48 HOURS EATING OUT 2: SLOPPY SECONDS, FULL GAY MOVIE COMEDY, ROMANCE LGBTQIA+
Video Installation
48:00:00 HD 1080p
Jon Copes and Guy Nechmad Stern
Stretching film as a sculptural action towards infinity is familiar— of the most basic ideas of reshaping a moving image— slowing it down placing emphasis on our inability to control time. In 1993 Douglas Gordon, stretched Hitchock’s Psycho (1960) into a full unwatchable 24 hours. Douglas referred to watching 24 Hours Psycho as excruciating, not only is the material being stretched, so is the gaze of the viewer, simultaneously.
In response to Gordon’s 24 Hours Psycho, the artists stretch the frames of a pirated YouTube video canonizing a rejection of “classic” film as a dominant cultural voice, and choosing instead to revel in the wrongness of low budget gay cinema. Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds (2006), directed by Phillip J. Bartell, is the second installment of a 4 movie gay comedy saga. It explores similar themes to Hitchcock’s Psycho: morality, corruptibility, confused identities, voyeurism, and human vulnerabilities, celebrating deviancy and depravity through humor. The film adopts the cis gay male gaze with an almost entirely white, thin, “desirable” cast and is shot using conventions of gay studio porn of the era. The film is a timestamp of the early 2000s, and yet is timeless in its references and archetypes of the LGBT community.
Jon experienced watching Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds, in his early teenage years, and remembers it as a formative awakening of his identity at the time. He recalls a distinct feeling of wrongness– the film was provocative and irreverent with a crudeness that was engraved in his memory. This first viewing experience became extended through time into 2024 when he shared the film with Guy, passing on what felt like an essential canonical reference. This exchange of knowledge, despite the differences in our personal identities, was the touchstone in the overlap of our shared experiences. Though we sit outside of the identities that the film frames as desirable, we are able to understand it as a monumental idea of what it means to be gay in both an intercommunal and cross-cultural sense. By making an eternity out of the film we are attempting to insert Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds into an academic context, suggesting that every second and every frame of the movie should be studied and referenced as a tradition of gay expression and shared culture, while at the same time laughing at the idea of a cult gay movie.
