Mike Hoolboom (director) Positiv / 1998
Once again in this part of the film, Hoolboom
employs a split camera with, in this case, beginning with a single figure, the
filmmaker himself, speaking about the body and AIDS, as around him the screen
gradually comes to represent some of the many images of film, popular culture,
scientific data, and hospital and doctor care of which the filmmaker speaks in
his monologue.
Gary
Morris, writing in Bright Lights Film Journal characterizes this first
section as a poetic discussion of the “sense of displacement that accompanied
his [the filmmaker/narrative voice’s] HIV diagnosis: ‘I felt like a virus
that’s come to rest in this body for a while.’” And Morris, moreover, notes that
ultimately the narrator comes to find “a curious solace in his betrayer, as if
a kind of logic and pathos coexist with the disease.”
Morris is not incorrect in his statements, but there is so much more going on in this first monologue. The narrator first sets up a kind of dichotomy between two kinds of people: “bodies and minds,” and his dialogue becomes a sort of antiphon or what some might see as a battle of body and mind. Associating himself with the former, as any active sexual gay being in his prime might, he realizes, at first, that the virus has come to rest in his body for a while, but that it doesn’t belong to him anymore, like “I’m trying on a new suit that won’t fit.” Because he is now left simply with his mind, he imagines himself wandering through the streets like Michael Jackson, imagining along the way what parts of other bodies he might replace with his own: “everything here can be replaced or traded in except for the cellulite army which has conquered my thighs, or the small hands which were always too clumsy to play Satie.”
Thinking
of practicing Satie reminds him of his family, remembering how his own mother
drove him to the edge of town, “saying that’s it, you can’t come back now, good
luck. That was the day you left home, crouched in the cab of a Molson’s Brewery
truck headed for Kapaskasing.”
And it his
brother Daivd, whom he first told of his illness, he most seriously calls up,
recalling this determination to become a second being (he had three nipples, a
so-called supernumerary nipple evidently not being that uncommon, the
discussion of which is cut from the final film; but I think it adds to a better
comprehension of the work.)
“Dave always said that was the beginning of his
double that he was growing from the chest out. He always kept a bandage over it
so no one would know, one day his double would appear in the world to take his
place and he could get on with his real business, or maybe, he’d wink at me, maybe he
was already gone.”
Telling
his brother about his illness, he argues, made his sickness real, because it
was shared with someone else. A thing of the mind with doctors charting its
development again becomes something of the body:
And there
his mind takes him to the realization that there are more dead than people
living, and that perhaps the dead define a country, people who have died who
are most close to others living nearby. From there his thoughts turn to the
notion of friends, a speculation wherein some of his saddest and most profound
statements are expressed:
You think: it’s hardest for your friends, when they met you for the first time there was no way to know that they would have to bury you one day. You all seemed so young, and while they’ve continued to age at the usual rate, all of a sudden you’ve grown so very old, so close to the time of your ending. Mostly you would like to apologize for asking so much of them. Because your slide into sickness is slow, monitored by the machines at the hospital, you don’t notice at first that you’re any different than you ever were, until they come to visit. And while they are gracious and kind and you love them so much, you read the whole cruel truth on their face. You watch yourself dying there. This look hurts you more than all the fevers and sweats and blind panics because where once there was love, now there is only fear, and this vague, terrible sense that all this could have been avoided if only you’d been a little more careful, that somehow you did this to hurt them, or that they weren’t enough so you had to go out and get more, and after you crossed that line you were never the same.
Now that
I have AIDS I keep tripping over myself, and sometimes when I’m talking with a
friend I’ll just nod right out. When I come to they have this terrible
expression on their face like, ‘Are you alright?’ and of course I am. I’m fine,
I’ve always been fine, only they can’t see that. My body keeps getting in the
way.
Here
finally, he confronts the vision of the self as body, the “thing” laying on the
bed about who friends ask. Because he is not just body, he is also mind, in a
condition of being “alright,” a condition they cannot see in the body. His
friend Donna visits and entertains him with another possibility of becoming
someone else, a new body with new cells.
Yet
finally, since visiting hours are over, our narrator is left alone, no longer
primarily a body, but a mind left to imagine its own state, which is almost all
one can do, locked up in the small coffin of a hospital bed. In a real sense,
our lonely narrator comes to see the truth of “Cognito, ergo sum,” that the
body he inhabits is just a container that cannot even hold the emanations and
reverberations of the mind. In the struggle between body and mind, it is the
mind that wins out over the body, even if the body ultimately can bring that
mind to closure. The body, associated with disease, family, and country is a
delimited entity, while the mind can even imagine creating a new self.
And it
is, accordingly, a positive single image of the narrator with which this film
ends.
Finally,
I must mention, that it is the viewer’s mind that the filmmaker engages in his
quickly moving, shifting images, imagines not locked into the so-called real or
bodily world, but this narrator’s memories of film, childhood images, and
scenes that only the imagination can create. I have attempted to place a few of
these fast-moving series of images near to which they occurred in the
narrator’s discussion of mind and body.
Los Angeles, June 26, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June
2025).
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