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.”
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.”
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.”
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 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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