![]() ![]() That's the thing about blooming in the Internet era. Neil lies about his age in order to gain admission to Denis's adults-only community, but he really doesn't know much about sex, as the florid bits of his prose we hear make abundantly clear. When Neil is tossed aside by Julia, who uses her demeanor to mask her own insecurity around men, he turns to the mysterious Denis (Michael Ian Black, lending street cred), a much older man who edits their favorite slash website and seems to have a history of making young guys like Neil his playthings. The film allows its hero to genuinely puzzle out his sexuality in front of us. Yet Johnston and Marks are strong enough in their roles, crafting characters who express uncertainty and fear in vividly different ways, to make you believe their polarizing personalities truly draw confidence and meaning from each other. She's everything Neil isn't: brash and assertive, openly sexual and proud of her geekery. Julia defends Neil when his secret pastime is exposed, convinces him to publish his work online for the first time, and ultimately drags him to his first comic convention, where the next-level realm of fandom awaits. But he's also attracted to Julia (Hannah Marks, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency), a classmate and fellow slasher. Neil might be gay - his writing certainly suggests he's about to discover this, and he finds himself drawn to a couple different men in his orbit. (The lasers largely disappear once the shirts come off.) We see some of his visions shot with low-rent costumes and kitschy laser effects that will be familiar to anyone who remembers the deliberate cheese of 2009's Gentlemen Broncos. He's riffing off a franchise called "Vanguard," which looks to be one of those Asimov-lite bound paperback series with the spaceship covers. Here is the world of Neil (Michael Johnston, MTV's Teen Wolf), a shy, terribly repressed 15-year-old who only feels at home when he's slashing up some male-on-male sci-fi tales on his computer. As we're told repeatedly, the Bronte sisters themselves wrote their own form of fan fiction. "It's like they're begging us to fix them," says one of the heroes in the new coming-of-age comedy Slash, a line which amounts to the film's most succinct explanation for why these writers do what they do. And what of the original creators whose works form the basis for this remixed lit-smut? Well, to be fair, they did conjure fantasy worlds with virtually limitless possibilities. Slash plays with the relationship between creator and audience, injecting adult themes into decidedly non-adult content to see what happens, and commenting on an overall lack of queer characters in fiction. Write slash fiction on your own and you may be thought a pervert post it online and you gain initiation into a thriving community of like-minded (typically female) geeks and weirdos who've defiantly charted their own course through the pop-culture solar system. The culture has been around for decades and is the subject of much queer-studies scholarship, but until the Internet such activity remained largely cloaked in shadow. Slash fiction, for the unbent, is generally defined as fan fiction that pairs two characters or real people of the same sex in an intimate or erotic way: you've got your Kirk/Spock, your Sherlock/Watson, your Axl/Slash (sorry). Neil (Michael Johnston) and Julie (Hannah Marks) in Slash, a film by writer and director Clay Liford.Įllie Ann Fenton/Courtesy of The Film Collaborative ![]()
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