The Rite and The Rapture: Ham On Rye
Where did the practice of putting a corsage on your prom date come from? It’s something you never needed to do ever again in your dating life. Why do we do it? Or a better question might be, why do we do that and not something else?
The teenage heroes of Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye appear excited and nervous about all the rituals and rites of passage for the Big Night. Their quiet suburb is almost too familiar, so much so that we’re prepared for some postmodern hijinx. This could truly be Anytown U.S.A. The whole town is beaming with anticipatory energy. Taormina may have even smudged the lens of his camera with vaseline to give everything a dreamy haze, an age-old Hollywood trick.
There’s a meetup in a paved empty lot used as a skate park. No traditional movie plot seems to be asserting itself yet. We overhear dialogue as the kids interact. There’s a bit of anxiousness in the air. But it seems like any other day.
The adolescent residents of this community are played by actual kids who would be the age of the characters. We don’t follow any individual in particular. A group of girls discusses who might make advances on them. They fuss over what they’re going to wear or how they’ll do their hair. A group of boys are then speculating about how they’ll seal the deal. Will they score? Of course, they have no idea how to handle a woman. But a lot seems to be riding on the outcome.
Their parents fuss obsessively over their kids. There is an almost psychotic energy to their anxiousness as if their children were debutantes being presented to formal society. The kids wear what are undoubtedly hand-me-downs dress clothes and they all meet up at....a deli. It has to be THIS deli. Up until this point, the film has seemed like a dream; disorienting and shiny, with an implicit language of symbols known only to the dreamer. As a description, this will have to do because I’m hesitant to reveal what Taormina's film is doing. Permit me the following digression:
Despite how much I hated high school, it irks me to admit that I think I was actually pretty popular.
The end of the fall season culminating in the Homecoming dance brought with it a series of rituals that meant nothing to me. The pep rally. The big game. They announce the King and Queen of homecoming. Then there’s the dance. I always saw it as an opportunity for more of the school’s jock worship. The next term in a series of pointless window dressings and role plays. I felt like I was carrying the baggage of dead people, though I couldn’t articulate these thoughts and feelings back then. What does it mean to students anymore? Who is it really for? What does it have to do with the rest of our lives? My friends were the kids with wallet chains and patches with the names of their favorite punk and ska bands safety pinned to their backpacks, and we ate lunch outside instead of the cafeteria, where we felt free to be our snarky selves.
We thought it would be funny to run me for King of Homecoming as a goof. We were giggling as we put my name in the box. Then somehow I won. I had to appear with the Queen at the football game and at the dance as the pride of the school and the student body, both of which I had no emotional stake in. I was a class clown and I had to have known that would have stood out in people's minds when they voted. It was utter lunacy to me that all that happened.
Virtually everything on that day and night of the Homecoming dance felt forced and arbitrary to me and if you don’t know what it is to have that type of feeling, Ham On Rye may not work for you.
It’s during and then just after the sequence at the deli that something very mysterious and beautiful happens. There’s been a kind of shift. Now we’re only following some of the kids, in particular a sad girl named Haley (Haley Bodell). We don’t see the others again. The whole filmmaking style seems to have changed. A whole new group of townies - the kind you’d only see at night - appear to take over after dark. The town looks less inviting. The camera remains stationary within scenes instead of moving around. We’ve switched from classical to adaptive lighting. It’s these stark differences in style that underline the sharp difference between what it is to leave the rural small town of one's childhood or stay behind and be resigned to a life of defeat and aimlessness.
Taormina is a newcomer but he has a wryly poetic and inventive way of re-imagining the bizarre nature of American rites-of-passage from adolescence into adulthood. A bit of situation substitution casts the whole thing in a new light as the dream of the first half becomes sort of a melancholy nightmare in the second half, in which time seems distorted or drawn out somehow. His ingenious use of Nickelodeon child actors from the nineties in one scene nearly brought tears to my eyes.
Ham On Rye is moving and graceful; something that works without ever imposing itself on you; gentle, sad, dreamy, pastoral and quietly absurd. Insofar as they’ve affected my life, the imposed values and demands of society on young people are things I still wake up angry about from time to time, typically following dreams about my adolescence and buried emotional resentments that eerily resemble the ones brilliantly recast in this movie.
Maybe it’s because just like Haley, I didn’t get the thumbs up.
Ham On Rye is available for streaming on Kanopy and all major streaming platforms.
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