David Hoyle, Gary Reich, and Mike Nicholls | Uncle David / 2010

transgression’s solution

by Douglas Messerli

David Hoyle and Asley Ryder (improvisation) David Hoyle, Gary Reich, and Mike Nicholls (director) Uncle David / 2010

More than a two years ago I bought a copy from the British Film Institute of David Hoyle, Gary Reich, and Mike Nicholls’ 2010 film Uncle David. I watched the film a day after I received it, so taken aback by its subject and the implications of its message that I simply could not immediately write about it. At the time I had just begun my research for My Queer Cinema and I was simply unable to contextualize this film within the 100-some LGBTQ films I’d watched over the years.  As of yet I had no language with which to discuss this seemingly purposefully vapid shocker. Basically I agreed with critic Damien Ryan who wrote on his So So Gay website that it reminded him of "the very worst attempt of a first-year film student," and questioning its self-description as a “black comedy,” argued that it wasn’t at all “funny.”

     Several thousand queer films later, I am finally able to put this film into better perspective. Certainly, I still would not at all characterize it as “black comedy” in the manner its best practitioners such Harold Pinter or Joe Orton, very different kinds of writers but who both pack a wallop in forcing us to see the ridiculous in the seemingly most serious of matters regarding important issues such as love, marriage, and death.

      There is most certainly death in Uncle David—indeed, arguably it is the work’s central subject—and there may, in fact, be some love between the film’s two major figures, a young handsome man with the mind of an impressionable 10-year-old (British porn star Ashley Ryder) and his Uncle David (drag artist and monologist David Hoyle), and they may even be a kind of deep relationship between them that if one could define as a marriage might be described at least as a kind intense meeting of the minds, such as they are. For, in many respects, the pedophilic Uncle David is himself a spoiled infantile who believes that all of society is corrupt and rotten because it cannot accept the kinds of love and eccentric attitudes towards life that he espouses. And I can believe that Hoyle, his fellow directors, and his co-collaborator Ryder did in fact perceive themselves in their mostly improvisational transgressive work as presenting such an exaggerated and impossible view of what is perhaps the most common form of gay incest outside of fraternal sex that they imagined it to be outrageously funny.

      Presumably, they felt like they were creating extravagant figures that were as outsized as those of John Waters’ Divine. But something went wrong. In most of Hoyle’s previous live performances he had been, according to The Guardian, “something of a legend” on the British 1990s cabaret circuit. His character The Divine David as described as an “anti-drag queen” who combined “lacerating social commentary with breathtaking instances of self-recrimination and even self-harm.” On television he produced two shows, The Divine David Presents (1999) and The Divine David Heals (2000), before he killed off his character in a farewell show at Streatham Ice Arena near London, in a show titled The Divine David on Ice.

      Evidently he was unheard for about five years before he began to perform live once more under his own name, continuing to create bitter satire, dressed in bravura costumes, while relying on his perfect timing and compelling charisma. But as some have pointed out, Uncle David, which followed is almost a monologue, this time presenting himself as a character that he has evidently retrieved from the boy’s abusive mother (she has apparently been putting out her cigarette stubs on the back of her son’s hand) whisks him away to a trailer park, in real life the wastelands caravan community on the Isle of Sheppey.

 

      Tamping down what apparently were his previous wild audience induced interactions with truth and absurdity, Hoyle approaches the fairly dim-witted but amazingly buff nephew a bit like Tom Ewell might attempt to seduce Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, so in awe of what has landed at his doorstep (although we suspect the two may have toyed with their sexual affection previously), gently bathing him while telling him pernicious bed-time stories about the failure of the nuclear family, the next morning serving up breakfast and gentle kisses as they tour the area, David filling his nephew’s ears with praises for his newly displayed sense of independence, his beauty, and his “purity,” by disparaging all aspects of normative society and dismissing normative conceptions of sexual and social behavior.

       Against the backdrop of the ugly and almost intentionally perverted ordinary folk of Sheppey and their caravan environs, and if the boy’s mother is the monster that he makes her out to be, it is hardly difficult to convince the naïve boy that in relationship to everyone else Ashley and his uncle’s love is something so special that it hardly deserves to survive in the totally corrupt world about. And again, we have to believe that this is not the first time he has argued some of this tripe. It is, after all, a standard way of grooming a young child into believing that the sexual encounter the elder is offering is something so exquisite and special that others cannot comprehend it and accordingly condemn and outlaw their sacred love.

