Jesper Just: Bliss and Heaven

Projected onto a surprisingly large screen, Bliss and Heaven portrayed an emotional connection between to extremes of masculinity. In it we find, a younger man with ready-for-Hollywood good looks, and an older truck driver, who looks as though life has not been kind to him. When the younger man enters the truck driver’s trailer, the trailer is turned into an ornate theater. In the theater, the truck driver is performing, in a deep voice, Olivia Newton-John’s “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting.” The majority of the video is silent until this point making the deep voice of the truck driver a bit jarring. Usually when a male character is performing in drag, hilarity soon follows. However, there was something more sensitive happening in this performance. If the truck driver were just lip-syncing, the performance would have come across as – this may be stating the obvious – fake. I mean fake as insincere. The singing is off-key, and the dancing awkward, but the emotion is there. This whole scenario is ridiculous, but there is honesty in the truck driver’s voice. There might be a few chuckles while watching this video, but the solitary, standing ovation by the younger man is in congruence with sincerity of the truck driver’s performance.