Mike Hoolboom | Frank’s Cock / 1993

the body believes only in the present

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Hoolboom (screenwriter and director) Frank’s Cock / 1993

 

Canadian director Mike Hoolboom had done several short films in the 1980s devoted to different aspects of the body, including White Museum (1986), From Home (1988), and Eat (1989). But after being diagnosed with AIDS upon attempting to donate blood, Hoolboom became involved with a Vancouver based group of “People with AIDS” (PWA) where he met a young man whose lover was dying of the disease, and Hoolboom began work on a script about the new friend and his sense of humor in relationship to the disease which Joey (or by some accounts Alan) maintained throughout what he described as a mostly joyous and happy relationship.

      Retaining that sense of humor, the resultant work, Frank’s Cock, narrated by then unknown actor Callum Keith Rennie is almost shocking in its straightforward expression of a gay couple’s meeting, sexual activities, and growing sense of finality.

      Shot in a split-screen format, Hoolboom combines an image of the narrator in the upper right corner along with three other panels in color pulled from studies of human embryo formation, popular culture, and gay pornography which created what the director describes as a “fragmentation of the body” which many AIDS sufferers experience.

      The unnamed narrator characterizes himself as a teenager who when he came out wanted to be the "Michael Jordan of sex" or "Wayne Gretzky with a hard-on” until he met Frank at a group sex session, older than him, almost 30. Interested in fantasy Frank gave the young man several alternatives for what their relationship might constitute: “Coach/rookie, sailor/slut, older brother/younger brother, father/son.”* “I picked ‘older brother/younger brother,’ and well, we’ve been together ever since.”

      The narrator goes on to further describe his new lover, hinting at his partner’s love of exaggerated story-telling in his recollection that Frank never had a problem being gay. He began his sexual activities as a baby, so he claimed, while trying to wank-off the baby in the next wicker basket. 

    “My parents weren’t big on gay. You remember the ad with the preacher holding a shotgun standing beside his son? The preacher said “If I found out my son was gay, I’d shoot him.” And the son said “I kinda think he’d like to shoot it in me.” Well, it was kind of like that.” He had a girlfriend in high school named Donna, he tells us, and when his parents found out he was gay they blamed it all on Donna. “Like she was an ambassador from the country of women, and she’d fucked up somehow.”

    With his new lover, so our narrator tells us, he felt immediately “at home” with Frank’s rather large penis firmly planted in his ass.

    But Frank also evidently did serve as a kind of older brother for the young man, showing him how to open a bottle of beer, as any Canadian can, with his teeth (some of which he evidently loss in the process of learning). He showed him how to build a box-kite, and how to make an omelet “that would rise to the size of a man’s head.”

 

“Frank had a thing for omelets. I guess he got it from his dad. His dad signed for Viet Nam and he got caught behind enemy lines in Phnom Penh and got bread and water and a hole in the ground, no light, no food, no people. And you know how he managed? Eggs. He thought of every way you could cook them, bake them, boil them, fry them, souffle them. And when he got out he went to a restaurant. He ordered an omelet, a six-egg omelet. He ate it. Had a heart attack. Died right there in the restaurant. Frank always said it was a good thing, because the rest of his life would be such a let-down.”

 

     The two apparently have great sex, Frank often making appointments with his younger lover to have sex for the entire day. The narrator truly enjoyed the seemingly endless sexual activity except that Frank insisted upon listening always to Peter Gzowski's “Morningside” radio show during sex, making his friend sometimes lose his concentration.

     These and other short tales represent the brilliance of this work in its mix of the serious and the mundane, reminding one very much of the joyful and sometimes humorous tales the central character of Bressan’s Buddies tells of his lover while himself dying of AIDS.

     But the end, as one might expect, is painful as the narrator tells us that he and Frank have now been together for nine years. “In December will be our anniversary, our 10th. But I don’t know if Frank’s going be around to see it. ...He’s lost a lot of weight. He’s got these marks on him, that’s the Kaposi. But when you talk he’s inside the same as ever. I talked to him this morning. He said “The body does not believe in progress. Its religion is the present, not the future. ...He was always saying crazy things like that.”

     The engaging story-teller ends his 8-minute tribute to Frank with two simple sentences. “I’m going to miss him. He was the best friend I ever had.” And through his gentle unwitting eulogy, by the end the viewer also feels he now knows something about Frank and certainly shares the joys and sorrows of the handsome young narrator so brilliantly portrayed by Rennie.

     Hoolbloom’s film received numerous Canadian and international accolades. Critic Janis Cole of Point of View described the work as an "extraordinary experimental documentary" that is "as bold as the title implies" and a strong argument for the widespread dissemination of short films. And scholar Thomas Waugh in How Hollywood Portrays AIDS argued that the work was one of a  "great AIDS triptych," together with Hoolboom's later works Letters from Home (1996) and Positiv. 

     

*The alternative fantasies that Frank outlines are once again examples of a few of the tropes of gay pornography deconstructed also in films such as Francis Savel’s Équation à un inconnu (Equation to an Unknown) (1980) and Constantine Ginnaris’ short work Caught Looking (1991).