Were the World Mine (2008)

directed by Tom Gustafson

Nick Snider

At fourteen years old, I admitted to myself that I might be gay. This wasn’t necessarily a significant step in my development, given that I had no concrete ideas about what that label even meant. I lived in Kentucky and attended an all-male, Catholic high school. Some of the boys I went to school with called me gay, but some of the boys I went to school with called everyone gay.

At night, I turned off the lights in my basement bedroom and dropped countless search terms down Google’s well: gay, gay men, men shirtless, men kissing, men in underwear, famous gay, Ellen DeGeneres, gay singers, gay movie, gay porn, and so on. I told myself that the tremor in my gut had less to do with the thrill of seeing the men and more to do with the thrill of getting away with something, of pressing search and not getting caught.

In my real life, I knew no other gay people. Ellen, Neil Patrick Harris, and Chris Colfer belting it out on Glee were my unknowing compatriots, the sum representatives—aside from the porn stars—of gay life. If being like them was a prerequisite for being gay, I didn’t have much to worry about. I didn’t see myself as funny, or good looking, or particularly talented. For being gay, I was fairly average, and I wasn’t sure that those two qualities could coexist.

When I watched movies like Tom Gustafson’s Were the World Mine, I was looking for another path forward. I wanted a fictional stand-in for myself, an on-screen avatar who felt like me but could do things I couldn’t, like kissing boys and falling in love.

I thought I’d found this avatar in Gustafson’s protagonist, Timothy, who also attends an all-male high school. In the movie’s first scene, Timothy is targeted by bullies during a game of gym-class dodgeball. Just before a rubber comet collides with his face, the screen flashes white and the film’s title appears. When we fade back to Timothy, something has shifted: the ball is frozen midair, and he steps out of its path. He stares out the doors to where the silhouette of a tree has appeared, and his classmates—now wearing cut-off tank tops and silver hot pants—fall into line behind him. The boys twirl to a soundtrack that mixes techno with hand chimes, until the vision ends with the smack of ball on flesh.

As a teenager, I felt the sting of the dodgeball on Timothy’s face and knew this was a character to whom I could relate. Not just as a target, but as someone prone to fantasy. In English class, Timothy imagines Jonathan, his crush, shirtless and singing with an angelic, echoing voice that repeats “Oh, Timothy.” The visions are intrusive, Timothy’s hormonal longing subsuming the plot in a move that, in the tradition of musicals, both pokes fun at the drama of his emotions and recognizes their grandiosity.

My fantasies were (mostly) raunchier but similarly consuming. Puberty made a tea kettle of my body, and unlike my classmates, who steam-whistled the names and best features of their crushes, my desires were trapped and roiling. I was captivated by this short scene of Timothy’s fantasy because it replicated the intensity of my own teenage feelings. Watching the movie back now, it’s difficult to see past the melodrama, but I understand that the eroticism is in his desire’s simplicity. All Timothy wants is for the boy he likes to look at him and say his name, to acknowledge that he exists, not just as another body in a classroom, but as someone worthy of attention, even a serenade.

Were the World Mine was, in some ways, my serenade. It depicted a relatable, gay teenage interiority during a time when I thought there was no one else like me. Still, for all his relatability, Timothy has an exceptional talent that drives the plot of the movie.

English teacher Ms. Tebbit thrusts a flier under Timothy’s nose, awakening him from his daydream. She has reimagined Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a techno-rock musical and wants Timothy to try out. Onstage at his audition, Timothy stumbles through the line readings but gains confidence when it’s time to sing. Ms. Tebbit demonstrates the melody just once before prompting him to try the lyrics.

Here, the film’s perspective shifts, and we see Jonathan sitting outside of the gymnasium with his rugby team, waiting for auditions to end so that they can practice. He hears Timothy and turns to watch through the gap between the double doors. Inside, Timothy stands tall on stage, lets the music sheets flutter out of his hands as he sings and the scene melts into fantasy—though whose is difficult to say.

Timothy reaches out to Jonathan and pulls him up from the floor. They sing together in front of a papier-mâché tree, the play’s main set piece and the silhouette from the film’s opening. Behind them, the rugby squad has filtered into the gym and repeats a chorus of “Be as thou wast wont to be. See as thou wast wont to see.”

As the song reaches its conclusion, Jonathan lifts his elbow up to Timothy’s shoulder and leans against him. Suddenly, the boys are back in reality—a few days later—and Timothy is visibly startled by the casual contact, the easy familiarity of teammates that has deeper resonance for a skittish gay teen. The cast list has been posted: Timothy is Puck, and “looks like I’m one of the lovers,” Jonathan smirks.

Timothy’s crush on Jonathan is both annoying and understandable. In gym class he sinks a free throw and Jonathan pats his ass and says, “Good form.” The flirting is bland and unsubtle because it isn’t really flirting. Jonathan has a girlfriend and hews closely to his rugby squad of stock jock-bullies. The attention he pays Timothy is a product of their all-male environment, where logic warps and flirting with boys—especially the gay ones—bolsters the flirter’s heterosexuality.

