Saturday, June 28, 2025

Mike Hoolboom | A Boy's Life / 1996-2018

childish things

                            When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

by Douglas Messerli


Mike Hoolboom (director) A Boy’s Life / 1996-2018

 

Although it appears as part of Panic Bodies (1998), A Boy’s Life is generally listed as a 2018 film, while others date it 1996-2018. Hoolboom himself explains:

 

“Originally cast as the second part of a six-part feature Panic Bodies (1998), the original 16mm negatives were rescued courtesy of the Cinematheque Quebecoise, then rescanned, recut, and reimagined. They were shot in 1996, the year the AIDS cocktail arrived. It’s not uncommon during illness to experience one’s body grow as large as the world, here the body is figure and ground, friend and enemy, projection surface fragments, memory machine. I asked the excellent performance artist Ed Johnson if he could come by and perform in this psychodrama of loss and longing.”

 

    Whereas I perceived Positiv to be a struggle between body and mind, A Boy’s Mind is nearly all about the body. And Hoolboom’s own site on Panic Bodies describes it as “a masturbatory revel,” going on to explain: “this first person monodrama shows a man in flight from the sins of his childhood, his attempted escape through a masturbatory revel that is so shattering he loses his prick, and his ensuing search for his missing organ.”


     Bright Lights Film Journal critic Gary Morris, expounds on the work, describing it as representing “a more whimsical sensibility.”

 

“Toronto performance artist Ed Johnson appears as a naked man haunted by his childhood (seen in fractured home-movie inserts) and, even more, on his prick, which he plays with so much that it falls off. While Ed is busy searching for his lost appendage, Hoolboom is playful, reminding us of Ed’s quest with a cut-out penis shape through which we see the action. Of course, this is not

exactly standard light fare. A scene where Ed eats a baby doll that’s been halfway up his ass recalls Goya, while scenes of multiple Eds masturbating (seen through a kaleidoscope) are as unsettling as they are amusing.”

 

     This work reminds me, in some respects, of the late version A (the original version of the gay filmmakers who did work from the 1940s through the 1960s) “coming out” film of 1965 by A. J. Rose, Jr., Penis in which the central figure also loses his penis.


      In that film, his supposed female lover has stolen it, but here it has become nearly superfluous, despite the flurry of masturbatory activity, since, as the narrator makes clear at the very beginning of the 8-minute film, it belongs to what the narrator describes as “childish things.”

     The magic cocktail pill for AIDS is finally available, but it is too late for the narrator, who’d already been sick for 8 years at age 35. “I should have thrown a party, but I felt the only thing I knew for sure had been taken away. I’d rehearsed by death so often like all the others. My body was both playground and graveyard. …The pictures that follow are childish and trivial. They don’t know how to present themselves, but I like to keep them around me. Like an idiot uncle who doesn’t know how to grow up. As a reminder of what everyone else called the best moments of my life.”


    What follows, accordingly are things no longer available to the narrator from the naked baby wandering out in the world to be covered with mud to the endless masturbating gay man who finally does it so much that he loses his penis, a metaphor for what his previous sexual actions has done for our narrator.

     If the narrator of Positiv discovers that his mind still controls his body, the narrator here focuses on the childish actions of the body, the selfish body seeking to control and dominate his life. It is a “boy’s life” to which the narrator is still nostalgic as well as regretful.

    In an interview with Larissa Fan, Hoolboom quickly reveals that the film also concerns the artist not “filling” a void, but selecting aspects of his or others’ lives to reveal a world—in this case combined with a great deal of regret.

   

“LF: In the second short sequence from Panic Bodies called A Boy’s Life, a man is searching for his lost penis. The lost member seems to be a metaphor for a void in the man’s life. In regard to your work in film, have you filled the void? Have you accomplished the things you’ve wanted or are you still searching for your member?

MH: Why did Freud think that penis envy is exclusive to women? So far as the void goes, painting and writing bring their makers to face emptiness. When they begin work their canvas, their pages, are empty. Movies are just the opposite. As a filmmaker I begin with everything, every image, and from there I make a choice. Filmmaking is like shopping. It’s a question of choosing.”


    This film, accordingly, represents some of the choices, childish ones perhaps, that the artist made during his life, revealing a kind of satyr-like life, a glorious youth of sexual delight, which his illness has taken away from him.

   The film, in fact, begins with the realities of the current day, a now nearly bald-headed man facing the ACT-UP crowds shouting on the streets for the governmental refusal to take AIDS seriously. We see the man eating his own childhood, the “baby-doll” of which Morris wrote.

     Following this reminder of reality, Hoolboom takes us back into the narrator’s childhood and sexual life, a kaleidoscope-vision of masturbation and fucking that results in the loss of the penis itself.



     The major question for the narrator becomes now, “How to survive a second life,” the one the disease has now “awarded” him. He quotes a dying friend, “Any man who expresses his true feelings is a drag queen.” How might the “drag queen” he now feels himself to be remain honest to who he once was and may yet truly be, a man of the body.


      The lost penis becomes a recovered dildo, a replacement of the full bodily being he once was, as the musical accompaniment of the song “Bye, bye, bye, bye. I’ve something more to say,” takes over, the lonely figure on the boardwalk turning to leave.

 

Los Angeles, June 27-28, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025). 

 

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