This week, we’re bringing you a series of conversations about modern masculinity, and the various ways it’s being expressed and debated.
Nic Owen, a recent University of Arizona graduate, created a film for his thesis project that combined images of the Sonoran desert with original poetry about his evolving relationship with his gender identity and sexuality.
Owen joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: So tell me a little bit about the voice of the poetry in the film, because I was really interested in the way that a lot of times you’re sort of addressing the desert directly, using the desert as a way of talking about certain ways of perceiving masculinity. Is that fair to say?
NIC OWEN: Yeah, absolutely. I kind of have three, I guess, characters in this work. And there’s the narrator, obviously, which we’ll come back to in a sec. But then there’s this sort of like deified version of the desert that is usually the one being spoken to. And then there’s the third kind of masculine presence that is being spoken about a lot of the time.
He’s kind of that “he” in the background. And the main goal of the narrator, the speaker in the poems is to kind of find his place, his existence between both worlds, but also in a way deconstructs the line between the masculine ideology versus the natural desert world.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. One of the things I think is interesting about what you’re doing with the “he” character is that sometimes it feels like the presence of that character is welcome, something that the narrator desires and is like trying to invite. And then sometimes it feels like that presence is unwelcome or there’s tension about that presence and there’s a movement back and forth there.
OWEN: Yeah, I think that that was a very personal aspect as well. I think I’m somebody who kind of came into my queer identity a little bit later in life, quote-unquote. Like end of high school is when I was finally coming into that part of myself, and at that point I was in very male-dominated spaces.
And so I think there’s a part of me that still thinks that’s who I am, that’s who I want to be. But I also want to maybe sever myself from that masculinity. And it’s just that internal battle that becomes external in the poetry.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. I love the line, there’s a line in there somewhere about the desert as a canvas primed for glaze.
OWEN’S THESIS PROJECT: “Your body is flat now. Kiln-fired smooth. Your emptiness an invitation for innovation. A canvas primed for glaze.”
DINGMAN: Tell me about that line up that feels connected to what you were just talking about.
OWEN: I mean, looking at the Sonoran Desert in particular, a lot of people kind of overlook its beauty. It’s, I believe, one of if not the greenest deserts in the world. But still, you’ll have people kind of write it off as just this flat, empty, barren wasteland. But really, it’s so full and so lively, especially when it rains, especially at night. Those times when nobody really wants to go see it.
In a similar way, you have that, like queer masculinity that exists often in the shadows, in moments where you feel safe from the gaze of other people.
DINGMAN: So one of the interesting things about the visual manifestation of the piece is the way it opens, which is that we’re in a car. And there’s somebody driving, and we don’t really get a lot of detail about who that person is. It seems to be a male presenting person.
And then as the rest of the film unfolds, we see a lot of images of the desert. As you were just alluding to, we see the unexpectedly vibrant flowers that grow there. Horses. We see mountain ranges, we see fruit. We see the human body, but we keep returning to the car.
And even when we don’t see the car, we can hear it. We can hear the sound of the car driving along the road. What was interesting and important to you about that imagery and sound?
OWEN: It actually all kind of comes back to the title and the Bible verse that opens the story. So it’s Isaiah 40, lines three through five. And of course, it’s from whatever translation sounded best.
DINGMAN: Right.
OWEN: And the line that I pull from is, “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” And of course, I took “make straight in the desert” because, “straight” is obviously the expectation.
DINGMAN: Yep.
OWEN: I originally was going to name the piece “Make Straight in the Desert a Highway.” Just because I felt like the highway was such an important line, and I also feel like a lot of the American Southwest can understand that feeling of being on the highway and just looking out and seeing kind of nothingness and flatness and power lines and maybe a mountain range way in the distance.
And the highway is kind of that expectation, almost. Like, build the highway for our God. Like the highway is going to be the thing that leads us to our proper presentation, our proper respect and fear of God. Or in this case, the highway is going to lead us to that true masculinity. And in the end, there ends up not being a destination for the car. It’s just driving.
DINGMAN: There is also a lot of violence in the poems. There’s one line in particular, “In my brain there are hills like yours impaled with silver skeletons.” There’s also a whole sequence where on screen we’re being shown a piece of citrus, and we see hands ripping the skin of the citrus open and the juice flowing out.
And as that’s happening, we hear lines about the speaker having a similar sensation with their own body.
OWEN’S THESIS PROJECT: “His teeth work their way through me purposefully, like a machine. I feel his tongue tighten at my tang. Tender, carnal, blood red tendrils.The chewing grinding grinds to a halt. He curls over, heaves.”
DINGMAN: What was interesting to you about that? Because a lot of the piece focuses on the kind of quiet beauty of the desert. But you also, in these sequences, are not shying away from the harsher elements of life.
OWEN: Yeah, absolutely. The desert is a violent place, and I didn’t want to downplay that. Like the desert, whether it be in nature, where you have spiny plants and lots of scavenging animals and vultures and coyotes. And of course, the heat is lethal. Like everything about the Sonoran Desert is pretty, pretty intense. And so I think it would be kind of unfair to portray the desert as just this beautiful thing.
At the same time, though, I feel like that violence can be beautiful. And I wanted to write the poetry in a way that made the speaker — who is undergoing this sort of, especially, bodily violence towards the end — I wanted to portray it as not so much of a negative feeling, more of a cathartic sort of sense, where we’re being broken apart but maybe it’s for the best in some type of way.
DINGMAN: Well, Nic Owen is the writer and the filmmaker of “Make Straight in the Desert,” the poetry film that he did as part of his thesis work at the University of Arizona.
