Brad McDermott | Silver Light / 2018 [music video]

saying goodbye

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frederick (music and lyrics), Brad McDermott (director) Silver Light / 2018 [6 minutes] [music video]

 

Had this short video been presented as a narrative with dialogue, I might have suggested that the central figure, a high school—and perhaps much later adult—lover of a man who has just died, described only as the “Boyfriend” (Brad Dietrich), had made a terribly selfish and stupid mistake in attending his former lover’s funeral uninvited, particularly without the wife, children, and other family members even knowing of his existence in their loved one’s life.

     But this is a romantic musical narrative that does not comprehend those logical boundaries. Canadian director McDermott’s work is actually a music video accompanying a song by the openly gay Vancouver-based electro-pop recording artist Frederick.

      Fred Kuhr, the co-director of Ticktock Pictures, we are told, accidentally “stumbled upon the track on a Spotify playlist and was instantly hypnotized by its haunting melody and arresting vocals. The closer he listened, the more he realized that this was a love song from one man to another. The lyrics told the story of heartbreak from an openly gay man who was being rejected by a lover not yet ready to come out of the closet. Kuhr then searched online to find traces of Frederick, a recording artist he’d never heard of - and discovered that he was indeed gay, and a fellow Canadian as well. Kuhr and his partner Brad McDermott then contacted Frederick directly.”

     In the song, the old “boyfriend” had known the dead man since they were children, both quickly falling in love. That love evidently continued through their high school years and after, the two often meeting in a nearby woods. But as the now dead lover grew older, it became quite apparent that he was not able to come out, and like so many such cowards, chose marriage instead, even though it is apparent that the two still occasionally met up, with the boyfriend pleading with him to come to his senses.

    Now years later, the boyfriend appears out of nowhere at the funeral, causing some deep consternation among the wife and family members who obviously are wondering who the stranger is and why he is standing so attentively peering down upon the open coffin, of their husband, father, and son.

      The boyfriend, finally unable to take the pain, runs out of the church, returning to the woods where the two boys finally said goodbye, resolving the dilemma emotionally in the recognition that his lover has now truly said goodbye to all through his early death.

      We have to wonder, obviously, what was the cause of that death, and we hardly dare ask what the melancholy song hints at, that perhaps the pulls between his two selves finally became to much for the man who resolved the situation through dying.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (September 2024).