Or maybe I’m projecting, looking back and wishing that Timothy (that is to say I) would maintain a little dignity when selecting his crushes. At fourteen, I had my own Jonathan, a blue-eyed boy who rescued my notebook from his football teammate. I was infatuated, a kicked puppy chasing after the slightest scrap of attention. He, of course, took no notice.

For that reason, it was with some bitterness that I watched as Timothy discovers a spell to create love-in-idleness, the flower whose sap bewitches the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The recipe, which Timothy discovers inside Ms. Tebbit’s copy of the play, concludes with instructions for Timothy to sing and launches the film’s titular number.

Timothy wears wings of satin and lace onstage. Below him, Jonathan lies sleeping on a bed of flowers. The rugby squad appears, dressed as fairies and performing choreography that involves repeatedly thrusting the soles of their (dirty) bare feet into the frame. When Jonathan awakens to join Timothy in a duet, we’re first treated to a shot of his hairy armpit. Everyone wears eye shadow that has been applied by a shaky hand.

Face to face, the boys sing: “My ear should catch your voice. My eye should catch your eye. My tongue your tongue, were the world mine.” These lines, as with most of the musical’s lyrics, are repurposed from the play’s text. In Shakespeare’s version, Helena wishes to catch Hermia’s fairness like a sickness, so that she could seduce Demetrius. She would give up the world to have him. Were the World Mine’s interpretation of the lines feels more about power, Timothy’s (Gustafson’s?) horny revenge fantasy.

Timothy embodies the trickster fairy and doses Jonathan, his bullies, the rugby coach, his mother’s boss, and countless members of his town with love-in-idleness. Tanner Cohen, who plays Timothy, enacts the sap spraying with an almost sinister glee, though the film attempts to excuse the wrongfulness of his spell, essentially a love roofie. The victims we see are primarily those who have tormented Timothy throughout the film, and the town, somehow overnight, legalizes same-sex marriage and becomes a haven for queer people.

As a teenager, I was envious and uncritical of Timothy’s power. I wanted to be pursued and desired and, in a vague way, wanted conditions to improve for gay people. I rewatched Were the World Mine over and over again during high school and have returned to it several times in the years since. Each time, I question my motivations for watching and what it means that its story has stuck with me. In 2008, when the film was released, there were so few characters with whom I could identify, so the parallels I found between myself and Timothy were monumental and grounding. The person I thought and feared I was felt nearly imaginary, locked up behind the veneer I’d assembled to survive high school. If Timothy could exist, then maybe so could that version of me.

Still, there were key differences between me and Timothy, whose singing unlocked the spell and is needed to reverse it. With Ms. Tebbit’s insistence that he restore free will, Timothy returns to school to perform the same act in the musical. The undoing is a strange moment, largely due to the lavender, Karen-banged wig Timothy wears. “Jack shall have Jill; nought shall go ill; the man shall have his mare again,” he sings over Jonathan and the other sleeping lovers, breaking the spell.

The lyrics are lifted verbatim from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but they feel more complicated for being used in a queer adaptation. Lifting the spell doesn’t just restore free will but signals a return to a specifically heterosexual reality. This is especially interesting in light of the film’s final twist, in which Jonathan finds Timothy in his dressing room, calls his performance unbelievable, and kisses him. The spell, rather than forcing him to love Timothy, had driven him to act on latent feelings he’d already possessed.

So too are the other members of Timothy’s community altered by their experience. The most vicious of his bullies congratulates Timothy and invites him to a party. His mother’s boss, who had previously fired her for having a gay child, tells her, “You’re very lucky to have such a marvelously talented son.”

I don’t want to place too much blame on Gustafson, who should, and I assume did, make the movie he wanted to make. But I also wonder what it means that a gay filmmaker could only envision a future in which the boy gets the boy, in which the community is supportive, and in which gay marriage is (briefly) legalized by leaping into the realm of fantasy.

Before Timothy reverses the spell, he and Jonathon spend a night together in the woods. The lighting is an ethereal silver, the water of the pond mercury as Jonathon strips out of his shirt and slips under the surface. Timothy looks on from the bank, dressed all in white, until Jonathon swims over for a kiss. At the end of the night, the pair hold each other beneath the canopy of a protective oak. They’ve abandoned their old lives for a world all their own.

But their perfect night together must come to an end, and this is where I think Gustafson’s queer retelling meets its limit. Timothy must return to his life, and, though he gets the boy, the rest of the world still looks much the same as it did before. The movie can’t conclude with Timothy in this radical, joyful night because that would be a different script, one that can’t be accessed through a repurposed straight narrative.

It’s possible that Gustafson wouldn’t interpret the ending in the same way that I do. It is, after all, Timothy’s acting and singing abilities that garner praise at the film’s conclusion; the effects of the spell “no more yielding but a dream.” As a tone-deaf teenager, this wasn’t a happy ending I could celebrate either. Once the movie was over, my laptop powered down, I sat in the dark and thought about the other gay teenagers in Timothy’s town, those who, like me, remained offstage. What role should we play to reach our happy endings?

Nick Snider is a queer writer originally from Kentucky. He received an MFA from Oregon State University and currently lives in Los Angeles.