Wrik Mead | Closet Case / 1995

escaping bondage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (screenwriter and director) Closet Case / 1995

 

In his 1995 three-minute film Closet Case, Canadian filmmaker Wrik Mead literalizes a gay man, who after hiding his sexuality for however long, finally begins to escape and expose himself to the world.      

     We first see the figure lying on the floor straight-jacketed and bound, barely able to move. Gradually, however, he (or even “it” as far as we know) somehow begins to undo the lower half of the torso, usually the first part of the body which actually does reveal its true inclinations given that it contains the sexual organs of all individuals. Finally the figure strips away all bindings below the belt, so to speak, standing naked, with arms and chest still strapped and bound, a complete covering over the head hiding its identity.

      Gradually, but still struggling, he (since we have seen his penis we can now assume the figure is male) pulls away the bandages of his bondage—and indeed the entire nature of his original state might be compared to a sadomasochistic drama—until we can finally also glimpse his rather thin hairless chest (suggesting he may be younger than we first thought). And finally, with freed hands, he can now pull off his head covering, at the last few moments of the film revealing himself to be a rather handsome young man (David Archer), presumably now ready to face the world if not the camera lens, which having captured his struggle to free himself from bondage, is now suddenly closed.

      Obviously, Mead’s literal rendering of the process is comic, but at the same time it turns what is usually presented as a psychological battle—wherein the individual, after a long series of contradictory actions, admits to the reality of his own sexuality to family, friends, or lover—into a truly physical struggle, helping us to truly realize just how seriously perverted the restraints put upon the closeted man were, how they have hidden his beauty behind what appears to be a version of total madness.

      In a matter of three minutes, accordingly, Mead retells the “coming out” story which commonly in real time takes months or years to perform and in cinematic tellings generally lasts from twenty minutes in a work such as Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) to something close to two hours in films like Get Real and Edge of Seventeen (both 1998), and even several years in series such as the “Will Lexington” episodes from television’s Nashville (2012-2019).

 

Los Angeles, January 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).