln’s while the two are out cruising one night.

Even within Lincoln’s strictly white community, Sachs is careful to expose stark differences in social strata. As Lincoln and his pals embark on one, long, shapeless night of hanging out, they pick up a female friend from a house considerably more modest than Lincoln’s, and the teenage girl’s expletive-laden front-yard fight with her mother, who accuses her daughter of stealing cash from her purse, harshly and uncomfortably underlines the different ways families discuss—or, in Lincoln’s case, likely don’t discuss—the specter of money. As the night wears on, the kids aimlessly smoke pot, chilling in outdoor garages or indoor rec rooms, enacting obscure fragments of fights and flirtations. Lincoln tries to forcefully kiss Monica, the pertly perfect blonde he’s dating, and becomes offended when she resists, calling her a “bitch.” Following this, Lincoln retreats into his shadow self, returning to the cruising spot we saw at the film’s opening. Only this time, he tests his own boundaries by allowing himself to get picked up by a white, middle-aged businessman and brought to a local hotel room. However, Lincoln’s moonlighting only goes so far; after he is commanded to strip during the older man’s awkward attempt at dom-sub role play (“You like being daddy’s boy?”), Lincoln is turned off, gathers his things, and leaves. In a film about the tentative breaching of divides, this line—the boundary that would typically separate a rich kid from the making-ends-meet life of a rent boy—is one that even curious teenage sexual desire can’t ultimately bring him to cross.

After allowing himself to be momentarily put in a subordinate position, Lincoln retreats to a more familiar enactment of sexual desire and goes furtively cruising in a local arcade. He again becomes the object of another’s lustful glance when he meets Minh here; at this point, Thang Chan all but overtakes the movie. Magnetic and aggressive in his pursuit of Lincoln, Minh speaks in a forthright, unapologetic way that’s both alarming and disarming for the more rehearsed, patrician Lincoln: Minh calls Lincoln “cute” and “sexy,” comes right out and asks if he’s gay, and constantly refers to him with the diminutive “boy,” a word that has both sexual and racial connotations as a term of implied inferiority—though coming from Minh it sounds as much like a term of the greatest endearment as a power move. Minh—who goes by John—all but seduces Lincoln, at least emotionally, as the white teen clearly responds to the lavish attention. Just hours after Lincoln had somewhat needily asked his girlfriend if she loved him, Minh is now the one asking Lincoln, “Do you want to love me?” Lincoln’s curiosity is piqued, and his teen ego is likely stroked. When the two decide to abscond with a boat to go downriver on the Mississippi, it’s still unclear who’s using—and potentially—exploiting whom.

These are knotty issues, and irresolvable ones, and not the normal province of gay coming-of-age stories, which often build to some kind of confrontation or redemptive conclusion. Here, Sachs provides no easy comfort; instead of fashioning a common cause-and-effect arc, he allows the film to ebb and flow around inchoate feelings—specifically what it’s like to experience the world as an outsider. It’s a portrait of queer interiority, and how such emotions are compounded by parallel oppressions caused by class conflict. The film’s sense of authenticity—or at least humane curiosity—is likely thanks to Sachs’s approach to the material. After his initial drafts, he had reconstituted the script after meeting and getting to know Thang Chan, an out gay man who is half-black and half-Vietnamese. Says Sachs, “I rewrote the film with him in mind, using a lot of his own history. So the character couldn’t have existed without the actor. He was an immigrant. He grew up in Saigon with a G.I. for a father.”

In preparing for the film, Sachs spent nearly half a year back in Memphis, familiarizing himself with the Vietnamese community. The Delta ended up getting rewritten following a series of videotaped, improvisational exercises with his nonprofessional actors. In this way it’s difficult to imagine The Delta without this step in the process, which evidently allowed Sachs to see the world from a perspective different from his own; when making a film about the wide gap between the privileged few and those who never are given the opportunity to rise, this ability to put oneself in an authorial position of discomfort—an act of self-implication—is crucial. Among The Delta’s most discomfiting ideas is that queerness can create only a momentary bond between people from different sides of stark socioeconomic and racial divides.

At the end, Sachs overturns everything we may have come to expect; it was, and remains, a controversial final passage. Following Lincoln and Minh’s fleeting connection on the river, Lincoln goes back home, and tries to rekindle a romantic relationship with Monica, once again seeking the comforts of the closet and suburban privilege, at least for now. Minh, beaten and abandoned by a desperate, scared Lincoln following a near-arrest for playing with illegal fireworks, returns to his own life as well, though by contrast it’s one marked by economic deprivation and stasis. In the last scene, Minh tells a sweet-natured African American man who picks him up at a bar that he “plays games with people.” He claims, with a hollow forlornness, that he is a liar by nature, and that though he can flatter and whisper sweet nothings, he never thinks of his hookups again. Are we then to believe that everything he told Lincoln was a lie, a ploy to get closer to him, to try and transcend the class and racial boundaries that keep him impoverished and feeling unloved? Or is he lying now, as a way of creating distance between himself and his failed relationship with the white boy he seemed to have true affection for? Did we—like Lincoln—only hear what we wanted to hear? We will never know; the final, shocking act of violence that closes the film doesn’t provide an answer, just further fogs the lens. For his part, Sachs has said, “I always felt [The Delta] was too German! I had watched just a hair too much [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder.” One can sense in the final scenes the grim influence of the great queer auteur (whose particularly dark In a Year of 13 Moons is also included in this Queersighted selection), but these fatalistic last moments carry the weight of a specifically American tragedy.

However one feels about the swift, sad ending of The Delta, it’s undeniable that it represents a kind of challenge to its viewers largely unseen in many gay-themed films, which continue to revolve around images and stories of positivity and pride. In a Village Voice article about the state of queer cinema in 2002, B. Ruby Rich, who just a decade earlier had coined the term “New Queer Cinema,” wrote, “The prevalent Queer Lite formula endlessly recycles romantic comedy, pausing every now and then for tragedy, then getting back on the dancefloor. Issues of race, class, family trauma, and life-changing desire are not likely to pop up on the current menu.” Rich then identified The Delta as one of the rare exceptions, calling it a “groundbreaking work.”

Throughout his career, Sachs has proven his commitment to questions about contemporary queer living, and he has rarely allowed issues of class to be extricable from them. Especially in such films as Keep the Lights On (2012) and Love Is Strange (2014), Sachs dramatizes deeply personal gay stories in which lives are affected by the cruelties of aging and disease, only to be further swallowed up by an economic landscape that often doesn’t allow contingencies for either, especially for those who exist outside of the forward march of hetero time. In these and The Delta, Sachs reminds viewers of those untraversable regions that make queer sexuality both a privilege and a burden in a world that has traditionally made no physical or emotional space for it.

Across the Lines: Ira Sachs’s Class-Conscious Debut

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