Wrik Mead | Hand Job / 2001

a turn of the hand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (writer and director) Hand Job / 2001 [4 minutes]

 

In Wrik Mead’s 2001 short, Hand Job, a man with a black coat enters what appears to be a beneath ground operation, walking down a streetside staircase, entering a wooden door, passing through a pair of sliding wooden doors, and opening a heavy curtain before entering the “theater” where he sits, spreads his legs, takes out handkerchief, and appears to open his zipper.

  

     On the screen we can make out beneath Mead’s intentionally static-ridden, scratched, and bespotted images two men kissing before one going down on the other’s cock, masturbating, and sucking his companion. Our voyeur seems to be moving his hand up and down in a manner similar to the boy on the screen, until he see that what he has been rubbing may, in fact, be his own arm as he moves his hands down in what appears to be a prayer-like position, the two hands entwined with each other.

      Anyone who has seen a Wrik Mead movie knows how he loves to play with puns on sexual phrases such as “fruit machine,” “closet case,” etc, and, accordingly, might have expected a more literal depiction of a “hand job” than the obvious which the film invokes. But in this case we cannot quite be certain what this gentleman was actually doing with his hands and why. Was he simply rubbing his own arm up and down in reaction to the tension of the sexual actions upon the screen? Was he perhaps praying for the homosexual figures he witnesses? Perhaps he was simply never told that a hand job usually involves the genitalia.       

 

    There is no obvious answer, but eventually it becomes evident that he himself was not masturbating his penis, but perhaps simply playing out his excitement over what he is watching or

manually engaging in the stimulation of prayer against the evils of what he sees before him. In any event, he appears to be more of a censor watching the pornographic tape in front of him—just as it is basically censored for us by the terrible condition of the print—than an aficionado.

       And finally, one has to wonder if he doesn’t receive as much joy in his manipulation of his forearm or his religious beliefs that others receive from releasing their sperm. Mead seems to be jokingly expressing the common liberal reaction, “Whatever turns you on.”

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2012).