everybody on twitter criticising the chemistry read extras w old scripts of ryan call naim a "limp wristed little fag" during the snake-frog scene & making reference to touching a girl's tits as character assassination and look . i get it. i am understanding of other people's perspectives of how seeing a darker side to a character you love is distressing. but some are choosing to express this by criticising adrian's writing in a way that is deeply bothering me.
ryan exhibiting cruelty towards naim before they became romantically involved is not "poor writing". we did not "narrowly escape the bully x victim trope". ryan and naim are BOTH victims of the pressures of homophobic society and their intial interactions having a brutal colour is meant to demonstrate this. we're not forgetting that adrian chiarella is a gay man yes? who grew up in australia and spent portions of his youth in an industrial town similar to bandee? say what you will but ryan whelan is a character born of an gay man's lived experience growing up in australia. yes queer men's internalised homophobia manifesting as bullying against other gay men is cross cultural, but i cant help but put emphasis on the australian setting of leviticus when analysing adrian's initial writing choices. tall poppy syndrome gets thrown around a lot—australians being unable to celebrate other's successes, having the tendency to cut each other down, targeted insults enforced as social ritual. australia actively promotes and idealises the rough, hypermasculine man who use misogynistic, homophobic, and racist language as currency. the crueler the comment, the more power you hold in a social interaction. taking that cruelty on the chin and returning it with equal fire is the accepted social norm. cannot emphasise enough how many times have i seen a person ridiculed for "not being able to take a joke". in australia, a person responding poorly to an insult is deemed a greater sin than the insult itself. showing that something hurts, that a comment made against you cut deep, is unforgivable weakness. if not spitting poison back in the face of the person who fed it to you, at the very least you should learn how to fucking swallow.
adrian wrote ryan whelan knowing what australian teenage boys are like, and each teenage boy he serves us deals with their queerness in a difference way. hunter is in complete denial, going to his death without ever admitting who he is. naim knows who he is but buries it deep, so unmoored by fear he cannot accept his queerness while knowing it is hated. unlike both hunter and naim, ryan is not deluded about his queerness. ryan knows he's gay and has accepted it as something that will not change (pre-ritual talk w hunter - "he thinks he can make it stop"), but he also knows his community would reject him for it if they knew. so being 17, having no reason to risk otherwise, he does what is expected of him to fit in with the crowd—which is call the wimpy new kid a fag, and loftily throw in a comment about touching a girl's tits for some extra misogynistic flair (bc yk. why not). stacy himself has said that's exactly what he found interesting abt ryan's character. the masculine facade ryan has worked so hard to uphold as his armour becomes dismantled because of his affection for naim. and it's called armour for a reason. gay men dealing with internalised homophobia aren't bullies for funsies. they harm because if they don't they get harmed. once ryan is outed and his performance rings false, he is forced to face society's rejection of his queerness without protection. ryan the bully becomes ryan the bullied.
also can i just say that leviticus is ryan's coming of age as much as it is naim's, and the core of ryan's maturation is him deciding that his queerness and feelings for naim are more important to him than acceptance into the hypermasculine australian ideal. the only glimpse we get in the film of how ryan has been indulging his queerness is with hunter, but that relationship is violent and lustful—something that doesn't entirely conflict with ryan's masculine performance. hunter hurts him, but ryan hurts him back. their intimacy is a violent struggle, fitting the mould of familiar push and pull for power that their society demands of men. but when ryan kisses naim, naim surrenders to ryan's touch, kisses him back without the price of blood. it's only through the tender intimacy he shares with naim that ryan learns to reject all he has been taught about the necessity of violence and cruelty. he goes from mocking, insulting, taunting naim with his fears and roughly pushing him around, to defending naim from others with a protective hand on his back, talking naim down from wet-eyed panic with softly spoken words. in a pivotal moment of change, he does what would be unthinkable for the ryan we meet at the beginning of the film—he puts himself at naim's mercy by confessing exactly how much naim means to him. i don't want it to look like some other dickhead. i want it to look like you. how much more does that confession mean when we understand the armour he had to shed to get there? how much more does ryan's tenderness stand out when we know the cruelty he had to unlearn? ryan's care and sensitive treatment of naim becomes something earned, something he fought for against society's expectations of him. ryan's love for naim is the catalyst for his self acceptance, and him leaving bandee behind at the end of the film signifies him leaving behind his need to conceal his queerness with masculine cruelty and violence. whether or not naim had met ryan at the bus stop ryan's character arc still would've mattered. we're just incredibly lucky that this story was written by a queer man who knows how much a happy ending means for queer audiences. the boys get to come of age together, and we get to see queer suffering conclude with a hopeful note.
i'm not upset these old scripts were changed bc i prefer the more subtle characterisation we got in the final cut, and clearly adrian does too based on the way he talks about earlier versions of the script and edit. but i don't think he'd completely condemn his initial conceptions of ryan because hints of this cruelty still linger in the film, and if anything i think this background enriches what we see of ryan's character rather than blights it. for that reason it's disheartening to see how readily some dismiss it. in an age of second screen over-explained slop that doesn't allow any room for the audience to engage with moral compexity, adrian delivered something beautifully subtle and restrained while allowing opportunity to explore and criticise some darker aspects of australian social norms.
