Friday, June 27, 2025

Mike Hoolboom | Positiv

body and mind

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.)

   He notes that given his relationship with his family previously he has always feared “the image of your own infirmity, bedridden and helpless, that you would once again become a child.” Yet through the agency of the disease, he has “managed to return there, to the place where memory comes from, to the history of your failures, in the body of the family.”


“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:

 

“He was the first one who was told you were sick, and you’d never seen him cry before, not since he was six or seven and that was just because he caught his hand in the door. As you held each other and whispered I love you, you knew why it had taken so long to tell him. Your sickness was real now, because it lived independently of you. From now on it would live in your brother as a reminder that we would never be young again, never young enough to change what had already happened. Before you spoke your illness was a professional concern discussed with the doctor, drawn up in charts and tables. If your body had become a danger in your sexual relations, with Dave it had become again a house, a place where blood was thicker than the years we’d grown apart, a place where the certainty of death was no longer disguised by our youth.”


     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.

    Last week Donna came to visit, my best friend. She told me that 6,000 cells die in the body every day and that every seven years we’re completely new people. Donna’s always coming up with crazy shit like that. So I guess I just have to wait it out. I think I’m gonna remake myself as a fat ice cream queen with perfect skin. Donna says that sounds just perfect and then she kisses me because it’s time to go. Visiting hours are over.”


     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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