      I can imagine that just thinking about recording that set of circumstances on celluloid must itself have seemed something right out of Ronald Tavel’s and Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater. But having determined to play it more like John Waters, as straight-faced as possible, and given the actual sexual potential of Hoyle’s only slightly mincing character and the beautiful bodied Ryder, who had already had significant experience at seducing his audience of mostly elder watchers of his porn tapes. That, along with the verisimilitude that all film brings to any narrative and set of images it records and the low-key acting style at odds with Hoyle’s previously audience-engaged conceptions, turned what might on the surface seem patently absurd into a sort of realist-like drama, which suddenly seems to switch into pure drama when the young Ashley, fully convinced by his seducer’s views of the denigrated world, determines that he seriously wants to commit suicide.

      Any truly loving “uncle” would immediately work to rid the young boy of such intentions. But we can only imagine that David, knowing that eventually we must pay for his sexual actions, may posit the idea that at least in this way he won’t have someone to testify against him, even if the boy’s body is found, drugs will be discovered as the cause and not the uncle’s molestation or abuse. Even if no such concept existed in the creators’ minds, the fact that we begin to create explanations for their behavior demonstrates just how realism has taken over what began as a comedy of transgression.

 

     Circling around each other, nephew and uncle gradually begin to engage in fulfilling sexual actions, at first lovingly but with the introduction of cocaine and other drugs gradually involving more brutal anal sex, sexual strangulation, and the application of make-up and masking. In this case the real world of the actors interweaves with the fantasy story of film, as the drag-queen Hoyle shows Ryder how to make-up for drag and they dance together while watching Ryder’s actual porno tapes.  As the two culminate their acts in a kind of wild sexual release, David assures his nephew that he is, indeed, “too nice for this Earth” and it will be necessary to escape from the problems of the world—meaning, of course, his problem in having to face up to his transgressions of societal restrictions.

      In fact, a case could be argued—although given today’s hysterical attitude about older/younger sex, particularly involving homosexual love and even worse when it implies incest it would certainly go unheard—that there is no real harm of a willingly sexually active gay boy of Ashley’s age and physical development to have sex with a blood-related male since it involves no issues of the gene pool or child-bearing.  But in this instance, all of that is beside the point since David has used his power as an elder to convince the youth of something far more horrifying than sex.

       The next morning the film reiterates the mental level of David’s nephew as we find him playing in the sand, building sand-castles like a child. But at the same time, he seems even convinced of the wisdom of leaving a world that does not allow what two have experienced that night. And David has apparently purchased a concoction of powerful drugs to make Ashley’s wish come true. Even more perversely Uncle David lies to the boy’s mother when she telephones demanding to know his whereabouts, insisting he is not at Sheepey but in Manchester.

 

     The last few scenes, accordingly, are nearly unbearable for anyone with moral conscience, as we realize that this so-called “black comedy” will surely end as a kind of simulacrum of a snuff-film. Taking the boy to an abandoned military bunker, David injects the mysterious substance into his nephew’s veins as they kiss, Ashley falling into another state consciousness, as David guides him back to the trailer park where they smoke marijuana.

        As David injects the boy with the second dose, they stare out to sea, the boy babbling about his love of being set free into the ocean and other nonsense. As the sun sets, David places his now nearly catatonic nephew in a dog bed, handing him a book titled Is Britain Great? But the lame satire by this point has no meaning, as the two profess their love, and Ashley dies, David dragging him out to lie in a shallow dugout in the sand, and tearfully kissing the boy goodbye as his body is gradually swept out to sea.

 

      There is what I might describe as a gap here between desire and apprehension, between on one level the boy and uncle’s desire for one another and the fears of what that means in society or even in their own lives after. There is in any such relationship a deep reason, no matter how powerful the desire spreads through the mind and body, for anxiety, fear, and alarm in what the enactment of that desire will bring about. And in this case both parties have almost insured themselves for their fears by making certain the very worst happens to them as a result to such desires: self-death and a form of murder.  

      While such a story might certainly be described as quite unplausible, perhaps even unimaginable, it is nonetheless not at all comic, but fully tragic. For in a sense this condition of being in the gap is created by all of us, by the society itself which cannot imagine and will not imagine that the desire in any such instance might ever be resolved in love.

      It’s too bad that Hoyle, Ryder, and the filmmakers didn’t treat their narrative and acting as seriously as the evidence of their enactment of the myth did.

 

Los Angeles, January 14, 2022